Day 231: I know why old people are grumpy!

Day 231.  After my normal morning routine yesterday—up at 4:30am, morning work, am yoga, walk for an hour—I have my usual protein shake before I jump in the shower.  I felt a wee bit off in general after waking up thanks to Aunt Flow making an extra early arrival.  Awesome, just what I need.  Apparently, I’m starving because I suck down my icy cold liquid breakfast as if someone is going to steal it from me.  I chase it with a really large glass of warm water because I haven’t had any water since I woke up and I know I must be dehydrated.

The water is warm because I read somewhere warm water encourages better digestion, cold water doesn’t or stops it or something like that.  Might have read that in Clean or maybe it was Crazy Sexy Diet or was it From Fatigued to Fantastic?  Can’t remember.  Anyway, my stomach immediately seems angry at the exorbitant amount of hot and cold liquid I have just ingested.  Hmmmm, maybe that wasn’t the best idea.  By the time I’m out of the shower, I’m somewhere between needing to barf, shit or a combo of the two.  My stomach feels like it’s being poked with jagged glass.  Insert any two-word expletive here.  I choose the most logical course of action—I curl up on the bathroom rug in the fetal position and wait for it to pass.

Oasis in the bathroom.

During my three hours of delirium where I neither throw up nor poop, I ponder dying.  I know, I know.  I haven’t gone down the death road in a while.  Zebra don’t change her stripes.  You knew it was bound to come back up again.  Mortality.  It’s a big one for me.  All I can think is how much dying must hurt unless you’re highly medicated.  And how much it must suck and hurt to get really old and die.  “I know why old people are so grumpy,” I mumble to the green carpet, “they must feel like shit most of the time.”

The stomach crisis set the tone for my Friday—GRUMPY!  I have my pals on Twitter to thank for finally helping me to shift out of it and get the hell out of Grumpy Town.  Have I told you lately how much I love Twitter?  I chock up the jagged glass in the stomach feeling to a perfect storm of Aunt Flow making my stomach more sensitive than usual, the B-vitamins in the protein shake making me sick and the hot and cold really pissing off my stomach lining.   Bottom line, I wasn’t dying.  But, it reminded me that I would someday.  And so will everyone else I know and love.  And besides knowing why old people are so damn grumpy—because they’re probably in pain and are probably in some part of the process of dying—I also know that, regardless of any pain or the prospect of not existing anymore, we cannot stop pursuing and creating our dreams until we are dead.

Everything is back to normal this morning.  Hallefreakinlujah!  I do plan to skip the protein shake and just go for a regular breakfast instead though.  So far the tummy is happy.  And so am I.  Granted, I’ve only been awake for about 20 minutes.  I’ll keep you posted.

Until tomorrow, create from what you have…visits to Grumpy Town.

Kelli Joan Bennett is a filmmaker, actress, writer, entrepreneur, advocate for creative thinking and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Think Outside The Box Inside The Box Media.

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