This is quite personal, so please don’t read it.
What are you doing? I just asked you to stop reading and you totally disrespected me. Fine. Whatever. Just go right on reading then.
Yeah, I get a little PMS once in a while. But, more importantly, I get horrible menstrual cramps. By the way, I just lost all four of my male readers by using the word “menstrual”. That is unfortunate and mildly ironic, since in my next post I’m going to say “boobies” a lot, which may eliminate most of my female readers as well.
I’m moving on now to the brunt of my story. I can almost hear your sighs of relief.
So, it’s around 1986 or thereabouts, and I’m watching Jaws for about the 15th time. My cramps have subsided. The movie has gotten up to the point where the main characters are showing each other their scars. I notice my heart is beating out of control, so I’m thinking, “Am I this scared by the movie? Surely not. I know what’s going to happen right up to the last chomp.”
Then it occurs to me that I took god knows how many Midol before the movie even started, and they are probably kicking in. Since my heart is beating way too fast, I’m a little worried that maybe I’m going to have a Midol induced heart attack.
I call poison control to ask them if I need to make myself vomit or just drink lots of milk. Milk does an OD good, you know.
The woman who took my call was not condescending at all, which was super cool of her, considering how I must have sounded.
I tell her how many pills I could have taken, which was probably about 6-8. Stupid? Yeah, over here! Here I am!
In my upper teens I had this philosophy, “Less is not more. More is more. Bad cramps. More Midol.”
So, the non-condescending poison control lady told me to take a hot bath and calm down. Since there were no killer sharks in my bathtub, this did the trick.
My episode was, I guess, caused by too much caffeine. If I took the same amount of the drug today with my higher caffeine tolerance, I probably wouldn’t even notice its effect.
Is there a moral here? Do I look like Aesop to you? Does anyone know what Aesop looked like, or why he found a moral in everything? He’d be annoying as hell to live with, wouldn’t he? You’d say, “Aesop, honey, I had a hella bad day” and instead of cuddling you or offering to make dinner, he’d tell you some tired-assed story he’d made up about a bird and a fox.
So, a moral…
Well, don’t take too many Midol, and don’t marry a guy named Aesop.