This week has been a little crazy at work. I’m going in a lot of different directions and finding new meaning in the phrase “drinking from a firehose.” More on that in the near future, but not today. So here’s what else I’ve been thinking…
Apparently I have allergies now. I’ve suspected this for a while and chose not to believe it, but I can’t come up with any other reason to explain why my nose is stuffy, my eyes are itchy, and I sneeze a million times a day. (Speaking of: if my officemates insist on saying “bless you” each of the zillion times I sneeze, do I really have to say “thank you” each of those zillion times too? That’s just a LOT of blessings and thankings.) It is annoying, but not quite annoying enough to make me actually buy any medicine for it, so instead I just complain. And I blame my office, which has been filthy for the entire 8+ years I have worked here. There is so much dirt and dust visible to the naked eye that I shudder to imagine all the crap around here that I CAN’T see.
Apparently I’m also going through a majorly lazy phase because my weeks have been completely BLAH. Weekends? Great! Weekdays? Oh, I run and I cook dinner and do laundry and that kind of stuff, but then I spend the evening parked on the couch watching TV. I’m in search of some energy. I don’t know where all my energy has gone!
One thing I have done — which has taken me 3+ weeks at this point, mind you, and the unfinished pile is still sitting in the middle of the living room floor — is go through old photos to send off for scanning. The collection starts around 1999 and ends in early 2002 when I bought my first digital camera, so the photos cover my last three years at Georgia Tech, my last few co-op tours, the month-long backpack trip through Europe we took after graduation, and the first half of grad school at Stanford. The thought occurred to me more than once, however, that it’s a good thing Facebook didn’t exist when I was in college because the number of embarrassing photos is…not zero. There actually aren’t any pictures that are truly awful, but there are plenty of co-op parties and random nights in the dorms that are forever immortalized on film. It’s odd to look back and remember my life in college. I’m the same person now that I was then…and yet I’m also NOT the same person. But it’s been fun reliving the memories, and I’m excited to get the photos (at least the non-embarrassing ones) into a more usable format.
There are some definite keepers in the collection. I rediscovered this photo of me (it’s an iPhone photo of a printed photo, hence the awful quality). It was late January 2002, and I’d just run 3.1 miles through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. That’s the Pacific Ocean behind me. It was my first 5K, and first race, EVER, and I was so proud of myself. I’d only starting running regularly a few months earlier, and I thought running an actual event would be good motivation to keep it up. I love the getup I wore — long track pants, a COTTON t-shirt, a fleece vest, a cotton hat, and probably cotton socks too. It was chilly that day, but not THAT cold — like any other beginning runner, I just didn’t know any better yet. The only thing in that picture that I’d wear during a race today are the shoes! Little did I know that I’d still be running races and doing triathlons almost 9 years later. I hope to be able to say the same thing in another 9 years, and another, and more.
I think when officemates say bless you more than once, they’re really saying, “Why aren’t you working from home instead of giving me your germs?”
I sneeze daily due to allergies and my co-workers have given up. They’ve realized I’m not actually making them sick.
1 Claritin tablet in the morning keeps you sneeze-free, itchy eyes-free, and stuffy nose-free all day. Try it, you’ll like it. I went through a period where I had laryngitis every fall and it turned out to be allergy-related. Now I have the itchy eyes, stuffy nose in the spring, not fall. I think allergies can come and go, so you might not have fall allergies forever.