Roughing It, OR: I'm Trying, Subway, I'm Trying

"Goody gumdrops, I was up all night fantasizing about fucking fiber. You know that feeling when you get a belly full of fiber and you can skip round the room taunting everybody who didn’t get theirs? Remember all those times in your life when you stopped strangers in the street and screamed at them, I NEED SOME FIBER!"

-- Dylan Moran

 

 

Lies, and corruption -- sums it up nicely, I feel.

All these health nuts (I always think of someone in workout clothes painfully trying to masticate whole walnuts when I hear that phrase) who warble on about the marvels of kelp or a new 45-ingredient salad they've discovered, I go to my happy place. There's mountains of mashed potatoes there, erupting melty butter that flows into lakes of real gravy, amid rough breaded foothills of fried chicken. It is glorious. I frolic there until the unwanted nut has begun to witter about something else, essential oils* or yoga or whatever else they talk about.

 

I lost my weight by not exercising, and eating empty/low-calorie foodstuffs -- no, not actual foods, just foodstuffs -- like Kraft cheese singles. I hate vegetables. If I try to force them down it is quite literally, factually, nauseating. I had to throw away a perfectly good dose of Caesar dressing and fancy Gorgonzola crumbles last week because they were on a salad I could not bring myself to take more than two bites of. Just "making" myself eat them is not working; so now a mystical journey to the heart of all things, like how to make me enjoy roughage. Just a little bit. Because SUBWAY COMMANDS YOU.

 

 

 

So far my greatest ally has been my passionate, unending love of cheese. I know, the great blocker of all that roughage is supposed help hustle through your digestive tract. They are karmic opposites in this, but it is through balance that one achieves enlightenment. At least that's what I think as I load up my wrap with cheddar cheese and a begrudging fistful of Baby Greens Spring Mix. What? At least I'm eating some of the damn stuff.

It's mine, my own; I made it. Hiss. [Gollum copyright]

 

Lunchtime Solution #1 is the Roughage Wrap -- lunchmeat, salad dressing, (as little) cheese (as possible) and greenery in a tortilla. Bonus points for the more virtuous diet wheat wraps. They don't taste bad, per se; it's just that the way they tear under your teeth leaves you fighting the instinctual reaction not to swallow, because that it is not a food texture.

 

 

Lunchtime Solution #2 is the Sans-Meat Sammich -- because cheese is even more important than meat in my sandwich. It's got garlic aioli and garlic Monterey cheese on a Kaiser bun with the usual essential greenery. The key to this one is very expensive high-quality cheese. It is muy delicioso, but the after-lunch breath will kill at forty paces if you don't keep mouthwash at your desk. Not, however, always a bad thing. Plus, it tastes as fancy as all get-out, and not like you're being punished at all. HUGE step towards that whole Enlightenment and Oneness with the Green Stuff thing.

 

They're all pretty good calorically, too, around the equal-to/less-than 400 baseline that I shoot for in my small meal of the day.
 

LoseIt pretty much tells me how much shame/pride to feel on a given day, and these midday greenery mini-meals have really helped the ratio tip in my favor. All you healthy blog ladies are probably all over this stuff anyway, so here ya go. The blind leading the sighted -- nonsensical, yes, but it should be hilarious.

 

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*Fun Hypocrisy Fact: I use essential oils all the time, instead of perfume, because the smell lasts longer. But not because they're helping my memory or curing my Doodler's Early-Onset Arthritis.



Loop-Free Is The Way To Be

In my work for Big Oil, I bestride the technical-administrative line that delineates creatures like geologists and engineers from the army of receptionists, administrative assistants and so on. I'm like an office chimera of compositeness (not a word); not versed in the arcane secrets of the earth, but my position is classified as a technician...not considered part of the administrative staff, and yet that is exactly who I have to report to. I like to think of it as being equally wrong-footed in both sectors. I report to a small permed, tanned, bleached, highlighted AND lowlighted poodle-creature that barks ferociously and leaves me hovering on the brink of a full-on panic attack; I constantly worry that if I panic-faint I may crush her, and be jailed for manslaughter.

Fortunately, there is a small bevy of bosomy admin ladies who interact with her way more than I have to, and occasionally bring me news in my far library wing; tales of great cattiness and double-talk that I can only feebly grimace at. They think it's an awkward smile, as well they might; but it is even less than that, my friends, for in reality it is my helpless  fear-rictus. These are precisely the kind of girls that made grades 1-12 an endless waking nightmare for me, whose laughter is a scourge upon the soul and whose thresholds for interpersonal conflict seem unlimited.

What's great is I'm terrified and therefore somewhat (understandably) emotionally distant towards them, and that's turned me into some sort of benign confessor they all come to in order to secretly bitch about their so-called office friends: Mindy doesn't like Stacie because she's a total power-hungry bitch, and Jennifer is on Mindy's side but is closer in age to Stacie, so Mindy thinks Jennifer is probably talking behind her back to Stacie, even though she still totally hangs out with Jennifer like all the time to go on little unauthorized breaks to the Nordstrom's around the corner...etc, etc, etc. 

Now, at this point I'm totally stroking out on the inside from the sheer level of conflict-avoidance panic my brain is pumping through my body, but still I courageously manage some pathetic little "Well at least it's Hump Day*, ha ha ha" office nothingism. It checks them immediately, and the look of bizarre recognition crosses each of their wodgy little faces respectively as they recover from their gossip-gasm to recall that No, I'm not cool and bitchy, that I am in fact the weird girl that none of them has ever invited to lunch. And then they hustle straight outta my library and back into the fray.

I've never been good at that cool, flippant, callous sort of vindictiveness that seems to be so very part of female popularity. I'm definitely capable of isolated incidents of vindictiveness, you betcha; and I mean them, too, from the bottom of my temporarily belligerent heart. But that sustained cruelty for the sake of honing it to an even finer edge that popular girls seem to live for, I just don't have the heart for it. Even if I could dish it out, I certainly couldn't take it. This gave me a lonely and awkward adolescence, but now as an adult I wear it like a shield; I am awkward, you don't want to chat with me! Don't involve me in your shit! Hear me inaudibly roar!

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* HATE THIS PHRASE. So much.

Calloo Callay, I Made A Purse Yesterday

Creativity went a bit more of a tactile route last weekend, and instead of a thought-provoking or entertaining blog post, a cute purse was born...as were many needle pokes, a few tears, and many swear words. In fact, that would be my advertisement if I ever went all craft-fair-y (if honesty were ever the best policy in business, that is): A Swear Word In Every Stitch! Lovingly hand-crafted personal receptacles with matching expletives. But don't let that fool you; I am sooo happy with how the little thing turned out. It's mah bebbeh.

Almost laughable, now, looking back on it

It started out really simple; I tell ya, denial is the most important step in beginning a project like this. I came up with a basic design and executed it -- and that was about the first eighth of the actual journey. I ended up buying a stiff material to put in to help it keep its squared shape, and these crazy wooden handles to help distribute the lifting force off a single point on either side of the bag. I did my first-ever inner liner to hide the stiff material, which ended up being awesome as far as improving the professionality of the bag's appearance; I even got to put in 2 inside patch pockets whose stitches didn't have to mar the exterior of the bag, sewn onto the liner layer before it was stitched into the rest of the bag! Plus, all the unfinished edges were hidden, and it added tensile strength to the handle-attachment points. So much better than my last effort.

The Anchorage Costco's fabulous transvestite greeter complimented my bag, asked me where I got it; it was the highlight of my weekend, proudly saying that I'd made it. Hir reaction made my day, and I was still suffering from spontaneous puppy-wiggles of delight an hour after hir booming praise. Totally worth all the needle-pokes.

Game Of Seasons

I have strong feels on this one, guys. Alaska is NOT cooperating.

Lord Stark strikes me as the kind of guy that's got little bandy chicken legs under all those robes, what do you guys say?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I don't know why Blogger's choosing to April-Fools me by posting next week's post now...Roll with it, I guess, and check out the post below; the actual April 1st post.

Conspiracy: Feline Monitoring System

I'm pretty convinced that cats are actually kibble-munching, fuzzy-faced spy drones, gathering data on humans foolish enough to pay to take one (or two, or three) into their homes.

At first I thought they were a kind of good/evil thresher device...it was the only way I could account for how a thing of such ineffable fluffy cuteness could generate such pure evil hatred as has been seen in her litter tray. It takes in resources, keeps all the adorable for itself, then sieves out the wretched remainder to deposit in the box. Makes sense, right? But I have recently been forced to reconsider my hypothesis.

It's the way she watches me through the clear part of the shower curtain, sitting nervously on the toilet seat lid -- she obviously doesn't want to be there, but bigods, it's her mission. She must see it through. She's probably programmed to self-destruct if she should fail.

She looks a little concerned for me, I think



And the way she always seems to materialize in my immediate vicinity whenever I have to do something dignity-compromising, like the pantyhose-hoisting dance. She just precipitates out of the ether to stare unblinking at my lady-gyrations, enormous yellow eyes giving me the absolute focus she cannot seem to muster when I'm doing something like, y'know, calling for her. Those perfectly round yellow lenses must be recording it all, sending transmissions out of that flat little kitty skull to the mothership.

Crazy, you say? But I know it's true. I can feel it; locked in a staring contest with this unblinking feline monitoring system, frozen in a deep knee-bend with elbows akimbo, rib-deep in infinitely expandable hosiery. She's recording the whole damn thing, I'm sure of it.



This is her judgy face; point-blank scrutiny from right inside my Bubble