My hayfever has been mostly unproblematic this summer, but it seems to be seizing its chance to have one last go at me this week. I've had several sneezing fits already this morning, and I'm currently sitting here experiencing physical symptoms that feel exactly as if I've been crying: the puffy eyes, the lump in the throat and the sniffling all match. But I haven't been crying, of course; I've just been sneezing.

Curiously, this is having an emotional effect on me, presumably by associative memory. On the very rare occasions that I do do serious crying, I tend to feel fragile afterwards: prone to treat minor setbacks as major, on the basis that I've only just returned from beyond the limit of what I can cope with and so even a minor frustration pushes me perilously close to going back over that limit. And what's odd is that I'm feeling very much like that now, for no better reason than that my current physical state is similar to the way I would be feeling just after a crying fit. I keep having to actively remind myself that my life is quite good at the moment, that nothing has gone seriously wrong recently at all, and that it's only hayfever.

I think I've mentioned before, haven't I, that the human brain is a shoddily designed piece of ad-hoc-ware and should be sufficient in itself to refute any feeble excuses a creationist can come up with? Well, perhaps it's worth saying it one more time. If I were an omnipotent god, or even just a finitely-but-extremely potent one, I'm sure I could do a better job than this, and if I couldn't then I'd deserve to have my deification revoked.