April 5, 2003

My nose is a confused little organ. It seems to think that, for any given problem, there is only one worthwhile solution, and that is to produce enough thick, green snot to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. Are there pollen particles in the air? Make snot! Did suitemate Kyle microwave an Oreo for a minute again, filling the room with smoke? Make snot! Is that Geraldo Rivera on Fox News? Make snot! It's a very simple formula.

The trouble with this formula is, however, that snot seldom solves anything. I'm not sure what use for snot my nose believes I have. Perhaps it feels that I should employ it to seal cracks in the windows to keep those suspicious foreign particles from getting in. Or, judging from the sheer quantity of snot it makes, perhaps it feels I should seal ALL the windows in Cone dormitory. I would ask, but my nose isn't particularly forthcoming with information. It is only forthcoming with snot.

You see, it is springtime here in Searcy , Arkansas . The weather is pleasantly torrid, the horseflies are out, students are cursing the “No Shorts Before 2 PM” rule, and everyone on campus can see where I've been because there is a giant trail of mucus-filled Kleenexes behind me wherever I go, in the manner of a snail. A snail, that is, who happens to be highly allergic to everything.

It might be surprising that it is springtime, considering that the last time I posted a C-File, it was quite clearly wintertime. As you may recall, I did a lot of complaining about the cold weather and the near-fatal coating of ice that winter brought this year. So, you might think that, now that springtime has rolled around, I would be content. Boy, are you ever foolish and naive.

It's all the fault of my nose, which does not listen to orders. “Stop making snot!” I yell to it every so often, but it doesn't listen. It is very stubborn. Like many human beings I know, it has traditionally done things one way all its life, and it's not about to change that tradition just because it is useless and harmful. Nope, it will make snot until kingdom come. If I don't like it – tough.

It surprises me, because my body is usually pretty smart about things like that. The signals it sends normally make a certain amount of sense. If I feel a stabbing pain in my chest, for example, my body is cueing me to remove the knife. My body can generally tell what to do in any given situation. It knows to store everything I eat in long-term fat cells just in case I become shipwrecked for 800 years. It knows to set each of my hair-follicles to “time-release” because, evidently, my scalp is just as fed up with my hair as I am. My body knows things. It's smart. Except, for some reason, my nose.

As best as I can remember, the reigning theory is that allergies are simply a form of organ xenophobia – irrational fear of foreign particles. So, let's say you're wandering along, minding your own business, when all of a sudden, a foreign particle, such as a molecule of French toast, enters your system, perhaps through the nose. Your body, upon detecting the foreign particle, goes into bigoted hyperdrive – “We don't want this particle! It's French!” the various organ systems cry. “Quick! Deport it! Send it to an internment camp! Possibly both at once!”

And so, the nose goes to work. “I think some snot would solve this problem,” it decides after reviewing its options. So it starts pumping snot out like crazy, on the theory that, if it happens to make enough snot to coat the French particle entirely, I might just take a knife and dismember my nose from my face entirely, thus removing the French particle.

Of course, it is not only random food particles that irrationally upset my immune system. It's mostly pollen. I know it's pollen, because when I was in third grade I took an allergy test involving little “walkers” that resembled a pair of Afro picks welded together with little needles on the end of each point. The nurse would “walk” the “walker” on my back, making a handy grid for figuring out exactly what it was I was allergic to. As it turned out, I'm allergic to just about anything that grows green*, including many species of plant I'd never even heard of, such as “timothy grass.”

So, it seems to me that the solution to allergies is clear. It's not any form of antihistamine. That's for sure. I'm presently taking Claritin, Allegra , and two types of Sudafed simultaneously. My nose reacted to this development by making lots and lots of snot. No, the solution is for the trees to stop having sex.

It's all the trees' fault. They're lazy. When they want to reproduce, the male trees don't even bother starting a courtship ritual with a female tree. They simply open up some flowers and pour something like 40 bajillion tons of pollen into the air, on the theory that at least some of it will make it to a female tree before spring is over. Little do they realize the vast majority of it will land in Chris Guin's tear ducts and nasal lining. The trees must be stopped.

Getting trees to stop having sex is quite a dilemma. This is especially true as, as far as we can tell, stopping human teenagers from having sex is only slightly less impossible than getting our dormroom to stop smelling like burnt Oreo. However, I have a number of possible policy options that might do the trick:

1)Peer pressure. We simply tell the trees that the more advanced species of plant use insect pollination now. All we have to do is portray the insect-using trees as “cool,” and the wind-using trees as “losers.” Madison Avenue could get it done fairly quickly, I think. The commercials would kind-of look like those “Go- Gurt ” commercials they used to play several years ago, where the cool kid (who, incidentally, eats “Go- Gurt”) is spinning around on his mountain bike in an alleyway while bright colors flash around him, while the poor loser who still eats his yogurt with a spoon is sitting on his doorstep looking sad and rejected. E-mail spam is also effective: “learn to attract honeybees in 14 days!” or “r u satisfied w/ your pollination rate?”

2)Abstinence campaign. We simply force all the trees into dreary, institutional-looking classrooms and make them watch videos starring teen stars from the 1980's about the dangers of unprotected pollination and unplanned seed-bearing. Or we could just put up posters everywhere saying “Just Say No to Pollen.” This would definitely frighten them into compliance, because the posters would be made out of paper.

Unfortunately, until the federal government learns to stop dealing with irrelevant issues such as the economy and terrorism, my nose will continue to pump out gallons upon gallons of snot and fit it in my head somehow. Evidently there's a lot of empty space in there I didn't know about...

*As well as cold temperatures, believe it or not, although that's a whole other C-File