Ha! I only let 2 weeks slip by between posts this time. Go me! I apologize for any random m's, k's, or n's that pop up - the soda I spilled a month ago on my keyboard is getting a bit temperamental and changing letters that it likes to add repeatedly. At first my computer wouldn't let me type those letters, but now it seems determined to make up for this fact by adding extras to every sentence. What's better, I sometimes don't even push k, but it adds a random k just for the heckk of it. And I can't be bothered with typing this in Word first and then doing spell checkk, so you'll just have to live with it. :-) Apologies.

On Allergies
Currently in Japan, we are going through allergy season. I believe that everyone is saying that it is cedar allergy season. They say that cedar pollen is getting to everyone. When they do the news every night, they have a separate time during the weather when they broadcast how bad the pollen will be for the week (instead of suns to show sunny weather, they have little animated heads. A really bad allergy day is represented by someone wearing a mask kand coughing, whereas a mild day is someone wearing a mask and looking somewhat constipated).

Anyhow, literally everyone around me is suffering intensely. The staff rooms are full of nonstop coughing, sneezing (which they don't cover their mouths to do, and they appear to try to do is as loudly as possible), burping (? not sure of the connection to allergies, but the instances of random burps in the staff room have risen of late), hacking, and (shudder) sniffing. The composite of all these makes it sound like I'm working in a rat infested plague pit. I've never encountered cedar allergies before, but they seem to make everyone in Japan absolutely miserable. And I can only assume, based on the continuous and annoying nature of the sniffles, that said cedars are growing inside their nasal cavities. What's more, these allergy sufferors seem to be trying to keep said cedars INSIDE their noses, while at the same time, the allergens are trying to convince the cedars to come out and frollick in the snot-covered fields with them.

And the thing is, there’s no medication here that can help because all the semi-strong sinus and allergy medication is ILLEGAL in Japan . That’s right. Even something like Tylenol sinus is too strong and is considered highly dangerous. So instead of helpful medication, people are forced to go to nose and throat clinics where the doctor gives them water in a squirt bottle and 28 different kinds of sugar pills and tells them to come back in a week if their symptoms haven’t cleared up. So for 2 months, they sit in misery, making others miserable, too, as their noses run nonstop. I miss America, where we can just go straight to a doctor who says, “oh, you have allergies.” And he gives us some medicine with warning labels like: may cause drowsiness, slight mood swing, loss of appetite, seizure, blood clot, insanity, bed-wetting, etc. And we wake up the next day next to 10 dead bodies of people we’ve killed in a sleep-walking rage and say, "Hey, he was right! No more sniffles! This stuff is great!"