I'm eating some delicious mac and cheese from Bistro Montage down under the Morrison bridge. For years I couldn't eat macaroni and cheese because the worst case of intestinal flu I ever had was inaugurated by the spectacular vomiting of just-eaten Kraft macaroni and cheese. For the longest time even the mention of macaroni and cheese was enough to trigger a tiny reflex urp. My boyfriend and I had eaten some macaroni and cheese and I remember feeling a little funny about twenty minutes later, and then suddenly the curse was upon me; in no time flat I was retching my guts out, great lumpy exhalations of familiar orange matter. This flu went from zero to sixty with breathtaking swiftness, barely ninety seconds after the first symptom ("hmm, I feel a little queasy") I was on my knees convulsing in front of the toilet. After a few rounds of world class heaving I felt the first ominous rumblings of trouble in the southern colonies, barely getting my pants down and situating myself on the toilet before indescribable digestive horrors commenced. Luckily the sink was adjacent to the toilet, because at one point it was as if I had two internal firehoses, one pointing out my mouth and the other out my ass, both turned on full blast simultaneously. I remember feeling renewed respect for the human body's powers of resolve; it wanted something out of me and would clearly not be deterred in its mission to expel, expel, expel. I made sure to do a quick visual check in each porcelain basin after every spasm to make sure no vital organs or crucial glands were being erroneously disgorged in the general tumult. Between gut-wrenching full-body seizures I wondered how much I could accomplish in my life if I could harness even a fraction of the driving purposefulness my body was at that moment exhibiting. My boyfriend was looking on in horror. I spoke haltingly between anguished sobs: "I'd be unstoppable...if somehow...I could tap into this...fuckfuckfuck...fixity of purpose, this...unshakeable singlemindedness, only directed...at projects...more personally meaningful to me than what I...am now...experiencing, and maybe...with less...childish weeping." He surely wondered why I was bothering to speak, but then again he knew me pretty well. "Here," I told him between explosions of radical mammalian disgust, "here we see the...laserlike focus and...unrelenting determination...that are possible only in the absence or disabling of...a meddling...consciousness." And then a fresh bout of violent puking.

He nodded thoughtfully, and then I saw mirrored in his face the first stirrings of the nausea that had completely ruined my evening. He quickly put his fingers to his lips and made a face like a very confused chimp. Fortunately we got sick sequentially, I was able to vacate the chamber of horrors just as he was beginning to need it.