The usually alarmist posting style of WebMD let me down when trying to diagnose The Mc at 3am Sunday morning.

What their timid article about our friend FP should really say is: “Those suffering from food poisoning will frequently clutch their stomachs, beg for death and run unexpectedly towards any object that might serve as a receptacle for their projectile vomiting.”

It should continue on to say that people in the throes of poisoning can be quoted as saying “oh God…oh God… oh God… oh God…honey, it hurts … oh God… oh God…”

That would have made it much easier to diagnose, which is key in treatment. I mean, I could treat him for something else, like lice, but I’m not sure the desired effect would have been reached.

With regards to treatment, the article should list the following:

Things you should *not* do:
- Allow the barfer to consume liquids within 30 minutes of last explosive episode
- Give the barfer Emotrol, Pepto or Immodium

Things you should do:
- Call your health insurance nurse line after the second “episode”. Do not wait until five hours later when the sickling is finally ready to accept defeat against the unseen
- Take copious notes so you can mock the ill when they’re – un-ill.

Nothing says “love” and “healing” quite like getting a laugh out of your PFL’s misery…then sharing it on teh interwebz.

Four years ago he sweated through one shirt and changed into another before heading to my place. Four years ago we walked our way through my (now our) neighborhood to three different venues: a glass of wine with his body turned away from me while I vomited up everything that might eventually scare him away, dinner half a mile away where au jus dripped down my arm like a savage and finally a nightcap at the Irish bar which needs no additional detail.

Four years ago it all started unraveling and unfolding, neither of us knowing how much our lives – and we – would change, how much we’d stay the same.

Thank you for four wonderful years, Mc – you’re up for sainthood this time next year.

It’s a picturesque fall day – though around me people are complaining that fall was skipped entirely and we’re in the throes of winter.

Me? I’m okay with it. Sitting outside at a coffee shop – one I used to frequent far more than I do now – with a sweater under fleece, a hot cocoa and my trusty yellow tablet (oh, how I’ve missed you). On the sheet prior to the one I’m writing on now, I’m making a list of goals for myself in 2010.

The wind is gusty, sporadic. It holds a definite nip but it’s just teasing the leaves of my tablet. Flipping up the corners of the pages I have yet to fill with scrawl and navel gazing, I’m smiling back like the village idiot at the invisible when it greets me and flushes my cheeks.

The jolts bring me into the present: to feel my skin and pay attention to the nourishment filling my lungs. To revel in the silence broken by passing cars and footsteps of people hustling in and out of the shop as if they’re outrunning a blizzard. It reminds me at 9 knots that too much time has been spent worrying about where I should be and with who and doing what, and that it leaves me empty, even when I fulfill my obligations. Even when I have fun. Noodle that, Freud.

There’s an itch on the back of my brain, it has a face and a name and a little gray body with Gumby arms and it’s clearing its throat repeatedly to get my attention and pointing at a picture of The Mc and I not spending enough time together. Correction: enough quality time. In the picture, we’ve hit our routine stride as we encroach on the 4 year mark (my God! Has it been so long already?). We come home – exhausted – share a meal and collapse. Or, many evenings, I’m out and come home to him already in his second round of dreams. Thank you, Little Mr. Itch. I needed help seeing what was right in front of me.

I imagine that most of the coupled-up, once giddy and swooning population reaches the same space, but I don’t imagine they move through it. I imagine they stay there, forever. I see it in the way their bodies don’t touch in restaurants and in the sparkle missing from their eyes in the grocery store aisle when they hand off the box of pasta to be dropped in the cart beside the Rogaine and tampons.

I don’t want that. Never have. I want romance and love and I want it to ooze out of us like an abscess partnered with a fever you’re not sure if you should be scared of or not.

Luckily, I found a man who doesn’t want it either. Of course we’re moving forward and building our future (honoring our inner adults), but we’re also recommitting ourselves to dating and affection and affirmation and being silly and playful and not taking one another for granted and embracing the good and the bad we both carry with us. There will be tudes copped and eyes rolled and groans at bad jokes but in the end there will be this: mutual respect and adoration.

Contrasting history with reality, contrasting the days I spent at that coffee shop 5 years ago, the nights and weekend afternoons of writing my way through my own rebirth after thinking I’d failed at life against the balance (but with an acknowledgment if a permanently restless soul) I’ve been given today…well, it’s really something to behold.

You actually can start over. If you want it, if you try, if you fight for it and if you stop long enough – once in a while – to visit the old coffee shop, get slapped around by a premature winter wind and listen to Little Mr. Itch.

Next Friday afternoon I’ll board a plane for Ireland and all I can think of – besides “omgwtf I haven’t even started packing” – is “omgwtf am I doing, I’m going to die. The Mc won’t even be with me and we’ll never get to build the cabin and I still haven’t gone swimming with turtles and who will give the boys mani-pedis and and…”

I blame him completely.

Apparently nearly 4 years of being with a man who gets hives at the mere mention of boarding a plane has turned me into a ragingly unstable, paranoid lunatic.

Never having thought of myself as an easily influenced person let alone a person easily influenced via the osmosis like transmission neurosis of her partner, I am disgusted. Disgusted, disheartened, confused, lost, disturbed, a little pale though reasonably well groomed, and oh, did I mention disgusted?

My mental bags are packed. The itinerary is set, passport and car rental and plane tickets all printed and waiting to be put into a yet to be determined piece of luggage. Am I avoiding packing because I’m inexplicably freaked out or because my tripod won’t fit in my wheely bag and I’m frustrated I’m going to have to go buy another one?

I’ve always adored travel! (see exhibits a b, c, etc.) Especially solo travel (though this trip won’t be solo it also won’t be with The Mc) and travel to far away beautiful places and omgwtf I’m bringing my camera with me this time and last time all I had was a half dozen shaksy disposables and it’s going to be awesome…so could someone please tell me what filthy bar toilet seat I picked these voices up from so I can go back and sue the cleaning service?

Did the plane landing on the Hudson and the chopper colliding with a small plane and countless others falling from the sky screw me up, or can I legitimately blame The Mc?

I ask because blaming him is easier to stomach than me just getting old and scared all by myself. I’m not capable of such heinousness.

So here I go, typing it all out hoping that talking about The Boogyman (capitalization is called for in a case such as his) will make him less real and keep my plane in the air.

Quick. Someone. Validate me!

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
-John Barrymore

Mmmhmm. Git ‘er done, youngin’.

I’ve had a Roomba on my Amazon wish list for eons, and since none of you have bought it for me yet I started nagging The Mc.

With two cats and hardwood floors, every day is like coming home to Hansel and Gretel gone wrong. Instead of a trail of bread crumbs, it’s little bits of litter. The kind that force me to wear socks – which I hate – rather than deal with the alternative: said bits suck to the bottom of my sweet tootsies like barnacles.

Last weekend while we were nesting, we each went our separate ways for a few hours and my wonderful man (clearly worn down my my whining) brought this home. She’s no Roomba. She’s different…better than what I thought I wanted.

I’ve named her Rosie, and have taken her dancing multiple times a day since she joined our family. She’s a beaut.

Is it bad that gifted me with an appliance, and at that, a vacuum? Is it bad that I love it?

First, let me say how much easier it is to chronicle a vacation when you’re sitting in a hotel room alone, rocking and sucking your thumb, than it is when you’re attached at the hip with your husband-like-boyfriend who is deathly afraid you’re going to fall off your balcony when he looks away for two seconds.

Wow. Okay…where to begin.

We’ll begin with The Mc being allergic to all medicine, including the nail sized sticker that promised to be 10x more effective than Dramamine at inhibiting motion sickness but instead made him as droopy and void of energy as Sleeping Beauty. Which brings us to…

Day 1ish – May 10
…was a loss, with him laying in bed feeling like dookie and me looking on helpless while my pity for him fought a savage battle with my desire to GO! SEE! DO! This is also where my “aunt” shows up a week early. Thanks for that.

Day 2 – May 11
I bounced out of bed like a kid on the first day of summer vacation

The ship was massive, the website and pictures had no means of adequately prepping me. Tell me there’s an ice rink. Tell me there’s a show every night. Tell me there is non-stop food. Tell me there’s a jogging track. Tell me there are two specialty restaurants, an MG parked outside of a pub, a Ben & Jerry’s, a cigar lounge, and a bijillion other things I’ll never remember to tell you about but this: nothing – and I mean nothing – will prepare you for the financial hemorrhaging you’ll endure for the likes of a “water package” ($36 for 10 bottles of Evian delivered to your room), the excursion costs ($14pp for floating mats in Haiti and the like) or the bar tab at the end (um. I don’t even want to tell you. It was more than I used to pay in rent…but I’m getting ahead of myself). The pictures also didn’t feature shots of the bathrooms I was warned about, or the round shower that had me bracing myself mentally to be sucked out of it and into a drive through teller window somewhere in South Dakota.

Day 3 – May 12
When we woke, the ship was pulling into port in Labadee, Haiti. I was so damn excited to see Haiti I can’t even tell you – especially after my grand plan to make friends with Little Dude were foiled by the swine flu and subsequent Mexican port closures.

I’ll grant you that it was beautiful, but what we saw was a sanitized version of what I wanted. A private stretch of the island that belonged to the cruise line, with miles of gorgeous crystal blue waters but no native inhabitants – save the ones with badges that had been sanctioned to hawk their wares in the “market”.

A specialized disappointment, but/and great hours on the shore, an interesting guided walk with a Haitian who educated us about how they (Hatians) have one day a month where the Dominicans allow them on “their” side of the island to pick up the necessities – like you know – rice. To eat and live on. Now THAT is the Haiti I wanted to see.

Day 4 – May 13
I caught a cold somewhere along the way, but a woman cold is a fascinating state of being. No whining was had (what was that? SILENCE): I mountain biked down 2,000 foot of a Jamaican mountain, ate a mango straight from a tree, and cliff jumped. I went snorkeling and gambling and left the blackjack table with a profit in hand. I’m just sayin’. I’m pretty much a stud, and you’re lucky to know me.

Day 5 – May 14
We woke again by some small miracle because I had too much in the casino the night before ifyouknowwhatImean and found ourselves already in port in George Town, Grand Cayman.

This port looked more promising, with even prettier, bluer water in the bay that our behemoth was parked in…and a pirate ship to boot! Traa la and arrrrrrr. From the ship we could see the line of shops on the main drag and we were anxious to embark on our two adventures: a trolley ride with a pirate named Steve from Canada who tugged us along in his Jeep while we kept our appendages in the trailer. Again, we were educated about the island we were invading as part of a swarm of tourists.

The good: Tortouga Rum Cake (hellz yes we brought one home and devoured it) which I fully expected to be a boozy version of a fruit cake and found much to my delight – was nothing like a fruit cake. It was more like an angel food cake soaked in the nectar of the gods…of rum. Also good: the snorkeling.

Days 6 and 7 – May 15 and May 16
Day 6 was supposed to be when I’d make friendly with the turtles, when they’d accept me as one of their own and sweep me off into the big blue ocean and I’d grow flippers and a shell and forget my human ways and live happily ever after.

As we know, the damn swine flu was out to get me…and it got me. This is also where The Mc starts showing symptoms of my cold and where we should have called a Whaaaaaaaaaamblulance for said man cold.

Instead of turtles and perfect health we spent a day at sea, doing a float-by of what should have been our port and keepin’ on, keepin’ on. Interestingly, we also floated by Cuba, and were close enough for me to goob out and take some shots of the skyline we could make out from our balcony. You’d never make it out from the shots I took.

Coming full circle and landing squarely in the same spot we vacated a week prior in Port Canaveral, we opted for the earlier and more laborious of our two exit options: the glamorous carryallyourcrapyourowndamnselfsoyoucangetontheroadat7am.

It was worth the bruises and muscle burn I’d endure to get off the ship and back home to the kitties four hours earlier than planned. One small deviation from our path at customs where a very kind officer (who would later hand us a survey) inspected a wood mask we bought in Haiti for boring (or boooooring – ZING!) parasites let us on our way.

One very tiny last thing I have to add to this boring chronology is this: people prepared us for being seasick – but not LAND sick. For the first four days we were back in Atlanta and attempting to acclimate ourselves to work and checking the mail and caring about bills and doing our hair, we were both woozy as all get out. You’d have thought our eardrums had ruptured for the equilibrium issues we had.

Good GRAVY. Did you actually read all this drivel? Leave a comment so I can send you a gold star via collect mail.

Oh and PS? I did kinda get to see some turtles.

The full set of snaps from the trip can be viewed here.