no.30 - The Dehydra

From time to time my wife will ask me a perfectly normal question, like "What should we do for dinner?" and my mind will snap, reacting like an viper uncurled.

Do I have to make dinner now? We can't order out? Can't she see I'm busy? God that's a crappy song playing on iTunes. Why is she looking at me like that? Dinner? Dinner isn't for an hour! What the hell?!?

I might grumble out one or two of these irritable thoughts before my wife calmly asks me if I have been drinking...

...enough water.

Invariably the answer is no.

Dehydration makes me irritable. Sometimes very irritable. My wife knows this and knows slaying this demon is just a matter of getting me to drink a glass of water or two — though her efforts to get me to drink when I am in this cantankerous, dehydration induced mood are not unlike trying to get a dog to swallow a pill.

I did not realize until I was about thirty that many of my grouchy mood swings were a simple matter of mild dehydration.

My short fuse for all twelve years of grade school can be directly linked to the fact that I drank no water at all during the day. The gum-stuck, saliva sodden water fountains were our only source and we were only allowed to drink from them at the teacher's discretion, twice a day, if we were lucky and even then you could expect no more than a mouthful. In reality my only liquid intake was a single pint of coldish, usually chocolate, milk from a carton with my salty, salty lunch.

A normal, lazy adult should drink about three liters of water a day, but few do. Usually I drink enough to keep myself from being a complete bastard, but not quite as much as I should.

When I do drink enough, I feel better, I'm more polite and I get more done. This sort of productivity is probably not to the benefit of this blog, which does not reflect my better moods. When you do read a particularly cranky post, the first thing you should ask is: "How thirsty was he?"