Hungry and angry.

Please don’t tell me to smile or engage me in idle chatter if I look like I’m in the grip of the hangries. I will understand that you are keeping me from food, and you will be destroyed. Nothing personal. You’re better off silently handing me a banana.

The hangries run in families, and my younger brother David gets them worse than any of us. He’d fly into bona fide rages over the tone of someone’s voice as they said “Hi.” My mom’s response was usually, “Have a cookie.” In our household, this was never considered condescending, but the height of sympathetic understanding, and could only be performed by someone not in the hangries.

Because often when you’re hangry, you don’t know that you’re hangry. Maybe you’ve had your coffee, maybe a bit too much coffee, but skipped breakfast, and you go to do some errands, and traffic sucks, and GODDAMN all those people at Costco banging into you with their carts, and not saying sorry, and then traffic sucks again, and you keep making the wrong turns and having to drive for blocks out of your way because of all the fucking one-way streets not going your way, and then you have to look for parking for 20 minutes, and the bag breaks as you’re trying to carry the groceries up the stairs and you get inside FINALLY and your boyfriend hasn’t done the dishes he said he would do two nights ago and you just start crying, but he’s such a good boyfriend (and is not currently hangry himself) so he goes, “Want a cookie?” And then as the blessed, blessed sugar dissolves on your tongue, you see your day for what it was – a day lost to the weird other-reality of the hangries.

This is the kind of Philip K. Dick species of hangry, where you don’t suspect that the reality you’re experiencing is all biology and hormones and can be altered by absorption of a mere few calories; and then there’s the self-aware hangry, where you know the world is preventing you from fulfilling your imperative snack treat needs. I’m a bit of a hummingbird, and need to eat my weight in cheesecake or Thai food every three hours. It’s especially tough when I travel away from the large coastal cities, into towns where the food is barely edible, and convenience stores stock nothing that isn’t alcoholic or full of hydrogenated poison (note: beer is a decent, but definitely temporary cure for the hangries).

Being hangry is for suck. Carry provisions!