I don’t have a great picture to go here, so here’s one of me eating waffle fries.

I’m a giant fucking production. At minimum, it takes me 8 pills and one injection to get ready to eat, which means it costs about $70 for me to even think about having dinner. (luckily I have insurance right now, so I’m not paying that directly). If I ever had to pay $70 for a meal, I’d crap myself in protest. Even if I decided not to eat today, it still costs roughly $60 for me to wake up. Sure, I could wake up and not do my pulmozyme, but it’s not worth it.

If I stop and think about how much time, energy and money I put into mustering up enough strength to sit on my ass for 8 hours and be better at Excel than everyone else (that’s my official job title), I get a little depressed. So I don’t think about it. My day is a series of “and thens” that I drag myself through to get to the part where I fall asleep watching wrestling bloopers. I keep my maintenance schedule rigid and automatic, hoping the momentum of doing the same thing everyday will keep me rolling like a tractor tire down a grassy hill.

And then the holidays come.

I see Christmas trees in the same way that Donkey Kong sees barrels: as an object to throw at Italians. I get a legit nausea around Halloween when I’m stocking up on popcorn balls and I can see an army of plastic Douglas Firs gathering in the Lawn and Garden section. But until this year, I never really questioned it. It’s not like Christmas has anything to do with Jesus anymore, so that can’t be my problem. And yes, it costs a lot of money, but what about the joy I felt when I got volume two of the Vincent Price Collection for $40? Plus, this year I got a badass Behemoth hoodie. Why do I hate the holidays so much?

Because they interrupt my schedule.

I have a pill (actually 5 pills) that I have to take with a meal every 12 hours, which breaks down to when I wake up and before I go to bed. So those times are pretty set (I’m not going to sit here and tell you I haven’t told them to go fuck themselves before), but lunch can happen whenever. However, I’m not supposed to take my insulin doses less than four hours apart, so if the turkey is landing at 3pm and I woke up at 11am (because fuck you I’m an adult and I’ll wake up whenever the hell I want), I either need to:

-Eat right when I wake up (which I don’t like to do because eating makes me logy).

-Find something non-carby I can eat for breakfast (my most frequent choice, because I’m not against sausage links)

-Sit quietly at the table while everyone else eats (if I wanted to watch people eat, I’d be at the mall)

-Do the math required to take a little more insulin now (I tried it twice, just to make sure I was terrible at it) or

or just eat and play catch-up for the rest of the day.

Then we get to the part where everyone eats like I do for one meal, which is fine, but being amateurs, they’re not hungry again 4 hours later. And since I’m not one to burden the fine folks at 7-11 with my problems, I’m stuck with a colder, drier version of what I had for lunch.

This isn’t life threatening stuff here: it’s more like a telekinetic paper cut that hurts just enough to bother me. Though, in spite of the $40 worth of Cinnabons I bought over the holidays, I did manage to lose 4 pounds, so if Christmas happened once a month, it would eventually kill me.

In conclusion, I hate the holidays because once a year I’m reminded that I’m a slave to medicine and time and most houses put up lights to celebrate it. But then January shows up, no one wants me over for dinner and all is right with the world.

Now let’s hope they’re keeping the ovens warm at the Cinnabon.