Meredith, get away from the email.

As I was having my hair cut last night, I was discussing thermonuclear PMS with my stylist, who gets the worst PMS known to man.

I get bad PMS once in awhile. When I do, it's bad in the way that I know whatever crime I will commit will get me no sympathy in the public arena but I will go to the chair unrepentant because the irritating motherfucker deserved it,probably for disregarding escalator etiquette one time too many.

Perhaps it's being off the meds and making up for lost time, but this time 'round, it's the double whammy of ca-RAYZEE physical AND emotional PMS.

Physical: If I were a celebrity, the magazines would be splashed with photos of my baby bump. I cannot shove enough food into my face fast enough, which is hard considering I really have to go shopping. I wake at 2am starving and unable to sleep without eating something, anything, which last night were two dill pickle spears and two pieces of Wasa bread with mayo.

Chest? Two flotation devices of pain. I have to move slowly lest there be any reverb, because I have turned into a blue-ribbon Guernsey overnight.

But ah, the bitchery. The land-mine/leghold-trap bitchery that springs without warning, lethal and fiery. THAT is the crowing glory of this particular bout.

A man on the packed train was releasing silent-but-deadlies literally next to my seated head. I was forced to inhale ripe, putrid air that had been, just moments before, inside a stranger's colon. That I suffered Stranger Ass Gas without making a public announcement or ripping a hole in his proximate ass cheek is as inexplicable as my INability to not yell at the big-screen TV in the common area at work every single time Mitt Romney's face appears. Every. Single. Time. I am some operant conditioner's wet dream. Just the sight of his smarmy insincere smile that never quite hits his eyes sends me instantly into pure foaming fits.

"HE'S A LYING SACK OF CRAP WHO HAS NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN AND PEOPLE WHO AREN'T RICH!!" I'll yell for anyone to hear. You'd think that would make me a pariah, but I now have a group of strangers who nod at me knowingly and say hello.

We know how it's going to go down. The revolution.

(as an aside: just started The Hunger Games, and i like the writing, but you can't convince me a society would let its kids be taken annually  for a fight to the death. Because if such a one were to exist, it deserves to be oppressed.)

Kevin is coming to a play with some others of us tomorrow evening.

"Should we go to dinner beforehand?" he asked me.

And here's where I did something that's brave for me. I trusted someone with my anger, with my ugly deep dark full-on unqualified rage. I took the chance that he was a good enough friend to be able to see the werewolf and remember that on every night but a full moon I'm just a person.

"We can," I replied, "but I'm very, very PMS-y, and if J-- makes one more pedantic comment about how I place my chopsticks is socially unacceptable in China, it might get bad and bloody. And if K-- makes another melodramatic statement about her elderly cat 'almost dying' again, I will suggest that it might help to spend less money on pot and more on proper veterinary care and decent food."

Kevin did not respond. I called him when I got home. He answered the phone.

"Please don't yell at me," he ventured timidly.

I've decided to call my PMS alter ego Meredith as a way of distinguishing her from who I am when I have control and don't want to completely obliterate people for behavior that I normally find only mildly irritating. I may have to drink tomorrow.

Meredith wants me to.