Overreacting Stomachs on Par with World War I
Published: September 23, 2005Section: Opinions
I dont know about you, but my body is a bit of a wacko. I say this not because I like to, as often as I may, go star spinning. This is when you go to the Great Lawn or some other wide stretch of ground that wont dislocate one or more of your internal organs if you come in contact with it at high velocities while disoriented. Then you pick out a star, say, the left one. You know which one Im talking about. You then proceed to spin around really fast 30 times until the star traces a circle in the sky, and then you run as fast as you can in a straight line until the ground comes up and thwacks you in the shoulder.
No, this is not why I have decided that my body has lost its mind. After all, star spinning is quite a logical thing to do, especially when you want to get drunk but have no money or friends, like me. Im just joking of course. I have money.
I have decided that my body has lost its mind ever since two days ago when I had a 24 hour bug. Word has it on the street that it was either the bad General Tsos chicken or just plain ABSAcquired Barfing Syndrome. Either way, my bodys response to it was completely disproportional and totally inappropriate, much like World War I. A little pisher guy assassinates one meaningless insignificant Serbian Archduke who probably couldnt even speak English and everyone gets pissed off and starts killing each other by the millions. But this is exactly what my body did on a microscopic level.
Two days ago, my stomach registered that something undesirable had entered into its territorial borders, and God damnit it wasnt going to have any of that on its watch. So what my stomach decided to do in order to let me and everyone else on Usen floor 1 know that it had had enough of this crap was to throw EVERYTHING out, and not let ANY other speck of food in for an entire 36 hours. If I even tried to, it would get extremely wrath-of-God angry.
But this wasnt all. My stomach sent waves of insanity to the rest of my body telling it to get really nauseous if I even tried to sustain verticality for more than a microsecond. As a result, I was unable to go to class, do work, stand up, or even nudge around a little in my bed slightly in order to redirect the path of the drool splattering on my chest back to splattering on the floor. You DARED eat a bad piece of chicken, and now you have the AUDACITY to think that you would be able to redirect drool lines? Who do you think you are? Royalty? said my stomach, folding its arms in contempt.
Some people who have never had Acquired Barfing Syndrome simply dont understand the level of complete ineptitude one reaches at the peak of the disease. For example, a friend of mine who happened to be taking care of me, seeing that I could not do any work and that I had a lab report due in 2 days, offered to help me do it. I presume, though I cannot be sure, that she meant that shed write it while Id do the thinking and dictate. I answered her with the following monologue:
Flaghuuuuwwwbbbsppt
In ABS grammar, that can be understood as an implied maybe, leaning towards probably not.
Had I consented to the team-up, Id imagine that it would have worked something like this:
HELPFUL FRIEND: Rafi, OK, we have limiting reagents here. The paper says you have .06 moles of barflimide dipukeum, which combines with carbon tetrahurlide to form .17 warts of nauseic triwretchine. Which one is the excess reactant, and how many freckles do you have left of the resulting product?
RAFI: Flaghuuuuwwwbbbsppt
While this may have been happening, I was lying on the floor in Usen hall focusing all of my mental and physical strength and concentration on the critical objective of not moving any part of my body more than absolutely necessary for the process of breathing. I was doing pretty well until my left pinky twitched ever so slightly to the right, and once again my stomach had had enough of this maltreatment.
It was then, in the act of plunking my head in the garbage and making some very manly noises, that someoneand I am NOT making this upcame out into the hallway and asked, get this, Are you feeling OK? to which I answered, Sure. Im fine, and proceeded on my merry way with a jolly Christmassy-green tinge tacked onto my now thoroughly unattractive facial hue.
It was rather soon after this that I decided to head on over to the health center. I did this via some bit of nerve, energy, and will power that I had no idea existed, but that Im certain was fueled almost exclusively by my desire not to call BEMCO, who I was certain would simply find me on the floor smelling like the aftereffects of alcohol poisoning and proceed to pump my stomach after repeated questioning of what todays date is and who the last president was yielded nothing but Flaghuuuuwwwbbbsppt. I of course had absolutely no faith in BEMCOs knowledge of ABS grammar.
The health center turned out to be very helpful indeed, in the sense that they told me thatand again I am NOT making this upThis is going to be a long night of kneeling to the porcelain god, Rafi. Heres some Ginger Ale. This, I would not have figured out on my own. Seriously, I was too sick to make the connection.
But all is well now. Lovers quarrels are only temporary, even if they are on par with World War I. My stomach and I are slowly rebuilding our shattered relationship. Food is once again a major staple of my diet. I can even twitch my pinky again.
Maybe Ill go star spinning to celebrate.