Allergic to Allergies - by Philip

Just to let everyone know, our mom is now reading the blog, so I'll be making an effort to clean up my language. My topic today is allergies, so I'll begin by saying that allergies can be a total female dog. A real intercoursing pain in the gluteal region. Thankfully, Douglas and I have never had to deal with allergies in any significant way. We are each mildly allergic to only three things: As Douglas mentioned earlier, he has a rather disgusting inability to digest lactose. I won't reveal what his other two allergies are in case the people who own that restroom that he desecrated want to get revenge on him by putting codeine or avocados in his soy latte. Actually the avocado soy latte with codeine sprinkles is the drink of the month at Starbucks, so Douglas should probably go to Dunkin' Donuts for awhile. My allergies are penicillin (hives), eggplant (mouth itches) and mushrooms (see Douglas's lactose intolerance post).

I was born with the eggplant allergy, but that didn't stop me from eating my grandmother's fried eggplant because, well, it was fried and I'm from the South. I became allergic to penicillin at age seven when a doctor, who was a total rectal entryway, pumped me full of the drug after insisting for a week that I just had the flu, when any chimp with a stethoscope would have known that I actually had pneumonia. I later became allergic to mushrooms while living in Japan when I ate a bad batch of defecation-ake mushrooms. Okay, maybe that's taking the language cleanup a bit too far. As with Douglas's intolerance for dairy products, it took several unpleasant bathroom visits and one trip to the doctor to figure out that my beloved mushrooms had conspired against me.

But last year at age 39, I seem to have developed a new allergy. This is the really annoying kind that causes a runny nose, itchy eyes and lots of sneezing (as opposed to the really fatal kind that causes anaphylactic shock). I thought at first that I just had a cold because I had never had allergies like this before, but a friend of mine pointed out the error of my self-diagnosis and suggested that I try allergy medicine. I took it just to prove her wrong and it actually cleared up my symptoms. The end result is that I have a whole new allergy and a friend who acts all roostery around me now.

My other three allergies are easy to deal with. I just avoid eggplant, mushrooms and particularly aggressive bacterial infections. But this new allergy floats in on the air and makes me slightly miserable for a week or so before going away. I consider it my own little period, but without all the... okay, there's nowhere I can go with that comparison that will end up well. I still haven't figured out what I'm allergic to, but I'm not sure it matters since it would probably require me to move to Flagstaff or Boca Raton to get away from it and I'm not quite ready to pull my pants up to my nipples yet.

When I lived in Japan, a lot of people were allergic to cedar trees and I was completely unable to sympathize with them as they sniffled and sneezed for several weeks each year. One Japanese man even asked me, "What is the English word for a man who is allergic to cedar trees?" I told him that it's, "a man who is allergic to cedar trees," but he didn't believe me. He clearly thought that I just didn't know the answer and was lying to him to get away from his spigot-like nostrils. Now that I am whatever that word is, I finally understand their pain, at least for two or three weeks out of the year. A different Japanese person asked me if I thought that air was delicious, but I never found out what that meant.

Of course, the reason that I'm writing about this topic now is because my new allergy is currently rearing its ugly head. It's not actually that big of a deal except that I sound kind of nasally so my phone calls now primarily consist of people asking me if I'm sure that I'm okay. It also keeps me up at night since I have trouble sleeping when I don't have free airflow through at least one of my nostrils, but at least I now have a newfound appreciation for the comedy stylings of Craig Ferguson. Who knew that Scottish people could be so entertaining?

One other thing about allergies that I'm sure you've noticed, Dear Reader, is that each passing generation seems to have more allergies than the last. My daughters are both allergic to nuts (Hey, no testicle jokes! These are my daughters we're talking about!) and Lauren is even allergic to chocolate. Can you imagine? While that sounds horrible, when she's an adult it will be much better for her to come home from a hard day's work and drown her sorrows in a bowl of steamed broccoli rather than in a pint of Chunky Monkey.

Now that I think about it, I'm actually kind of urined off that I'm only allergic to healthy things. I wonder how much healthier I would be today if I had been born with an allergy to Milk Duds and deep-dish pizza. Hmm... maybe I can make myself allergic to them now like I did with the mushrooms. I'll think about that right after I finish eating this box of Prostitute Prostitutes.