golden girl superpower

I am now officially old.  And this is different from the old I felt when I went through the Golden Girls rerun phase, or the times I’ve found gray strands in my hair.  It happened unexpectedly with a new prescription this week and forgetting to take my medicine one day before going to work and that’s when I decided I needed to buy the thing that makes me an official Golden Girl.

This is my new pill case.  It has a slot for each day of the week and I can set it up on Sunday and leave it on the counter so I remember to take everything each morning. 

How did I go from a single multivitamin in the morning to needing an organizer to keep all my pills straight?  I didn’t think I was taking this much stuff until I got it all into the pill organizer and realized that it’s not as empty as I thought it would be. 

If one more thing goes wrong I might need to upgrade to the super deluxe model or set up a whole drawer in the kitchen with dividers for each day of the week.  But I really only take two medicines a day. 

One is my antidepressant and the other is the new high blood pressure medication I have to be on because of my antidepressant.  The other pills are vitamins and a super B pill I take for stress.  Which is kind of a joke because wouldn’t you think a person on antidepressants and blood pressure lowering medication would have so little emotional and physiological stress they’d walk around blissed out all the time and have to be scraped up off the kitchen floor every day?  Not me.  Even with all that, I still need additional help in calming the fuck down.

Oh I almost forgot the patch I stick to my arm every morning that makes me not crave cigarettes.  I can’t believe how well the patch works, but I think I’ve found its one fatal flaw.  It may be waterproof against water that comes from the outside, but is powerless against the water comes from inside your body.  You can shower with it on and it remains stuck tight, but if you sweat even a little it slips right off. 

I was at work on Friday and after lunch I started feeling warm.  I spend my days working with people on exercise programs, and part of that is showing the proper form by doing the exercises for them so they can watch.  A few hours in the gym doing squats and steps and weight machines will make a person sweaty, especially if it’s a warm day.  On Friday afternoon I touched my forehead and it was wet, my hair was damp and stuck to my neck underneath, and then I started craving a smoke.  I thought I was just having a weak moment because it happens all the time.  I’ll be fine all day and then out of the blue I’ll get a mad craving that lasts for a few minutes and then goes away.  But Friday it didn’t go away.  It wasn’t until I was driving home from work when I went to rub my patch that I realized it wasn’t on my arm.  I couldn’t imagine where it fell off but when I glanced down my shirt, I saw that it had peeled off of my arm, traveled through the sleeve of my shirt, and adhered to the front of my bra.  No fucking wonder.

I wish there was a patch you could take in pill form.  I could just add it to my pill case with all the rest and forget about it.

But I love not smoking.  I can smell things now and I can sniff a smoker out from twenty feet away.  I’m always amazed by my sense of smell when I quit smoking. Suddenly I can tell things about people just by their smells.  I can tell what kind of fabric softener someone uses, their soap or perfume, what they ate for lunch (especially if it had garlic in it) and I can always identify a smoker by that burnt garbage aroma they wear like an aura.

And then there was the peculiar smell I came across the other day that may mean I am going beyond normal and developing supersmell powers.  I’m not sure if I understand pheromones.  It’s a subconscious thing and you’re not supposed to be able to smell them, right?  If that’s true then what is it called when you stand near a guy and he smells so good you want to fold yourself into his arms and bury your head in his chest and cling to his body until the cops pry you off?  I want to say that this phenomenon is pheromones because it’s stronger than cologne.

Eli has this effect on me.  When I get close to him, he smells so good that I want to pull open his chest and climb inside him.  That probably sounds a little gross, but it’s the only way I can think of to be close to Eli without him being bothered by my hair.  I hug him and he’s assaulted by my hair.  I’ve tried sleeping with my face pressed into his neck but he can’t stand the hair wisp tickles for very long and ends up moving me so that my head is far enough away from his face that my hair can’t choke him or tickle his face or get in his eyes.   

I don’t know how this ended up about Eli because he doesn’t really count.  I’m in love with him and there are other forces at work.  I’m talking about the raw attraction to a stranger who maybe sits next to you in a meeting or walks next to you and he smells so good it’s distracting.  And I don’t know whether it is pheromone-based, or if I’m just rediscovering my lost sense of smell, but it doesn't happen with everyone.  Is it the delightful scent of someone with great body chemistry or soap?   I like to think it's my new superpower at work.