Mood:  caffeinated

It got me to thinking about effluvia (doesn't take much, admittedly), particularly after last night when the gorgeous Tess messaged me from Belfast to say that all the English are obsessed with shit.

And why not?

I'd have to go a long way to beat the glorious Niki's poo-obsessed posts of late, and she's from Chicago, not ye Olde Browne Country. Mind you, she's not yet gone this far. That curry does look a little fecal, does it not?

Anyway, effluvia. I have weird veins -- they pop sometimes. If you pressed my arm too hard, it would become a hand shaped bruise. (At 16, I had a fight with a boyfriend. Not a serious proper fight, we were bored and seeing how much more power you could put in a punch if you pulled back your fist into a 'claw' shape, before throwing from the shoulder. The answer was: gains considerable impact. I knocked out one of his teeth, and had to wear long sleeve sweaters / lie that I'd been in a car accident for a month.)
I blame the pasty-skin Celtic heritage (take that, Belfast!), but I bruise so easy that I sometimes don't need the original impact at all. I just feel a weird ache in a wrist or a finger for an hour or so, then ... pop ... large swollen black digits. The first time it happened, I rushed to an A & E.
Exhaustedhousedoctor: "You have a bruise, madam."
Me: [shrieking] "But it's filled with black blood and swollen to eight times the size! My artery just exploded!"
Exhaustedhousedoctor: [sighs] "That's what a bruise is."

Anyway, while working through uni in a |malecentredindustry| McJob, near Arsenal (lasting effects: a fondness for shouting "Up the Arse" at your father), I used to exploit the exploding vein syndrome in order to alleviate the boredom of dealing with tipsy bloke customers who permanently addressed my knockers, and used to while away their own boredom by seeing how red a single comment could make my cheeks go.
Only, because I worked Saturdays, and because I was twenty-one, and trying to be 'wild', I used to generally turn up for work in the most awful |morningafterthenightbefore| sort of state. One time I wandered in to McJob twelve hours after taking my second ever tab of E (ee, those were the days), gave away #120 to strangers from Perth, and had to wear a miniskirt for the next three weeks to save myself from unemployment.
The week of the exploding arse was the worst, though.

I was fortunate, I knew, to be working one of the joints with a bog, or the whole sorry tale could have rendered this blog the victim of a million scat searches.
Slow morning, only one near dead pensioner overcome with the jitters, usual regs still all in the pub next door, working themselves up to their weekly *makevanessablush* challenge.
Stomach rumblings. Nice quiet moment to excuse myself to the loo by the manager's desk. Once inside, it's a windowless fan-assisted closet. One of those situations where it's you, the Sixties spit-flush slimline bog, a ten year old crusty loo brush and the fag end of an Asda bogroll. Okay, I could tell that I was packing solids, so perhaps if I folded the eight squares then separated them carefully into tiny, pleated squares, I could make it.
I don't know what I'd taken the night before, but it was not going to agree with the tiny pleated squares theory.
Cue anal explosion. Didn't even make it to the bowl in time -- it all happened while hovering. Chris Ofili would have been proud of what I plastered on those walls.
I won't go into too much detail about the clean-up, except to say that all eight squares were prioritised for my arse, thankyou, sod the walls.
I was in that stinky airless room for ninety minutes, co-workers hammering on the door. It took many many flushes, and it was me, my bundled up knickers (the only disposible item of clothing I could bear to use as a washcloth) and the bog brush scrubbing the walls in horror for almost every one of those minutes.
Finally, I flushed the knickers, adjusted my clothing and tried to calm the raging beleisha beacon that was my face. I opened the door to face the horrified boss sat at his desk, 30 centimetres away. Behind me, the walls of the lav were clearly soaking wet.
"What? I'm fine. But do you mind if I go home now?"

A week later, I turned up after an entire week on amphetamines, speeding my tits off, latest shag in tow, to resign.
Horrifiedboss: "You're not normal. It's not normal to wear see-through tops to work, go bright red all the time and have exploding veins. You wanna see a doctor."
I've always had half a crush on him for not including in that exit line any reference to anal explosions.

Footnotes:
1. He still invited me to his wedding.
2. I poo quite regularly and normally now.
3. And I never take drugs.
4. Vic dared me to blog a virtually unbloggable reminiscence involving old men, park toilets and a used condom, but my family read this blog, so I won't. I don't think my mum is the type to be upset by drugs or poo.
5. I half hope the longtime ex who goes weirdqueasy about shit reads this post. And recalls the other two anecdotes I didn't blog. Hah!
6. I ate all those scones.
7. Normal service will be resumed when I'm not ill any more.