Hello again,
Thank you for opening these emails and having a read. And thank you for the feedback to my last, more personal correspondence. How did this week go? Same old, or are you having breakthroughs?
My week was filled with unexpected bursts of energy to get things done when lying foetal in bed seemed more appealing. Perhaps it’s the antidepressants starting to work. Maybe the fear of getting left behind during this time spurs me on to fill out that job application and send off that enquiry email. Either way, I approach another quaranweekend feeling like I have momentum and there’s hope for new things to come.
I have allergies. It’s a chronic illness that seems to get more complicated each year. I will figure out one way to dampen my body’s reactions to the allergens and then go and develop another allergy to something else. In the past twelve months I have become allergic to capsicum and slightly less so to chilli. What most people are allergic to in these fruits in the chemical capsaicin. Cut to: 2 years ago being prescribed rhinitis sprays that have the active ingredient, capsaicin.
Last year a trip to Japan was almost ruined because of my allergies. We stayed in a cedar wood house in the middle of a cedar forest island. My sinuses got so bad I lost my senses of smell and taste for most of the trip. It wasn’t until afterwards that I read ‘sugi-pollinosis’ (Japan cedar pollen allergic rhinitis) is Japan’s NUMBER ONE disease. It’s become so bad that people can follow news of the pollen’s spread across the country on the daily weather report. For a couple of days before returning home, I regained my taste just in time to find Sydney covered in bushfire smoke so dense it became the world’s most polluted city. Did I forget to say that my nose is so sensitive, I get non-allergic rhinitis, too? If the smoke didn’t get to me, then the plane trees’ trichomes would find their way into my nostrils anyway.
This exhausting experience prompted me to look up the most allergy-friendly city in the world. Apparently, it’s any city whose planners heeded the advice of horticulturalist, Tom Ogren, to favour female trees over the male ones. Most cities’ streets are now lined with males only because of the short-sighted observation that female trees would drop fruit that would need cleaning up. The decision to plant male trees failed to consider the fact that instead of dropping fruit, they spew out clouds of pollen, and with no female trees to pollenate, there’s no natural receptacle for the load. It’s not a mystery why rates of hay fever around the world have increased. We have systematically done this to ourselves. It’s not an easy fix, either. A city has to replace every single male tree, and preferably all at once.
It can also feel like you’re going mad if you’re the only one in a group to be suffering so much. My partner looks on bemused each time I have an attack. Earlier this year, I stayed in an Airbnb that had clean, but undisturbed, bedding that had accumulated so many dust mites that just two hours in it sent me to hospital with a puffed up face. I’m on immunotherapy for grass pollen, but it’s so expensive ($400 for 90 pills) that I will only be able to tackle my many allergies one at a time over the rest of my life. The science behind why our bodies decide random harmless things are out to kill us is still so murky, I’ll be waiting for a miracle cure for a while yet. I just wish city planners had listened to the science of tree sexism 30 years ago, but we all know how reluctant people can be to listen to science. (Keep washing your hands, folks.)
The linguistic nerd in me got a kick out of a few videos this week on the YouTube channel, Ecolinguist. Recently, the creator of the channel has been using quarantine ubiquity, Zoom, to create comparison videos of languages from the same family. He invites language teachers to guess the meaning of phrases from a language close to their own, and affable discussion about false friends and cognates ensues. I’ve watched all the videos of the Romance languages, but I’ll share the two he has recently posted on Old English. It’s a fascinating look at/listen to our more Germanic history, and a real challenge to infer meaning from a vocabulary that we’ve all but lost in our modern version.
The guy who can speak Old English has his own channel and has posted the following video of him pretending to be an Anglo-Saxon being interviewed for a documentary. It’s a hoot.
Well, that’s all from me this week.
Stay safe.
Until next time, Habbaþ gōdne dæg!