I just got back from a much-needed and all-too-short vacation, and my brain is still on the trip. Therefore, I am presenting an excerpt from Teeny Weenies and Other Short Subjects, written when I was not so exhausted. Remember, Teeny Weenies is available in paperback, e-book, and Kindle format.
Putting the Men in Menopause
Shortly after I turned fifty, I started to perspire. It wasn’t the glowy dew that I had produced as a female and it wasn’t the labor-intensive, manly sweat that I like to think comes naturally to a hard-working, macho man who sits behind a desk and types for a living. It started at the top of my head and crept its way down, as if I had slowly stepped into a sauna, head first and then body part by body part, activating sweat glands that I didn’t even know I possessed, until I was left soggy and soaking, my clothes tattooed to my sticky, wet body. It was nature turning a hose on me as if I were some hormone-crazed dog.
This happened whether I was sitting on a blanket in the sun or directly in front of an air-conditioner turned on at full blast. It happened in bed and it happened on the street. It took me a while to realize that not every place I went was mysteriously undergoing random temperature fluctuations. This was internal – my own personal global warming.
The worst thing about these episodes was that they had a scary emotional component that often went with them. This part happened primarily at night, when things are scarier anyway, when I already found myself lying awake for hours wondering what hideous rare disease I was going to die from, how I was going to pay my bills until that time, and what exactly was going to happen to me when the universe stopped expanding and started to fold back in on itself.
As I pondered these things, a new and unfamiliar feeling crept over me – one of imminent dread and doom, as if something were horribly wrong right at that moment and I just didn’t know about it yet. Maybe the universe was folding in on itself already, and it would all get back to where I was before the flesh-eating-mad-cow-avian-flu caught up to me.
Then, within a minute or five, the wave of heat began moving down my body, inch by inch, or sometimes millimeter by millimeter. I could feel it beginning at the roots of my hair, creeping down my face and neck, across my chest, down my stomach and legs, and out the bottoms of my feet. Then it was all over, leaving a trail of sweat, and a resulting chill, in its wake. It was so powerful an experience that, even when I had managed to fall asleep in spite of all the worldly threats out there, it woke me up to lie shivering in my own perspiration. Continue Reading »
