ALERT! ALERT! MENOPAUSAL WOMEN BEWARE:
10 signs you need to keep menopausal madness at bay.
1. You go out to sushi with a large group of extended family members.
Everyone else is done eating and your order still hasn't arrived.
You go into hunger-related psychosis and, like the whipped-up Calvary coming round the bend at the Battle of Gettysburg, you unearth your waitress in a bus station and demand to have your goddamned fucking halibut sashimi.
She makes the mistake of arguing with you, a ravenous, peri-menopausal woman, saying it's not her fault because the sushi bar is backed up. Which incites you to yell, "I was a waitress for ten years and you're a terrible waitress and you better not add a gratuity because we're a large party and where is your freaking manager so I can get you fired?"
After which you rail at the pretty, petite, Japanese manager who smiles the entire time you're yelling because she doesn't understand English and thinks you ordered a "tuna roll" when you said "heads should roll."
And then there's a moment where you sort of step out of your body and look down at yourself yelling and you kind of casually think, "Wow. That bitch is crazy."
Then you return to your body and the table whereupon your siblings, nieces and nephews treat you like you're strapped to a self-detonating bomb.
Quickly your mood swings in the opposite direction. You're overtaken by remorse and leave the waitress a 25 percent tip, even though the kitchen ran out of your goddamned fucking halibut sashimi and you had to eat your sister's soggy seaweed salad.
2. You're offended, the next morning, when your husband and daughters tiptoe around you in the morning as if you were a vat of nitroglycerin.
3. You're picking up a latte at your favorite Internet cafe when suddenly your entire body is awash in a hot tsunami.
It starts behind your knees, sweeps mercilessly up to your groin, floods your armpits, and rolls in to shore at your hair follicles.
You ask the manager if you can, just briefly, step into her freezer locker and she lets you, probably because she heard about you from the manager at the sushi restaurant and thinks you might be unhinged.
While you're in the freezer locker you eat a wheel of gruyere.
4. Sitting down makes you hungry. Standing up makes you hungry. Looking out the window makes you hungry. Sleeping makes you hungry. Breathing makes you hungry.
Your mail carrier thinks you're pregnant, which both flatters (because she thinks you're young enough to get knocked up) and appalls (for obvious reasons).
5. After everyone's in bed you watch the Friends episode where Phoebe Buffay thinks a stray cat is the reincarnation of her dead mother.
Which makes you think about what would happen if you died and your children looked for your reincarnated soul in stray cats or feral possums and how that would ruin their lives and they'd end up living in the gutter with grocery carts full of stolen cat food, which makes you cry ceaselessly, but you can't help thinking, as you're crying, that this loss of fluids might waylay more hot flashes?
6. The following morning you see local billboards for the horror film The Strain, where a worm is coming out of a woman's eyeball, which makes you feel that, as a society, we're basically doomed if this is the kind of horse shit we call entertainment.
7. That afternoon, while cleaning the house, you feel like your body is full of electric shocks and you're the kite Benjamin Franklin used to discover electricity.
You think you could plug the vacuum cleaner into your mouth and vacuum the whole house.
You don't want Henry to touch you in case your electric shocks collide with your watery hot flashes and you inadvertently electrocute him.
And he already doesn't have a lot of hair.
And isn't yet in need of an implanted defibrillator for his estrogen-weakened heart.
8. You decide to make a video about menopausal women emasculating unsuspecting men instead of dinner. It's seems to be your calling. God told you to do it.
9. That night your vagina becomes passive-aggressive. One minute she's hot and bothered, the next she's as frigid as Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.
10. Once Henry's asleep and you have insomnia, you're overtaken by a stingingly desperate love for your husband.
Because at 53 he's already beginning to die more quickly than you. You can't stop hugging and kissing him. You can't help smothering his feet with your feet.
Then, just as quickly, his irregular sleep breathing pattern pisses you off and you ask him to roll over.
That does it! Henry cries. You're unbearable.
He pelts out of bed and dashes out (as quickly as a dying old man can) to get an emergency supply of your meds from the 24-hour pharmacy.
Ladies, what are your early menopause symptoms and how do you combat them? Gentlemen, what are your woman's early menopause symptoms and are you in love with a hooker name Clarisse?
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