What a strange way to start a week. I spent the last two hours in an allergist’s office, suffering the scratching and poking of a battery of tests to find out what I already knew: a $45 copay for an office visit makes any trip to a doctor feel like a trip to the proctologist.

It also seems that I’ve developed a slight case of asthma. Personally I think it stems from spending too much time on Long Island in the 90’s but I have no hard evidence of that. Call it a hunch, if you want, but I’m certain there’s something in the air on the island that is not fit for most humans. So right now I’m sitting a bit tattered on my couch – telecommuting is a wonderful thing – feeling like I’ve been have shoved into the Matrix, what with all of the bumps all over. Well, the bumps and the fact that Pink Floyd videos are actually being shown on TV without a national cause or reason – I never see bands like this being shown on cable. I think it’s VH1-Classic or some shit. My cable company just realized that there’s a whole bunch of MTV and VH1 channels that they weren’t offering – always looking for more ways to extort another buck each month! – so they flung on a bunch of new channels this month… I find it ironic that MTV2 is advertised as the “looking for music” channel, since MTV means Music Television. Anyway…

For those of you that don’t suffer from allergies, an allergy test is pretty simple. The Dr. picks a bunch of stuff to test for – they have little vials of all sorts of things, like pollen, spores, and stuffs – and then they stick you with pins and needles, to see if you get itchy by them. I seem to be allergic to dogs and cats, even though I grew up with both. I’m not allergic to rabbits which Bing – my cage-based depended, who happens to be a Netherlands Dwarf rabbit – must be thrilled with. Then again, maybe not – hard to tell what he’s thinking, usually. I’m allergic to tree pollen. Makes sense, given all of the paper I’ve used in my life and how many times I’ve cheered at their destruction to make way for mini-malls; they’re just getting even. That’s about it, actually. Dust mites too, but that’s only after they gave me a shot of them. Stick anyone with a syringe of dust mites and see if they aren’t ready to chew their own arm off in minutes.

I was hoping to see if they could test for other stuff… since I’m convinced that terror agrees with me I’d get to keep that anyway, but would have liked to have proved that I’m physically allergic to my current work environment. Bluh.

So I have new medication to pick up at CVS – whoopie to aging. I’m breathing today, which is much better than what I was doing a week ago. I’m still waiting for a panic’d call from the office soon – with all of the appointments caused by the ongoing lack of oxygen, I’m certain that they think I’m interviewing. They’re like that, my current employers… jumping to the wrong conclusions at the wrong time – there’s no work out there! I never figured out if they read this site or not either but just in case, here’s what my arm currently looks like, just so you know I wasn’t interviewing this morning:

I have a feeling it’s going to be a long week…