It's been 12 years since I moved to California, and my hay fever has finally caught up with me. And it couldn't have come at a worse time -- swine flu anxiety season. As a result, I have discovered the loneliness of the mass-transit sniffler.

I'm allergic to all sorts of living things, which made the period from late spring through early fall miserable for me on the East Coast. The flora are so different here, though, that I'd gone more than a decade without taking a single antihistamine. All that changed last month, when I figured out the "cold" I'd been suffering from for a week was actually allergies. Since then my nose has pretty much been an open spigot, and my itchy eyes have been the color of a fine California sunset. I'm not sure what someone walking around with swine flu -- excuse me, Influenza A(HINI) -- would look like, but I think I present a decent approximation.

Anyway, in recent days I've noticed that whenever I entered a Metro car sniffling, people winced. Every time I reached into my pocket for a tissue, I could almost feel the opprobrium from my fellow passengers. When I blew my nose yesterday, the woman seated next to me actually got up and walked to the next car, where she stood for the rest of the trip to Union Station. I felt like explaining to her that hay fever wasn't contagious, but then I figured she might spend the rest of her day worried about having caught something deadly from me, and that made me feel better.

All the same, I decided to try to avoid some of the shaming looks today by dosing up on loratadine before my commute. But some of the other riders were way ahead of me -- they were wearing surgical masks to protect themselves from folks like me. I wonder how many masks I'll see in church Sunday, or how many people will opt out of the practice of holding hands during the Lord's Prayer. If the WHO bumps this up to a Phase 6, maybe the pastor will replace the Holy Water at the entrances with Purel.

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