A stupid wet day
My nose and toes are cold BLA
Give me tequila
My hair bothers me
I am annoyed at appliances
5 long days
A frosty wind
My annoyances pile up by the minute
Fuck this 5-7-5 thing who made up these dumb rules anyway
I’m tired of laundry. I’m tired of the dirty basement, and the washing machine that doesn’t drain correctly so that all the clothes are sitting in 4 inches of FREEZING water ALL the time, even when I give them an extra spin.
I’m tired of the cement blocks the washing machine sits on, making it slightly too high for my very short arms to comfortably…reach.
I’m tired of the multi-level laundry obstacle course I must make each day to get clean clothes into everyone’s drawers. The dirty clothes are piled up on the second floor, the washing machine and dryer is in the basement and the main floor is where I stop to rest and fold before bringing the clean clothes back to the second floor (where I started the whole process in the first place.)
I don’t wanna do it anymore! I feel like the soup Nazi from Seinfeld.
NO SOCKS FOR YOU! YOU SHALL ALL GO BAREFOOT UNTIL YOU START DOING YOUR OWN LAUNDRY!
And while I’m putting all this PMS laundry-induced angst out into the void. I have a few more disgruntled comments to my family at large.
To my children:
2 seconds lator…
To my husband:
2 seconds later…
There’s nothing like having PMS around the holidays. I can hang ornaments and garland on the black cloud that’s hovering over my head. This thought occurred to me this morning as I huddled miserably on my couch between my two cherubic children and cringed as they rolled through their typical litany of morning “wants.” My non-verbalized responses to them are in square brackets.
4-Year-Old
7-Year-Old
Of course I didn’t say any of that stuff, and quickly took myself out of the room and into my office so that it wouldn’t accidentally on purpose escape my lips. Don’t want to give them any MORE things to tell their therapist in 10 years now, do I?
PMS and the workday don’t mix. I fully admit this. If you happen to work with me in some way shape or form during this volatile time of the month, my sincerest (and I do mean SINCEREST) apologies. I thought it’d be kind of fun to illustrate some of my classic reactions to work-related issues with and without PMS.
SITUATION
I’m one-day late with a deliverable, although in my defense I had two days off in the last week AND got three other things out to the client on short notice. The client says nothing about what I’ve managed to accomplish, and sends me a one-line e-mail pointing out the missed deadline while stating I must try to do better.
Without PMS:
I apologize politely and promise to have the item out to the client first thing in the morning, which requires I work until midnight that night. No problem, I’m all about customer service!
With PMS:
I write a venomous email filled with defensiveness and ire only to promptly delete it and write another, only to delete that. The email I finally send out is riddled with typos and makes no sense and sounds somewhat like one long shriek as such, “Apologies for not respnding sooner but I was in the process of completing your third deliverable fo rht eweek and for the future any time I provide you with a deadline please add three more days to the final due date.”
SITUATION
The phone rings at 10:05 a.m. as I’m frantically finishing up a report for an 11:00 a.m. call.
Without PMS:
I answer the phone on full alert, take studious notes and promise to follow-up with whoever called as soon as I’m done with my call.
With PMS:
I glare at the phone and ultimately answer it, my voice riddled with thinly masked hostility. The moment I say “hello?” I regret the action of answering the phone, and promptly feel justified in treating whoever has called like a thoughtless, productivity-sapping saboteur.
SITUATION
It’s 4:55 p.m. I’m exhausted, loaded up on caffeine and my head is throbbing with a hormonally-induced headache. The presentation I sent off to a colleague an hour ago – the one that’s due to the client by tomorrow at 9:00 a.m., comes back to me with four hours worth of changes.
Without PMS:
I scream, “THAT FUCKER!!” get more coffee and get the work done.
With PMS:
I scream, “THAT FUCKER!!” send the report back to my colleague with a curt email explaining that I’m unavailable for the rest of the evening, and get drunk.
Okay, so I get the fact that it’s the end of August and therefore I must deal with a smattering of over-eager retailers who insist on putting out Halloween decorations and costumes for (likewise) over-eager consumers. I GET IT!
But please, please, please, if you own a store, consider the children! Yesterday I took my daughters who are 4 and 7 to our local craft store (*ahem* Michaels) for some stickers and other goodies. I saw the Halloween stuff from across the store. I can’t deny it. Nor can I deny the horrendous experience I had last year when my now-7-year-old was six and a giant animatronic witch came to life and proceeded to cackle at her while its eyes glowed red. She shrieked and we left the store, not to return until after Halloween. As I recall, I had to carry her out (howling) with her face buried in my neck.
So this year, in this same store, I thought – well, we saw the witch last year so we know to avoid it. Let’s walk down the Halloween aisle because I personally love looking at eyeball-shaped candles and ghost-statuary. Only this time I had the four-year-old with me as well. I know what you’re thinking. What the fuck is wrong with me? I don’t know. I have PMS. I have a head cold. It was a poor judgement call, on my part.
The children were happily grasping their new craft paraphernalia to their little chests when we rounded the bend and approached what looked like a statue of a woman in a white dress. It took me a moment before I realized the statue didn’t have a head. My older daughter noticed right away though, and ran past it in terror. I yelled at her to stop, just as my younger daughter and I came up beside it. These things are motion activated so once the child ran past, the statue came to life.
It’s called “The Headless Bride and Her Groom”
The description on Michael’s Web site reads, “Nothing says true love like this couple. Both statues speak and are motion activated.”
The above picture really doesn’t do the statues justice. In the store, they were propped up on a table so that the head of the bride was exactly at eye-level with my 4-year-old. The head swiveled around, looked at her, began screaming and, as an added fun effect, its eyes began pulsating with a red light.
My daughter screamed as though she were being kidnapped and ran through the store (while continuing to shriek at the top of her lungs). I caught up with her as she ran past the cash registers, which were full of perplexed people watching her trail of smoke. I then heard one of the cashiers say, “yeah, all the children are reacting like that…”
At which point the PMS kicked in. Whose idea is it to put up a terrifying Halloween display in a store whose essential clientele consists of children below the age of 10? And what bright bulb decided to arrange the headless bride at eye level of most 4 and 5 year olds? And, finally, what genius propped the “groom” atop a table so that we could still see his gaping mouth and bloodless face from clear across the store?
Oh, and by the way, it’s AUGUST. Let’s get them their back-to-school crap before we psychologically traumatize them for life, k?
What the fuck is wrong with people? If children are screaming and running from the store all day long, could it be that the display is POSSIBLY too scary??
Yes, it is. YES IT IS TOO SCARY. You bastards. I’m calling the store to complain on Monday (with the full power of PMS behind me). mmmf.
update: I called and complained yesterday. I was very nice (honest). The store manager was also very nice, but she said that all stores are mandated to keep the things out and have them plugged in – it comes down from Michael’s Central Command or something. She said the thing freaks her out too and she keeps it unplugged while she’s there (obviously not on Sunday afternoon).
How comforting.
She’s going to tell the district manager about my complaint and she advised me to call before coming into the store and she’ll throw a sheet over the thing and unplug it. Ummmm, no thanks. Looks like I need to find a good online craft store… Honestly, if I can’t even get a local craft store to push its tasteless Halloween crap to the back of the building, what the fuck can I get accomplished in life? I feel so disenfranchised.
MaxinePad: I have to cut out salt from this second on… I’m on full cankle alert
PMS666: I hate that term
MaxinePad: I love the cankle
PMS666: It’s so misogynistic. There’s no equivalent term to demean a trivial portion of a man’s body. Men don’t get cankles
MaxinePad: Kevin Nealon calls one of the men on the Agrestic board “Cankles” in season three (of Weeds). Wait, maybe it was a woman. I don’t remember
PMS666: see!
MaxinePad: I love Kevin Nealon. and his cankles
PMS666: Can I repeat this conversation on PMS666?
MaxinePad: Yes
I got my period about five hours after my last post and promptly took a two hour nap.
From that moment on, the hormones lifted from my mind like a cloud of locusts in search of their next victim, and life settled back to normal. Then things started getting better and better.
Yesterday, through cramps and discomfort, but relative good humor, I took my six-year-old to her first singing lesson. She’s a little young for singing lessons (the teacher sounded a bit hesitant when I called her two days ago), but I knew the kid could sing, even though everyone around me pretty much nods and smiles whenever I suggest she’s a prodigy. And who can blame them? She disguises her voice whenever she sings in front of anyone else.
So, yeah, this lesson wasn’t just for her, it was for me dammit! I needed to know that the quietly perfect singing voice I notice whenever she thinks no one is listening isn’t just the promise of impending senility lodged in my own head.
So after the first 20 minutes of the lesson, my child took a potty break and the teacher approached the dark corner where I hid (because the kid wouldn’t sing with ME in the room) and she had this look on her face….a look of wonder. And she said, “Your child has an amazing gift. I can’t believe she’s only six. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
And I know I speak for every mother out there who suspects their child is a genius in some way or form (because don’t we all?) when I say this..
I KNEW IT!!!
Okay, there, I’m over it. And the kid doesn’t have to do anything with it and I’m definitely not going to put her up in front of Simon or become a crazed stage mom, or start bragging on my various blogs or anything (er, oops). She can sing to me in the car for the rest of her life if that’s as far as she wants to take but, but damn if I didn’t know it!
This morning I woke up to my other child talking and laughing at 6:30 a.m. at the top of her lungs and I thought to myself, “there are a lot worse ways to wake up in the morning.”
AND…I’ve got absolutely NOTHING planned for the weekend. No birthday parties, no long trips to anywhere and almost all high-pressure deadlines filed way this week. So, yeah, the sun is definitely shining again.
Until next month…
Today I’m functioning in a PMS fog of stress and frustration. It’s one of those days where I can’t seem to get anything right.
A client is in a panic because something I did may get her fired. It’s not actually something I did, but something I can’t figure out how to do – and ultimately not my fault, but I can’t fix it, and I should’ve recommended they use a different solution in the first place and now it’s a complete mess.
My daughter is getting headaches and so of course my PMS-brain goes right to the “it’s a tumor!” scenario, but I’m just as stressed at the prospect of her needing glasses because it will require she visits the doctor.
Doctors. Another hugely stressful subject in my life. I recently switched both my kids to a new doctor because their pediatrician’s office was so crowded. I was very pleased with myself because this guy is a family doctor, and seemed very nice. But unfortunately the nurse who gave my 4-year-old her vaccinations last week was a complete idiot. She didn’t prepare the three shots in a neat little row with the band aids ready to go on a tray. As a result, my child had to wait a few minutes in between each shot and bled all over herself waiting for the band aid.
Now my 7-year-old needs to go to the doctor and I have no idea where to take her.
My head hurts, I’m tired, I can’t keep up, I’m making too many mistakes…but I’ll keep trying. What else can I do?
I just had the perfect picture that can relate how a woman feels when she’s buzzing on PMS freakazoid hormones. Thought this would be the appropriate place to share it: SHAKE AND BAKE CHICKEN
How to describe PMS…..well, i basically feel like someone’s thrown a dozen eggs at me, plunked and rolled me around in a huge bowl of flower till i’m covered and sputtering, and then shaken me in a bag all fecking day. SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!![Conference call] SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!![lunch break]SHAKE!!!SHAKE!!![PMS666post]. Shaken. dammit. simply shaken! my nerves are shot….no wonder we get so tired. it’s fecking exhausting!
…Now to be thrown into a pan of burning hot oil.
GOODY!