Your monthly dose

My latest humor piece is up today at Generation Q. And have you noticed that I've been putting these things out MONTHLY? Quilter's Home was bi-monthly, so, you know, I had time to paint my toenails and stare off into the middle distance until inspiration finally hit, but now these slave-drivers that I work with are all addicted to how all of you go over there every time I have a new piece up and shoot up our stats and leave tons and tons of comments and make us all attractive to advertisers and whatnot, so now I have to actually put on clean underwear and brush my teeth and act like a normal human being and produce work on a regular basis. I liked being a big ol' sloth. I also liked not having to be so aware of how my menstrual cycle was affecting my creativity.

Back when I was an optician, I had this customer, whose name I should dutifully hide but her name was the same as a southern state where they grow lots of peaches, but like I said, privacy and all that, so lets just call her Idaho (no, you da ho!). Anyway, Idaho was a gigantic pain in my ass because she was one of those rich, self-centered, entitled people who thinks the world revolves around her and justifies it all by announcing every ten seconds that she's a Christian. You know, I've known a lot of Christians of various stripes in my day, and many of them were capable of practicing virtues like humility and charity, but this one? She would say things like, "I prayed about it really hard and God told me that He wanted me to have a new BMW." I AM NOT KIDDING. And this woman spent INSANE amounts of money in our shop, so it wasn't like I could go, "NO, I'm pretty sure God wants you to suck up your pathological need for a flashy car and give that money to somebody who HAS NO FOOD." Nope, I had to nod my head and smile and ask if she'd be using her AmEx or paying cash today.

She was roughly 8 or 10 years older than me, which put her in her early 40s when I was in my 30s, and not only did she torture us almost daily with tweaking her eyeglass adjustments by mere microns and her contact lens prescription by degrees too small for ophthalmic instruments to actually register, apparently she also did this to her doctor with her hormones. Her hormones for peri-menopause. Her hormones were so in need of constant adjustment she had her poor doctor on speed dial and would call her at all hours to discuss how many milligrams up or down she needed to go in order to be able to function normally. NEWS FLASH, IDAHO: IT WASN'T THE HORMONES.

Naturally, I thought she was full of shit. But then I hit 40 and I started getting my period every two weeks. And then it would skip three months. And then be normally spaced but so heavy I'd wonder if it was possible to need a transfusion just for a really heavy period. Then after about a year of this, it all just went back to normal. Except now, I'm not normal. I am a raging bucket of mad, evil, murderous thoughts for one week before my period starts. Everything pisses me off. I get boiling mad over everything, and I can't write to save my life. Then, my period starts and I have four or five days of relative normality and then, for the next two weeks, all I can think about is sex. IT'S VERY DISTRACTING.

So, now I feel like maybe I shouldn't have been so hard on poor Idaho. Though, I do hope that, like me, she was plagued by naughty thoughts all the time and had to talk to God about it. "Honey, I've been praying about it a lot and I'm pretty sure God wants me to do it with the repair guy on top of the washing machine until neither of us can walk straight."

And what does that have to do with my humor column? Um, nothing really. Except that it is what I manage to do in between wanting to kill everyone in sight and being a middle-aged degenerate.

Oh, and come back on Wednesday. I'll have an announcement that day and I promise it won't have any links you can't click on at work (unless they have a no-burrito policy).