Elves in June

So yesterday, I started my day like most days.

I woke up and said to myself, "Andy...would you punch one hundred terminal illness clowns in the face to be able to sleep in today and do absolutely nothing?"

And what came out was a faint muffled whir. But that's because my head was buried in the pillow. What I was trying to scream was, "YEEEEESSSSS!!!"

So then I got up, ran 3 miles, ate breakfast, went to work.

About half an hour after I get there, I'm on the playground. I stand up and something deep within my lower left abdomen said, "Oh ho ho ho, I heard what you said about those clowns. Get ready for, MODERATE TO SEVERE ABDOMINAL PAIN!"

It was bad. I was hobbling around. My face went pale. I had trouble breathing and/or shouting at kids to stop running in the mulch. But going home would've meant missing out on a whole day's worth of money! Sweet sweet paycheck! So I try to tough it out but after a couple of hours of me dragging my butt around from activity to snack to free time to activity again, I knew I was done for the day.

SIDE NOTE: STILL TOTALLY CRUSHED EVERYONE IN BUMPER POOL!

So I leave before lunch and get home and see my sister and say, "I'M GONNA DIE! GET PEPTO-BISMOL!" So right away, without question, she gets in her car and goes to get some Pepto. I lay out on the couch and start looking up Pepto-Bismol and realize it's probably not going to help me at all. I also look up possible explanations for lower left abdominal pain and the third possibility on the first website was ectopic pregnancy.

My sister gets back and I yell, "Erin! Nevermind the pepto! I need laxatives! Also, I'm ectopic pregnant!"

Which is a pretty remarkable sentence to create at one in the afternoon on a Wednesday but she sighs and goes "...how many?" She was actually going to turn around and get me laxatives. And pretty much ignored the ectopic pregnancy part.

But anyway, I go downstairs to put on sick-day pants and almost make it to my closet when I decide that it's much more important for me to just lay on my bed with no pants on. I stay like that for about five, ten, one hundred minutes, put on pants and crawl back upstairs to find that my sister...is gone.

So I call her and I'm like, "YOU LEFT ME!?!"

And she's like, "I wanted to go running!" (in 90 degree heat in the middle of the day) "I yelled to you when I left" (to which I am sure she got no response from me).

Before this happened my sister was looking pretty good. Then she left someone who could barely walk to go run in heat advisory conditions only 30 minutes after eating breakfast. What was her excuse to leave, "Well, I yelled something at you in your room and didn't hear anything so I figured it was okay to go."

Having been abandoned by my only sibling, I decided it was time to get serious and call my mom. We talk, she suggests I don't get laxatives (I'm pretty certain at this point that there is something in me that needs to be out of me) and drink coffee instead. Well, I can't stand coffee so I make hot chocolate and drink that.

And the sad thing is--it totally worked. Within 10 minutes, I felt my body temperature rise, I hunched over one knee really tight, and I felt things shift around. I sat up and the pain was completely gone. Nothing came out. It just shifted.

So I'm relieved. But my first concern is-- I need to come up with a way better story than this for work tomorrow. I took over half the day off and when they ask what happened when I went home, I'm gonna have to say, 'Well! I drank some hot chocolate and then my tum-tum felt all better! Guess I just needed some hot chocolate!'

And they should rightly fire me on the spot. This isn't Santa's workshop. I'm not elf--fueled by christmas cheer, candy canes, and delicious hot cocoa. My crippling pain was the result of shortage of hot chocolate in my system. That makes me just barely better than a doll that cries and pees.

So I made up a story about my mighty bowel movement that was as black as night and thick as the horn of the bull rhinoceros. The pipes trembled under its density and the foundation of the house shifted three inches to the left. The local news ran a story about a sudden change in the migratory patterns of some birds. Some would say that's unrelated: I THINK NOT!

I bring a story like that back the next day and nobody's gonna be doubting my integrity. Even little kids aren't taken seriously when they are in want of hot chocolate. But NOBODY questions the seriousness of a for-real-deal Number Two.

That's life. That's the modern working world we live in. I'm sorry for the poop story but that's what it had to be if I wanted to survive. So no, I'm not sorry. Blame yourselves!

Also, my sister later came home and I told her that I was going to die but out of sheer spite of her neglect I willed my hate into life-fuel and raged the pain away.