I woke up this morning to find that Luke had called twice. I called him back at work because the machine had cut him off and he said that he called the first time because he had forgotten his nametag and the second just to tell me he loved me. So, he then invited me to spend his lunch break with him. I zipped into clothes, did hair and makeup, and scuttled off to spend a very nice midday half hour with him. I had some lovely broccoli and cheese soup from the caf� and we wandered around afterward looking at books. He also showed me the youngish guy who comes in very morning dressed business casual, sits down with a bunch of book, and promptly falls asleep, only to remain there all day long. We think that he does the business casual in order to fool his significant other into thinking that he�s got a job still. It�s so sad when someone is ashamed to tell another that he or she has lost his job. That sort of dishonesty breaks my heart.

I was reluctant to come back home when Luke�s break was over. He said I could bum around the store until it was tie for hi to go, but as much as I like books, I have no idea how I would be ale to waste three and a half hours there. He suggested the mall, but I don�t even really like the mall when I have business there, let alone window-shopping with no money to buy that which I find irresistible.

The weather yesterday was gorgeous. It�s amazing that in the span of just twenty four hours, you can go from needing several blankets at night to air conditioning the following morning. The temperature reached a zenith of seventy-six degrees, eighty-three if the thermometer happened to be in the sun. When I went to pick up Luke at work, I think it�s safe to say that he was a little miserable. He had chosen to wear this garish vintage seventies shirt with a burnt umber sueded blazer and he was broiling. So, we popped into Best Buy, grabbed Secretary, stopped home so he could change and ran to Planned Parenthood so that I could restock no pills.

I was pretty happy when I finally got called to the window because I think that they have changed their prescription policy. It used to be that you received a prescription of a set number of pill packs and if you ran out before the next time you needed an exam, you had to call in and go through all the red tape of having the script extended. This is what I had to do last year and it took three calls to finally do it. This time around, I didn�t have to call once. They simply handed me my three packs every time and I was permitted to go on my merry way. This despite the fact that I used more packs than I did last time around due to having skipped the placebos almost all the time. I�ve only had three periods since last May and I have to have one before my exam, schedule for May twenty second. I don�t want the NP having a fit when I say that I haven�t had a period since November. I always feel kind of bad when I say no to condoms, though. I mean, I know that we�re monogamous and have been so for almost two and a half years, but the clinicians don�t know this just by looking at me (though they may recognize us).

Of course, the NP knows me and knows that I�ve been with the same person the entire time I�ve been here, and I�m pretty certain she knows that I�m super responsible about taking my pills on time. The first time she saw me, she asked me if I was a nursing student just because I knew so much about how my body worked and how much research I had done before deciding to switch to a monophasic pill. The funny thing about my taking my pills is that it�s like clockwork. I do it completely without thinking, often even forgetting that I have. A lot of the time, I find myself checking my compact before I go to sleep, just to make sure that I took my pill that day.

I simply don�t understand how someone can mess that up. They recommend that you take it at the same time daily, but you have a five or six hour window and how someone can forget to take it is beyond me. They know they�re gambling with the possibility of becoming pregnant when they skip pills and they do it anyway. Obviously, a person is on the pill either because of completely medical reasons or because they don�t want babies yet, so regardless of why it has been prescribed, each situation is sort of dire to my mind. Either pregnancy, pain, or both are the risks. Why mess with that?

Once upon a time, I had an idiot friend. She had not only extremely painful ovarian cysts, and an irresponsible boyfriend as well. She was prescribed the Pill in order to try and keep her cystic ovaries from going out of control after her laparoscopy in our senior year, before the boyfriend came into the picture, and she was good about taking them daily until actual sex became a regular activity two years later. I would visit her tiny one bedroom apartment furnished her by public housing because she was part of City Year only to find her pills lying on the counter, her pills obviously not having been taken for a week. She was paying forty dollars a month for them and I just found it incomprehensibly stupid for her to risk herself in such a fashion. But, after one or two lectured from me, I told her that I simply wasn�t going to worry about it anymore. If she wanted to go into the hospital because she couldn�t stand from the pain of the cysts, that was her problem, and if she wanted to end up pregnant with an unwanted child, that was also hers to deal with. Lord knows what she would have done had she become pregnant. She knew she was lucky, but if she couldn�t even tell her parents when she had been sexually assaulted by an acquaintance, she could never speak up and say that she was with child. She probably would have left it to me to tell, as she had with the assault. Maybe had I told her about Maggie�s abortion when we were seventeen, she would have lightened up, but our friends were not supposed to know, not even that many years later, so I kept mum.

To close out this long rant, girls, take your meds. I don�t care what they�re for.

Boys, you take you meds too, and if your girlfriend is too scatterbrained to take hers, remind her to do so. Oh, and wear a fucking condom.