The entertaining part about having little or no depth perception is the fantastic alacrity with which large, immovable objects present themselves. This group includes, much to my misfortune, 1 foot-wide solid cement pillars that have no give whatsoever when you walk dead into them.

This is what I did: I walked into a cement pillar all alone at the gym one morning and gave myself a concussion Mike Tyson would envy. This is what I tell people: my boyfriend beat me, but it wasn’t his fault because I burned the dinner.

No one believes the truth anyway.

Hardly my fault though, as I didn’t see the huge roman columnar structure coming towards me, as I had decided my post workout thoughts would be best dedicated to philosophy rather than safe navigation. I decided my task o' the day would be the following: I was to plot my life's history on a Cartesian coordinate system where the events are the x-axis, past ideologies & beliefs are the y and the somewhere on the z plane I had intended to find the exact point at which I sold my soul to the devil. The only thing I can't sort is how I got cheated out of a Walpurgisnacht-like romp through the streets of Manhattan. (Or rather, above the streets). I had already assigned a value system for my past belief systems - that I have discarded like a q-tip into the sticky bathroom trash. It is a direct relationship (1:1) that correlates amount of time spent on the pursuit + number of dollars at the bookstore divided by the amount of time it took me to disband it altogether. (For simplicity's sake I left out the cost of travel to foreign locations to investigate these ideologies more thoroughly).

So you can see how the pillar had caught me unawares.

The subsequent pain and trauma of the ER was not nearly as disconcerting as when I got home and my brain decided to hurl my body to the floor and make it throw up. Bad, swollen brain. The following would have been more pleasant: being tarred and feathered and forced to sleep on a bed of nails while I have nightmares all night about David Lynch midgets taunting me and calling me names, only to wake and be lit afire. Not just a regular fire. But, rather, one where they shoved bamboo under my fingernails & used it for kindling, creating some sort of funeral pyre for Hindi widows to toss their hapless and now useless bodies atop of and for small American children to roast s’mores at. I would have utility in two countries – my farewell homage to John Stuart Mill.

At the ER, a funny idea came to me about the state of my life or alarming lack thereof. New guy in the picture, I decided contraception would be a keen idea. The commercials for the patch being kinda sexy, I reckoned that was the way to go. I called up my best friend, Sweetpea, who affectionately calls me “liquor” to share my idea. All she had to say was, “pull yourself together.” And so I tried.

 

CHAPTER TWO

LIQUOR’S ON THE MEDS

The entertaining thing about hormones is that you really don’t need anymore than you have in your body already, and your body doesn’t like you suggesting otherwise. The entertaining thing about the sexy patch is that it collects lint like a Cure-ad band aid and makes a dark, dirty ring of all things it has rubbed against on your ass. This really, really makes men want to jump you, let me tell you.

I am not supposed to smoke while on the pill, but I am a chain smoker and I am not about to give up my one outlet of stress relief now that I am too terrified to return the gym of many pillars. I am doing my impersonation of a smoke-stack. My factory has no utility; nothing being created, just smoke coming out of it. I will have such dark lungs I will be my own coal factory. I will build a hot sync cradle for my basement and sit in it and the coal from my lungs will generate enough electricity to power my whole apartment building. I won't fall prey to the Arab oil cartel.

I take breaks from the nicotine only to munch on the genetically altered sun chips spliced with fish genes as I slowly creeps toward dementia induced by the slightest tinny noise produced by S.A.D.-causing fluorescent lighting in my office that only dogs can hear but that my subconscious registers. These lights coupled with this patch will leave me as bifurcated as self-flagellating Ed Norton in Fight Club.

Hormones make me feel like I am seeing life through a dirty, fluoride-ridden Brita filter. My skin has organized a protest against me. Picket signs and the whole she-bang. WTO riots to ensue, I am sure. I am retaining enough water to build a dam and give electricity to small cities in the mid-west. If I lose my job I could find work bailing out west coast cities from their rolling power outages.

I decided to spice it up to lift my mood, but my boss is not being very supportive of the full Indian headdress I chose for my outfit today. I am thinking about filing a grievance with the American Indian Cultural board or something. I am half Ecuadorian so I must be Indian - or at least this is what I tell myself today as I realized that I could not convince my fat ass to climb into my really sassy size 4 Moschino pants that I love so much, I am blaming this on being Hispanic or the pill rather than the wheel-o-Brie-a-week plan I was on last month when I was celebrating French culture. I could go to some stone-tool using nation and impress them with my largesse and appoint myself queen. Or at least controller of the rice supply dropped by low-flying UN planes.

I think back to the time when I escaped the Turkish prison with nothing but the fish bones from the “soup” they fed me and I am convinced I can get through it.

I was wrong. The patch is evil. I kicked the cats, pulled out my hair and cried in the bath tub. Then I ripped it right off my ass in a swift move of prize fighter defiant glory.

Little did I know that I was already pregnant.

 

AMY FITZPATRICK divides her time fairly evenly between early morning kung fu, mid-afternoon neuroscience and evening time debauchery and defilement that ought only be found in a Nabokov novel. Any free time is spent recovering from the attendant trauma of these activities or writing about them. She is available for charity/foundation dinners and other socialite functions that need livening up.