SO. Great morning, really great. What I like to follow up a weekend of intense gastrointestinal distress with is a Monday morning of it. I have called off work and felt kind of wimpy about it until I went back to the bathroom. Again. I could not even make the hour commute to downtown at this rate. The other bus commuters have low tolerance to people shitting themselves, I hear.

I was putting on my work trousers this morning and feeling grateful that my brain is about back to 80%, maybe. Saturday was all derp derp march to fuzz. This morning I noticed my custom cut shirt that fit me perfectly a year ago now hangs funny and the darts stick out. I’d been a D-cup for…over 15 years? I am now officially a C-cup, which I can’t remember happening since high school. Also they don’t hurt MOST OF THE TIME. Or at all really. I’m going to tell you something, because that’s what I do: sometimes I will be sitting on the couch and I will think of my boobs and I will squeeze them REALLY HARD. Not to the point of damage or bruising or anything. Just much, much harder than I have ever been able to for like 1,000 years.

I demonstrated this to Franny recently, who was amazed. She thinks I am going insane (short trip). We are working on stamping out (bad visual) her breast pain as well. We’re getting there. She is not as consistent with vitamins as I am, but she notices that she feels MUCH better now on them.

P. came in while I was thinking these deep booby thoughts, standing in my bra and trousers, before I put my shirt on.

“Yeah, you’re looking poofy today.”

THE MAGICAL WORDS EVERY WOMAN LONGS TO HEAR. It’s like the honeymoon never ended in this house.

(Seriously though, it was true. I was wearing pants I needed a belt for last week and they were not tight but they were snug on the waist. I wasn’t really offended. It was just a fact. He is very frank about these things. On Friday night he said, “You’ve shrunk a little again.”)

I think there’s probably stages of Celiac for some people, and the one I think I am on is that I lose my mind a little bit if I get “glutened.” I become Detective Obsesso until I figure out what happened. And guess what? Most of the time it is not certain or clear at all.

I usually have effects fast, within an hour or two, so it’s pretty easy to chain back to when it happened. If I feel HULK SMASH ANGRY, have lesions on my scalp or upper back, and itch and fidget like I am a cartoon character with the DT’s, I know it’s corn. If I am pooping myself, have joint pain, and feel confused, it is probably dairy or wheat.

How did I get through life like this for so many years? I had severe joint pain on Saturday night, the kind I remember happening back to ’09 or so, and I used to just blame that on my quality of sleep. Which was poor, because, you know, wheat etc. I was running 5Ks 2-3 times a week then (in addition to other stuff like push ups, pull ups, and lots of walking everywhere), and eating healthy food (so I thought) and I felt terrible most of the time and could not lose “that last fifteen pounds” to save my life in spite of a rigorous training schedule.

So Saturday night I just sat on the couch, folded laundry, and bingewatched three Parenthoods to catch up, my guilty semi-pleasure show. I am on deathwatch with every single character on that show. ESPECIALLY the character of Ray Romano’s daughter (wishful thinking). Also am mad that I actually enjoy watching Ray Romano now. WHAT KIND OF UPSIDE DOWN WORLD IS THIS.

Strudel was home alone with me since Frannie was off with her dad and P. was at his bimonthly game night. “These people are SO NICE,” she kept exclaiming. It seems like there’s much less yelling and crosstalking than in previous seasons.

“Do you like them?” I said.

“They’re kind of boring,” she concluded.

Word.

Speaking of boring, let me tell you what my life is like now. I will say first that I really like it! It’s working most of the time. 98% of what goes into my mouth, I have made myself from single components. Example: salad dressing. Sometimes salad dressing has gluten of some kind. Many, many products are now going gluten free. THAT’S GREAT! Problem: they are “manufactured in a facility where someone once whispered the word ‘wheat’ on the factory floor under a blanket at midnight.” (Cross contamination.) If this is not the case, sauces often contain dairy. Or corn. Or xanthan gum.

Well, fuck that shit. I make my own salad dressings now. I would often bang a vinaigrette together in the past, but now, I make a jar of something once a week, and that’s what we eat that week. Most dressings I make have about five ingredients, give or take. I make a riff on Annie’s shiitake sesame dressing, because we used to love that. I make classic French vinaigrettes. I made a great “Russian” for a noir night.

I am HUGE into sauces. Dressings, hot sauces, bizarro catsups (so good on hash browns). I have been introducing sauces slowly, at the rate of one per week, tops. On Friday I brought home some safe looking Thai sweet chili sauce (made with cane sugar, no thickeners), and that is the only thing I did different. I made one of my comfort food meals, which sounded great on a Friday night–rice and stir-fried broccoli and marinaded chicken thighs to make quick Thai barbecue. By Saturday morning, Strudel and I were both ill. I immediately thought of that new chili sauce, but then, P. hates sweet sauces, so he didn’t have any at all. WHAT WAS IT???

Okay so anyway. I am trying to figure out what happened. I think it went back to Friday night, since Strudel and I were sick by Saturday morning, and P. was sick by Sunday. But I cannot crack it. And the reality is, I will not be able to figure this out.

This is the part where I do the little dance of “I am so lucky that there are so many things I can still eat, and at least I don’t have crotch rot/ass horns/veganism.” And I am glad I am not trying to just jam my square peg into the round hole of most of the food that is available outside my doorstep. I’m aware that I’m probably going to live longer, and I am definitely living better. But it’s weird. I’m very aware that most of the social/leisure part of the world is now out of my grasp without moderate to extensive planning. I’m aware that I’m going to have sick days where I cannot leave the radius of my bathroom.

I’d like to write today (real creative writing, not this blathering) but I am still pretty unfocused. However, this flash fiction I started to keep myself busy this summer when I was working 15 hours a week is shaping up into something, and I am working on an outline for another novel, so that’s good. I’m trying to accept that I am 98% transmogrified into Kilgore Trout at this point and I will never write Serious Important Fiction ever. Because Donkey Surgeon.

HAPPY MONDAY!