Demon Blueberry

I was born, raised, and will most likely die a Northwestern girl; this means the following things apply to me...

1. I have an embarrassingly uneven tan. 

2. I CAN tell the difference between Starbucks' and Tully's roasts.

3. I don't drink enough water. 

For some reason, us Northwestern types don't drink water. I'm not sure how we came to the assumption that water will naturally occur in our bodies, but we certainly live that way. Maybe we think that because of the abundance of rain that we have naturally absorbent skin, or that we can suck up the water in the air through our nasal passages or something. Who knows? The fact is, I'm not a huge water drinker. I never have been. I'm not sure HOW I stay hydrated (because I know you're supposed to drink something like eight glasses a day), but I'm still not a dusty, creaky corpse yet. 

 
The summer is the best time in the world to not drink water. Or, so I thought for the longest time. Northwestern summers are a bit of a paradox. We don't get a lot of sunlight 'round these parts, and somewhere around late March, we start pining for sunlight uncontrollably. 

Northwesterners have a funny habit of associating sunlight and warmth with a sudden switch to a Jersey Shore lifestyle: the sun comes out and everyone rushes for their booty shorts, hoop earrings, man-flops, and guys start wearing their shirts in odd places, like in their belt loops...?

When it finally GETS here however, we become hostile and confused. We lash out at the sun, because it makes us hot and dry and gives us better looking skin. We crawl out of our video game caves and blink at the mysterious, flaming orb of happiness with a sneer. We snarl and foam at the mouths, retreating into the dark and moist places like Gollum from Lord of the Rings or...Lindsay Lohan. 

And so the sun makes us hot and confused for most of the summer. We're Northwesterners, and we don't know what to do when we get overheated. We just become delirious. 

Which brings me to my anecdote. 

Yesterday's weather was ridiculous. The sexy-voiced guy on the classic rock station told us that it had peaked somewhere around the mid-nineties in parts of the county, and he reminded all of us to DRINK WATER. "Oh, pssshhhaahh" I thought to myself as I subconsciously tried to remember what it's like to physically feel thirst again. 

After pulling into the driveway of the my house, I started to feel a little funny. 

I wasn't thirsty, no...but I was...yearning for something. A strange, foreign feeling in the back of my mind, perhaps my dehydrated psyche's last plea for mercy, crept into my frontal lobe: WA. TER. NEED. WA. TER.

I ignored this of course. Why? Because I'm stupid. Instead, I decided I was hungry, so I went to the box of blueberries we had sitting on the counter and picked them out individually. I was starting to feel a little dizzy, so I sat down and stared at each one before eating it, thinking to myself, "And so the foolish blueberry, unaware of the predator's gaze, wanders unabated into the jaws of DOOM..." and so forth. 

When I got to the ninth or tenth berry, I had to double-take. Surely, that last one had just made a FACE at me. When I looked at it a second time, it seemed normal, though I was CERTAIN that this:

had looked like this:

merely two seconds ago.

So, like any overheated and delirious individual, I tried to rationalize with the blueberry...

 

 

My rage thus being fueled by the horrible irony of receiving a raspberry from a blueberry, I ate the demon berry and all was well with the world thereafter. 

Not really sure why I shared this story.

I guess the moral of this whole thing is drink more water. 

Yeah, let's go with that. 

- JSP