Catholic+Withdrawl= LENT

I am doing something that only the insane and the Lenten Catholics do: giving up soft drinks.

Here’s how the genesis of this idea came about. One of my coworkers (a stunningly gorgeous miniature version of a Greek goddess) has been “getting healthy.” I believe I have mentioned this bitty-Barbie in the past. This is the same uber-healthy blond who has me eating lots of vegetables—but I digress. This gorgeous bombshell has been making all of these healthy changes in her life and, yes, she is glowing.

(I doubled checked, no pregnancy is involved. This is a shame because if pregnancy was responsible for her dynamic change I would want no part of that animal and simply continue doing what I am doing, which is lolling about in general unhealthiness, a place in which I am familiar. Instead, I am left with a decision to either lumber along in her glowing direction or hang back here in dull skin-ville. I can’t allow my skin to grow more lackluster, so you know which choice I have to make.)

Thus, I have given up soft drinks in lieu of water and begun my own healthy regime.

Again.

True, I tried this back in the fall and fell back into my strict Dove Chocolate and McDonald’s diet fairly quickly. This time, however, I have made my intentions public. Now I have lots of people asking me about my progress, which should help keep me motivated.

Of course, “should” was the operative word in the last sentence. I’ll likely need something more concrete to keep me motivated. Shoes, maybe? Clothing? A massage? Hmmm…my wonderful, kind, gorgeous, generous husband gave me a gift card for a hot stone massage for Christmas. While my first thought was that hot stones ostensibly indicate some sort of medieval branding ritual Queen Mary used on her non-Catholic countrymen in the late 1500’s, my friends assure me that a hot stone massage is a very pleasant experience. This may be just the time to try this out....

Having a Bad Day?

There's a list of stunningly bad similes floating around our English Department. One of them descibes a man falling from a building and "hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup." Now there's a bit of imagery for you.

This simile is the first thing I thought of when a friend of mine emailed me an amazing story about a repairman who fell sixty feet from a cell tower. The doctors and nurses thought they'd never be able to "put the peas back in the pea soup," if I may. Yet, after many surgeries, steel rods in his back, and months and months of intensive therapy, he pulled through. When asked about his amazing recovery, he responded, "I knew I could choose to live or choose to die. I chose to live. I approach every day that way: I can choose to have a good day or choose to have a bad day. I find it's always best to opt for the positive."

You have to admit, though, no one would fault the guy if he was a little less than cheerful after a fall like that. (I get weepy just thinking about chipping my pedicure or passing gas in public. If I did both at the same time, I'd likely be hospitalized and on oxygen.)

Yet, cheerful he was! When he was rushed into the ER, doctors and nurses were huddled around him. One asked whether he was allergic to anything. His raspy response?? "Gravity."

Okay, if Hefty Humpty can crack jokes in the midst of crisis, you'd think it would be a no-brainer for us ALL to see the positive in our lives and choose to have a good day, right? After all, when we choose to have a bad day or to look at things in a negative light, it is really only ourselves who suffer. Right? Right?

All of this brings me to the subject of seasonal blues. About this time every year, I get all fidgetty and grumpy and tend to see more negative and less positive. There's something of a let down immediately following January 1st and the months of Chicago's cold darkness that follows. The snow and cold --which were magical during the holidays-- now just seem like dirty slush through which we must wade. Warm sunshine? It's a distant memory. And don't even get me started on the January and February credit card bills. Oy.

You know these feelings?

Then, you know how you tell yourself how you should count your blessings, things could be worse, you're lucky you aren't a nose-diving Hefty bag full of minestrone, blah, blah, blah?

Still, seeing the positive is easier said than done. It may help to hear about an ACTUAL BAD DAY. It's always better to have some sort of specific contrast, right? Thus, I offer for you a DAY YOU ARE GLAD IS NOT YOURS. This may help you to see how lucky you are...even when the temperature is hovering in the teens and you haven't seen sunlight in weeks.

Actual Bad Day: (You might want to grab a tissue...and your favorite hair product.) A foreign exchange student visiting our school from Spain (picture Fez from That 70's Show) was in America for exactly one day. He took a morning shower in his host family's bathroom, probably excited to meet students from a new country. He grabs the shampoo and lathers up. Virtually everything in America is written in English and Spanish. Everything except Nair. The poor kid depilatoried his head. He said he thought the "shampoo" smelled unusual, but he just chalked it up to a new American scent. His hair melted to his scalp. Want to know how to fix a head of long, thick, black hair Naired into a frizzled pouf? You can't. You have to shave it all off. The poor kid wanted to fly back home to Spain but, after thinking about parading his sudden baldness in front of strangers in a foreign land or in front of his friends back home, he opted to spend the next six weeks wearing a ski hat amongst strangers and completing his foreign exchange.

I know, I know...I am petting my hair and crying, too.... But doesn't your day seem better??

Even Sigourney Got Bit...

...by the alien. You know how alligators lock their jaws on their prey, rolling their struggling victims along the water's bottom until dinner gives up and ceases to fight? Well, if the flu was an alligator, I was the prey caught in its death roll.

Luckily, I smoked it with my increased fluids, hours of bed rest, and antibacterial cleansers.

Suck it, flu.

The Flu-Fighters

Like Sigourney Weaver wielding her make-shift flamethrower against a malevolent extraterrestrial creature in the 1979 sci-fi film Alien, I have armed myself with bleach water and sponges against the evil stomach flu that has attacked my family. I’ve also smeared black eye liner under my eyes and tied a ripped bandana around my forehead Rambo- style, so the virus knows I mean business. Every time bodily fluids are expelled (at force) over sheets, the bathroom floor, or the toilet, I grimace and mutter, “Eat this, you bastard,” while destroying the microscopic alien flu virus with my lethal bleach concoction. I am only minutes away from going completely McGyver and turning the Lysol canister into a flame thrower. (Actually, I saw on Mythbusters that using aerosol cans as flame throwing devices usually results in explosions, so children? Do not try that at home.)

The Super Bowl party we had planned for Sunday has been officially cancelled. Our guests need to save themselves. Meanwhile, I? Am going in. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find me, then maybe I can help you…I am A-Mom.

(Bonus points for anyone else who can combine 80’s trivia with fighting the flu.)

Actually, I've also glued on a fake mustache, started sporting hawaiian print shirts, and driving a red Ferrari 308 GTS so I can go incognito in my quest to save the world from flu. Below is a home video. The fake chest hair? Itchier than one would have thought. (And you thought I would be Higgins, didn't you?)

Clearly, People Were Not Listening...

...to a post I wrote last week.

Russian Obama Stacking Dolls?

Try to keep your eyes from rolling straight back into your brain.

However, these dolls in no way compare to these "extraordinary gifts for your home." Kuj found these and, I'm fairly certain, is STILL howling with laughter.

Insert the Jimmy Choo's

You know that feeling you get when you start an anecdote you THINK a group of people will appreciate, but part way through your tale you realize that they are looking at you quizzically, clearly unimpressed with your story, and maybe a little put off? But you are already part way through the story and it feels awkward to simply stop, so you continue speaking, even though you desperately don’t want to? So, faced with indecision, you continue telling your crappy anecdote, only you speed up the pace because you want the torture to end? And you become even more animated because—well, damn!—they’ve just got to see the humor in the story at some point? And then, against all rational thought, you begin adding exaggerated facial gestures and hand gesticulations in a final desperate attempt to win your audience over to your side?

You know that feeling?

That’s the feeling I had when I tried to explain to my Creative Writing class why I had a deep fear of poetry for a number of years after high school.

And now? I have a deep fear of public speaking.

From now on, I will only communicate with people through grunts and clicks.

(Oh well. It could be worse. I could have done this while wearing my thong inside out with the leg hole around my waist…Cheryl.)

Spring Cleaning

There is an OBAMA LAVA LAMP??

People, I am just as excited to see a change in administration as the next person, but this flood of kitsch Obama-related knickknacks has. got. to. stop. The multitude of Obama memorabilia has reminded me yet again why baseball cards are single-handedly responsible for the clutter in people homes.

(Side note: Why isn’t anyone/anything ever double-handedly responsible? The phrase “single-handedly responsible” seems to place a great deal of unnecessary blame on people missing a limb. You know what that is? Prejudice. And I will have no part in that. From here on out, responsibility knows no number of limbs in my vocabulary! Hazzah!)

I have seen enough Clean House episodes to know that people often hang on to things they don’t need because they believe that these items will be of value some day. You know why this is, right? Because someone once decided that he would pay an astronomical amount of money for an original Babe Ruth baseball card, even though a brand new exact replica of that Babe Ruth baseball card could be created for a handful of pennies. (Which is in no way similar to paying top dollar for a pair of Jimmy Choo’s, so don’t even go there…Sue…Denise….) And so a culture of clutter was born.

The truth is that 99.9% of the junk we keep in our closets, basements, and attics is just that: junk. It is the detritus of our lives and the lives of our family members who think they are doing us a favor by donating to us the things they are afraid to throw away themselves. My guess is that people purchasing the Obama Lava Lamp must think that these floating wax blobs hovering mere inches over a light bulb with a plastic presidential seal of our new president plastered to the base will eventually be worth something some day.

It won’t.

(And if it is, then my vintage Jimmy Choo’s better wipe the floor with your presidential lava lamp.)

This means twenty years from now two people will stand over a box of soon-to-be refuse in their basement trying to decide whether they should keep or toss the dusty Obama-fire-hazard-in-waiting-lamp. And you know what they will probably decide to do? They will probably decide to give it to their kids because they won’t want to throw away a perfectly good lava lamp. And these people will probably be my in-laws.

Crap.