LOATHING

From the bottom of my teeny tiny heart, I LOATHE food poisoning. There is nothing redeemable about it. It serves no purpose. And yet, there it is. There it fucking is. Someone needs to be accountable for signing up for that because, well, I’m not pleased and someone needs to take this bitch slap I’ve got waiting.

Sunday (5/6), I was to have dinner with a “girlfriend” who isn’t really interested in me, so much as cultivating a relationship with a female American. Which is fine. However, I always get a bit nervous about confusing business with pleasure; a great friend is rarely about business and vice versa. They are neither mutually inclusive nor exclusive. However, in China, the two more often than not are directly linked. As she is the boss of my friends and a pleasant enough woman, I try to maintain a comfortable acquaintance but her constant declarations of our tight-knit friendship is a bit unsettling for the commitment-phobe that is me. Nevertheless, once in a while we have dinner, which always seems pleasant enough but is always tainted with a follow-up favor. No matter how hard she tries to be social, all I can think is, “So, what do you need this time?” because every time I see her, I am guaranteed an imposition of some sort.
As she is a translator, she often needs my assistance on a variety of things. Out of courtesy and curiosity, I always lend a hand. However, at the latest dinner to butter me up, I got food poisoning the likes of which I have never had before.

Truly. I never thought it would be possible to that sick and not be on death’s door. I had some sort of modified Ebola and I could never figure out which end of me was to take priority. Consequently I have bent and twisted myself into positions the likes of which not even my over-a-decade-of-yoga-limber body was ready for. My face is nothing but a patchwork of bruising from the force of involuntary pushing and my stomach is so sore both internally and externally, it hurts too much to eat a whole banana two days later. Once I was “empty” as it were, I simply had to suffer the wondrous indignation of burping straight from my intestines for a day… to say nothing of what the other end of me was doing. I now understand what people mean when they talk about the “bowels of hell.”

Frankly, if you could have lived without those images, you have no idea how many lives I could have lived without those experiences.

To top it off, as I’m lying in bed, trying to figure out how to get the strength to crawl to the toilet not ten feet from my bed to commence my umpteenth full-body Heimlich maneuver, said ‘friend’ who took me to said poison dinner calls with the favor she forgot to ask me over the deadly food. Per usual, it was a last minute thing and I only had a few hours to correct two pages of dense legal text. Under normal circumstances, unraveling all of that would have taken me a solid two days of uninterrupted study. Under current circumstances, I couldn’t compose coherent sentences of my own much less make sense of what Chinese lawyers were saying through her less-than-stellar written English. Christ, I couldn’t keep down more than a sip of water, much less enough sugar to power my brain for higher brain functions.

After some indignant protesting on her part, I finally made it clear that I simply could not, under current eviscerating circumstances, focus well enough to sort through her (god awful) written English, much less sort through it as filtered through “legal lingo.”

And, as I fell back into silence my stupefied brains could only resonate the emotion, “Food poisoning, I loathe you.”