👀 Achoo....God Bless You

#369 | I want to be allergic to allergies

I'm sitting (okay, fine, I'm half lying down) with my laptop in a valiant attempt to bust out one of the three thousand Just One Thing posts I've imagined. All I can fixate on, though, is my blocked nose. Breathing is typically one of those things we take for granted. For those of you reading this with fully clear nasal airways, consider yourselves lucky.

To be fair, my body did warn me that something was coming. It started a couple of days ago with a sore throat and a headache, followed by a runny nose. The abysmal air quality in my city also played a role, and here I am now with yet another round of allergic rhinitis, a.k.a. hay fever.

This is a chronic condition where your body overreacts to allergens like pollen, and dust, and smoke by going into an overdrive, producing bucket loads of histamine. And you pay the price by spending your weekend at home instead of the new trampoline park in town. 

Anyway, as I like to do with everything that goes wrong in my life, I turned "allergic rhinitis" into a Google search input. This took me on a fascinating and somewhat scary journey of learning about all the various kinds of allergies humans experience. 

From water to vibration, exercise to bodily fluids, there seems to be an infinite number of allergens doing their best to get us. If you want to know more (and you should! I'm all for terrorising oneself wilfully on a regular basis), check out this deep dive by the wonderful science communicators over at SciShow on YouTube.

Googling this stuff gave me a kick, but I am still at the mercy of my allergies. This means I can't visit my friend's 3-month-old kitten anytime soon.

As always, the internet has a "solution": a custom cat purr generator. Yes, you read that right. It's called Purrli, and it has a clear and simple UI which asks you practical questions like "How nagging do you want Purrli to be?" Go try it out and thank me later. 

Proiti