I don't just write about periods. No, sometimes I write about PMS: How do you ease your premenstrual symptoms?

I am at the point where a good rant is in order. It has been one of those weeks of soreness and cramps and bloated, blerghy blahness. All this ickiness has unfortunately collided with a big bowl of leftover Halloween candy and all of it has be done with all this Pre and just get on to the MS part of this moment.

I'm used to these symptoms. After all, I've been ibuprofen-ing my way through them for two decades. Once in a while, though, there's a month that seems to scream at me rather than just slowly hammer from the inside of my uterus. The screams are making me so crazy this week that I not only feel the need to complain about it (a lot) but make it known to all of the Internet (and frankly, I'm just too crabby to care if all this PMS talk is TMI).

There are certainly some great alternative methods to calming premenstrual symptoms -- everything from incorporating gingko, acupuncture and aromatherapy into your self-care routine (you do have a self-care routine, right?) -- and I am definitely open to trying new, more natural remedies. But I've had the best luck when my girlfriends have intervened with recommendations of teas and yoga sequences and flower essences and great massage therapists. These suggestions have, at certain critical and crampy moments, done me a world of good. Maybe that's because I'm not just reading a book or blog, I am getting advice from women who've been there with hot water bottles and fourteen mini candybars and jeans that won't button.

I imagine there are many of you out there who have your own remedies and ways of soothing the PMS symptoms that feel like slow and salt-obsessed torture.

Help a crabby lady out: So what do you do to ease the pain, cravings, irritability that comes in the period before your period?

I told you I write a lot about this stuff:

[photo credit: Getty Images]