Things that PMS will give you:

1. The ability to eat half a box of Girl Scout cookies, cheesy pasta loaded with butter, cinnamon sugar oatmeal, biscotti with coffee and a handful of hard candies and still not feel full, when you normally survive on a handful of almonds and a piece of fruit in the AM hours.

2.  The understanding and rationalization that by drinking a 5.5 oz. V-8 with all of those foods, you're undoing all of the calories you just consumed, and are healthier for it.

3.  A surprisingly vitriolic intolerance to Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber (when you were previously apathetic about the youngsters) because 10-year olds should not be making more money than you.

4.  Anxiety and paranoia that everyone is mad at you, because you are already convinced you're being a bitch based solely on the negative thoughts you have about everything around you, even though you've been alone in your office all day and haven't actually interacted with anyone.

5.  The inability to distinguish between good idea texts and bad idea texts.  Example:  Cute Boy:  "How are you today?"  Good idea:  "I'm not feeling well today and am a bit stressed out."  Bad idea:  "Trying to figure out what my coworker wants me to do makes me want to strap her down and take a rusty cheese grater to her face."  It's sort of like drunk texting, except you have no excuse for atrocious spelling and grammar errors.

6.  The unmistakable urge to cry at the Golden Girls theme song.  Thank you for being a friend...::sob::

7.  The idea that french fries are a good dinner.

8.  The belief that people want to hear you bitch about your PMS.

9.  The inability to deal with bad traffic long lines a freezing office cold air people anything.

10.  But also?  A legal defense in case you go batshit and take a rusty cheese grater to someone's face.  Not that I would consider doing that.

Game On, Parking Ninja.

I think the Los Angeles Parking Enforcement officer who patrols my street is a ninja.
I'll cruise my street, scanning for empty spots, pull into the No Parking zone for a minute to wait for a spot to open up, blink and BAM! PARKING TICKET.

Where did the ticket come from? Where is the officer who wrote me this ticket? I don't see any Parking Enforcement vehicles, so how did this happen? Where are you, Parking Enforcement Officer? I'll tell you where. In the goddamn bushes in ninja camouflage.

My craptacular avenue is perpendicular to a day care/school thing and when I get off work, I'm often forced to contend for spots in front of my apartment in manic who-can-parallel-park-the-fastest death battles for open spaces with parents coming to collect their offspring. And I always lose those battles because I am a WOMAN and cannot parallel park to save my life. I'm sorry if you ladies are offended by my automotive sexism, but let me just stop and say that there are a lot of things that I'm good at and quite a few things that I can do better than most boys, (like getting a period [ha, sorry, kidding...]) but when it comes to getting in my car and driving my happy ass to point B, I'm already as good as lost before I even pull out of the driveway. I talk to other cars as though they can hear me, (i.e. "LET ME MERGE, YOU ASS-PIRATE!") I get lost almost every time I get in the car, I have no concept of directionality ('north' is up, right?) and you can just forget about parking. Sometimes I literally put my car in park and make EM's boyfriend do it for me.

What?! Don't judge me - at least I'm aware of my failings. Also, I have excellent boobs and I can't be good at everything, you know?

So Parking Ninja hides in wait for me. On days when I'm sick from work and can't move my car to the other side of the street for street cleaning between 12 and 2 pm, I'll groggily shuffle downstairs and regardless of whatever time I *thought* it was when I remembered to move my car, it will always be 12:02 and I will always have a ticket written at 12:01. Parking Ninja is nowhere to be seen, because he is a ninja and he is laughing his evil laugh from behind the bushes or in the storm drain or probably even from *inside* my car that he broke into with his Ninja Magic.

I think I'm being hunted and unfairly targeted by Parking Ninja. Fine. Two can play at this game. I will wear my own camouflage and lie in wait... patiently... patiently... patiently waiting for you to enter the 6-inch force field-activated Shitstorm of Velociraptors car alarm that I bought with all the money I saved by not paying the city of Los Angeles your alleged "parking citations."

I keep fireworks in my underwear drawer.

Oddly enough, Independence Day is one of the most memorable holidays for me. EM and I were born in Sacramento, where it is legal to buy and use fireworks because 1. NorCal is not made of specifically flammable plants, and 2. if things get out of hand, people have the good common sense to put the fire out with water, as opposed to attacking it with axes like they do here in SoCal.

"Stupid 'no-hose' budget cuts."

This is probably why I held on to my ex-boyfriend's gifted bottle rockets for as long as I did.

My ex gave them to me as part of either a Christmas or Birthday present a couple years ago because he shared in my moderately destructive leanings, and I figured that I would hold on to them for us to light together... you know, saved for something special. I stuck them in the safest place that I knew: my underwear drawer.

Fast forward a year to July of '09, when I was hopelessly smitten with TOL. For our 4th of July celebration last year, a group of us headed over to the coast to see the *big* explosions over the beach, and then on our way back to inland Los Angeles I remembered...

I have firepower in my skivvies drawer!

TOL and EM's boyfriend made with the matches and we lit said bottle rockets off in the street outside. It was a glorious and unsafe combination of alcohol, explosives and asshole-neighbor's-car-directionality. We made it out alive and unscathed. The rest of my bottle rockets were abandoned in favor of hour-long makeouts with TOL, who attracted my attention much more effectively than the smell of gunpowder.

This year, again, they were discovered nestled in the back of my underwear drawer, mysteriously wrapped in a pair of stockings.

"EM's boyfriend!" I called across the apartment. "Do you have any interest in possessing some slightly illegal fireworks that I've been stashing in my underwear drawer?"

"Uh. Yes?"

"Good. I don't know how old they are, really, and I'm afraid they'll suddenly and inexplicably go off and light my lingerie on fire. Also, I think one of them leaked. How do I get gunpowder out of stockings? Can I just wash them? Am I in danger of having them explode?"

"No," EM's boyfriend said, eyeing me with that look.

I handed them off and nursed my nostalgia for previous Independence Days, when, this very 4th of July weekend, I uncovered yet another bottle rocket while cleaning out my drawers of drawers. I thought about lighting it off, I thought about giving it to EM's boyfriend, I even thought about tossing it, but then my girly-emotion-centers stopped me. I suddenly remembered my childhood 4th of July block parties with root beer floats and Roman Candles and sparklers, I remembered a 4th of July at Mount Rushmore on an epic month-long camping trip with my parents, I remembered my adorable ex giving me the stash of flammable projectiles and I remembered TOL laughing at me when I lit them off in the street.

No. I decided. I'm going to save this for something special.