Even less photogenic than usual!

The small plastic piece that would hold the battery into my camera has been broken for some time, and I don't really miss it that much. Even when it was working I would rarely take pictures, and so other people wind up using it, which means I wind up being in the pictures, and that's not good. On the other hand, will it be sad twenty years from now when I have absolutely zero pictures of college?

I bring this up because my friends were quite upset with me for not having a camera last Friday, while I'm feeling a more ambivalent about it. A large crowd of the Mathies wound up having dinner at Pizzeria Uno. In the best of times would only make me nostalgic for Giardano's spinach delivered to the U of C dorms. This night the service was bad enough to make me forget this - the "vegetarian" pizza came with sausage instead of black olives, and someone's chicken was undercooked. They were very apolegetic and gave us some free food, but still. After the dinner debacle a group of us headed back to my place and my eyes started itching right as we arrived. Soon the conversation becomes monopolized about me commenting on how itchy my whole face was, and the friends laughing as my lips start to look more and more like Angelina Jolie's, but after a collagen injection. The winkles on my forehead all jumped out, those lines you get under your checks when you smile (do they have a name?) were permanent, and my nose felt twice its normal size. When my voice dropped an octave our worries over what would happen next became serious enough to go to the emergency room, where I got a shot of epinephren and an IV full of Benadryl and some steroid type thing (I got (got?) to see half an episode of Numb3rz while it was draining, though I was out of it enough not to have anything meaningful to say about it), but no photographic evidence. I never had any problem breathing, though the ER staff was reassuringly impressed with the swelling and removed any doubt that I was wasting their time. The rest of the weekend was spent either drugged out on some benadryl-like pill they'd given me, or whizzing around at 90 miles an hour after I had slept 12 hours, stopped taking the benadryl stuff, and rather underestimated my caffeine consumption.

I have no clue what caused this (some bizzare spice in the Chicken Fajita pizza? something in the Irish beer?) though I did have a similar reaction once when a bee or wasp stung me in the hand, which in short order looked more like an inflated latex glove than I felt comfortable with. Wednesday I have an appointment with an allergist, so we'll see what turns up, although I don't really have my hopes up as to figuring this out. Also, I now have an Epipen, with which I can administer myself epinephrin through my jeans, which I find way cool, if a little scary. And on the whole, a picture would have been a nice.