pseudostoops

Internet, I’ve been keeping something from you.

For the past week, I’ve been pretty much convinced that I was dying of some horrible mystery ailment.

It all began last weekend when I got a searing, knife-stabby feeling in my stomach.  “Ow,” I thought, and also “oh dear.”

The knife-stabby pain continued for a few minutes, then seemed to abate.  Every hour or so, though, it would flare up again. “This is bad,” I thought.  “I am almost certainly dying of some horrible mystery ailment.”

So of course I did nothing about it.

The next day, it happened again.  In fact, I didn’t even make it to the next day, because the knife-stabby feeling woke me up in the middle of the night.  I drank a glass of water that did little to improve the situation and tried to go back to sleep.  Mostly, I stared up at the ceiling contemplating my imminent death.

This has continued for several days.  I had a good day on Wednesday, with few attacks of the knife-stabby feeling, but yesterday they were back again with a vengeance.  Last night, they woke me up at 4 in the morning.  As I sat on the floor of the bathroom, whimpering, phone in hand, I contemplated twittering some last words, something for you all to remember me by.  Instead I went back to bed.

I told John about all this when he woke up this morning.  The knife-stabby feeling, where it hurt,  the coming-and-going, the searing pain when it’s there and feeling pretty much fine when it’s not.  I was just about to tell him that we should probably schedule me for a CAT scan and start drawing up wills when he interjected:

“Oh, that’s the worst.  Heartburn sucks.”

Heartwhaaaaaa?

So.  Ahem. It appears that I might have been suffering from the world’s most common gastrointestinal ailment, and I just didn’t know it.  In my defense, I have never had heartburn before, so I was clueless!  I have done some googling, and apparently heartburn can feel like a searing pain in the dead middle of your abdomen, right below your breastbone.  Did you know that?  I didn’t!  I figured, it being called HEARTburn and all, that it would be up by where the heart is, up in the throat.  But no! Apparently it’s really common to feel a knife-stabby feeling in your gut!

So you can all be relieved that I’m not dying.  I know you were concerned.  I’ll be over at Walgreens, buying some Tums.

A note to any employers out there considering legal action against former employees:  before you send a letter threatening to sue your former employees for allegedly possessing company information that is only accessible to current employees, which they should have given back when they left the company, you should probably make sure that they are, in fact, former employees.  When 2 minutes of research reveals that they are actually current employees whose contracts do not expire until September, and you have taken no action to fire them, it makes it awfully easy to rebut your allegation.

This helpful tip brought to you by the “No Shit, Sherlock” department of Lawyer & Counsel, LLP.

Do you all read Yelp?  It’s an online site for user reviews of local restaurants (and stores and bars and clubs, too.)  Somehow I have gotten on Yelp’s email list.  Every week they send out some “thematic” email- favorite Chinese restaurants, best places to watch the Cubs home opener, etc. 

Today’s list is entitled “Yelp Loves Locals.”  “Hm,” I think, as I click to open it.  “Must be like a list of local haunts for different neighborhoods.  Could be worth checking out.”

The list of places recommended in this email, in order:

• H&M
• Filene’s Basement
• Gap
• Urban Outfitters
• Chili’s
• P.F. Chang’s
• McDonalds (“kids in the know call it Ronalds.”  Um, okay.)
• The Cheesecake Factory
• Blockbuster
• Target
• CPK
• Domino’s

I’m thinking: Dude, Yelp, if I wanted a recommendation for freaking Chili’s I’d ask my cousin in the suburbs.  “Kids in the know call it Ronalds?”  What the hell?

Then it hits me:  the date on the top is April 1.  This is not for real. I just totally fell hook, line, and sinker for an April Fool. And I came within about 30 seconds of posting a semi-ranty email about Yelp’s ridiculousness.  I am awesome.