Never Eat Sushi in Mexico

When you think of cautionary tales in Mexico, a few obvious pointers come to mind:

"Don't drink the water"
"Don't get shot by a member of a drug cartel"
"Don't wear a 'Trump Rocks!' shirt"

But, as Jerrod and I would discover, there are other evil forces afoot in our neighbor to the south.

To be fair, our vacation had a shaky start. We were ORIGINALLY supposed to go to Puerto Rico, but Hurricane Maria hit two days before our scheduled departure. (I won't gripe too much about that; Puerto Rico has it rough...and I don't pretend that a nixed vacation compares to toughing out a legendary storm, losing everything, and seeing your home in ruins.)

Luckily, I snagged a TravelZoo deal at the last minute: A trip to Los Cabos, 4 nights, all-inclusive, airfare included, for ~$650 a person. Not bad, not bad. "This is so spontaneous and adventurous," I thought in a moment of optimism / trying to be a completely different person. (I plan trips for months in advance--it's my hobby, yo. So this was uncomfortable, though not unpleasant.)

Jerrod and I had a pretty uneventful flight there, except we did nearly get scammed by some overzealous locals selling timeshares in the airport, not to mention Jerrod was pressured to propose to me (one of two times on this trip). But somehow we made it through the minefield of the airport, found our shuttle, and ended up at our resort.

BEFORE THE SHITSTORM

Jerrod and I took some amazing spoof-glamor shots at the beach and added another awkward photo to to our burgeoning collection (look for a coffee table book soon). A local who spoke no English took the picture of us, and he had no context or explanation as to why we posed like complete, utter dorks. I forgot how to speak Spanish due to my laughter--and general rustiness.

"ME ENCANTAN FOTOS TANTOS"

I also took full advantage of the bar, and it was like a competition with myself to see if I could truly get my money's worth. I spilled two drinks but no biggie, "no pasa nada," or something like that. That's the beauty of all inclusive resorts.

That night, we got dressed up and went to the Asian restaurant on the premises. Everything was already paid for--so I indulged in EVERYTHING EVER. But that would bite me in the ass. Or at least impact my ass.

Dressed up to lay around and stuff my pie hole

I ended up getting everything I loved--Thai soup, sushi, sashimi, yellow curry...and would ruin these things for myself forevermore. Or at least for a few weeks.

How could something so delicious kill me?

"Let's eat here again tomorrow!" I gleefully told Jerrod after a delicious meal.

"Yeah!" he agreed. "We'll do hibachi tomorrow."

We scheduled our meal for the next day like a couple of ignorant chumps.

That night, I reflected on my perfect day with my perfect human and snuggled into bed at 10:30 p.m. with a smile on my face. Sun, fun, a sexy pair of buns, and mojitos--did it get better? No, no it did not.

I can't wait to repeat this tomorrow, I thought.

Famous last words--er, thoughts.

D-DAY BEGINS

(yeah, I'm shifting to present tense here. What, what?)

My eyes fly open. I glance at the clock. It's 12:30 a.m. ...and my stomach is turning.

Weird. Maybe I ate too much, I think. The second that thought occurs to me I realize that's not true because it's been HOURS and I eat like a champ EVERY DAMN DAY and WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING and OMG I HAVE TO PUKE--

I scamper out of bed with this horrid realization. I hug the toilet and promptly vomit sushi and Thai food. It's just as disgusting as it sounds.

As wretched as it feels to throw up, I somehow feel a strange sense of relief afterward and figure I can crawl back to bed.

I sleep. An hour passes. My eyes fly open and OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

Back to the toilet. This time it feels like a gremlin is wringing out my insides like a wash rag, and vomit shoots out of me like a geyser, I'm talking Old Faithful in Yellowstone, and holy god I want to die. I am violently ill.

The worst part? I am basically scream-vomiting because of the force. Jerrod starts knocking at the door (which is dumb because it wouldn't close all the way, just close over).

"Go away!" I yell. "Don't look at me!"

I collapse on the ground in a deep sweat. The cool tile feels good on my clammy skin, and I curl up in fetal position.

The next few hours I am a creature outside of space and time. The only things that exist are me and the toilet. I retch and retch and retch, but nothing can come out of me, and my abs are already sore. I crawl back to bed, and Jerrod tries to wrap his arm around me, but I feel too filthy and have all-over body aches so I bark, "Don't touch me!" not unkindly, but dear lawd, touch at your own risk.

At some point Jerrod goes downstairs to the convenience store, but it's some ungodly hour, so NOTHING is open.

At this point, my puke transitions to poop that looks like coffee grounds. Glorious.

"What happened? Why aren't you sick?" I moan, racking my brain for a possible explanation. Was it the water from brushing my teeth? Surely not?

How can something so innocuous and cute accompany a bacteria-laden meal from hell?

Meanwhile, Jerrod's searching his phone for answers. "You DID have milk with your cereal this morning," he says. "That can be risky. Maybe that's why."

I literally get up so often to empty myself that at one point I just decide to lay on the floor of the bathroom, and preempting my needs like the total amazing dude he is, Jerrod has a pillow on the floor already for me.

Speaking of his amazingness, Jerrod decides to brave the world outside of the resort and walk down a Mexican highway to find me some electrolytes and meds. It's at this point he realizes...

He is sick too.

He's not puking, thankfully, but it's not like the other end is much fun, either.

Good thing he double-fisted it and hydrated at dinner

He finally tells me this in the gray light of the dawn. "I'm sick too, baby," i remember him saying.
I blink in disbelief. "But you haven't been running to the toilet."

Apparently, he had to use the toilet downstairs while he was searching for meds for me.

HE WAS SICK AND STILL SEARCHED FOR MEDS FOR ME.

(#perfectGuy)

At some point we had to let the downstairs desk know that we couldn't make our sailing and snorkeling excursion. To do so, we had to have a doctor's note. Bull, right? I should've just pooped on the guy.

Our First Foray into Mexican Medicine

Still, a doctor's visit wasn't a bad idea. We were screwed up, after all, and that's putting it mildly. The resort shuttle whisked us to a Mexican doctor who gives us detailed information on what to eat and not eat, along with what meds to take. The whole visit cost us $7. The meds were cheap as hell, too.

Only problem was...

Jerrod's SnapChat says it all.

Yeah, I was told to shoot a needle in my neck so I could stop throwing up. No, the doctor wouldn't do this. I had to buy this from a pharmacy and DO IT MYSELF.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Can't people kill themselves by getting an air bubble in their bloodstream? Yeah. Thanks but no thanks.
 
The Aftermath 

The next 12 hours were spent literally shitting nonstop every few minutes. I drank water, my stomach growled, my body rejected it, repeat, over and over. The worst part was that the door didn't completely close...so Jerrod and I got to the next level of intimacy on this trip. What a bonding experience!

Even though Jerrod didn't puke, I'd take the puking over his experience. He ended up super feverish and literally slept all. day. long.

The next day? We were done puking and pooping, but we were utterly devoid of energy, unable to eat, and unable to eat hardly anything. Pretty much it felt like we were run over by a truck, then eaten by vultures, then barfed up again. Yaaaay Mexico!

The One Bright Side to All This?

We expected to leave the resort fat and bloated from buffets and drinks. Instead, we lost weight in what was the world's shittiest weight loss regimen:

"I lost 7 pounds on the Cabo Cleanse! Simply ingest the tainted sashimi and watch the pounds fall off!"

I also got to hang out with a pretty rad fella and further realized how swell he is. There is no one I'd rather suffer alongside.  :) (Gag) Y'all don't wanna hear about that. I guess that's another bright side. A happy couple on vacation is boring...so now we have a story worth telling.

My First TIme Shooting a Gun

All right, I'm gonna come clean: I'm not the biggest gun fan. My view on guns can be summed up in this Bill Maher quote. **Yeah, yeah, I know he's said some questionable shit lately, but I still agree with him on this matter.

"'Do we have to adore them, do we have to love them so much? I look at guns like antibiotics...You know, maybe sometimes you need them, but I don't kiss my antibiotics, I don't polish them. I don't worship my amoxicillin. If I need it, it's there.'"

And that's it, my friends--what if I needed it? It's no secret I'm a pansy (in spite of my Gryffindor status and my cockroach-killing abilities). I don't seem like a hard-ass Lara Croft, but I aspire to throw unsuspecting criminals off, dammit!

So when my brother Kevin invited me to the gun range, it went something like this:
*long, reluctant sigh* "Okaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy, fineeeeeeee."

My enthusiasm remained tepid at best until we arrived at the gun range. I immediately felt like I was transported to the great Republican ideal: The Country of Texas. The parking lot was packed with small penises XXL trucks. When I entered the premises, it wasn't much better. I was directed to a side-room to watch a safety video. Everyone wore a 10-gallon hat in the video, no shock there. When I returned to the main room, Kevin said, "I paid for you," to which the cashier shouted, "AS HE SHOULD!"

Psh, I'll have you know I am a financially independent, self-sufficient women...and actually, no, it was all good, I really didn't wanna pay for this crap anyway. Woo!

Everyone in the gun safety video looked like a wannabe Chuck Norris.

Before we went out back where the targets were, my brother presented me with ear protection that made me feel like Warren from There's Something About Mary:

Courtesy of Galleryhip.com, not my photo, back off, folks

This made me nervous. See, whenever I learned percussion in high school, I kept having an embarrassing problem where I'd wince and jump whenever someone crashed cymbals together. That includes when I crashed the cymbals. I didn't exactly want to jump while shooting a deadly weapon. But if it were super loud, well, that would be a very likely possibility.

My suspicions proved correct. My brother showed me how to hold a gun and continuously emphasized squeezing the living shit out of it. I would then pick up the gun, squeeze it until my knuckles turned white, and--as an instinct--my finger rested on the trigger.

"NO DON'T STOP WTF TAKE THAT FINGER OFF," Kevin shouted. "You aren't even holding it right yet! Keep the finger off the trigger 'til it's time to shoot."

It took me about five tries, but I finally got all my fingers where they needed to be and held up the gun. I gripped it tight, wore my best grimace, aimed for the target, and...

POP! The force of the gun shot me backward. I felt a sting on my thumb. Turned out I wasn't gripping the gun hard enough (HOW?), it moved, and the force gave me a ripe red mark on the second joint of my thumb. Great.

"You didn't hold it tight enough," my brother Captain Obvious told me.

I couldn't reply. Damn, that was a lot of force. I stared down at the gun as the killing machine it was, thinking about removing the bullets and peacefully placing a dandelion in the hole. Maybe I wasn't hard enough for this. What I was good at, though, was jokes, and I asked my brother, "If I were to shout 'HILLARY 4 PRISON 2017' right now, how many high-fives do you think I'd get?"

Even though I felt defeated, I decided to learn more basics. I tried loading bullets, which surprisingly took a hell of a lot longer than I thought. Damn things don't exactly drop in there. Any gun I'd use in a life-or-death struggle would definitely have to be pre-loaded.

"Now lock 'em in," Kevin told me. "Push on that button right there." I tried popping 'em in all stylish-like, hoping my inner gangster (gangsta?) would come out. But it didn't. I pushed and pushed and couldn't get the bullets to lock in.

"Help meee," I cried, so my brother rolled his eyes and did it for me. Okay, cool. I was a spoon-fed gangsta, but a burgeoning gangsta nonetheless.

This was totally me.

Pow pow pow. I shot three times. The same chill went down my spine with the realization I was doing something dangerous, but at least that time I got the grip right and didn't hurt myself.

"I know how to hold it now! Take a SnapChat of me," I told Kevin. He scoffed and told me to stop being a faggot (gun range talk is similar to locker room banter, no worries). I figured I would mess up anyway--annoyingly enough, I hit the target dead-center on my next shot. Figures.

Unfortunately, that was the climax of my visit. I didn't get a whole lot better at anything except loading bullets into the gun and locking them in place. I kept aiming at the center of the target and would hit far too high and too far right. In other words, I still couldn't hold the gun tightly enough, so I kept jumping backwards and the bullets flew in the opposite direction that I intended.

One of Kevin's final directives to me? "You're jumping before you even pull the trigger, Ashley! Stop it."

But when all is said and done, I *theoretically* know how to shoot a gun. Still, knowing my dumb ass, I would be too anxious to remember anything in the head of the moment--holding the damn thing too loose with my sweaty hands, probably shooting my cat instead of an intruder.

Thank God for pepper spray!