How I Cured Myself of Debilitating Mental Illness - And Other Stories

I was a strong-willed child growing up. Or, as one might put it less gloriously, I was as stubborn as an ox and fiercely independent.My mother told me at one point that I would make a great drill sergeant when I grew up, if it weren't for my oversensitivity to things like papercuts and itchy clothing tags. Little does she know that I actually am a drill sergeant.

"DUDE, YOU CALL THIS COUNTER CLEAN? JUST LOOK AT IT! THERE'S A STICKY SPOT FROM YOUR PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY IN THIS CORNER, AND THERE ARE BREAD CRUMBS IN ELEVEN AREAS. SERIOUSLY, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU CALL THIS CLEAN. ARE YOU BLIND? THIS IS NOWHERE NEAR DONE! WHY ARE YOU SITTING ON THE COUCH DOING NOTHING, YOU DIDN'T EVEN FINISH THE COUNTER!"

Ahem.

Anyway, there's a picture floating around of me, age three, partially naked, sitting around reading an upside-down copy of Parenting Your Strong-Willed Child. Or it might have been Toilet Training in Less Than a Day. Same thing. I was (and am) still have a cold heart of steel.

Growing up, I was afraid of two things. I was (and am) afraid of dogs. When I was four or five, I got chased by a dog at a party. I wasn't hurt, and the dog was probably just trying to play, but I was still scarred for life. I was also deathly, devastatingly afraid of throwing up.

Yes, as a child, I was the terrified victim of emetophobia, which is the irrational fear of barfing. (See? Like emetophobia... emet... emit... you emit bad things from your body when you vomit... see?) I'm not really sure where this fear began. I do know that when I was seven, I got a stomach bug and was perfectly okay with it, so it must have hit me after this point.

I lived in fear of getting sick to my stomach. I worried about it daily. Uh-oh, I had a twinge in my stomach. Maybe it was that chicken I ate. Maybe I was getting sick! Oh no! I was going to get sick! I was going to throw up! It would be awful! I would die of terror!

And just so we're all on the same page here, what's one of the physical symptoms of anxiety? Stomach problems. Yikes.

A pattern emerged. A family member would get a stomachache. I would worry that they were sick, the epidemic would begin, and I would get sick and barf. I would get so anxious that my stomach would feel sick, which would make me even more anxious. It was awful.

One of the scariest times of my life occurred when my dad was in England for a week on a business trip when I was eleven. Without my dad, my mom had two (yes, two, I never found out how that happened) king-sized beds all to herself, and on a whim, told all of us six kids that we could all hang out in her room for a night and have an epic slumber party. We all jumped at the chance, had a fun evening, and then all crawled into bed for the night.

Full of popcorn, I was just beginning to drift off when I heard the most awful sound coming from the sibling to my immediate left.

BLEEAARRRGGHHH!

Acutely attuned to panic at anything that could be construed as the sound of someone vomiting (for years, I would jump out of my skin if someone spilled a cup of water on the floor... what did that sound like?), I jumped up. Sure enough, there was definitely barf within six inches of my face.

I would have jumped out of bed immediately and run back to the safety of my own germ-free bunk, but before I could move, I heard another weird noise coming from the sibling two down from my right.

BLEEAARRRGGHHH!

Oh crap. There was a stomach virus in the house. And it was spreading super quick!

I ran at marathon pace out of the room of horrors. On my way out, I heard it again. Another sibling was throwing up. I knew I was doomed.

I finally reached the comfort of my own bed, but not before hearing the sound of vomiting yet again.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I just lay there wishing I could be transported to the deepest circle of hell instead. I stared at my ceiling, but I couldn't help but listen.

When I think back to that night, I admire my mom's ability not to run screaming from the house by the fifth barfing session. At the time, however, all I could do was count the number of barfing episodes I could hear.

Somewhere around 3 AM, I lost count after the thirty-second instance of vomiting. I am unfortunately not kidding. When there are six kids, and five of them have the stomach bug, and they're all doing what kids do and vomiting multiple times, well, that number actually sounds about right.

By dawn, still paralyzed in my bed, refusing to use the bathroom in case someone had vomited in the toilet, it struck me.

I hadn't barfed yet.

And in the week of terror that followed, all my siblings threw up multiple times. My mom got the bug. Some of my siblings got the bug twice in a week. Yours truly, wracked by anxiety, was mercifully passed over by the Angel of Death.

It could have been possible that my incredible fear of throwing up actually had a psychological effect on my body, preventing me from actually... throwing up. In seventeen years, I have thrown up exactly once, when I was fourteen. I knew I was fourteen because I was reading The Legend of Luke all night to try to alleviate the anxiety of my nausea, and that book came out in 1999. Unfortunately, I couldn't look at another Redwall book for years after that, and it sucked, because I just loved The Pearls of Lutra.

My emetophobia was a constant present all through childhood, all through adolescence, and all through college. When I was growing up, I used to pray every night that God would spare me from barfing until "I was forty," because I assumed that I would be over the fear by then. But I was now twenty-three, and I was becoming uncomfortably aware that I only had seventeen years years left until I had told God that I would be totally okay with Doomsday.

And then, one day, my fear went away. Just like that. Almost out of the blue.

I was sitting in the parking lot of the gym, terrified once again. Then it hit me. What if I could unscientifically calculate my chances of actually throwing up this time around?

So I started thinking.

Let's say, I thought, that I've had at least ten years of this, even though I know that it's been more. I've worried about throwing up at least twice a day each day since then. I'll round it to about fifteen times a week. There are fifty-two weeks in the year, and ten years, so that's 520 weeks. Multiplying together, I have worried about throwing up 7,800 times during the past ten years, and I have only thrown up once. Based on my previous history, there is about a 1 in 7,800 chance that I'll throw up for every instance of anxiety.

Then I looked at some other odds. What could be more likely than throwing up once in every 7,800 times I worried about throwing up?

Well, I was more likely to:

Die walking across the street
Die in an airplane crash
Die from a hornet sting
Die from an asteroid crash
Be audited by the IRS (and I didn't even make $15,000 a year)
Produce a child with a genius IQ
Become a pro athlete (and that was never happening)
Find a four-leaf clover
Win an Academy Award
Date a millionaire
Lose a limb in a freak chainsaw accident

Well then.

And just like that, I was no longer an emetophobic. I had successfully out-logicized my thought patterns. I had championed over my emotions. Maybe it wasn't quite correct, but my brain no longer cared.

I don't think about vomit every single day, anymore. But I still have a tiny bit of dread about hitting forty. Just a little.

Communication Revisited: Or, How I Taught a Kid to Talk

I was hired as a one-on-one for my little guy, LG, back in April. He needs the extra support because not only is he autistic, but he may also have other mental health issues, as evidenced by the manic fits he will have a few times a week where he runs around the classroom screaming, jumping up and down, flapping, and laughing hysterically. When I was first hired, he was in a mental health classroom for otherwise-normal kids with severe emotional issues. I spent a week in this particular classroom with him before he was transferred back to his original autistic support classroom, dragging me along with him.

LG is non-verbal, and when I first met him, he had exactly two signs for expressing himself - marshmallow and bathroom. He didn't consistently use these two signs, and would usually just grab my marshmallows or randomly run out of the gym to use the bathroom. He couldn't tell you if he was tired, hungry, sick, bored, annoyed (well, I guess he could punch and kick...), too cold, too hot, wanted a snack, wanted a different puzzle, wanted to watch a movie, and on and on and on. So he pretty much ran around the classroom grabbing various things, crying, screaming, and being aggressive. I felt very bad for him, and my bruises were increasing exponentially by the hour.

Remember this post, where I taught a kid in summer school how to request snack foods he liked, and how it generally helped him to calm down and not punch me in the stomach all day? Well, once we moved over to our current classroom, the first thing I said after saying hi was "LG needs some PECS, pronto. Do you have any?" And yes, this being an autistic support classroom, they had a box full of PECS (PECS are small cards about one inch by one inch labeled with pictures of various items - if a child wants something, he can just give you the picture of the item, which he understands and you understand). Even though he had been in this classroom for most of the year, PECS hadn't really been tried with him, possibly due to his punching and kicking all the time, or possibly due to all of the other kids punching and kicking all the time and focusing staff's attention on safety, not PECS. LG had already learned the PECS for bathroom and help.

So I went over to the PECS box and filled up three pages with illustrations of just about anything I could think of that LG might want. I might have overdone it just a little ("Dude, Grace," said the teacher, "He doesn't even know what half of these things are.").

I worked on the PECS for the stuff LG likes the best to start. His main focus in life is completing puzzles and then carefully putting away each piece in the box so that all pieces are face up and absolutely no cardboard bottom is visible, so we worked with the picture for puzzle. When LG wanted a puzzle (which was about 6,783 times per day), he had to give me the PEC for puzzle. If he didn't, there was no puzzle. Even though LG is nonverbal, there are certain areas where he catches on pretty quick, and this was something that he caught on to pretty quick. By the end of the week, he knew that the quickest, most efficient way of getting that puzzle was to give me the puzzle picture. Once he seemed to get the idea, we worked on marshmallow, yogurt, and cantaloupe (the latter two items are what he eats for lunch every. single. day.). He got that right away, too.

Then something pretty much amazing happened.

Most kids with autism are pretty slow with learning the PECS system. In the traditional method (which I, as a trained non-speech therapist, did not follow), a student learns how to ask for just one item with just one available PEC. Then the child learns how to ask for something out of a field of two PECS, then three, then four, etc. It's a long, involved process that can take years for a cognitively impaired person to understand.

Not LG, however.

One afternoon, LG was throwing a fit. He was being a pain in the rear end, and I was trying to lay down the law and make him sit at his desk and show me quiet sitting before he went to pack up. He was punching and kicking and wiggling his fingers in my face and saying DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE with enough emphasis to let me know that he was really, really not happy with having to wait for the bus. Suddenly, he stopped attempting to bruise my ribs, jumped up, and ran across the room. I assumed that he was headed for the table or a desk or somewhere he could crawl under and further demonstrate that he was really, really, really unhappy with me, so I ran after him. But he didn't try to do that. Instead, he ran towards one of the other student's visual PECS schedule hanging on a wall, a schedule that I didn't think he had ever noticed before. He pulled off a PEC and pretty much threw it at my hand.

It was a picture of a backpack.

I almost cried. Then I forgave LG for the twenty-minute pinching session and let him go get packed up.

It was a huge communication breakthrough. LG had realized that he express himself through PECS. He had learned to talk.

In the next few weeks, it became increasingly clear that the only thing holding LG back from expressing himself was the number of PECS that we could give him. Most kids in our classrooms who used PECS were able to choose a picture of a favorite item out of a field of two. LG could flip through three pages of PECS with fifteen PECS each and pull out the picture of whatever he needed. Amazingly, something in his brain was able to make the connection between sometimes-abstract pictures and communication. Some kids need to be taught each PEC individually. LG could pick out a picture of something he had never seen before or had never needed before and communicate accordingly.

These days, it sometimes feels like my job can be a little boring. LG doesn't sleep well, so he's often a grumpy, crabby kid who hits you on the arm if you tell him no, you can't have snack at 8:15 in the morning, but overall, he's not really that much of a problem. He doesn't have to hit me to communicate. What do you want, LG?

He flips through his book and pulls out a picture of a shoe.

Alright, I say, I'll tie your shoes.

I tie his shoes.

He flips through his book and pulls out another picture. Can he play?

Sure, do you want Mr. Potato Head or Legos?

He points to Mr. Potato Head. He works on making an impressively genetically mutated Mr. Potato Head for twenty minutes. Seriously, it looks like Mr. Potato Head was the victim of an unfortunate disaster at a nuclear reactor. He has two arms on the right side of his body and a nose growing out of the top of his head.

After a while, he gives me yet another picture. He's mercifully all done with Mr. Potato Head, the poor spud.

Yay, you finished up just in time, LG! The bus will be here soon.

Then he asks to go to his locker. He packs up and goes home to annoy his parents with his excited shrieking at the sight of movie credits.

Maybe I'm a boring Plain Jane and careening right down the path of short and fat. But I unlocked someone's world. How many people, dumpy or not, can boast of that?

Confessions of Social Confusion, Part One of an Excessively Long Expose

I have often wondered if I have some form of Asperger's Syndrome. I have some of the characteristics associated with being an Aspie, but I lack other traits. I'm not sure if I'm just ADHD, a huge nerd, and lack social skills, or if there's something more going on. I'll probably never know.

There are two main diagnostic criteria for Asperger's, according to the DSM IV (the DSM V is kind of hazy on the definition). The first criteria is a "qualitative impairment in social interaction", which means my social skills suck but nobody actually has the data to prove it. If I'm an Aspie, my sucky social skills need to be present in two out of four specific sucky social skills.

1. Marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction.

I don't think this describes me at all. I have good eye contact (in fact, sometimes too much eye contact, I have to make myself look away sometimes), typical expressions, typical posture (but I slouch!), and while I don't talk like an Italian even though I'm half Italian, I'm very capable of using gestures to make my point.

2. Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level.

This is unfortunately right on the money. When I was in elementary school, I had no friends. When I was in middle school, I had friends, but they never actually asked me to come over and hang out or anything, so maybe they weren't actually friends. However, when I was in high school, I definitely did have friends.

But they were all in middle school.

I was acutely aware of the weirdness factor of a high school girl hanging out with middle school boys. It just looked wrong, and I knew it. But frankly, we could all hang out and play card games or video games or joke around. High school girls were all about hair and makeup and (high school) boys and feelings, which I just didn't care about just yet. I was sixteen, but I felt twelve, so I hung out with twelve-year-olds. It felt like this. I looked like I was twelve. I felt like I was twelve. I thought like I was twenty. I was emotionally and intellectually all over the place, and I was incredibly uncomfortable.

3. A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interest or achievements with other people, (e.g.. by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people).

Sorta kinda. It's not like I didn't want to connect with other people and hang out with them. I just didn't really know how to talk to other people my own age. At the same time, I didn't want to talk for hours about the latest movies. I was a little more interested in zip codes and area codes. So yeah. Major fail there.

4. Lack of social or emotional reciprocity.

Again, not really. It truly did (and do) want to connect with other people. It's just that... I don't know how.

And really, that's the core of it all. I don't know how to interact with people. I'd love to, I just don't know how.

Recently I've been trying to figure out how my interactions and thought processes are different from other people. I've come up with a few reasons why I might be socially clueless, even though I have stuff to say, even though I want to make connections. Here's why (in list form, because I like lists, like really like lists).

1. I'm blunt. I'm honest. I'm logical. I want everybody to be blunt, honest, and completely logical, just like me.

I put a lot of stock into what Dan tells me. If he says he's going to be home at 9 PM, then I think he's going to be home at 9 PM. If he's home at 9:30 PM (which he often is, because he isn't as obsessively punctual as I am), I get upset. For a long time, Dan didn't understand why I got so upset. What did it matter if he was fifteen minutes late?

It took two years, but Dan recently said he had a light bulb moment about why I get so riled up over stuff like this. He thought I was being obsessive, perfectionistic, and controlling (which, to be fair, wouldn't be too far off the mark with me). He thought I was just trying to control him and everything in my environment. But he suddenly realized that... wait, that wasn't it. He had told me that he would be home at 9 PM. I expected him home at 9 PM. He wasn't home at 9 PM. But he had said that he would be home at 9 PM, and he wasn't. In my brain, that's the equivalent of being dishonest. He didn't do what he said he would.

For my part, I was confused at why he had been so confused for so long.

"But," I cried, "I've been telling you for years that I mean what I say and I say what I mean!"

"Yeah," replied Dan, "But I didn't think you actually meant that."

Apparently, as Dan kindly explained, many people, when they communicate, do not communicate all of the reasons or all of the emotions behind the words that they say. There's often an undercurrent beneath communication. If I went to defcon five because he came home fifteen minutes late, he thought that I was really trying to say that I was angry angry angry because I just knew he was actually meeting some hott librarian babe at Starbucks instead of going out to buy toilet paper.

No, I wasn't trying to catch him in a lie and or make him miserable. I just wanted him to be home at 9 PM.

2. I usually communicate to either give or receive information, and I rarely talk about stuff.

"Dan," I complained, "I got my hair cut today and the lady who was cutting my hair was blathering on and on about how hot Ryan Gosling is and which celebrity married which celebrity. She talked about it for fifteen minutes straight!

"So?"

"What do you mean, so? She talked for fifteen minutes!"

"So?"

"Ummm... she talked for fifteen minutes?"

"Grace," said Dan, "I was at the gym yesterday and the two babes next to me talked about their (ahem ahem) plastic surgeries for forty minutes."

"Oh. Well, that's pretty banal," I scoffed.

"Welcome to normal people land!"

I punched him in the arm. But I shut up about the hairdresser.

Most people, I've come to realize, talk about stuff. Their dogs, their kids, the romance novel they're reading, past boyfriends, dating troubles, whatever. I don't get it. What's the point? There is no point. They could have said what they said about Spot in thirty seconds, not thirty minutes.

It recently hit me that the point of talking about stuff is... to talk about stuff. What the heck. That's just circular logic.

So here I am asking questions, getting information, answering questions, giving information. Then I'm stuck. What do you talk about then? Apparently you talk about minutiae for half an hour or until you kill Grace, whichever comes first.

And as an aside, that's how I realized why I never fit in with the nerdy and geeky crowd even though I'm nerdy and geeky. It's because nerdy and geeky people still talk about stuff, it's just that they talk for hours about computer programs or World of Warcraft for hours instead of hair or Fluffy the Really Cute Poodle. They're just rehashing. Where's the information?

3. It takes me a while to process what you're saying.

Grace is more than a little slow on the uptake. It takes me a while to get jokes. It takes me a while to respond to a jab or a sarcastic remark. When I watch movies, I am so incredibly confused for the first fifteen minutes or so until everything sinks in and I learn everybody's voices.

I need time to process stuff. When people talk to me, I have to think about what they said, and I have to think about how to respond to what they said. All of this takes me time, and time is something that I don't have in a conversation. So I normally default to vague comments. "Really? Is that so? Seriously! Wow! Wow. Well, that's quite an issue. Oh no! Haha!"

My fillers don't necessarily invite the speaker to continue on with the conversation, and they certainly don't give the other person any further stuff to go on. Shockingly, the conversation soon ends. Then I'm usually up late thinking about some pretty awesome responses to the now-irrelevant conversation.

So how does this all add up?

Apparently, this is how people socialize and complete the "making friends" merit badge award.

First, they go up and introduce themselves, or someone goes up to them and introduces himself. That involves questions and giving and getting information. I can do that. "What's your name? Where are you from? What do you do? What are your hobbies?"

At some point, the information-getting period ends and you have a pretty good idea of what the other person is like. Then you step into the talking about stuff stage. Uh-on. I know this person loves movies, so now I have to talk about movies. What should I say about movies? This person knows me pretty well, so maybe they're interested in what I did this morning. Great, I just killed two minutes. Now what?

The talking about stuff stage is where most of my attempts at connecting with other people peters out. I just don't know what to say anymore. And I mean, come on, even if I'm able to come out and talk about stuff I'm interested in, economic demography and onomastics just aren't anything most people care about.

My conclusion: I may, indeed, be screwed.

The Color Talk

My students at the detention center were mostly sixteen to eighteen-year-old boys, with the occasional girl or twelve-year-old thrown into the mix. Being smack in the middle of their crazy teenage years, the kids thought that they knew everything there was to know and they were pretty much perfect at everything they did. Except schoolwork, which most of them thought was a waste of time. And they weren't all that good at crime, considering they were all currently in detention.

To their credit, these guys did know a lot more than I did about many things. They knew how to get illegal guns. They knew how to get illegal drugs. They knew how to impress their fellow juvenile delinquents. All things I had no clue how to do.

But I knew more about science than they did, with the exception of one guy, who had tattoos, was a recovering drug addict, and watched Animal Planet in his free time. Sometimes the gaps in their knowledge were pretty impressive. You could be a sixteen-year-old gang member, but you might still think that rocks were sentient beings (true story). Because I'm a pain in the behind, I enjoyed showing them up in scientific know-how, because I certainly shouldn't show them up in many other things that they were, um, quite proficient in performing.

One day, while I was monitoring my class to see if they were indeed filling out my graphic organizers (they all hated those things with a passion, but more than one kid grudgingly admitted that it did help them understand how all this stupid stuff worked), one of the guys raised his hand.

"Miss," said the miscreant, who had earlier been identified by his caseworker as "The Terror of the XYZ School District, "It says here that the color white is really made of all colors. What do they mean?"

"Well," I said, a little hesitantly. "They're right. White can really be thought of as a combination of all the colors. Or, you can think of it as white can be separated into different colors."

The School District Terror shot me a withering look.

"Miss," he said, "White is just one color, not all colors. You teach science. You should know that."

"Actually," I responded, "The textbook really is right. I mean it. Like think of black. Black is the absence of color."

By now some of the surrounding delinquents, desperate for a chance to escape the painful boredom of reading about the chemical compounds, were tuning in.

"Mrs. Huang," interjected the Animal Planet Aficionado. "What do you mean black isn't a color? That's like saying the sun ain't the sun."

It was slowly dawning on me that my incredibly elementary grasp of color and wavelength was oddly light-years beyond what my students understood.

I called for a general consensus.

"Guys, how many of you think that white is a color?"

The entire room raised tattooed arms in unison.

"And how many of you know that color doesn't really exist? That color is just what you see when wavelengths of light reflect off an object?"

Nobody raised their hand, but several of the kids looked shocked.

Animal Planet Aficionado spoke for the room.

"Color's got to exist, miss. Look, your shirt's blue. If your shirt isn't blue, then what color is it?"

"It is blue," I explained. "But the blue is only what you see with your eyes."

The room began to discuss this revelation with their cellmates. The thing they don't tell aspiring young gang members is that if you get caught and go to jail, you might just die of boredom. My students loved anything that let them escape from detention, if only in their minds. Some of them thought I was an awesome sauce teacher because I made forty photocopies every Friday of Connect the Dots puzzles with 800+ points and handed them out at the end of class. But I digress.

"Alright," yelled the youth worker. "You guys are too loud. Back to work!"

The room fell silent. All the kids bent their heads and pretended their hardest to read the next paragraph.

I explained the lack of color knowledge to two of my three fellow teachers during lunch that day.

"What!" shouted the math teacher, a young guy who worked so hard to bring the kids up to speed in his class. "They don't know that stuff yet?"

"Apparently not," I responded.

The next day during lunch, the math teacher had news.

"Grace," he said earnestly, "I was so taken about by what you said about the colors that you know what I did?"

"What?"

"I canceled all of my math classes today. We spent each period having the color talk. The kids all know how color works now."

So now, when my students get out of detention and possibly go back to their lives of crime, perhaps they will realize that gang colors don't actually mean all that much, since technically, the colors aren't really there in the first place.

And we all drink Pumpkin Spice Lattes in the fall!

I don't actually have to be awake for another 25 minutes, but I have unfortunately been up since 4 AM. At least it was just plain light sleeping/insomnia this time, and not random perseverating thoughts keeping me awake. You know what sucks? When you can't sleep. You know what sucks more? When you can't sleep because your brain keeps saying TYROD TAYLOR TYROD TAYLOR TYROD TAYLOR over and over and over. (He's the backup quarterback for the Ravens. No, I don't know either.)

So today I'm going to waste a few moments of my day doing some Pinterest anthropological studies on Starbucks.

My mission - Explore the relationship between hott female users of Pinterest and very pretty sparkly mugs of overpriced coffee.

My method - Use the search string "fall starbucks" to gather pictorial data for analysis.

My analysis is as follows.

An exemplar Starbucks/fall photo found on Pinterest. You can clearly see the hott girl influence in the off-center Starbucks sign, in the slightly-above-amateur photo composition, and in the overall tone and mood of the photo.

This photo is typical of the Starbucks/fashionista relationship in Starbucks fall pins. In this exemplar, you can clearly see the hottness of the female pinner - her legs are lean enough for skinny jeans, her disposable income affords her the luxury of expensive Uggs, and on top of that, she has enough spare change to be drinking Starbucks in the fall. Also note the use of the Starbucks cup as a fashionable accessory for the fall season.

Hott girls also use Pinterest to pin Instagram photos of themselves looking hott while drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes from Starbucks. These photos are of such importance to hott girls that they pin them in abundance, while other hott girls repin the original photos.

A single pin that most accurately depicts the hott girl trifecta of a hott man, a hott man doing hott things, and Starbucks. Pin description: "He knows how to make her smile. Starbucks and flowers in the fall." Perhaps the intermingling of the hott man with the cup of Starbucks is indicative of the deepest desires of the female heart.

Numerous pins bluntly stated that the season of Fall did not begin until all hott girls had sipped their Pumpkin Spice Lattes. In the above pin, one can deduce that the hott girl love for Pumpkin Spice Lattes is strong enough for some fanatics to dig deep into the bowels of the Internet to find a meme creator to tell the world of Starbucks love. Notice that no watermark exists on the above pin. Perhaps the love of Pumpkin Spice Lattes was enough to induce hott girls to learn how to use Microsoft Paint effectively.


OK, I've wasted more than enough time. Gotta get off my behind and go eat breakfast. And then perhaps drink a Pumpkin Spice Latte... if I can find one.