If you’ve noticed the number of sniffles and sneezes increase exponentially over the past few weeks, do not panic. Avian flu hasn’t reached UC Davis and a new super-cold hasn’t started within the bodies of us college students. The culprit of the extra classroom sounds is allergies.
Davis lies in the fertile Central Valley of California. Because of this, come springtime, flowers, trees and grasses bloom and release an explosion of pollen into the air. This, combined with the vicious Central Valley winds, creates a vacuum of allergens that leads to sneezes and sniffles galore. And because of the dry winter and spring, this season has been worse than ones in the past.
Unfortunately for us allergy sufferers, there isn’t an all encompassing answer to solving this problem. We buy Claritin, rush through boxes of tissues and run the air purifier 24/7. Still, despite these preventive measures, we continuously sneeze and itch our teary eyes.
There are a couple natural solutions that can help mitigate the amount of pollen filling up the nostrils of college students. The easiest one is rain. The one thing that we loathed most about Winter Quarter and couldn’t wait to leave come Spring is exactly what we need now. Rain will literally wash away all the pollen floating around in the air, providing relief to everyone.
Unfortunately, rain won’t be coming anytime soon. The closer we get to June, the less likely those sweet clouds of alleviation appear and release their almighty water on the sun-scorched earth. So, it’s time for the bright minds of UC Davis to come up with another solution — a rain machine.
UC Davis boasts one of the top atmospheric science departments in the nation. It’s time for the future weather-people of the world to develop an artificial cloud that can dump buckets of rain and clear out all the evil pollen floating around in the air. The obvious issue is where the water will come from. Well, if they pull the water from a local reservoir, there will be no water lost as it will fall and then drain into the same body it came from. This is clearly a win-win situation.
The only other reasonable option to limit sneezing and sniffling is to cut down the trees and plants that release the allergens into the air. So, if the UC Davis think-tank can’t come up with this rain machine, they’d better get their clippers and saws ready to go. We allergy sufferers aren’t going to take it anymore.
This may all be an overreaction. Allergies are probably the most annoying thing in the world. There is no simple relief, and unlike a cold, we don’t know when or if they will go away. So allergies, please and respectfully fuck off.
