oh yes it's ladies night, and the feeling's wrong.

ok, body, let's have a talk.

you are twenty-eight years old. hear that? twenty. eight. not fifty-eight. not even forty-eight. twenty-eight. so please, explain to me why i don't have full useage of my left arm, or practically ANY useage of my right hip?

explain to me why, at twenty-eight, on a saturday night when my peers are out sloshing it up with their zimas and shimmying their hula hoops about to their dan fogelberg, i am in bed in pain?

ok, to be fair, body, even if i wasn't in pain, i probably wouldn't be out anywhere shimmying anything, but still, it's unfair of you to decide that, since i'm not doing anything BETTER with my time (at least in your opinion) i should just go ahead and hurt.

OH AND THERE GO THE CRAMPS. god, you are so PREDICTABLE, BODY! "pain? you call that pain? FOOL!" now of course the hip pain is, once again, radiating down to my shin. like i said, predictable.

when i talk about my various body pains, it isn't so much in self-pity as in self-disbelief. i really, honestly can't understand why, at a relatively young age, i am beset with the joint problems of a pentagenarian (way to be prejudice against 50 year olds, spell check, real classy). granted, i'm not in the BEST physical shape in the whole world of ever, but all my cell counts are normal, my fluids are flowing, and my blood pressure is almost negative. i'm not overweight, just soft. the only overeating i really do is at indian buffets and right now ("right now" being the holidays, which of course doesn't count, so forget i even mentioned it).

ok, yeah, i have fibromyalgia, but that's not a very good excuse. after all, my mother and sister didn't seem terribly bothered by their fibromyalgia until they got older than i am, so what gives?

unfortunately, my habit when confused and frustrated is to voice those confusions and frustrations. this leads people to believe that i am an attention whore, which is mostly untrue. i say "mostly" because, of course, who doesn't sometimes crave a little attention, and if that attention can be in the form of pity and sympathy, well, sign me up for some of that. some. however, even pity requires some kind of response from me, and as i hate the back and forth of someone who doesn't know how to respond to someone else, it just ends up making me feel awkward. i guess the ideal situation would be to scream about my shitty body at the top of my lungs, and for everyone around me to kind of look at me for a second, then go about their business.

so if you're out on the street and you happen to see a short chick with dreads yelling at the sky about why her leg hurts, don't worry, just keeping walking along.