Hermetically sealed
Is it just me or is this city full of hypochondriacs who are allergic to the most obscure and inane things?
Cigarette smoke, I get; although in Seattle, I believe it's a requirement for a person to go over the top with how secondhand smoke from anything closer in than 500 meters personally destroys their immune system.
I'd honestly never heard of gluten intolerance until I move to Seattle, where just about every other person professes to have it. What is this condition, you might ask? It's not a food allergy: it's mild stomach discomfort caused by some of the proteins in grain.
To hear a Seattleite talk about it, though, you'd think they'd go into anaphylactic shock if they touched a piece of bread.
People in Seattle are so hung up on things like this that you will hear them making very specific orders in restaurants and then explaining why they "can't digest" certain things.
Meanwhile, what is it really? Either a terrifyingly flawed gene pool, hypochondria, or some weird form of Seattle pretension (I can envisage a one-ups-manship among Seattleites in declaring who is allergic to the most things).