Unchecked PMS

I’ll grant you, under normal circumstances I am not exactly a pillar of level-headed rationality. However, I manage to function and maintain a relatively stable existence (this being relative to my relatives.) However, every month I am blindsided by a sweeping storm of madness that, despite its recurrence for the past 17 years, perennially takes me by surprise. For the first time ever, this month I have been entirely alone – roommateless, boyfriendless, parental/familial companyless – to inflict upon myself the torturous insanity I usually reserve for my loved ones.

It starts with a desire to disinfect every inch of the house (which is different from cleaning the house). This seemingly benign impulse starts off productively enough. It is nine pm on Saturday – a totally normal time to begin cleaning the house. So I’m sweeping the stairs. I am sending clouds of dust and animal dander into the air with great flourish. At the bottom of the stairs I start experiencing that weird post-sweep satisfaction when you’ve got a really giant pile of gathered together crap to eliminate. But you can never REALLY get all of that pile into the dust pan. There is always a line of very fine dust left after the last swipe. Normally, I would throw a rug over it or something. But yesterday at nine pm I was a long distance from normal.

Out comes the vacuum cleaner. But even with that you can’t REALLY be sure that every last particle of dust has been eliminated. Thus, 10:15 pm finds me, a sponge, and warm soapy water all getting intimate with every surface in the house. And said intimacy follows no logical route. I walk from the kitchen to the living room and pounce at random. The finger print smudged light switch, door knobs, one floorboard but then not the next, then, mid-floor board, I remember the stove has a spot on it that had been bugging me earlier…all at great speed and with unnatural intensity.

At about quarter to eleven I decide I must know if my favorite jeans still fit like they used to. I must know right that very second. But I can’t just leave the soapy water sitting there. CAN’T have it both ways. And both things are (clearly) of earth shattering importance. War in Iraq, AIDS in Africa, Autism – you name it, it comes second, at this moment, to whether or not those jeans still fit and how clean I can get the house. I am standing in the center of a room having trouble deciding what to do first – get rid of the soapy water or try on the jeans. The stress of this decision making process frustrates me. Like the kind of frustration that makes me want to bite off my own fingers at the first knuckle and gnaw on them until my jaw breaks or I bleed to death, whatever comes first.

The jeans are a little snug. This begins the weep-fest that lasts until 4:27 on Sunday.

Okay, jeans are snug. So what do I do? I go to Walgreens for ice cream (a bit complicated but essentially I accepted the inevitability of my own pre-destined obesity and decided to sink into its clutches without further protest. Also there’s the chocolate thing, which is very real.)

But Walgreens does not have Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. I cannot allow the ingestion of 1200 calories in one sitting for anything less than Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. This is a catastrophe. Nightmarish. So I leave and decide to go home. On the way there I pass Cold Stone Creamery and think, “What are we if we aren’t willing to try new things?” But Cold Stone Creamery is PACKED and while waiting in line I revert back to my original decision that it’s BJ’s CFB or nothing.

I am standing on the corner of Highland and Baxter, without ice cream, still sniffling, meandering through an extremely insane and impossible to recreate thought process regarding ice cream, blue jeans, womanhood, etc. all of which morphs into a cold dagger shaped anger toward men/society/American Eagle Outfitters/planet earth. It is past eleven and the tail end of some festival has clotted the street to my left with drunken revelry. I am in no shape for human interaction and, had I any sense, would go buy my second or third choice ice cream flavor and go home to watch When Harry Met Sally. But no. I walk into the remains of the festival where stores are still open, their sidewalk sale racks poised for browsing.

It is a fabulous jacket. I have to have it. I will expire right here on the Bud Light cup littered sidewalk one block from home if I don’t have it and wouldn’t that be a tragedy. I’m there in the street wedged between clusters of drunk people trying on the jacket when some unsuspecting male person tells me that jacket looks great with those jeans. Very flattering. Etc.

I ask you to remind yourself of Linda Blair’s interactions with the priest. I think I turned to face him, but my head might have just wound backwards on its own, hard to say. I asked him in a sort of demonic hiss, “Don’t you have some fucking Nascar you should be watching or something?” He put his hands up in the “I don’t have any weapons” gesture. I literally shoved him out of my way and walked to the register to purchase the jacket (after all it looked good with my favorite jeans).

I end up back home without ice cream but with a great jacket, which provides some fleeting sense of satiety. Not three minutes later, hanging up my new jacket, I just start bawling. For absolutely zero reason. Instead of embracing a good cry I start doing the dumbest thing anyone can do during an irrational reasonless weep session which is FIND reasons to which the crying might be attributed. I am not sure if I can adequately explain this because I have since re-entered the world of moderately rational human beings but here goes. I don’t attribute the crying to actual reasons. Heck no. I don’t choose reasons that currently exist but reasons why, if those reasons applied, I WOULD cry. This means that in rapid succession horribly depressing POTENTIAL reasons to cry weave in and out of my little bloated brain. What if the dog got hit by a car. That would be terrible. I’d have to explain how I let it happen and the driver would feel badly and that would be bad too the driver feeling bad and what if I hit a dog well I don’t drive but what if I did and I killed a dog which would be worse Tizrah getting hit by a car or me hitting someone else’s dog oh that is terrible how could I even think that but I did I thought it I must be terrible and what if it wasn’t a dog what if like my sister got hit by car or who let’s see who would I pick if I had to pick somebody to get hit by a car who would I pick well that is even worse why am I even thinking about this I deserve to be crying that’s right I deserve it weep fatso weep devil woman.

Eventually I fall asleep and it is Sunday. There exists one reason to get out of bed. The Patriots are playing football today and there is no crying during the first football game of the season.

But I am in Kentucky. And no such game is playing on any channel. The remote is getting all wet because I’m crying all over it wondering “what could possibly be wrong what am I so UPSET about” still not really cognizant of the impetus for such insanity. I am flipping the channels, bravely coming to terms with the no Patriots game thing. There are a few films that a person in this state simply should not watch. Number one USED to be Philadelphia, then later Hotel Rwanda.

I couldn’t have stopped on TBS for cute little Melanie Griffith outsmarting Sigourney Weaver. Couldn’t watch Annette Benning fall in love with the president. Couldn’t even watch Harrison Ford prove what all of us knew already which is that every lawyer would benefit from a bullet to the head. Certainly not. I watch the one thing that could surpass Philadelphia and Hotel Rwanda combined. Spike Lee, levees, shattering indifference on the part of our beloved compassionately conservative administration….

So after watching Barbara Bush walk around and label American citizens “refugees” and profess that it was somehow fortuitous for such a disadvantaged population to be granted food and shelter I decide I ought to go for a nice long run but not before calling the white house and (still weeping, mind you) blubber unintelligibly long after some staffer in the 202 hung up.

After watching mothers mourn their drowned children another person might have been rendered unable to feel sorry for herself for, say, fifteen minutes. But when, not yet done with mile one, my right calf muscle cramps badly enough to stop my run midstride, the poor-kelly-meter’s needle is pushing eleven.

I get home at quarter past four, fifteen minutes past the hour Rose – the most evil cat on the planet – expects to be fed. I am now over my calf muscle and back to weeping about Katrina and this cat is meowing and whining and rubbing my leg, a thing she only does when she wants something. And I am thinking how Rose the cat princess assumes my world revolves around her and god forbid she wait fifteen minutes to have her dinner I mean she’s lucky to even BE fed for the love of all that’s holy she is so damned SELFISH I mean how ANNOYING is it to be in presence of something that believes the universe revolves not around the sun but around…

And that’s pretty much the minute I have the epiphany, stop crying, and feed the damn cat.


(The irony that I proceeded to post a three page single spaced blog about myself was noted and then subsequently ignored.)