TOO ANNOYING FOR WORDS

I KNOW he can't help it. I KNOW he hates it. I KNOW it is really really annoying to him. But.............When is it okay when someone elses's problem intrudes on your life so much, it becomes your problem and you get the right to be totally pissed off.

I am talking about Bill's sneezing. He has sneezed and sneezed and sneezed ever since the day I met him. Allergies he says, attention getting I say. And I am not just talking about cute little one offs. As a matter of fact we are sitting in a hotel room right now as I write and he is in the john sneezing. We are up to 13.

It isn't so much the actual sneezing I get pissed with. Its the way he allows himself to do it. Full open mouth, tensed up body force, loud as possible, spraying everything in sight. Try being near that, ten or more times in a row. What pisses me off is that when we are in a church at a wedding or at a funeral or somewhere serious, he stilll sneezes, but quietly into a wad of paper towel. And thats another offshoot of this. Every pocket he owns is stuffed with paper, wads of crumpled snotty paper. And they fall out everywhere. Because he can't bend over easily, they just stay there. I pick them up. I have picked up as many ten at a time, spread through the house. He lines them up along the fireplace near his chair. He says he is still using them. God forbid if they get left in a pocket and go through the wash. I will be picking paper bits for hours, off everything that went through the wash with it.

I don't think he is alone in this. On the last cruise a nasty cold spread through all the old peeps. About the second week they started coughing and sneezing. So, to make a point I pointed out to bill that men seem to be particularily self indulgent when it comes to sneezing. From that point on I would say man or woman each time we heard a sneeze. And it became really clear really fast. Men just simply don't have any self control whatsoever. They sneeze really loud and really messily. Women don't.

I worked it out once. I actually did the math. Twenty five years. That is 9,125 days. Average 10 (low) sneezes per day. And I would say that I have heard 91,250 sneezes since I met him. Very soon here we will hit 100,000. Now some say the sympathy should be for him. Nay nay I say. It is HIS problem that has become mine. There seems to be no justice in this. Good thing I love him.