Throwing Down/Up

Prior to this recent stint in SE Asia, I have had the opportunity to experience food poisoning once. Since July of last year, I have repeated the experience three times, most recently on Sunday. In spite of eating a wide variety of foods – water beetles, cow hooves, and fermented fish to name a few– each time I have been poisoned the culprit came from a Western restaurant (I also became mildly sick on my own preparation of macaroni and cheese).

I am not sure if this because my stomach has become accustomed to very spicy foods cooked in lime juice and has forgotten how to digest foods like salads, or maybe this is some sort of cosmic retribution for preferring Asian foods to Western foods. Regardless of the etiology, I wanted to share something that has never happened to me before with an illness: This food poisoning had a gender.

I am not sure how an illness can have a gender. In this case, it was female. Perhaps, I was simply associating the severe stomach cramps with the waitress that I was hitting on earlier in the evening. Conversation was actually going quite well up until the point when this anthropomorphized queasiness set in. I was still able to get the waitress’ name, address, whether she was single, and the next time she was working before I needed to head back to my home and spend some time with my porcelain loveseat.

I tried to sleep the pain off, but that wasn’t much of a solution. Around 1 o’clock in the night, I remember distinctly thinking that there was a small woman kicking from the inside of my stomach. Around 1:30, I recall that the mental imagine of a female kick-boxer also included screaming. I finally verbalized the gender persona around 2:30, while I was clutching the toilet seat, saying to no one in particular, “Get the f**k out, you f**king bitch!” a few seconds before gagging myself with my index and middle fingers.

Sure enough, the bitch left. Granted, it took about four or five times, but sometime things like this take time to break off.

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In happier news, I will be returning to the United States on May 29th. I think I will stop in the Bay Area for a few days in transit, before heading to Seattle, but I need to figure a few things out first, like who will actually be there when I am. In January, both my sisters were living there. By May, I doubt either will be.

Then it will be onto Seattle, where I intended to live it up like a kid on summer vacation for four weeks. Except unlike a kid on summer vacation, I can drink legally, I am not going to camp, and I will probably do my summer reading. However, like a kid on summer vacation, I will be staying at my parents’ house and complaining about how the summer weather isn’t ideal enough.