carrots PSA

Monday night I stayed at work until 10pm to finish up a particularly onerous motion for summary judgment. It is the second of five consecutive employment discrimination and retaliation summary judgments I need to finish in the next month; these cases are particularly gnarly because it always comes down to the facts, and often both sides disagree about every material fact, and cite dishonestly to the voluminous record, which does not actually reflect the proposition for which it is cited, and so some sad clerk gets to spend a rainy June looking through deposition transcripts in files inconveniently held together by fingertip-abraiding metal clips that prevent the document from staying open at the page one would like to stay open at, requiring Bluebooks and thermoses and rubber band balls to be repurposed as paperweights, in order to determine where a reasonable jury would say the truth lies.

Anyway, so I stayed late and got this little fucker done. But I am lazy and cheap, and I did not want to leave the office to eat. So for dinner I ate what I had on hand: a snack-size bag of Baked Doritos, and a one-pound bag of baby carrots.

(So sinister.)

This, readers, was a big mistake. I feel compelled to tell the world what a huge mistake it was so that it will not be repeated by lazy diners in the future. Please, please, never eat an entire bag of baby carrots.

You may think a one-pound bag of baby carrots is a healthy meal because it is raw and brightly colored, but it will make your insides feel as if invaded by a convention of ex-girlfriends dueling in spurs with hot, barbed pokers. I was okay for my bike ride home. I even downed the two homemade pizza slices that Olympia and her gf so generously offered. There were rumblings down below, and some stabbing pains, but I sipped ginger tea, watched an episode of 30 Rock, and tucked myself into bed at a totally reasonable hour expecting a full night of self-satisfied rest.

Not so! Soon after I lay down to sleep, the occasional stabbing pains escalated into waves of intense, crippling stomach cramps. It felt as though a giant's hand was grabbing all of my internal organs at once and rhythmically squeezing them down into a diamond under my lungs. I had just watched a Spike TV reenactment of a guy who died when his girlfriend punched him in the stomach ulcers and ruptured everything inside him, and I was sure this was happening to me. Really, I had never felt anything like this before. I moaned, I groaned, I almost cried. I lay on my side whimpering.

Each half hour, for the next five hours, I vommed. The first few times I made the toilet; the last few I only got to the trash can, which is wire mesh, so my bathroom floor was flooded with stomach bilge, and pieces of basil clung to the mesh. This was very exciting to clean up. It was the kind of out of control throwing up where you make those involuntary chirping/gurgling noises in your throat that make other people, should they have the misfortune being in earshot, want to throw up too. By 3 a.m. there was nothing coming up except orange-colored water, but my stomach was still trying to kill me, so something remained amiss. Finally, at 4 a.m., I took one last trip to the vomitorium and disgorged a fist of shredded carrot from my stomach. After this, I slept.

The moral of this story is that our bodies are not meant to digest so much carrot in so little time. Lucky for me, my body was able to eject the source of poison, so that nobody had to tell my parents that their idiot daughter had died from carrots. So much of my blog is devoted to stories such as these, e.g. when a combination of Popeye's chicken and Hot Tamales caused me to shit my pants on a plane, you would think I would learn to treat my body better. Lucky for you, dear reader, I haven't!

The epilogue to this story is that nothing has come out of my ass in two days except for some mysterious hissing sounds.