Cranky

I'm in a cranky mood, and I'm afraid I'm just going to ride it til bedtime.

I got a form letter in the mail from the clinic saying that I need to go have some blood lab things done because the clinic just built a huge new wing and now they need to use the cool extra new stuff they bought so they can pay for it "your provider believes having these tests completed prior to your appointment will make your visit more valuable to you."

My visit would be most valuable to me if I could walk in, renew my birth control prescription, and walk out and not spend half a day waiting around and being poked and prodded. That's it. That's really all I want, my complete agenda. I don't want to be weighed, or have my blood pressure and pulse and temperature taken, or anything else.

If I die tomorrow, so long as I die without having pms to the point of wanting to rip everyone's throat out through their noses, that would be fine.

But, of course, there are hoops to jump, so to speak. Only these hoops are worse than teaching myself to read Italian to pass the grad school second foreign language test hoop. And unlike that hoop, you have to keep jumping these at different intervals. (OMG, can I just jump straight to menopause, please!) (And thank dog that I don't have to keep retaking the Italian test!)

There's also a form I'm supposed to fill out ahead of time.

Do you remember the Cary Grant movie where he's a French WWII soldier who's married a US officer and he wants to immigrate to the US but all the forms and stuff are totally for women? And there's this scene where he's frustrated, sitting with a male US NCO whose supposed to ask questions and then fill in the health form, and the NCO reads the form and asks if he has any female trouble, and the Cary Grant character says something like "nothing but" in the tone he could pull that just totally worked for him. If I could get that tone, I would.

Anyway, this form would probably be more useful if I weren't feeling well, but as is, it's just a form and doesn't address what I want anyway.

At the bottom of the first side is a question that asks, "What are you doing to have good health?"

And that's where my problems start, because if I could just achieve that Cary Grant tone, I could have all sorts of fun. I really want to write down something like:

I'm using way better quality heroine these days.

I quit cleaning my ears with my katana.


You can probably think of even better responses. But of course, I'm not Cary Grant in a movie. And you can't really get away with those answers in real life, because sometimes people take you seriously when really they shouldn't, especially in the upper midwest where no one seems to understand any humor that isn't Sven and Ollie jokes or physical comedy, and even then it pretty much has to involve a trampoline. Ufda.

What an infantalizing question. Seriously, are they going to give me a sticker if I answer something they really like? A little pat on the head to tell me what a good whatever I am?

Then I turn it over, and there's the other side.

How much alcohol do I consume each week? (Consume? as opposed to what, drinking? So this is going to catch the stuff I snort, too?) I want to crayon in: Not enough.

How many caffeinated beverages do I drink each day? (but not consume? so I'm not supposed to count the stuff I mainline?) And are we talking cups of coffee or 20 ounce quadruple espresso shot lattes? Again with my crayon: not enough.

How often do you wear seatbelts? Only in the car. I was going to put one on my bike, but I figured clipping in causes me enough problems--horizontal trackstand!

How often do you wear sunscreen? Half the year--the half when we actually SEE the sun.

Then we get to the work part.

What type of work do you do?

Don't you totally want to make something really good up for that one? I'm an internationally known blogger! I'm a spy! I'm the person who carries the things Keith Richards doesn't want to be caught carrying across customs.

Any major stresses in your life? The patriarchy.

Marital status? How is "dating" a marital status? And what difference does it make medically if I'm living with someone with or without a license?

I'm thinking that the people who check all the boxes are either really big winners or really sad losers.

How many children do I have? Oddly enough, on my first college ID, it said I had seven children. I don't know how I fit them all into my dorm room, but some of my friends named the eldest and made up a sort of life history for him.