When singledom sucks...

It's 12:30, and I'm sitting in bed with the laptop. I can't get to sleep, despite being beyond exhausted, and even though it hurts to look at the screen, here I am. I'm simply overcome by the boredom of staring at the insides of my eyelids and listening to the soothing sounds of two grocery stores restocking and receiving shipments, three crackheads hassling people for money beyond 11th Street, two gay men being harassed by a couple of drunk salt-of-the-earth South Philly Eagles fans, one wino (no, not a crackhead, there's a difference, I've picked it up) sounding extremely angry as he loudly yells to himself, and the repo trucks cruising for the latest indirect consequence of the mortgage-lending crisis.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

Only in Philly.

That's not why I put that title on the post, though. I put it there because for the past four hours, I have had the worst headache of my entire life. I thought I had experienced a migraine before in my life, but this...this has convinced me that previously, I wasn't even to the level of Tylenol. Right now, Tylenol wouldn't even touch the pain in my hand, which has come about purely from squeezing my head in the hopes that the pulsing pain might subside. I've spent the past four hours wondering if I still have any of the good stuff left over from my surgery last October, but I'm SOL.

About an hour into this seismic condition in my brain, you know what I wanted? Ice cream. French fries. A frosty. Actually, I just wanted sympathy and attention, I'll admit, but unless I got up and walked across the street for ice cream, walked to Wendy's for a frosty or up to 12th for fries, I was getting none of it. That's kind of the difficult thing about being single sometimes - the exact thing that you cherish about your life - the independence, the self-reliance, the daring confindence that you can handle what comes your way - can just as easily turn around and be the exact thing that bites you in the keester. Coincidentally, it's probably the very paradox that exhausted moms seem to say as well - even though spending time with their kids is the most rewarding thing they can ever think of to do, sometimes it still sucks to be falling asleep during a meeting because they've only had two hours of sleep the night before.

I don't think ice cream or fries would have cured this - indeed, I would venture to say that a sledgehammer is the only viable cure right now - but sometimes, we all just want to be Patty Patient, and despite the possibility that Betty Friedan herself may roll over in her grave for my saying this, we just want someone to take care of us.

Now that I've waxed poetic, my head is still in an unimaginable amount of pain. So to any and all good-looking Philadelphia men who might have the soothing gene, a frosty or vicodin...call me Patty.