There are many traditional signs of spring. The first tender shoots of spring flowers, the cheerful chirping of spring’s red-breasted herald, the robin, the little pools of snow slowly melting here and there… all signs that Old Man Winter is packing up for the year and heading home.

My personal favorite : little kids jumping rope and playing hopscotch for the first time in the year.

But none of that, for me, beats that perennial personal reminder that spring has truly sprung : hay fever.

Yes sir, I know that Persephone has risen from Hades for the year when I start sneezing. And the sneezing is not the bad part. Sneezing is annoying but it’s over relatively soon and unless it’s been really bad lately it doesn’t hurt. Occasionally, an attack happens in public and causes some stares (trust me, nobody can ignore the big fat guy when he moves that much and makes a loud noise), but whatever.

No, the bad part is the secondary symptoms. For example, becoming a snot factory. When my nose is running, I have two choices. Blow my nose nearly constantly, or become stuffed up.

Blowing my nose, that hurts. Not much, usually, but still. And worse, I am the sort of person who cannot do it quietly. If it’s to have any effect at all, I have to use enough force to make it loud. When it comes to nose blowing, I’m a honker, not a sniffer. And having to do that in public is not fun. Sneezing is involuntary, so you can always look around and says “Well it’s not like I want to sneeze!”

Nose blowing, on the other hand, is technically voluntary, although there’s been a few times when I could have argued that it was only as voluntary as swimming when you’ve fallen into the ocean. (Seriously. It was blow my nose, or drown. I have been waterboarded by my own sinuses. )

So you nose-blow like I do in public, especially say in an elevator or on public transit, and everyone is giving you dirty looks. Rough on a shy and sensitive type like myself.

But the alternative, doing nothing, is worse in the long run, because that leads to the most dreaded phase of this pathology of them all : the SINUS HEADACHE.

Anyone who has suffered one of these knows how bad they could be. There was a painfully hilarious ad for a sinus medication a while back that summed it up nicely. It showed a bleary, stressed out looking man fumbling around in his basement workshop and eventually putting together his drill and pointing it at his temple…

Of course, that’s a comedic exaggeration, and trepanning is not a wise course of self-treatment in any circumstances, but I can sure as hell sympathize. There have been times when I had a sinus pressure headache that was so painful, I actually found myself pondering certain variables, like how long it would take the ambulance to get there, where I would aim the drill to get the most relief from the pressure with the least or at least most easily surgically repaired damage, how long it would take for the relief to fade and the absolutely bowel dissolving agony to set in….. you know, just a theoretical exercise…

Mostly, though, I found myself fantasizing that my sinuses had a pressure-release valve, like a steam engine, and I could just press the button and WHOOSH empty sinuses. Sure, it would be incredibly disgusting and really messy, but when you have a sinus headache, you don’t care. You just want to make the pressure go away RIGHT FREAKING NOW.

At least the allergy has grown milder over the years. When I was a teenager, my hay fever got so bad one year that I would sneeze in the middle of a sneeze. Word, y’all. I was sneezing so hard and fast that one sneeze would interrupt another, and so instead of “Achoo! Achoo! Achoo!” it was more like “Ach-chrk-cha-choo! Ah-chik-grk-guk-CHOO!”.

Let me tell you, that shit hurts. And having it happen in the middle of spring exams adds a special level of group hate, especially from the keeners.

And what with spring sproinging all over, it’s high time I dig out the antihistamines, practice all the little pressure relief tricks I have learned over the years, and dig in for the onslaught of airborne allergens.

And yet, despite all this, I still love the spring.

Helps that it has my birthday in it, mind you.