That title is meant to imply three separate things:
1. The fact that I’ve never been this mental at work and hope I actually leave here before midnight because
2. tonight is the Second Annual Debauched Debutante’s Ball and I’m nothing if not a debauched debutante, so
3. Stuart actually just went into Victoria’s Secret to buy nude back-seamed fishnets for me because I haven’t gotten out of work in enough time to go to a store in oh, a week, see #1.
More stories and pictures from the other side of debauchery.
Archives for the month of: May, 2005
This is me, telling you that I’ll see you on the other side of this horrific deadline, by which I mean, next week. To prove that my absence from you is merited, let me share a small tidbit of my day:
I’m so busy at work that I am sending myself timed emails reminding myself of stuff I need to finish by the end of the day. I just got one, about five minutes ago, in which I’d told myself, “you’re probably slacking. Stop it. You need to finish that layout by five. GO.”
I am, apparently, quite the bitchy task-master.
We are being mercilessly hurtled on a train bound for London and another airport parting, arms and legs entertwined and heavy with sadness, when a reckless epiphany hits me. We don’t have to do the right thing. Not when the Right Thing involves the painful cut of separation.
“Let’s run away,” I whisper and as soon as the words are out, it’s like a personal game of chicken to see how long I can keep my head under water with this unlikely feat of derring-do.
“Where?” He says, lazily tracing his finger along my upper arm. We’ve played this game before and he knows the routine. We talk about the fantasy of never having to be separated again. We imagine the moments when we’ll wake up next to each other every day, stubbly cheek to rumpled hair, molasses-slow voices mumbling about who gets the coffee machine going this time. But those conversations are usually late at night, curled under our duvets, three thousand miles apart. This time, it’s different. This time, there’s a glimmer of light shining, the shimmer of a silver train waiting.
“France.”
Suddenly he seems more alert and I know he understands me. Because we’re pulling into Waterloo Station in ten minutes. Waterloo station, with its soaring open-air departure tunnels that shoot trains into blinding sunlight. Waterloo, where everyone is rushing somewhere else, distractedly smoking a cigarette or pulling along a gaggle of unruly children. Waterloo, where no one will peer at our tickets and say, “Don’t you two have lives and families and jobs to be getting back to?” Waterloo, where trains leave every hour for France.
I was trying to explain how eating an entire tin of cheezballs means I couldn’t possibly be a complete snob, so I said “Hoi polloi eat cheezballs!” and I even used it correctly (without the redundant “the”) and in that moment, I realized, “shit, I used the words hoi polloi when trying to defend my unsnobbery, I AM SUCH A SNOB.”
It was a sobering moment.
I have a very mixed reaction when people have asked how “the diet” is going. Mainly because I’ve tried really hard to keep it out of my day-to-day interactions with people, I feel like I’ve somehow failed to do so when they ask how it’s going. I have a coworker who is thinner than I am, and when she found out that I was on a diet, she’s discussed it with me several times. It makes me feel strange for her to tell me how much she weighs (less than I do) and then complain about how much weight she has to lose.
It also makes me a little crazy when anyone takes any assumptive steps about offering me food. “Oh, I have these chocolates,” a coworker will say, “but you can’t have them, right?” I’m telling you guys, I will TAKE those chocolates and SABOTAGE my own progress just so that no one else is telling me what to do. My parents have lovingly – when we’re home – asked several times if what I’m eating is within my points value and, as irrational as it is, it makes me want to eat the entire table of food just to prove that I’m the one in control of this crazed little ship.
I’ve fallen, though, off a certain wagon of vigilance. The first very serious month, I was losing weight steadily but falling apart every few days because I was so sick of getting to six PM and realizing I could only have a leaf of lettuce and a powerbar for dinner if I wanted to stay strictly within my very small points allowance (which is very small due to my comparative smallness). I exaggerate about the lettuce, those of you reading this to monitor if I’m developing an eating disorder, but it was very frustrating to realize that while Stuart needed to eat another fifteen points to round out his day, I only had six.
In the past two weeks, I’ve been less than vigilant, and I’ve not really been losing weight. I haven’t been gaining, because it’s amazing how steady you stay when you just don’t eat sugar or fried foods, but I haven’t been losing. And as the end of our ten week period neared, and I looked with sinking regret at the fact that I haven’t reached my ten percent goal, I couldn’t figure out which path was better. Could I stop going to the meetings at a point where I feel disheartened with making this a daily effort? If I stopped going to the meetings, would I feel like I’d accomplished enough?
Basically, if I didn’t ever get that ten-percent keychain, would I feel like I’d gotten anything out of the meetings for the ten weeks that I went? If going for ten more weeks meant my committment felt more significant – and if I got that goddamned little keychain – would it be easier to stick to this, for life?
I’ve had mixed feelings about the meeting scenario this whole time. When I’m having a good week, and I get on the scales, and it shows that I’ve had a good week, I don’t need the pep talks. I don’t need the clapping or the little gold stars or the support. But my last meeting was a bad week. I’d gained a little and I knew why. I spent half the meeting telling myself to not even care about it, to just keep moving, but when I stopped talking to myself and started listening to everyone else, I finally realized that the meetings are good for the bad weeks. It’s good to be in a room with people that won’t ask you disparaging questions about your process or stare at you blankly when you complain about office lunches and the point value of a margarita. The meetings, I realized, are there for the bad weeks.
So, as much as I said I didn’t want to obsess about my diet for another three months, it looks like that’s the best option. Because I can’t give up on a road I put myself on, and I’m not sure I’ll make it far enough down that road without the weekly pit stops.
But so help me God, I don’t want any more gold stars. I JUST WANT THE KEYCHAIN.
For the record, sitting in my parent’s living room with a diet coke, tinkering with photoshop and cruising blogs at the same time strikes a deep happy chord at the geeky depths of my heart.
I have GOT to get me this new-fangled wireless thing all the kids are doing these days. Well, by kids I mean, my parents. (Because sheesh. Who gets out-geeked by their PARENTS?)
So, thanks to the previously-mentioned loan of the Nikon 5700, I’m happy as a clam, taking photos of this and that, generally enjoying every single minute that I’ve got my finger on the trigger. I’m an incorrigible shutterbug, but it’s been limited to point-and-shoot snapshotting since graduating from the place with twenty-four-hour darkroom access (O, darkroom!) and still not being in posession of a really solidly good digital SLR until this loan from my totally awesome dad.
To celebrate this month of photographic bliss, I’ve come up with a new way to procrastinate at work entertain my readers and make the most of the camera. It all started with the Creepy Drunken Statue you saw in the previous post. He made the words Opa! Opa! get irrevocably stuck in my head, which means I had no alternative but to create a banner with them. (Hopefully, they will put Opa! Opa! in your head too, and I think that your life will be the better for it).
Making that new banner made me remember how much I love changing site design around here, and specifically how much I love making banners with my own photographs. So I took my favourite picture from Greester and made it into a banner. I’ll be doing this every few days, as suits my whimsy, as pictures suggest good banner titles and good banner titles lead to new banners.
Eventually, after this orgy of pictures and pithy sayings, Jason and I will sit down with a twelve pack of beer and completely redesign the layout of pH, but this is my hold-steady until then, and hopefully will be just as amusing and interesting to you as it is to me.
You’ll also notice that there are now category links in the body of my sign-off line (along with the bright red donate! button that you should still consider very important, as the walk is next weekend). I’ve gone ahead and indulged my inner (inner?) organizational freak, creating categories that broadly suit everything we talk about here at pH. I’ve managed to categorize as far back as November 2004, and will continue moving laboriously back through time. Eventually, my new sidebar will contain links to all of these, for ease of movement through the site.
Changes are around every bend. Opa, Opa!
Opa! Opa! is a restaurant on 31st street in Astoria, the kind of dive that my father refers to as “greasy spoons” in some sort of ethnic slur reclamation attempt.
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/petithiboux/"
Click Opa! to see the rest of my Flickr sets and streams.
I spent a few minutes dodging and burning the picture so that the drunk-looking statue that’s supposed to lure you into the restaurant is in full effect. If this doesn’t make you want to live in Astoria so that you can pass this guy every single day, I don’t know what will.
Relatedly, the happy coinciding of my father’s month-long loan of his Nikon 5700 (thanks, buddy!) and my self-gifted flickrPro account (thanks, myself!) means that you’ll be seeing a lot more photographs up here, making it one of those pseudo-artsy photoblogs you know you hate.
Starting…. NOW.
The expression “chip on the shoulder” is something my parents always used to say, as in, “he’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood tree”, and while I grew to understand that it means someone who is bearing a grudge, or is resentful, or has an inferiority complex, I never knew exactly what a chip was, or why it was on their shoulders.
It turns out that it dates back to the nineteenth century when boxers and fighters would go around, with wood chips on their shoulders, challenging someone to knock the chip off, thus starting a fight.
Sounds about right, really.
source: idiomsite.com and phrases.org.uk.
or An Email That I Sent to Kate After She Asked Me Why This Week Feels Like Such a Whorebitch or Stress Reverts Blogger to Her Pre-Capitalization Ways or more commonly, The Most Pathetic Post Ever
“Well,
1. work is bitchy and past deadline and everyone is freaked and stressed out,
and 2. while I adore both Greek Easter (Greester!) and Mother’s Day and love going home to Rhode Island even two weekends in a row because hello my parents rule (hi guys!), it takes away my weekend time in New York and i’m sort of still sad that I can’t be here to celebrate your birthday with you, also because people keep asking me when i’m free to hang out and i have to be like, ooh, i have to pencil you in for may 20th,
and 3. and our new enormous television that we took from my parent’s house is AWESOME but the cable hole is different than my antenna’s hole so i can’t watch any TV and i don’t watch much to begin with but i really missed House last night and I’m going to miss Alias tonight unless we set it to tape on our small TV which we could do but houseguests, etc, rude to be watching TV in their room while they’re THERE,
and 4. and i have a couple nagging errands to run that i seriously cannot fathom when to fit in before friday (go to radioshack and figure out antenna problem without killing or screaming at anyone, go to old dentist and get copies of my dental xrays for new dentist appointment on friday morning which means paying old fucker dentist fifteen bucks and also new fucker dentist another howevermany bucks, get birth control at drug store which is really easy task and yet I always find a way to put it off because I hate me some Duane Reade, find the one kind of bandaid that stays on my heel and for some reason is hard to find at drug stores here in nyc O blister season, how i love thee! and get keys made for karen and pete and return the @*&^@*&$^ tee shirt i bought at express with you which has THREE COUNT THEM THREE tiny holes after being worn ONCE and going in the washing machine ONCE ARGH that is so annoying and also, picking up my goddamned skirt from the goddamned laundromat because i keep forgetting to get it and its been there for two weeks and i have this nagging fear that they SOLD IT TO THE FASHION POLICE and i’m going to get ticketed for wrongful abandonment of good fashion)…
*breathe*…
but 5. the BIGGEST THING I AM REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO IS SEEING YOU TOMORROW AND GOING TO THE BOHEMIAN AND EATING KEILBASA AND DRINKING A PITCHER OF BEER AND THEN TRYING DRESSES ON WITH YOU, so, really, i can’t complain about anything, because that’s a pretty great thing to look forward to, and i love you a lot and so that’s cool, so thanks for letting me complain. you rule. *pumps fist in air*
so that’s that.”
