Day twelve

I did something terribly stupid last night, and embarrassed the hell out of myself.

How is this burger-related, you may be asking? Well, let me tell you.

To start with, I'm hypoglycemic. This is not normally a problem, because it's easily resolved by eating all the time. Which is exactly what I usually do, and I think I have not had a full-blown hypoglycemic episode since this one time in 1994 when I was on a road trip with my boyfriend and we went through this epic stretch of, oh god, I think it might have been Wyoming, where there was nothing but green rocks and no food and by the time we got to a place where there was food I was FREAKING OUT sobbing hysterically, and my poor boyfriend must have been thinking "Oh shit, I have another two weeks in the car with this psycho". But then I had a sandwich (a BLT, god bless it) and everything was fine, and we kept snacks in the car after that.Well, fine except for the Grand Canyon episode, which I don't really remember clearly but it involved an egg salad sandwich on marble rye.

Anyway, my daily routine usually involves a great deal of eating, but I'm pretty much only eating two cheeseburgers a day because that's about all I can manage. Because of the huge amount of protein, my glucose stays pretty stable between meals, but last night I forgot to eat dinner and I had a belly dancing lesson to be at, so I grabbed a cheese stick and proceeded to forget all about eating anything else. After belly dancing, we sat around and sipped whiskey and had girl talk (if you define girl talk as being primarily about finances, investing, mortgages, crazy relatives, and home improvement) and then I went home. And the wind picked up.

I am childishly, irrationally terrified of high winds. It's really pretty stupid. I used to have nightmares about trees falling on the house and branches crashing through my ceiling and killing me. I always assumed that it was something I'd picked up from TV, maybe an episode of The Waltons or something, but then one day when was 30 years old and I looked like crap from not sleeping all night my mom told me that when I was five the 200-foot-tall Douglas Fir in our backyard had dropped a branch during a windstorm, a tremendous thundering limb ten inches thick, and it crashed through the roof into my bedroom, and I've been having nightmares ever since. What the hell. It seems like maybe I could have used, I don't know, therapy or something. I guess people didn't do that in the seventies.

So last night the wind picked up. My bedroom window faces the branches of a rather gorgeous (and probably too small to be lethal if it fell on the house) hemlock, which the wind rushes through in a wonderfully dramatic, terrifying manner. I was drunk, and had forgotten about eating, and I started freaking the fuck out. Normally I tolerate high winds at night fairly well, where "fairly well" means curling into a fetal position and weeping in my pillow. Back in the days when I had a husband, I would cling to him and shiver until I fell asleep, but now there is no husband, and I haven't been alone at night during high winds for about seven years.

I got up and went downstairs and started calling people, which is always a great idea when it's 11:30 on Monday night and you're drunk and having a hypoglycemia-fueled freakout. I called one of my friends once and another of my friends twice, with no answer, and then I hit on the completely brilliant idea of calling this boy who is, oh for fuck's sake, someone I am completely taken with. Because there's nothing more fetching than discovering via being woken up by midnight phone call that a seemingly competent girl you've been seeing is drunk, hysterical, and afraid of air. On the third call, he answers, and I proceed to say I DON'T KNOW WHAT except that I recall being completely unreasonable and telling him that I hate his bed, which is not true although it is not the most comfortable bed. In fact, I love his bed, because it is his and it smells like him and has him in it.

He talked to me until I was ready to fall asleep. Which was very kind. And this morning, having eaten my cheeseburger, I am horribly, awfully, crushingly embarrassed.