allergy

Hi. Today has been a good day so far. My friend Kim’s birthday! I found her some very cool and beautiful sounding wind chimes at this funky weird store on Commercial drive in Vancouver. it’s floor to ceiling with shiny things, whacky t-shirts, hammocks, pendants, incense, drums, sarongs, dolls, hats…yadayadayada. And the woman who runs the place said, “I can wrap this up for you if you like, really nice.” so I, who SUCK at wrapping, said, “sure, that’d be a happy thing”. and then i went away for nearly an hour, picked up my girlfriends cat (she lives in a TINY place, so when she spends the night with me, so does the cat, ’cause we don’t want the cat to be imprisoned in tininess for too long), went home, dropped off the cat, returned to the store.

I shoulda wrapped it myself. The paper is loosely draped around the box, and she fashioned some crepe flowers for the top, and then…oh dear god…she sprayed PERFUME on the fuckin’ flowers. “Smell the flowers!” she chirped.

“oh, that’s lovely” I said.

And all the way home, I could not freakin’ breathe, and my eyes and nose were running. I’d borrowed a co-op car (sort of a good idea, car sharing, but then again, maybe i’ll write another post about it being sort of like harm reduction, and therefore not such a good idea after all…)–and i drove with ALL the windows down, but it did not help.

At present, I am snuffling away here, and the present is in a bag, on my balcony. wafting.

also, the cat is roaming around. Also wafting.

ah well. i’m gonna go get some anti-histamines now.