I know that this is the time in our relationship for a grand gesture of apology. We’ve known each other for three years now? And I’m still gunning up for the beginning of every good story, over a cup of coffee with you? That hasn’t changed, has it? C’mon, baby, you know I still make you happy.
Oh, you’re upset about the week of silence, huh? So, I guess, this was a crummy week to show you how much I’m still here, how much I still love you, huh. Well, three blog years, that’s like a midlife crisis in internet-years, huh? Great, baby. Then let me buy you a ‘vette, maybe some decadently smelly flowers, maybe adorn your aging neck with a cascade of diamonds? The house is in hock, we can afford it, darling. Nothing but the best for my babies.
It won’t help, though, our strained relationship to be blindingly honest with you, because honesty is dirty and ugly and it’s not cascading in diamonds. But here’s the thing – today’s another anniversary, darling. With someone else.
Today is one year since I met Stuart and my life changed forever. And as much as I love you, baby, as much as I’ve known you longer, as much as YOU’VE changed my life, well, a girl’s got to celebrate true love first, right?
Don’t hit me. It’s ugly, baby. I still love you!
Well, sorry about the diamonds and the infidelity but happy anniversary, baby. My new guy, though, he’s taking me to dinner tonight to celebrate OURS. What have you done for me lately, baby? Huh?
OUCH.
I want, in no particular order or urgency:
A dog, two nighttables, a day at the spa, longer hair, a working knowledge of italian, a weekend in upstate New York this summer, a ride on horseback, ticket back to England for August and December, a glass of Malbec, a nap surrounded by pillows, a ride in a helicopter, to learn how to sew from my mother, a Hasselblad to shoot portraits of my friends, a Nigella apron, a weekend at the shore with family, a working fireplace, an easter egg hunt, green grass between my toes, a hug from my husband, a sunny porch stoop to sit on, a new band to love, to be able to give the things my friends need the most right now (cooking school for biscuit and a perfect new job for kate and a couch for jen and peace of mind for shiv and no more biopsies ever for heather), to spend more time with my family (a trip to vienna with my mom and a road trip in a winnebago with my dad, a house on the beach in Brazil with my brother), a bagel with lots of cream cheese, a sweater with sailor buttons on the neck, a second pair of frye boots, a coffee for the old guy selling the daily news outside my subway, 10 good new books, a houseplant that stays alive and flourishes…
… that might be it. For now.
it’s only been 20 minutes since i sucked down 2 tablespoons and suddenly every word in my head sort of sounds like “neeeeeee wagagagaga smooooble screeeeeee BOP” and i’m pretty sure it i stare out the window long enough i’ll have some out-of-body experience where i’m flying around the empire state building with my bedsheets as wings oooooh here i go wheeeeeee
oh i just touched my cheek with my fingers and that sort of brought me back to reality so i’m no longer doing swoops around the fog but i’m sitting here at my desk and my legs are oh so tired and my elbows are overweight have you ever gotten that feeling like your elbows weigh too much to lift off your desk? which is lucky for you since typing doesn’t require moving these hundred-pound fatty joints anywhere but what’s funny is i have to wiggle my toes to feel my legs
and swallowing feels a little funny like i can see the cartoon-like motion of my adams apple do girls have adams apples well its like i can feel it sliding up and down and ugh its weird
so the best thing is that i can breathe through both nostrils again but the whole neeeeeee murgle blooofle zang PIP thing has got to stop because now my boss is heading this way and i think he’s gonna want to know why i’m color coding my rubber bands and making small villages out of the carpet lint and all i’ll be able to say to him is
spuckle flarrrrr jubby jubby trooooooooooooo VAP.
Sitting on the kitchen floor, a towel around our two heads, leaning over a metal bowl full of boiling water and a teaspoon of vick’s vaporub… and still wanting to kiss each other afterwards:
IF THAT’S NOT LOVE, INTERNET, I DON’T KNOW WHAT IS.
I am home today with a headcold and a serious case of the sniffles. INTERNET, BE FUNNIER.
Because the kate did it:
I think bears have the right idea.
You had a bad day at the office, a bad day that lasted until seven PM. You’re usually in a pleasantly hazy state of denial about how lowly your rung on the ladder is, how fleeting is the respect you recieve for the myriad of cluttered tasks on your plate. The pleasant haze was, let’s say, lifted today. Today, you felt a little demeaned, a little unimportant, a little like your job starts where everyone else’s ends. Everyone has days like this, you think, and today was yours.
You stop at your local Hectic Supermarket to pick up the last few ingredients for dinner. It’s hectic because you live in a charmingly ethnic neighborhood where two hundred year old grandmamas still shop for their bratty adult sons and move at a glacial pace down crowded fire-hazard shopping aisles. (Your husband, for some reason, loves the chaos and madness of this place. You think this is possibly the huge dividing line between your personality and his.)
When three different “employees” direct you to three different aisles for water chestnuts, you have a moment where you have to stand very very still because it’s eight PM and you’re hungry and tired and feel so fragile that if the wind from a passing trolley were forceful enough, you might actually break. But you don’t – you find the water chestnuts and you stand in the line with your eyes closed imagining beaches you’ve been on, and you finally stumble out of the supermarket and put Blur’s “Coffee and TV” on the iPod because you think, in this moment, that the song really understands you.
It’s when you get home that you almost burst into tears because your husband has, sensing the fragility in your voice, tidied the ENTIRE front of the apartment and vaccuumed everything you’ve both been procrastinating and when your living room isn’t cluttered with coats and bags and magazines and junk mail and netflix envelopes, you realize how absolutely perfect it is, with the muted pinks and greens and browns and the vase of proud upright pink tulips and the pear-scented candles. So you almost cry because for the first time in a day of feeling like a peon, you feel like a princess.
So you unpack the groceries…
Tomorrow marks the end of our first week of the Great Weight Experiment (hereafter referred to only as the GWE). I have the following observations:
1. I haven’t had a coca-cola in over a week. Because, you know, Saturday night’s little episode (see also: nachos) NEVER HAPPENED.
2. I’ve been drinking my requisite six million glasses of water a day. This means I have to go to the bathroom roughly two hundred and thirty seven times every hour. THIS IS VERY BORING.
3. My mouth actually waters at the thought of a Gardenburger and corn on the cob. You know, if by “waters” you mean, “Wow, that’s a 2 point dinner! That means I can drink, like, SIX GLASSES OF WINE that night.” That kind of watering. The water that turns into, you know, WINE.
4. My idea of a perfect weekend breakfast is french bread, half a hunk of gouda, whipped butter, and coffee with half-and-half and an amount of sugar roughly equivalent to the WEIGHT OF BRUNEI. THAT, my friends, is a breakfast I’ll never see again. At least, not officially. Only on DIRTY weekends.
(4a. Did I mention that on the books, Saturday night never happened? And by “books”, I mean, the official record of how good I’ve been this week? Because, um, Saturday would sort of take the word “good” out of that sentence.)
5. I think, at the end of the GWE, I’m going to have to write a treatise on the unfairness of their favouritism towards pre-prepared meals and god-knows-what “snack bars”. My personal favourite afternoon lunch? Yogurt and an apple = 3 points. Their “chocolate peanut crunch” bar = 2 points. The delicious chicken-mushroom stir-fry wrapped in cold crunchy lettuce leaves I have planned for dinner? 8 points per serving. Their microwavable “lasagna”? 6.
Seriously, people. I am already fed up, after only one week, of totalling low-fat, low-carb dinner meals and finding out it’s “healthier” to eat something out of the microwave. I’m going to keep eating my home-cooked healthy meals, thank you very much. Trying to sucker me into buying pre-fab food? To which I say BOLLOCKS with every ounce of my acquired passport to british cursing.
6. There’s a certain amount of foot-stomping, tantrum-throwing childishness accompanied with dieting, the same I experience with quitting smoking. Why, I ask myself every day, do I have to face up to these facts, be pro-active about change, while everyone else around me gets to STUFF THEIR FACE WITH CHOCOLATE, SMOKE A PACK OF CAMELS, AND STILL WEAR A SIZE SIX AND HAVE GLOWING SKIN BESIDES? See? Childish.
7. And finally, I know this is about health. I know it’s about learning to eat right so that I don’t slide towards my family’s propensity towards obesity followed by onset Diabetes. BUT LET ME GET A WHAT-WHAT FOR IT ALSO BEING ABOUT FITTING BACK INTO MY FAVOURITE LUCKY JEANS, people. Cut a girl some FUCKING SLACK.
Jason: hey, so what are you doing this weekend?
Krissa (two hours later): LAR!
Jason: there you are!
Krissa: i know!
Krissa: i’ve been knee-deep in shanghainese concubines.
Jason: I hate it when that happens!
Krissa: i KNOW.
Krissa: Movin’ along, minding your biz, and then BLAMMO. wading through hookers from the Far East.
Jason: …I was about to ask ‘where did they COME from’, but of, course, Shanghai.
Jason: Also, the idea of WADING through hookers is hillarious. Like they store them in vats.
Jason: Some plumber hip-deep in concubines, wiping them off of his brow as he tries to unplug the drain.
Jason: It was really hard to write that sentence without it being COMPLETELY obscene.
pause
Krissa: I am SO blogging this shit.
