Another quarter, another Master Cleanse. Now appearing at Microsoft.
I did my second-to-last cleanse when I was temping at Omnicom in New York. I could pretty much guarantee that anytime I went into the break room to make my tea, some chatty assbag would come in and ask me what I was doing. At first, I didn’t mind giving the basics: what’s in the tea, how much I drink, how many days it lasts, etc. However, I do mind being asked stupid questions that are totally subjective. Unfortunately, doing something completely unfathomable to the majority of our McNation’s populace leads to (you guessed it) being asked stupid questions that are totally subjective.
So I was rather pleased that by the time Day 4 rolled around, no one had said a word to me about my lemon and syrup concoctions. Man, was I stoked, making my tea, minding my own damn business…
“Ohhhh! Are you doing that… um… that cleaning thing?”
Damn, almost made it through four whole days, I thought.
I turned to find a short, stout 50-something-year-old woman that I had never met before. I stared at her blankly, giving her a moment to search through her small mental database of words until she found the correct one.
“Oh! Cleanse! Is it a cleanse?”
“Yes,” I responded, “I am doing a Master Cleanse.”
She proceeded to ask me the basic questions. As I answered them, she responded with looks of disbelief with a hint of anguish, almost as if I was offending her obviously sound lifestyle sensibilities. But at the same time, there was also a look of consideration, as if she was trying to think of ways she could somehow pull it off.
“So you just drink the tea, no food?”
“No food.”
“How long do you do it?”
“A minimum of 10 days.”
Shock, disbelief, etc… And then comes the stupid.
“Do you get hungry?”
“It’s not really an issue.” (Why can’t people realize there are far worse things in life than being hungry, even for extended periods? The food will always be there. If you’re going to be worried about what is and isn’t being shoved into your fat face, then you’re not ready to do a cleanse yet.)
“Is it hard?”
“This is my sixth cleanse.” (I should have also mentioned that I run marathons and lived under the tyranny of James and Nancy Taylor for 17 years. I was also blessed with an above-average IQ and a relatively manageable body. Very little is actually hard for me. I suppose it has a lot to do with how you look at yourself and how you use the resources available to you. I chose not to enter the philosophical discussion of differing viewpoints on hardship with this woman, in fear that such a conversation would cause her to explode, covering me with globs of fatty, frivolous, fifty-year-old puss.)
“Wow….” she exhaled, and finally walked away.
A couple of notes about the cleanse: When you don’t eat for long periods of time, your breath begins to smell different from the lack of saliva you’re generating to chew food. Also, your sense of smell is extremely heightened.
This means that my breath stinks… and yours does too.