I get sick of talking about my hives all the time because it's such a stupid thing to talk about. It's impossible to just mention it to people, because if I just say "I've been getting all these awful hives because I'm allergic to aspirin," then they give me this look like "so stop taking it, moron." It's way too complicated of a problem to explain to people during small talk. Suffice it to say that the 'ol hives are giving me a really awful day today. I found out through some web searching yesterday that taking antihistamines negatively affects my fertility. (I'm not going to go into details, but this was something that I had been noticing for a few months and had been getting very frustrated about.) I'm glad that it is now explained, but now I've got to stop taking the antihistamines, which I have been taking off and on lately whenever I've messed up and eaten something I wasn't supposed to. I have been itching all over all day and it's driving me BATTY. I hope my future children appreciate what I've already done for them.

On a related note, since I'm no longer allowed to eat zucchini, I've been letting some of the ones in the garden grow to mammoth proportions in order to see how large I could get them. My husband went out and harvested a few today and is home making zucchini bread, which I won't be able to eat. He's so domestic sometimes. I hope he's also really hungry. Those were some big zucchini.

While I was reading other people's journal archives last week I came across a person who mentioned that she had a prejudice against the institution of marriage and how conventional and conformist it was. That really annoyed me. I've spent a while thinking about why it annoys me so much. One of the biggest problems I have with a hatred of anything conventional is how hypocritical it almost always is. Usually people who dislike conventionality do so with a passion that matches the passion of the most conventional person to do what everyone else is doing. They scoff at everyone that they perceive to be doing things only because they are popular, and then proceed to do things only because they are unpopular. It's like my Dad told me once when I was in high school, "if you do things only because everyone else isn't doing them, then you're letting yourself be controlled by the crowd just as much as everyone else."

Another problem with the "unconventional attitude" is that it's not really all that unconventional. Wanting to be different from everyone else is a pretty human desire. For example, I have a strange love for Dan Fogelberg that is seemingly shared my no one else in my peer group. However, even as all my friends are teasing me for being such a weirdo, I'm secretly enjoying the fact that I'm so quirky and unique. Of course, when you get right down to it, there's tens of thousands of people out there who enjoy Dan's music, and I'm sure I'm not the only one of them in her 20's. (In fact I'm positive, because I saw quite a few young'uns when I went to his concert, and they actually looked like they were having fun.) It's perfectly human to want to be different from everyone else, just like it's perfectly human to want to fit in. If that seems somewhat contradictory, well, welcome to humanity. It's human to love; it's human to hate. It's human to be joyful; it's human to be despondent. No one ever claimed we made a lot of sense.

Lastly, that kind of attitude really bugs me because it often knocks perfectly wonderful things, like marriage for example. Sure, marriage can be a bad thing if one just gets into it because it's what you're "supposed to do," but so can most everything else that's otherwise good. It's pretty presumptuous to assume that just because lots of people get married, most of them are only doing it because it's what you're "supposed to do." Maybe they're actually doing it because it meets a human need. Maybe that's why it became so popular in the first place. People have very similar needs, desires, and problems. Perhaps it's not such a surprise that so many of us do similar things.

Also, I think that the reason I got so annoyed is because it is a painful reminder of what a cocky idiot I was as a teenager. I had that kind of an attitude, and I find it just as annoying in myself as I do in other people. I used to sit around with my first boyfriend at age 16 and talk about how we were 'real' and most everyone else was 'unreal' and how we loved each other so much, but we didn't just want to get married because that was so conventional and there must be some way to better express our uniquely deep feelings for one another. When I did premarital counseling 4 years later and read about all these young idealistic couples who come in all starry eyed about marriage and then get divorced 2 years later because they didn't realize they were going to have to work at it like everyone else, I realized yet again how normal I was.

I don't think I'm the only one of those "unconventional" people who eventually grew up and realized she wasn't any better than anyone else. I remember talking to a friend online when I got engaged, and he asked me why on earth I wanted to get married. My answer obviously didn't satisfy him, because he then proceeded to tell me how he was never going to do that. A monogamous relationship was just fine with him, there was no reason to go and get married. It was simply too conventional. He's getting married this year. I wasn't all that surprised.

BTW, I wasn't kidding about those zucchini. 5 lbs.