Masochism: a sexual perversion characterized by pleasure in being subjected to pain or humiliation, especially by a love object.

You'd probably never say it from reading my blog, but I have a boyfriend. A good one, actually. We've been together since 2005 and there was no end in sight... Until last night.

Not because we're going to break up, but because I am likely going to kill him with my bare hands. Why? Come with me, and I shall explain in full.

As a seasoned veteran of all things love and lust, I will now go on record saying the following:

Gentleman, there come a few times in every male's life when it is completely acceptable for you to lie as you have never lied before to the one you love. In these situations, no court in the land would convict you, and even God would look at his third Commandment, shrug non-commitally and say, "Whatever. Rules are meant to be broken." These times include, but are certainly not limited to, the following scenarios:

• "Do you think my cousin is pretty?"
• "What do you think of my mother?"
• "Have I gained weight since (insert massively stressful, life-shifting event here)?"
• "Were your old girlfriends better looking than me?"
• "So... you never actually had sex with that sheep, right?"

...Actually, you might want to come clean on that last one. If that's something that would bother her, it's best to call it quits. If not, marry her first, ask questions later.

Anyway, this list is not even close to being exhaustive. Use your gut instincts. I'm certainly not suggesting you have a torrid gay love-affair and cover it up unabashedly. What I'm saying is that if your girlfriend is sporting a muffin-top over her pair of low-rise jeans, you are certainly not the person who should inform her of this, which brings me to my next point:

Ladies, if you don't want to know the answer, in the name of all that is good and holy, DON'T ASK. There is a subtle, albeit significant difference between, "YOU LYING SON OF A BITCH I KNOW YOU'RE SLEEPING WITH THE LANDSCAPER DON'T YOU LIE TO ME OH THINK OF THE CHILDREN WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN," and, "Baby, do you mind that my best friend in the world is a heterosexual male supermodel who's always been physically attracted to me and the bond he and I share completely outshines the romantic connection you and I have?"

Luckily, nature has a solution to this problem. Natural selection (your friend and mine) has ensured through millennia of evolution that men are emotional idiots. Likewise, women have developed into unnecessarily complex machines of psychological neediness. Ignoring the fact that this raises the deep philosophical question of how advanced we really are if nature just reins us back to stupid in the end, what does this mean for us?

Well, it explains why you see gorgeous, hilarious, otherwise intelligent women crying hysterically over their big, loud, stupid, unattractive husband/boyfriend/pimp who treats them like garbage, completely oblivious to the fact that, if this woman wasn't so needy and irrational, the second best thing to her they could obtain would be a ham sandwich.

It makes so much more sense now, doesn't it?

Sometimes, however, nature gives you mutants. Exhibit A: My boyfriend.

Have you ever seen those movies on TV with ancient Arabian princesses who get carried by four men on a day bed all around town and who are worshipped, pampered, and fed grapes by servants?

Those bitches had it rough compared to me.

My boyfriend absolutely adores me. I will be the first to admit this. I know you are probably skeptical; everyone is at first. But, after you see he and I together, you will quickly agree that there are Hindu deities that don't receive half the veneration. I have no idea why this is. I don't think I'm so fantastic. He would disagree, and frequently does. He is my biggest fan, my best friend, and--at 20 years old this is ridiculous-- I am convinced he would die for me.

Clearly he is in some way defective.

Exhibit B: Me.

I love my boyfriend. I really do. I would be absolutely devastated if anything ever happened to him. I would probably never get over it. But, if we were to break up tomorrow, I would be fine. Honestly, I have never understood why people get so hysterical after breaking up. Chill out. It's not like anyone is dead. As long as I know he is alive in this world, breathing, and happy, that is all I will ever need. Relationships are cool and all, but I am an individual outside of mine, and am therefore still complete even without it.

I believe Billie said it best when she observed, "Robyn, it's like you're the guy or something."

(I also forget anniversaries, initiate sex, and enjoy the humour of Dave Chappelle. I should probably just grow testicles and get it overwith.)

Anyway, what, you may ask, happens when you pair up a sweet, sensitive man and an unpossessive, psychologically masculine woman?

This:

Robyn: "Baby, if there was one thing about me you could change, what would it be?"
Boyfriend: "Nothing, babe. I love you just the way you are."
Robyn: "Yes, I know you love me, but I'm obviously not a perfect 10 or anything."
Boyfriend: "Well, I'd make you taller. I hope that doesn't hurt your feelings."
Robyn: "Boyfriend, YOU ARE SIX AND A HALF FEET TALL. I'm 5'4 in heels. That goes without saying. Try again."
Boyfriend: "There's really nothing!"
Robyn: "Hips?"
Boyfriend: "No, they're fantastic."
Robyn: "Butt."
Boyfriend: "I love it."
Robyn: "Breasts?"
Boyfriend: "How could you even ask me that? They're perfect!"
Robyn: "Thighs?"
Boyfriend: "Well, yeah, they're pretty big."
Robyn: "What?!"
Boyfriend: "You said to be honest!"
Robyn: "Really?! Of all the things that are wrong with my body you choose my thighs. That was possibly the one body part I had left that I didn't despise."
Boyfriend: "I'm sorry! They're not that bi--"
Robyn: "SHUT UP. Shut. Up."
Boyfriend: "You're mad."
Robyn: "I'm not mad."
Boyfriend: "Then where are you going??"
Robyn: "I have to go sit down before my femurs are ground to dust under the weight of my haunches."

You see? YOU SEE?? There is no normal but the abnormal. You're pretty much screwed no matter how masculine or feminine you are. The only difference is that in a normal couple, the woman would cry for days after this and possibly be unable to wear shorts in public for the rest of her natural life, and the man would somehow try to justify what he said, because as we all know, things with penises never make mistakes. In my relationship, Boyfriend will be the one miserable for a week, and I'm sitting here thinking, "My thighs are only big because I have a round bottom. One cannot exist without the other. If anything, this is his fault for buying me dinner all the time."

Opportunities for driving the guilt home must never be wasted. My plan is to reference this incident at least once every hour until one of us goes insane and butchers the other one with an ice pick. Likely scenarios include:

Boyfriend: Robyn, would you like to go out tonight?"
Robyn: "Can't. The people from Guinness are coming over tonight to take the circumfrence of my left leg. Don't want to jinx it, but we might have hit paydirt!!"

Boyfriend: "Robyn, why are you standing so far away from me?"
Robyn: "I'm sorry, darling. I just don't want to ensnare you in my orbital pull."

Boyfriend: "Robyn, the guilt is too much and, unable to sustain it any longer, I plan to take my own life. Do you have a length of rope I could borrow?"
Robyn: "Of course, I store many objects, great and small, in the disgusting, fatty folds OF MY GROTESQUELY OVERSIZED THIGHS."

You can already see what fun this will be. This, however, considering the planned rate of execution, I will get maximally three hours out of this material. Here's where you guys come in:

Make fun of my thighs. Post it here, laugh over it, bond, and I will happily take these barbs and use them to psychologically torture my boyfriend.

Cheers!

Inferiority Complex: A sense of inadequacy or tendency to self-diminishment, resulting in excessive aggressiveness through overcompensation.

Consider this more of a rant than a blog entry. I'm edgy like that.

In my relatively short time on this planet, I have been subject to the company of some pretty moronic individuals. People who were anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, and god-knows-what-else have bestowed their stupid, uninformed opinions on me unsolicited, but I have shrugged them off with ease. Why? For the same reasons I just stated: These people, like their opinions, are fucking idiots. It's not their fault. A poor upbringing, bad education, and more than likely a shallow, shallow gene pool have led them to their conclusions, so they know no better. This is not the problem.

No. What is really, truly terrifying are some of the opinions held by people with educations: People I go to university with; individuals who were at the top of their class in high school and are destined to be the architects, engineers, physicians, and politicians of the next generation.

Strangely, there is one gratuitously idiotic idea I keep hearing over and over again. Be warned, I'm about to reproduce it here. Vacate the room of any animals, children and pregnant women. It's about to get stupid all up in here:

"The English language should be standardized."

You read that correctly, I shit you not. There are people in an institution of higher learning that truly believe this. For anyone who needed it, this should be sufficient evidence that it is possible to earn a university degree, all the while being dumb as rocks.

I can say, as someone who never uses hyperbole at all under any circumstances, the following:

This is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said about anything, EVER. (In case you were interested, the number 2 spot goes to whichever member of the Khmer Rouge said, 'Hey, you know what Cambodia absolutely does NOT need? People with educations.')

On the off-chance you really don’t see why this is stupid and/or have recently sustained blunt-force trauma to the head, let me lay it down for you:

1) The English language is not static.

Contrary to the ethnocentric beliefs of most middle-class white people, Early Man did not climb down from the canopy of some pre-historical rain forest, immediately assume an erect posture and then say, “Good evening, fellows. Excellent weather we’re having. Pity about Ugg and the Mastodon. He only dragged his wife by the hair into his cave last week.”

Language took nearly a million years to evolve. And it’s stupid, egocentric and ignorant to believe it has stopped evolving now that we have English. Obviously, Western Civilization is not the apex of evolution. English evolves even with generations. Listen to old news reels from the 1940’s and pay close attention to that funny-sounding, nasal way of speaking the newscasters have. Do you know anyone who speaks like that now? Nope. The language has changed, albeit subtly, in sixty years.

2) The English language hasn’t always been English.

Are you ready for this? Are you sure? Are you sitting? Ok, here it goes:

They didn’t always speak English in England.

All right, for those of you whose heads did not implode at this revelation, let’s continue.

In reality, “English,” or the groups of successive dialects that have arbitrarily been marked as “English”, have only existed for about 900 years. Before that, we had Middle English (slight similarities but with very different vowel sounds), before that, Old English (which sounded more like German or Swedish than anything else) and before that, Old Norse, which sounds like something of which you could not possibly conceive. There is no one day when Old English became Middle English or when Middle English became what we speak today, just like there’s no one instant at which humans evolved from monkeys. It’s a constant, gradual process, and standardizing it is akin to sauntering up to the continent of Australia and saying, “Fuck continental drift. You’re staying right here.”

3) If, for some reason, everyone who matters on Earth went retarded at the same time and decided to ‘standardize English,’ they wouldn’t pick your dialect, you pseudo-intellectual prat.

The series of dialects North Americans speak are relatively new ones (with some exceptions—see below), yet when these people talk about standardizing English, their tiny, egocentric brains assume without question that their dialect is the ‘right’ one. Sorry, morons. You’d be relearning your dialect with the rest of us. Most likely, the honour would go to what has long (erroneously) been considered the archetype of proper language: The Queen’s English, an upper-class dialect whose native speakers comprise about 2% of the population of Britain. Hope you bitches like scones.

4) Really? Fucking really?

Look, if you’re going to standardize English, why don’t we just go and standardize religion or race or something? As I recall, some dude a few decades back tried to standardize eye and hair colour. I can’t remember how it all played out, but I’m sure there was no downside. Remember, folks: If someone isn’t exactly like you, they are inferior.



"My, Robyn," you may be saying, "you are awfully passionate about this subject. Why on Earth do you care so much?" There is a very good reason for this, and I shall explain fully in the event that I am really huge in Korea or something and no one understands the cultural implications this has in the part of the world I am from (What? It's not impossible...):

I live in a place called Newfoundland. It's a rocky little island in the North Atlantic and a province of Canada, though when I say 'province,' I really mean, 'source of non-renewable resources for Mainland Canada' (Also part of the problem; I'm getting there.)

The island was discovered by explorer/ Italian bad-ass Giovanni Caboto (Anglophonized: John Cabot) in 1497 and claimed it for England, though Nova Scotians claim he landed there. Don't listen to them. By 1510, Newfoundland had permanent fishing settlements and has been continually inhabited ever since.

The people who came to Newfoundland to fish were people who couldn't own land in Great Britain. People from the South of England and all over Ireland came to settle here, where they were promised land of their own.

What resulted is the wet dream of any student of linguistics.

Because Newfoundland is an island, and was therefore relatively isolated, and experienced very little cultural diversity, the English spoken here has changed very, very little over the last 500 years. Fun fact: Henry VII, the King at the time of Newfoundland's discovery, was Queen Elizabeth I's grandfather, who was BFF with William Shakespeare. Many linguists have noted that the dialect of English spoken here is nearly identical to the English that Shakespeare himself would have used. That is how fucking old this dialect is. Cool, right? Wait for it.

Newfoundland was a Dominian of Great Britain until we confederated with Canada in 1949, but India had to go and steal our goddamn thunder and gain independance the same year, so no one knows, nor do they care. Many Newfoundlanders decided that instead of living the way they and their ancestors had for centuries: no money, little education, back-breaking labour-- they would go to mainland Canada and try to make a better life for their families.

When these men got off the airplane in Toronto, Ontario with an accent that wasn't quite English and wasn't quite Irish and probably little more than a grade 3 education, many mainland Canadians promptly decided that Newfoundlanders were the stupidest people they had ever come across. Ironically, the accent became associated with ignorance, and even today we're the butts of all sorts of jokes and other equally idiotic things.

If you’re still awake, there’s a point to all this: The people who have said to me that English should be standardized are Newfoundlanders. Their grandparents talked like this. Their parents still talk like this. Would you like to know their reasons for hating our native dialect?

They also think the Newfoundland accent sounds unintelligent.

Does anyone else detect the extensively ironic nature of this, or is it just me?

The stereotypes that exist about Newfoundland English are so bad that presently, unless you were born in some obscure little harbour, you are trained to not use your accent as soon as you enter school. For some people, this is impossible and will speak with a Newfoundland accent until the day they die. Others (myself included, I am a little shamed to admit) do not use their accent in formal settings, simply out of habit. This is not to say I do not have an accent. Sociologists have noticed that, when a person who is not speaking in their native tongue or dialect becomes passionate in some way: angry, excited, scared, etc., they will revert back to their native dialect. I do this, as do most people I know.

The people I know who dislike my accent will often stop me in mid-sentence when I am speaking animatedly about something to say, “do you realize you just said [insert local colloquialism/ thickly accented phrase here]????”

NO.

NO I DID NOT.

GO BLOW SOMEONE.

I cannot help it. I shouldn’t have to help it. A far more pertinent question would be, “Why the FUCK do you care??”

Are you so insecure about how you are viewed by close-minded, uncultured, moronic, egocentric pseudo-intellects from mainland Canada and abroad that you would persecute and chastise an ancient dialect native to your home so they’ll pat you on your stupid, ass-kissing heads?

I am an intelligent person. I hope you can tell this by knowing me. If you don’t know me, I hope you can tell this by reading what I write. I hope to make academia my career. For someone to tell me my ideas are not valid because a bunch of snobs arbitrarily decided they do not like the way I sometimes speak is preposterous. But I’m not worried. Intelligent people—truly intelligent people—will evaluate me on what I say, not the way in which I say it.

I may sound like a moron, but that beats the hell out of actually being one.

One final note: I have yet to find a prominent Newfoundland Rhodes scholar who did not speak with a Newfoundland accent. I hope the guys who think Newfoundland English makes you sound stupid let me know when they get their letter from Oxford.

Passive-aggression: Behavior in which feelings of aggression are expressed in passive ways as, for example, by online blog posts.

Dear Bitch at Work I Hate (Henceforth Known As BaWIH),

You and I need to clarify some things. Namely, these are:

1) You are not my boss. You aren't even the full-time employee in my department. You are on exactly equal footing with me. If anything, I am higher on the pecking order than you, as I have seniority in the department, as well as The Mills in general. Yet, you insist on tell me how to do my job. Please go fuck yourself with something rusty.

2) Your IQ is roughly similar to the temperature outside today. It is February, and it is below freezing. This means you would need to gain intelligence just to be brain-dead. I hope this terrifies you at least half as much it frightens me. When I talk to you, I can actually feel my brain cells desperately trying to clamber out my ears in a vain attempt to escape your vacuous stupidity. Your obscene number of offspring will undoubtedly be the undoing of the race as we know it, because if that many children carry your genetic material into the future, I estimate it will only be another 4-5 generations before all human beings once again interact using grunts and blunt-force head trauma. You are the downfall of Darwinian evolution.

3) You seem to be under the impression that, when you badmouth me behind my back, it will not get back to me. This is rather unfortunate for you, as you seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that everyone hates you. When you say things about me, these people tell me. This is attributable to the fact that I have with these individuals a social relationship built on mutual respect and admiration. They are known as 'friends' in sociological circles. I have many. You have none. Bear that in mind the next time you make up rumours.

4) You need to stop complaining about everything. It is annoying, it wastes time, and I generally want to force-feed you the heavy duty stapler when you do it. You always marvel at how I manage to accomplish so much work in so little time. My secret: SHUTTING THE FUCK UP FOR TWENTY GODDAMN SECONDS.

5) There's another setting on your makeup mirror. It's called 'daytime'.

While I would go on, literally, for the next four days rambling about how you are unequivocally perversely stupid, and your constant bitchery has classically conditioned me to want to vomit uncontrollably at the sound of your stupid, stupid voice, I will condense my message as best I can. It is simply this:

Your husband doesn't beat you enough.

BaWIH, I have tried many, many times to find a good quality in you somewhere. I have been able to do this with even the people I do not get along with. These qualities are not always immediately evident, but in the end, I always find them.

I pretty much gave up on you when you said I should leave my boyfriend because he has bad knees.

It is with a heavy heart I concede that it is outside lawfulness to fire someone simply because they are a heartless shell of a human being. However, that doesn't mean I cannot hate you, or laugh at you when you say something painfully moronic. And I will forever content myself with the knowledge that I am only 20 years younger than you, but you look old enough to be my grandmother.

Get stabbed,

Robyn
xoxox

Delusions of grandeur: The erroneous belief that one is greater or more influential than they really are.

Have you ever been at work, minding your own business-- perhaps performing some menial, repetitive task as we partially educated twenty-somethings are often forced to do—when, all of a sudden, your charismatic, strikingly attractive co-worker saunters up to you, flashes you an impossibly white smile, and asks you to accompany him on a romantic candle-lit dinner at a French restaurant?

...What’s it like?

Perhaps not surprisingly, things do not work out this way for me. Ever. To make the above scenario remotely plausible for my life, we would need to replace “charismatic” with “socially inept”, and “strikingly attractive”, with “mildly to moderately mentally retarded”... Oh, and “white smile” with “no teeth”.

Don’t believe me? I present, for your reading pleasure, Exhibit A:

I work in a dead end, menial, minimum wage-paying job at a nepotistic, autocratic, quasi-slavering box store I shall henceforth refer to as The Mines. My job requires light computer work, repetitive tasks, and what I am fairly certain is the constant, methodical extraction of my soul by upper management to be used for what I can only assume are Satanist rituals to appease the restless spirit of Walt Disney.

And it’s a night shift. Seriously, for $8 an hour, the company gets its money’s worth.

The only things I can really say I enjoy about my job are the people I work with. The night crew are great. We have lots of fun at work because the store is closed, and generally speaking, loud conversations about sodomy tend to go over better when there are no customers to hear them.
I should also mention I am the only female on the entire night staff. This would probably perturb most normal women. Luckily, I don’t fit that mould. I find my lack of Y-chromosomes gives me a special place in the hierarchy of the crew: I am exempt from filthy comments the guys usually hurl at each other, and am generally treated with a level of respect virtually unknown to the male portion of the staff.

However, this only applies to the employees who work for The Mines. The company hires out two employees from a cleaning company to mop and wax the floors after the store closes. It should be noted that I use the term “employees” loosely. For their protection, we will call them George and Jeb. If I can describe them adequately, it will certainly be the highlight of my literary career, but I will try.

Okay. Are you familiar with Peking Man? The Neanderthal hominid monkey-creature that was unearthed in Beijing?

George and Jeb may be his primitive ancestors.

They are brothers, and my very limited knowledge of medicine leads me to believe they both suffer from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, autism, brain damage, inbreeding, or any combination thereof. I have known them nearly four years. For the first three and a half, I didn’t know they could speak. When they finally did begin to speak, it became evident that George had a severe lisp and Jeb has an even worse stutter. They are both somewhere in their twenties. Jeb has no teeth. George’s are brown. Neither of them are above 5 feet tall. They stare and leer and seem to have absolutely no inkling that this is socially inappropriate. They frantically hump both inanimate objects and each other.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before one of them fell desperately in love with me.

I realized something was different when I came in for my shift one night, said ‘hello’ to George as I usually did, and he actually responded. Even more astounding, every time he saw me for the rest of the night, he smiled. Sure, his teeth are the colour of feces, but at least it was an effort.
Soon, it was 4 am and time for our break. The other guys on the night crew told me to go sit down in the breakroom, they’d be over in a minute. I took out my snack and very unceremoniously began stuffing my face. My mouth was still blocked when George appeared in the doorway, saying something very incoherent, as per usual.

I nodded and smiled as I usually do when someone with a severe speech impediment speaks to me and I have absolutely no clue what they’re saying. This time, however, George looked a little frustrated at my vacant smile. I asked him to repeat himself, and then took another bite of my bagel.

“Wuhh u wike an flfghgdhhg”

Riiiiiiiiight.

Mouth still full, I raise my eyebrows in such a way as to convey my complete misunderstanding.

“WOULD-YOU-WIKE-TO-GO-OUT-SOMETIME-WOBYN” he nearly shouted, as though I were the stupidest person he’d ever come across.

Fuuuuccccck. My mouth was still full and the guy who had just asked me out is pretty much as gross as you possibly can be while your cells still perform cellular respiration.

I nearly choked on my mouthful of bagel trying to swallow it. It was taking me a long time to answer, and the long silence seemed to suggest to George that I was formulating a long, eloquent, painfully romantic acceptance, and a smug grin was creeping across his face. Finally, I could speak.

“Well, I think I would be in trouble. I have a boyfriend.” I managed. Instantly, his face fell.

“Oh.” He said. He turned on his heel and literally ran out the door.

“Thanks, though!” I called after him.

For the next twenty minutes, I alternated between extreme guilt, and hysterical laughter.

That was three months ago. He hasn’t spoken to me since.

So ladies, if anyone is in the market for a short, anti-social, lisping, creepy, intellectually impaired sexual deviant, you will be pleased to know I have jilted your Prince Charming. Feel free to claim him. I will do my best to repress the angry beast of my jealousy.

Hysteria: A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability and a physical deficit or condition, without an organic cause.

It began with stew.

I hate stew. Gravy turns my stomach. Carrots? Fuck that. But, last week, I wanted nothing more than to devour roughly 78 gallons of the stuff.

This, in itself, would have been unremarkable had it not been for a few other simultaneous ailments: I was perpetually tired. Funny pains in my stomach and head plagued me for days. I peed, conservatively, every 13 seconds or so. And I spent most of last Wednesday sobbing for reasons I still don't understand.

Then, one evening, I was shot in the face at close range with a moment of bone-chilling realization:

I must be pregnant.

It was the only explaination. I mean, sure, I've never once engaged in unprotected sex in my life, but that's totally immaterial. What matters is that I have a mass of fuzzy, generic symptoms that are much more easily attributable to more likely causes, such as stress or a mild infection!

Of course, I turned to the only place one can turn when they need their half-baked ideas reinforced through questionable sources: Google.

"Pregnancy symptoms" returned approximately 6.02 x 10^23 hits. The first five told me all I needed to know:

• Fatigue. Yes! I'm tired all the time. And there's no good reason. I only take a full courseload at university, volunteer with two different organizations, maintain Dean's List grades and work a weekly night shift.
• Nausea. Well... not exactly. But, now that you mention it, I do feel funny...
• Dizziness and Fainting. Uh, no. But really, this is the Internet. How much faith can I really put into something I see online?
• Thinking You Are Pregnant. Oh my GOD! I totally think this. I LOVE THE INTERNET.
• Headaches or Stomach Cramps, and Frequent Urination. Okay. To be completely fair with myself, I had, and still do have these, and I have no idea why.
• Late or Missed Menstrual Period. Oh yeah, that. Forgot about that.

I thought about the last one, and I honestly wasn't sure. I don't keep track of my cycle, because that's what my best friend, Billie, is for. I wish I were kidding. She's like a Palm Pilot with breasts and 94 pairs of shoes.

After a weekend of letting my thoughts grow steadily more absurd whilst tumbling in my head, I returned to school on Monday. Billie and I had a biology lab and were, as per usual, talking in lieu of actually doing any science. Today, however, this wasn't our fault. We were studying the composition of the amniote egg, and, for reasons I still don't fully comprehend, this required us to boil one in a 750 ml beaker on a hot plate. We sat waiting for the water to come to a boil.

"Billie," I began, "I think I could be pregnant."

"How?"

"Right now, I'm working under the 'microscopic hole in condom' theory."

"You're not pregnant, Robyn," Billie insisted as she pulled a piece of gum from her purse and popped it into her mouth."

"How do you know??"

She looked a little annoyed now. "Because," she retorted, "You just had your period."

"What?"

She looked quizzical. "Yeah, you were due to have it last week."

White lights suddenly filled my periphery. I guess that's what happens when your heart LURCHES INTO YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

"Robyn," Billie said, with a tremulous inflection, "you did have your period last week, right?"

I was unable to reply, leaving ample time for Billie to make the comforting observation:

"I know a guy who was concieved after the sperm got past a condom, spermicide, and birth control pills."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - --

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the Student Center of the University, alternating between fits of blinding terror and selecting baby names. I was surrounded by Billie, other best friend Will, and The Ex, who was observing me with the kind of rueful smugness that can only be felt by someone who feels they've dodged the mother of all bullets. Did I mention I fucking hate The Ex?

"Well," observed Will, "sucks to be you."

Supressing the urge to backhand him, I went back to my quiet trembling.

"Robyn," Billie said, "If you're really bothered by this, you should take a pregnancy test."

I perked up at the idea. Of course! Why hadn't I thought of this before? Off we sped to the nearest drug store.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Few things epitomize class like taking a pregnancy test in a mall bathroom while your best friend wrings her hands nervously outside the stall.

"How are you doing in there?" she asked.

"Fine," I lied. I positioned myself the way the enclosed manual instructed and--

"Fuck!" I cried from inside the stall.

"What??" said Billie, "Are you pre-"

"No, I missed."

"You what?"

"My pee did not make contact with the stupid stick. I missed." It's times like this when you consider how much more adaptive a penis would be in such a situation, and it makes you want to completely dismiss the Theory of Evolution.

"Well," said Billie, "can you... pee again?"

"Nope, I tried."

Defeated, we trudged back to the University.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - -- -- - -- - -

Thirty minutes later, I was struck with urge to pee again. Billie and I bolted to the nearest bathroom and I went in for Attempt #2.

This time, I was successful.

Moments later, I emerged from the bathroom, triumphantly, holding high the negative pregnancy test. Billie beamed, and I breathed for what I'm fairly certain was the first time in four days. However, the contentedness was not to last.

"But, your period is still late!" cried Billie after we'd celebrated ever so briefly, "And you're still peeing all the time."

"Who cares??" I replied, "Whatever's wrong with me, it's a thousand times better than being killed with a shovel by your mother and then buried in your backyard under cover of darkness."

"..."

All right. Maybe I do think too much.