And it has nothing to do with the temperature.

I am having some sort of reaction to something. Right now, I feel kind of numb from the knees down, and my whole nervous system feels hot. If it gets any more severe than that, I am calling 911. But it feels like it is slowly fading.

I did eat something new and unusual today. I tried that places where all the food is $4.95 that is a few doors away from 198 Homer where I go to school. It struck me as a bizarre but awesome business model until I actually went in, then suddenly the whole thing made sense.

It’s a bar. A place called The Warehouse. The food is their very smart way of getting people there and selling them liquor. Food service is modestly high margin in and of itself, but the real money, as always, is in liquor sales. ^[pop] So, sure, they will sell people a burger and fries for $4.50 and thus insure very heavy traffic. If most of those people buy at least one beer, the place is a goldmine.

And the food was decent. My turkey sandwich was pretty good, and it came on bread with cranberries in it, which makes sense (turkey and cranberry sauce go together well) but was weird. And that came with fries that were decent, but were listed as “peppered”.

They didn’t taste like pepper, though, so I ate them. And I think that was my mistake.

Because about twenty minutes after eating, I started feeling like I had deep-throated a blazing stick of Thermite. At first I was just annoyed that it was making me need to take a dump during lunchtime, which I prefer to spend in the lounge attempting to become a social human. But then, as I was sitting in class, I felt the burn intensify, and not 45 minutes after having to go the first time, I had to go again.

That’s not a good sign for someone who is an IBS sufferer like myself. It means something is irritating my irritable system and no good can come of that, because one of the cardinal rules of IBS is that things don’t get really bad until you’re empty.

Because you see, your bowels aren’t spasming in order to empty you out. That’s just a byproduct. It’s spasming because something has irritated it, and that doesn’t end once you have no more to expel.

Sure enough, I felt pretty ill during the rest of the class. ^[zzz] At first, it just seemed like the usual sort of turbulence that is part of the pattern of everyday life for us IBS sufferers. But eventually, I realizing that this sense of restless I was feeling was not just the usual restlessness of the bored student who wants to go home, but the result of the fact that my nerves were on fire and it was actively painful to sit still.

I also got these sharp stabbing pain on my right (your left) foot, which has been happening now and then lately and which I really need to stop ignoring. Because it could be peripheral neuropathy, and that is a nasty condition if left untreated. And it definitely seems neurological, given the was the sharp pain subsided into an “itchy pins and needles” feeling.

Anyhow, this got worse over time and really kept me awake on the Skytrain. The pepper angle occurred to me when I cleaned some gunk off an upper tooth with my tongue and under it was some pepper, which fell directly onto my tongue. I thought, “A ha! A possible suspect!”.

That is, a suspect in the case of the cranky lower intestine. I don’t know about the rest of it.

I hope it’s not that I have had a tiny heart attack or something like that. Or a neurological event of a negative variety. It’s kind of frustrating (though preferable) that the symptoms are so muddily minor. It could be something as simple as a punched nerve. Or it could be something going wrong in my brain. Who knows?

And as a recovering hypochondriac, I do not trust myself to make any sort of determination of my level of illness without clear, unmistakable, and/or severe symptoms. My mind will amplify minor symptoms into major panics if I let it, so I have tio keep that in mind at all times.

And while for normal people there are worse things than going to emergency for what turns out to be nothing, for a socially anxious dude like myself, there really isn’t. All it would take is one curt gesture, one frustrated sigh, or one disbelieving eyeroll and I would be utterly crushed.

Which, ironically, might qualify me for a Psych admission.

But I don’t want to end up on the Psych ward ever at all. I am terrified that I would never have the strength to leave again. I could easily convince doctors that I needed more treatment, and the ability to get the nurturing I crave while being safe from reality’s expectations might be mighty seductive.

So I am afraid that I would be the funniest guy in the psych ward for the rest of my life. And I got plans.

Which, sadly, involve finally doing that goddamned Format class assignment. That means I have to read a script for a half hour TV show, and one for an hour long TV show (both still on the air), and note all the ways the formatting is different between the two, and how it’s different from the standard movie format.

And that is exactly the kind of nitpicking petty detail work that I can’t stand.

Anyhow…. where was I… I guess I kinda lost my train of thought there…. well, all I am really trying to say is this :

I can’t eat fries from The Warehouse any more.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.