I saw a woman at the train station today who was *fighting for her life* against a sneeze!! Nostrils flaring, rubbing her nose, breath hitching, eyes half closing, everything. She went in and out of that kind of ‘on the verge of sneezing’ look a few times, until it was pretty obvious that she was going to lose control (I was almost passed out by this point).
I was so hoping it would be a big, powerful sneeze, but instead she sneezed three huge stifles, like “HhhGNNKK!” Big breath “HuhGGHHNNKK!” Big breath “HUH-CCNNK!” (I can’t spell stifles!!)
At this point the combination of her (likely) hay fever and mine were making *me* need to sneeze, but then my train came, so I managed to hold it back!
Guys I've never understood the appeal of just a big one and done sneeze but like I appreciate it a little bit after today
During a lecture, my friend (who is super cute and one of my favorite people I love him sm) who sneezes ridiculously loud...actually no he is just ridiculously loud.
Loudest talker
Loudest singer
Loudest player
And loudest sneezer
So anyways we all tease him for it but today he was laughing and had to sneeze and ig that fucked up his rhythm bc he sneezed at like half the usual volume (it was still loud btw it was just less than normal) and then he started gearing back up and sneezed again loud asf and that shit was so crazy
This mf sneezes loud as hell singles so wtf do you mean like if he doesnt do that it doesnt get the tickle out?
A woman sitting across from me today was suffering from what seemed to be a very sneezy cold. She's in her 40s and she has quite a large and strong nose that turns up very slightly at the end. It was a little pinker than her otherwise tanned complexion.
Every half an hour or so, she's been letting loose with 2-8 strong sneezes. She's been half covering them with tissues and has been through several tissue packs. Every now and then, she blows her nose into them.
Her sneezes are powerful and quite throaty. In longer fits, every couple of sneezes, her voice pitches up to a desperate sounding squeak. Her pre-sneeze face includes raised eye brows, fluttering eye lids, a tilted head. She's even apologised mid fit once or twice.
The longest fit took a couple of minutes to complete. The sneezes were mostly spaced about ten seconds apart, though towards the end she started getting stuck. The fit went something like this...
At the end of the day, as she was packing up to leave, a colleague came to talk to her. She mentioned that she was ill and not feeling great. As the conversation went on, she was standing with her back to me. She turned to the side so I could see her in profile and I immediately picked up on a pre-sneeze build-up. She'd already put her tissues away and she made a vain attempt to find one before her hitching and attempts to talk through gave out. With a beautifully desperate inhalation she released a huge sneeze to her side with almost no cover.
So just to set the scene, we're currently in a heatwave in the UK. Many of our houses don't have A/C, so the for the most part the only way to get airflow through is to open up windows and pray. A side effect is that one can end up overhearing things they otherwise wouldn't - which brings me to this obs:
We got new neighbours a short while ago and I haven't had the opportunity to meet them yet but I'm told they're an American couple M/F in their 30s. Anyway, I was hanging some washing out on the line the other day when I suddenly heard an absolutely enormous
"HEHSHUWW!!"
From next door. Followed a few seconds later with another
"HI-EHSHUWW!!"
By this point I'd paused what I was doing to listen. When I say these were loud, they were LOUD. Like birds-took-flight, dogs-started-barking kind of loud 😅
Finally, after few more seconds had passed, she let loose another
"hhEHSHUH!"
Before I heard her mumble something that sounded like "...oh my".
my gf was holding something in each hand and we were waiting in line....and normally she'll sneeze straight down at the floor, but it was a tile floor and it would have been rly obvious. and they don't like to cover with their shoulder or elbow.... and guys she had NO FREE HANDS to stifle with. so.....my sleeve was the only option. i knew she had to sneeze, too, bc of the way they started sniffling and rubbing at their nose.
she took a quick step towards me and let out an incredibly wet, congested stifle into my arm. she pressed her face against my sleeve pretty hard, so i could tell how desperately she wanted to contain the mess. it left a considerable wet stain on my sleeve🥲
Something potentially very embarrassing happened earlier. I was having my hair and beard trimmed and the clippers must have caught either a nose hair or a really sensitive 'tasche hair near my nose. My eyes started watering and I had a sort of burning tickle. I managed to control it until the trim was finished, then used my photicness to trigger a sneeze from the embers of the tickle when I got outside, which was both large and INTENSELY satisfying!
i feel like the worst person in the world for this thought, but i am SO excited for it to get cold enough for my neighbor’s flowers to die…and i think these self obs from today help me explain exactly why.
cw for descriptions of allergic sneezing + mess
i feel horrible for wishing death on this little old man’s plants, but his garden is full of an entire rainbow of multiple different flowers that have made me sneeze every single day i’ve walked passed them since april.
even on the good days when i manage to hold back an immediate sneezing fit, they still make my eyes water and my nose run, forcing me to try (and fail, almost always fail) to balance sniffling back the mess and trying not to sneeze long enough to make it inside my own place, which is not only a race against the clock but a race against nature itself imo.
i felt especially silly and embarrassing today as i fought against what felt like two different seasons of allergic affliction. it was as if my melodramatic nose couldn’t pick just one allergen to contend with, let alone to publicly humiliate me with—so, even as friday brought with it a merciful conclusion to a long work week of fall allergies, i ended up breathless and sneezy once more, my nose caught off guard after passing by these brightly colored remnants of spring and summer. the comforting, crisp chill and damp smell in the air of the incoming autumn had almost made me forget about the flowers and their threat to my already sensitive nose, until their bright colors caught my eye, in stark contrast with the grey evening sky.
i tried so hard not to inhale until i was past the stretch of flower-garden-allergy-torture, but somehow i forgot that sniffling is a form of inhaling, and the strong, floral scented air managed to hit me even through the double-layered protection of my mask and my existing mild congestion. i don’t think i even got to fully sniffle before my eyes were filling with allergic tears and my breath was hitching, the tickle too deep in my nose to hold back.
like all my allergic sneezes, especially the ones that start when my nose is already drippy and sniffly and dramatically irritated, these were bound to be wet, and there was no time to even pull down my mask, let alone scramble for my travel pack of tissues. in a panic i tried to stifle, which only made everything so much worse and only actually worked for about three poorly stifled sneezes before the first desperate, unrestrained sneeze ripped through me. obviously it didn’t have far to go, given the mask still hugging my face and caging my mouth and nose, but there was no way i was taking off the mask now. the damage was done, and i couldn’t risk the embarrassment of anyone seeing me like this.
not when the more i sneezed, the more mess i could feel run down my chin, completely coating the lower half of my face and inside of my mask. feeling the spray of each sneeze against my mask only made my embarrassment about yet another public sneezing fit worse, my ears and cheeks reddening even more than my nose. i tried stifling again but realized it was pointless, resigning myself to walking as fast as i could while remaining upright as my body snapped forward with harsh, uncontrollable allergic sneezes. my only solace was the slight muffle the (now drenched) mask provided, keeping my head down and towards my chest as i sneezed and shuffled my feet clumsily along the sidewalk. i only ended up having to stop my awkward, sneezy speed-walking once in the remaining two blocks home, for a rogue rapid fit that came so fast, all i could do was stop in my tracks to sneeze over and over again into my mask, my chin tucked into my chest as i instinctively held my elbow up as if to cover the fit despite the mask.
by the time i got into my apartment i had sneezed probably 35 times into my mask and the mess trapped inside was clinging awkwardly to my ever flaring nostrils, making the still unsatisfied itch even more unbearable. it felt almost like purposeful torture, as if the sensation of the mask’s now cool, damp fabric against the existing need to sneeze had become someone who was lightly tickling my nose with a feather, playfully torturing my glistening nostrils as they twitched. my nose was so unbelievably itchy and impossible to ignore in those last few steps to my apartment that i couldn’t help but try to rub my nose against my chest as i fumbled with my keys to unlock the front door. it didn’t even register with me that i was doing it until i had the door open and realized how ineffective of a handsfree nose rubbing method that had been, my desperate attempt at relief only bothering my nose more.
i didn’t even get the door all the way closed behind me before i was sneezing again, my walk up the stairs made difficult by more sudden rapid-fire sneezes, but i was determined to make it all the way home before i lost complete control. even though i was virtually alone, i still had no intention of taking off the mask until i was truly alone and behind a closed, preferably locked door—the thought of anyone seeing how much of a mess i was behind the mask was unbearable, somehow even more embarrassing than all the actual public sneezing itself. it couldn’t have taken me more than seconds to unlock my apartment door, the final destination and end to this nightmare, but it felt agonizingly long as i sneezed in rapid sets of 3s that felt like they echoed up and down the stairs. literally all i could think about was ripping the mask off, finally freeing my nose of the sort of self-inducing allergic torture chamber my mask had become and burying my mouth and nose into about a dozen tissues at once to have the fit of my life (or at least this week 🤣),
i truly applaud this man for not only keeping these flowers alive but THRIVING to the point they’re still pollinating, even as the temperatures drop and leaves fall in the same backyard, but i can’t deny that i daydream about the day i don’t have to try to hold my breath as i walk down that block…
so yeah, i guess in the nicest and gentlest way possible, i can’t wait for this man’s flowers to die (or be moved to some nice imaginary greenhouse in a land far away)
i’m working at a law firm for the first part of the summer (as an office clerk— i’m not practicing law lol) and sometimes i malfunction because the floor plan is relatively open, which means that you can hear almost every time someone sneezes
and pretty much everyone says bless you
at one point the receptionist on the second floor sneezed and someone on the third floor walked down the stairs a bit just to bless her???
also (not snz) i met a really hot guy in a suit today and im just…. sigh…. if only i wasn’t 5’7 and like 15 years younger than him
