life in mokievision

I recently discovered I might not be allergic to coconut after all.

When is an allergy not an allergy? When it's Oral Allergy Syndrome, also called Pollen-Food Allergy Syndrome (along with several other names, because everybody wants to be the one whose name gets used on House M.D.), in which regular nose-based allergies masquerade as food allergies, due to certain fruit and veggie proteins vaguely resembling problematic pollen proteins.

Basically, it's like your body mistaking a dust-bunny for a spider and wigging out inappropriately.

Outside of allergy season the problem food isn't a problem, because your body hasn't been primed by pollen and pushed into kill it with sneezing! mode. The heat involved in cooking and canning can also denature the troublesome proteins, which is how some folks can be allergic to a raw fruit or veggie but able to eat the same item cooked--because they're not allergic to the food itself, even though they are having an allergic reaction to it. Either of these could explain why I've been able to eat coconut just fine until recently, mostly baked in cookies or simmered in soups, but also just noshing on raw flakes without any ill effect. I just happened to do it at the wrong time of year this time.

The upside of this, apart from that OAS usually doesn't cause anaphylactic shock, is that it would also explain why my late winter/early spring allergies have been so bad since moving to this neighborhood: birch.

I used to live next to Tower Grove Park and the Missouri Botanical Garden, two big green spaces dedicated to growing a large variety of greenery, pretty much all of which I tested allergic to back in middle school. Apart from swollen hands when walking past a bushy area on Magnolia Avenue, though, my allergies just translated to a runny nose and some occasional sneeziness--and good luck narrowing down which bit of all that greenery was responsible for which sneeze. (Especially since the allergy scratch test throws a lot of false positives, as dracunculus pointed out.)

What the old neighborhood didn't have, and this neighborhood does, was a lot of birch trees. Specifically, a cluster of them half a block down from my current apartment.

In springtime, two of the biggest cross-reaction offenders are birch and alder trees. Depending on where you live, anywhere from 20 to 70 per cent of people who are allergic to birch and alder pollens will also have oral allergy syndrome. (Janet French, "Oral Allergy Syndrome: Why do Pollens and Foods Cross-React?" Allergic Living 2 July 2010)

The doctor interviewed in that article pointed out that OAS is more common than the legitimately scary food allergies like peanut, which might explain why so very many people believe they have food allergies even after a smug host points out that they just ate something they're supposed to be allergic to. (And fuck you if you do that to people. Seriously.) The article also mentions a point I regularly make, that chamomile and echinacea cause cross-reactions to ragweed because they're in the same family, which makes it really annoying when every suggested cure for your allergy woes is a nice cup of chamomile and echinacea tea.

The author does lose points for bad editing when she inadvertently (I hope) suggests that honey is somehow a plant related to ragweed, rather than that honey could contain ragweed (or related) pollen. That in itself sidesteps the point that many allergy sufferers intentionally eat honey hoping there's allergy-causing pollen in it, due to the old wives' tale that this will desensitize them. It doesn't work, though, because most of the honey on store shelves is (a) filtered, microfiltered, and then filtered some more to remove all possible pollen; (b) heated and treated till it's thoroughly dead so that it won't crystallize on store shelves; and (c) from China, and thus unlikely to contain any pollens you're familiar with. You could try raw local honey, but as someone who gave it a go, just go take a Claritin and save yourself the disappointment. (And the awfulness that is clover honey. Ugh.)

Back to the point! How vile is birch?

Here is the Wikipedia checklist of foods that are cross-reactive with birch: almonds, apples, apricots, avocados, bananas, carrots, celery, cherries, chicory, coriander, fennel, figs, hazelnuts, kiwis, nectarines, parsley, parsnips, peaches, pears, peppers, plums, potatoes, prunes, soy, strawberries, walnuts and wheat. That's not even a definitive list--other lists add all the tree nuts, and coconuts, and peanuts, and tomatoes, and turnips...

If you Google "oral allergy syndrome" and a food, Google will say, "Birch. It's the fucking birch, man."

Birch will take from you everything that you love.

Apart from a visit to an allergist, the only way to know for certain if my coconut allergy is a real allergy or a birch cross-reaction is to wait till the birch stops its arboreal spooging around June or July, and then nibble a little raw coconut while someone stands by with a heavy dose of Benedryl. A preemptive strike on the trees is out, as they wisely chose to be planted in front of a cop's house.

Sneaky, bastardly birch.

Update: TESTED AND CONFIRMED. The same coconut that made me miserable in April and May caused no reaction at all in June. Of course, now my grass allergies are in full effect, so I couldn't taste the coconut, but still...

There's nothing like being slammed with work to steal all the words right out of me.

It doesn't help that a large part of the work involves Googling terminology from specific fields. One fashion-related writing job, and for the next week Amazon and Buy.com send me emails about great sales in leggings, while Pinterest has oh so many fashion boards to share...

Three days late for a new year post. Well, so much for that resolution...

Let's get right to business, shall we?



1. WORK MORE AND BETTER. I've been very fortunate in my current line of work, but I need to buckle down and more actively seek more of it. This means overcoming my oddly specific fear of work-related scheduling conflicts, a result of having to fight at three different retail jobs to make them respect my 'unavailable' days.

2. WORK BY A SCHEDULE. A new soap or related product every week! This year, I will keep the shop stocked.

3. Here's where I break from the Guthrie list, because the man has eight different hygiene-related resolutions, which is a little worrisome. So instead, I'll take one from a very cool project manager I know: PUT ON A BRA AND GO OUTSIDE. Between working from home and working night owl hours, it's easy for me to forget to put on real clothes and go outside every so often. While the fresh air may be trying to kill me, I could probably use the vitamin D, and the socialization.

4. DRINK GOOD. With all due respect to Mr Guthrie, I want to expand my alcoholic horizons this year, from trying out more of the local beers to adding some of the better reviewed absinthes to my liquor cabinet.

5. READ LOTS OF GOOD BOOKS AND WRITE EVERY DAY. When scheduling gets crazy, one of the first things to fall by the roadside is my own writing. The next is recreational reading. I miss both, and so this year, instead of being something to fit around the schedule, they're going to be part of the schedule. That includes staying on top of the journals, and getting older entries properly tagged. All thirteen years of them.

And a corollary: read less tabloid fodder and media gossip, view fewer celebrity photos. This isn't a new resolution for me. I was never big on gossip rags, and working in retail during Britney Spears' Very Bad Year, seeing her mental illness played out over rows of magazines every day for entertainment, didn't raise my opinion of them. Unfortunately it's easier to get sucked into gossip online, where you're often looking at a row of links to news stories mixed with a row of links to stories that shouldn't be considered news at all. ("The Senate passed a bill requiring--wait a minute, Lindsay Lohan did what?")

It also weirds me out that our celebrities have WWF-style heroes, villains, grudges and sob stories that are wheeled out as a form of advertising every time they have a movie coming out. That can't be healthy for us as a culture.

But mostly, it's the idea that being a celebrity means someone gives up their right to common respect and privacy--that they don't have the right to sit in their own yard without cameras peering over hedges, that they can't walk their kid to school without hiring someone to first push the press out of the way, or that it's acceptable to put lives at risk chasing them through traffic in search of that perfect shot. And for what? For a picture to put in a magazine intentionally designed to make the rest of us feel old, fat, ugly and unhip so we'll buy products to fix what isn't broken. Why feed that beast? Why pay anyone to make myself and a handful of famous strangers miserable, when I generally feel better not knowing or caring who's seeing/breaking up with/stalking who?

6. DON'T GET LONESOME. I'm not just an introvert, I'm one of those introverts that makes other introverts uncomfortable. But I've been slack when it comes to maintaining my social ties lately, so this year I'm going to make an effort not to be such a hermit--from a family game night with the nephew, to taking a friend up on an offer to tutor me in local beers.

7. LEARN PEOPLE BETTER. I've seen some cooing over Guthrie's self-awareness, and even a project on Tumblr about interviewing people to learn them better. As a girl with roots in southern Missouri, though, I suspect Woody was using 'learn' in the rural sense--that this really means "Teach people more effectively." That's how I'm taking it, albeit in a personal direction.

Though I rant about random topics that rile me and get way too cozy with the TMI, I'm really a pretty private person. I don't open up often or easily about my personal life, feelings, beliefs, relationship status--anything, really.

In my hesitation to become that friend who won't shut up about their cause or their boyfriend or their faith, I've become instead something of a relatable blank slate. The end result is that I find myself fairly often with an angry ___ who is upset because suddenly my experience/feeling/opinion/belief doesn't mesh with what they've projected onto me, and I'm not an angry ___ too. (It's usually atheists. Don't know why.) I'm never whatever enough to fit the idea they've formed of me, so they want to push me to their position, or lecture me on how wrong I am to not be like them, or tell me what I really am/believe (and you would not believe how much that pisses me off). There I am, left with the awkward choice of smoothing things over and putting up with their crap for the sake of peace, or telling them to fuck off and dealing with the fall-out. I admit that I lean more toward the latter these days, because life's too short to cater to other people's personal issues. But anyway.

Essentially, I need to open up more, and get comfortable with expressing who I am and what I think (etc.) a little more, and not worry so much about becoming that creepy friend who nags you for wearing leather, or being targeted by that creepy friend if I reveal that I'm not also a Baptist/vegan/UFOologist.

For the record: I'm a relatively liberal blue-haired bisexual hammock-dwelling pulp-reading hippie-ish single neopagan who eats meat, listens to whatever damn music feels good at the time, and really only feels strongly about reproductive rights and single spaces after sentences. (Never double. It's a relic of the printing press and HTML ignores it anyway. Let it go.) There's probably more worth adding, but nothing comes to mind at the moment. If you're conservative, don't eat meat, don't dig hammocks, listen only to K-pop, etc., it makes me no nevermind.

8. STAY GLAD. I used to live within walking distance of one of the world's greatest gardens; now I'm a tedious bus ride from any of the city's fun activities. I used to live beside a well-planted park, in a picturesque neighborhood that I wandered with a camera in hand; I now live in a closely packed neighborhood with bland lawns, where I feel like an intrusive guest even without the camera. I used to have my own little garden, with plantings older than I was and a makeshift pond; now I have a tiny patch of weedy dirt that I share with a rotating cast of neighbors who always, always, take it over and ruin it.

I've let this vague, sulky, gloomy dissatisfaction rule my roost far too long. I need to zhenzhify my outlook! To look up and find the beauty in the moment and where I'm at, to look out over the neighborhood not as an intruder but as an explorer, to take bootyloads of photos and share them, if only to remind myself that it's not where my body is, it's where my head is.

9. SAVE DOUGH. Enough said, right?

10. LOVE EVERYBODY. And I do, even when I don't.

It has been suggested by someone who is very, shall we say, 'right', that I'm actually seething about something else that I can't do anything about. That anger that I can't fix is snaking its way out of my molten core and finding its way up to the surface through minor fissures here and there, causing things that should be small nuisances, like unclear instructions, to become sinkholes of raaaaaaaaaaaaaage.

Damn! I hate it when other people are right.

Realizing it helps. I can see where I tried to convince myself that I wasn't that angry over the thing that's making me seethe, since (a) it's a stupid thing to feel angry over, and (b) I can't do anything about it. And I can see where trying to shove that issue into the 'minor nuisance' box knocked all the real nuisances out of the box and all out of proportion, since (a) they were legitimate (if minor) issues, and (b) I could do things about them, including raaaaaaaaaaaaaage. It was easier to get angry at a few small, clear targets that I could knock out or blow up about than at a vague and currently unfixable thing.

You know what else helps? Mocha coffee hazelnut spread stirred into warm almond milk. No, wait, I mean, talking about it. But that too.

And another thing pointed out to me: socializing wipes me out and makes me cranky. I know, I shouldn't need this pointed out, since I point it out so often, but my Friday was full of more people and places full of people than usual (ooh, that's sad), so I should have expected to be spending my Saturday and Sunday waving a knife around re-establishing all perimeters, prison-style.

So now I feel stupid about being so tetchy for the better part of a month, and guilty for feeling stabby at someone (okay, everyone) yesterday, and waving a knife around, prison-style. (Joke! Don't call CPS!) And drained, because that's a lot of realizing and feeling to be doing all at once.

(Also, like I should be posting some emo song lyrics or something...)

[Related posts: I'm all out of fucks, because I used them all in this post. / All my fucks are back! / Well, that was brief.]

I keep vowing to improve my social skills, and I keep failing miserably at it.

No, I'm not fishing for reassurance. I'm very aware of my flaws in this regard, that's all. I don't remember birthdays, anniversaries or holidays. I rarely send presents, and when I do it's almost never on time or in alignment with the proper social etiquette for such things. (Oh hullo, box that I should have sent dracunculus ages ago. Oh, her birthday was last month. Double fail!) I don't hang out much, and I don't like hanging out that involves spending money because I feel guilty over what I'm not spending money on instead, like, say, that new fridge. Or pants. Egads, do I need new pants. I've never mastered the art of dropping in on people, and I always feel creepy when I'm visiting folks just by virtue of being in the room. For example, I'm pretty sure saying that after bringing up pants was pretty creepy.

When you think about it, it's kind of amazing that I've even made friends. And not out of yarn and plasticine, if you dig my meaning.

Back in the retail days, I promised myself I'd hang out with the co-worker friends once in a while, but their timing was insane. Who wants to end an 8-hour shift in a popular store where you're surrounded by people by going to a popular bar where you'll be surrounded by people? Everyone except me, as it turns out. My full-time schedule frustrated non-work friends too, because I was reluctant to give up one of my days off--my few, precious, people-free days off--and not at all willing to 'just tell the boss you can't work that day.'

I'll give them the former, because that's all me being a hermit. But the latter? Asking me to either blow off an already set work day or go to war to rearrange it so that I can go hang out with someone who doesn't understand, "I'm working"? Who asks that? (In my experience, the guy who was on his third write-up and about to be fired, the girl who complained that management wouldn't give her the hours she thought she deserved, and that one relative who never understood why I took jobs so seriously, mostly because she rarely had one. But that was supposed to be rhetorical.)

So I thought it was all explained, all just bad timing combined with my crappy hours. Then I ditched it all for the freelancing gig, which theoretically means I can set my own hours, or at least carve out more of them for other people, and instead I've only gotten worse about it.

Do I prioritize work first because it's so sporadic that I don't dare take it for granted? Sometimes, yes. Like the party I was actually looking forward to and planning on attending up until an hour beforehand, when I had to admit defeat and settle in for the night to fix an exploded work project that was due omgrightnow. I'm still grumpy about that, but it was a big next-month's-rent gig and I couldn't afford to blow it off.

And sometimes, when a nine-to-fiver tells me, "Now that I'm off we should go do something," as if I don't even have a schedule to be taken into consideration. It makes me want to hand them the latest mammoth undertaking and tell them, "No, finish that, then we'll go do something."

But other times I know that, even if the work is pouring in right now, it can wait and I should go be social, but then I tell myself, "But maybe if I get this done there will be more work, and what if urgent work comes in while I'm out? And going out means finding pants and spending money..."

There's nothing else for it but to keep trying, I guess. I wonder if Tina's game for getting together. Maybe we can go shopping for pants...

I opened my assorted friends lists today and realized that I haven't read in almost three months.

I've been swamped with work, and all that hardcore word-mining really strips my ability to put words together in anything longer than a sentence or two. I knew I'd fallen behind in posting. I hadn't realized I'd fallen so far behind in reading too, though.

And not just blogs. My sister lent me third book in the Dexter series before Christmas. It's sitting on my desk right now, mocking me with its unreadness. It's not a particularly dense or complex series, but making sense of sentences seems too much like work. I slide into the tub, open the book, and my eyelids droop in open rebellion; I took it to the doctor's office (just accompanying a relative) and nearly dozed off. The bookmark is at the midway point, but I'll be damned if I can remember anything past the first three pages.

Can one overdose on words? I think I might have.

So, mokie, where have you been?

Oh, mokie. You know how I get...

- I've been hard at work in the word mines. December and January saw a burst of urgent work, and when February came I belly-flopped into it like a big, comfy bed.

- I alternated between sleeping lots and not sleeping at all--not in a manic WHEE! sense, but an oversensitive to noise and general grouchy insomnia way. A good portion of February was spent being tired and sick but awake but too tired to concentrate on anything but oh God why won't you let me sleep?, and an even better portion was spent finally dozing off.

- And then waking up because I couldn't breathe. This is the winter of the Sinus Infection That Will Not Die. Sudden calcified booger impactions have reduced me to tears and vaporizer addiction. The air pressure changes and the contents of my nose liquefy and gush out, without warning and unstoppable for half an hour at a time. I sneeze up jellyfish, and try not to skunky Mucinex-squirt while doing so, which is 50/50 no matter how careful I am to keep my bladder empty.

Seriously, crawl inside this image with me a moment: you're sitting in your tub crying because you can't stop sneezing and you can't sleep and sneeze at the same time and you've already changed clothes twice and one of those times you'd just gone to the bathroom and it doesn't make any sense and it's 3am and if you could just stop long enough to doze off...

On the upside, I discovered that vodka is the best painkiller out there, in addition to its known soporific goodness. Oh Russia, it all makes sense!

- I've been trying hard not to get off on the wrong foot with the new neighbors. Irregular hours? Not a problem, unless you're screaming and slamming doors at 1am one day and breaking down metal for recycling at 7am the next. Sounds make me twitchy like a mofo; the sound of metal screeching is a special Chinese hell for me. (If ever there were something we should outsource, it's Hell. China's hells are just far more efficient than ours.)

Not very exciting, I must admit...