Demanding Drug Dealer

I'm starting to think it would be easier to be a meth addict as hard street drugs are generally sold by dealers requiring no more than a bundle of cash from their prospective buyers and a seedly location for the transaction to occur. My drug of choice, endorphins, come at a much higher price from a demanding dealer: the anterior pituitary gland. That particular part of the gland, which secretes hormones controlling everything from tissue growth to sex hormone production, gets a massive ego rub whenever someone requests something of it.

The posterior pituitary, the siamese twin of the anterior, boasts a far less bloated ego on account of only being responsible for anti-diuretic hormone and oxytocin (though that is important for couples gettin' it on- I suppose if they feel like going the personification-of-glands route, ladies can claim that they had to fake because their posterior pituitary simply refused to dole out the oxy). If the kidney asks for some anti-diuretic hormone, posterior pituitary happily obliges, or decides to be a jerk and gives you diabetes insipidus (which makes you pee everything out, basically).

Yet Mr. Anterior Pituitary, as I mentioned, is not the kindest gland in the body for a variety of reasons. If you rub him the wrong way at all, there's no telling what he will do (I don't know why the anterior pituitary is a guy in my mind- the image of a woman is not the first thing that jumps into my mind when I think of a seedy drug dealer). Well, actually there is: he can screw you over and give you gigantism or pituitary dwarfism by bombarding you with or withholding growth hormone, mess with your estrogen or testosterone levels via secretion of luteinizing hormone, make you fat, crazy, anxious, and depressed via hypo or hypersecretion of thyroid-stimulating hormone, give you Cushing's disease from unleashing too much adrenocorticotropic hormone, fatten you up by holding back on lipotropins... the list goes on. And that list is ridiculously long as it is. I have just educated you all on the endocrine system, you're welcome.

I shove those dreadful evils of which Anterior Pituitary is capable, however, on the back burner when I remember my favorite hormone he stashes away in a glass case on the top shelf- endorphins. Anyone who has watched Legally Blonde has heard of endorphins from the famous line: "exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people don't shoot their husbands- they just don't!" Well, Elle Woods is right.

Endorphin highs morph crotchety Scrooges into hippie life lovers who, let's face it, drive those who haven't just run five miles insane. When you realize the demands of Anterior Pituitary to convince him to release that addictive hormone, it's easy to see why people turn to crack/meth/insert street drug of choice here as opposed to giving in to his absurd demands. Our encounters go something like this:

Me: yo man, I'm jonesing... I need my fix. I just need a tiny dose of endorphins to get me through the next couple of hours!
Anterior Pituitary: you know I can't just go givin' handouts, dawg (he talks like a dealer, too). You gonna have to earn it (because drug dealers have notoriously bad grammar).
Me: anything you want, man, I'll do it!
AP: I need you to go do a killer workout- none of this sissy stuff. You ain't gettin' the goods til you're sweating and about to collapse with a racing heart after at least an hour of cardio. Get yo desperate ass to that point, come see me, and we'll talk. (What a jerk, he just called me desperate!)

That anterior pituitary is the bane of my existence! He's such a self-righous jerk! I want to give him a piece of my mind (even though that's exactly what he is...)! Maybe I'll just give meth a chance instead. I've always wanted to partake in a drug deal in the parking garage of a seedy motel (if it's one that even has a parking garage). Okay, maybe not...

I WISH it were this easy....