The Poetry of Logical Ideas

I'm on Weight Watchers and it works, people. But you know what doesn't work? Me. The one who is DOING the weight watching. I've thought long and hard about why this is so dang difficult and I came up with a simple answer: MATHEMATICS.

Yup, blame math for my inability to stay away from the M'FING KRISPY KREME STORE with its M'FING "HOT DONUTS NOW!" SIGN.

Up to this point, I've done fairly well keeping to my daily POINTS(TM) allowance. I've cheated here and there, sneaking in a cupcake or three, but I always managed to pull it together enough to tip the scale in a downward direction. Until that one week where I lost my mind and ate everything I could get my meaty hands on. That week I gained 2 pounds and went mental with superstition.

The following week I was back on track (sort of) and I lost the 2 pounds I had gained, plus an additional 0.4 pounds. (Losing weight is like having a baby. You measure in the smallest increments possible. "Look! I lost 0.0025 pounds! My baby is 36 weeks old! That cupcake looks delicious!") I was supremely happy to see that the pesky pounds were going down and I have to admit to feeling generally better than normal, but I still can't get my ass in gear enough to be consistent.

This is where the math part comes in.

"So what's the problem?" you ask. "Why can't you get your ass in gear enough to be consistent?" And the answer is simple: Weight Watchers requires me to ADD and SUBTRACT and sometimes MULTIPLY and that is difficult. So difficult in fact, that the difficulty makes me so tired that I'm not strong enough to resist the lure of the Krispy Kreme.

So you see, the problem is math.

Let's break it down. Lunch consisted of 1) piece of Pepperidge Farm Oatnut bread; 2) a serving of my friend's shrimp salad; 3) one glazed Krispy Kreme donut. (Make no comment about the donut, because I actually ate two. One had chocolate on it.) I do the math: 1) 2 points; + 2) 4 points; + 3) a million points = 1,000,006 points. Now, when looking at that number, I can already start to tell that something is amiss. Visually, the POINTS(TM) system works, ie: 1,000,006 is a really big number and I know that really big numbers are not good. I'm not allowed to have a million points a day, so I make the very accurate statement that I have gone over my daily POINTS(TM) allowance and am thus GOING TO BURN IN FAT-PERSON HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY. The second thing I notice is that the donut was SO not worth the POINTS(TM).

Pretty logical and easy, right? So straightforward and simple. On such a system as this, the pounds must FALL off of my body. My stomach must be washboarding itself even as I type this. My butt is contracting and my chin is reappearing. But no. Oh no no no. Because despite the simplicity and logic of the POINTS(TM) system, you have to factor in one very illogical tour-de-force: ME.

Because I'm now doing some complicated math to determine how I can eat MORE donuts, despite the knowledge that the donut just isn't worth it. If I just lick the icing off of the donut, will the donut have less POINTS(TM)? What if I chew it down into very small pieces? Or liquify it? Or what if I eat the donut while standing up? Will that make it less POINTy(TMy)? And then as I start to carry the one, I get all confused and decide that the 1,000,000 POINTS(TM) attached to the donut is SO WORTH IT if it means that I don't have to keep doing math.

So I eat a second donut.

And then regret it.

Because after all of the very difficult adding, I have learned that I am now 22.5 points IN THE HOLE. Negative points, people. And even I, mathily-challenged girl, know that negative points ain't good. So all of this donut-eating-no-math-doing means that I am GOING TO BURN IN FAT-PERSON HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY where my ass will expand and expand and my thighs will join together into one blobby uni-thigh. It also means that I need to do some serious exercising to burn those points off and bring me back to zero.

I hate math. Math makes me hungry.

The Usual Way: A Little Wine, A Little Dinner...

Be warned my friends, I am about to share too much information. Information of a personal nature. Like about bodily functions and such.

This shouldn't surprise you, my oversharing, seeing as how a recent post used the word "poop" about a gajillion times. Granted, I haven't actually told you ABOUT poop, but it's only a matter of time. In fact, I have a GREAT poop story to relay but Mr. Mystery says I should find an alternative word for "poop" before telling it. So until a suitable stand-in can be found, you shall not hear my poop story.

Instead of poop, this story is about Aunt Flo, aka: That Time of the Month, aka: Riding The Crimson Wave, aka: HELL.

So here's the story about my Aunt Flo: I happen to be a little late this month. As in my auntie ain't visitin' at the moment. As in it is not That Time of the Month for me, I am not Riding the Crimson Wave, and while I AM in Hell, it has nothing to do with my reproductive organs.

That about sums it up. Great story, no?

Now before you all go getting worked up and assume that I done got myself in The Family Way, be assured that I am NOT pregnant. And if I were? Well, let's just say that if I were pregnant you'd see a canary-shaped hole right through this here blog with an accompanying word balloon declaring, "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu*k."

No. The lateness of my little friend is likely due to the insane amount of medication I am on for the Dread Pirate Sickness. Though WebMD has been less than helpful in answering, "Do antibiotics make your period late?" Google has stepped in with a wide variety of ambiguous research and eHow hits. After a quick search through the Internets and a reminder to myself that multiple forms of birth control have been utilized at all times, I determined that I was not pregnant and thus unpacked my bags and settled in for the long-haul.

But that doesn't mean that I didn't have a few hours of wondering.

This morning I sat in traffic on the Beltway and thought to myself, "If I had a kid, how would my life be different?" I figured that if I had a kid - was in possession of said child right that very minute - that I'd be sitting on the Beltway in traffic. Nothing new there. Except that with a kid, my car would be covered in snack-food debris and spilled drinks. Oh wait. That's not new either. Okay, so traffic and car maintenance wouldn't change regardless of whether there was a Little Canary or not.

Work. Would work be different? Work itself would not, but my hours would be interrupted by daycare calls and The Ever-Present Childhood Sick. Though... as things stand now, my hours are all over the place anyway. Appointments with Mrs. Lady Doctor, the Dread Pirate Sickness, the bitterness and resentment that keep me in bed later than I should be, etc. I can accept that birthing a meatloaf would change my career and job, because my priorities and obligations would change. This, in theory, does not bother me because I am currently less-than-pleased with my job, hence the bitterness and resentment.

Traffic and work are aspects of my life, but they are not my entire life. I can readily accept changes to these two things because they exist but are not a part of me. A child, though... A child would be a serious kick to the ass of my life because a child WOULD be a part of me, both emotionally and physically. Money would be tight, dating would be hard, and then there's the sleep to consider. Oh sweet precious sleep, how I would miss thee.

My biggest fear was that being a single mom would cause me to put too much emotional baggage on the wee shoulders of my offspring. I don't want to be the sole reason my child ends up in therapy. I know that I'll be PARTIALLY to blame for my kid's Crazy (I'm certain my brand of Crazy is genetic), but I don't want to be the End All Be All of my kid's WHITE HOT FREAKING INSANITY. If my kid's going to be crazy, I want that crazy to be the result of something simple, like a chemical imbalance, and not ANYTHING THAT HAS TO DO WITH ME. Blame someone else, you little rugrat. For reals. And right now... Well, if I were to reproduce right now, I think I might screw my kid up irreparably.

But despite knowing all the hardships that having an unplanned baby would bring, I didn't so much mind (apart from screwing the kid up and ruining its life, ohmygod). It was more, "I'll deal. I'll figure it out." Because really, isn't that what Life is? A great big puzzle to figure out? We turn the pieces over in our hands, inspect their shape and color, and look for a place to set them down that makes sense. Some people find that place on the first try, but not me. I move and move and move the pieces until sense is made. I am not tactical; I do not plan. Things happen and I react and, at some point, I figure it out.

But this breezy outlook on the matter is likely the result of the fact that I know I'm not pregnant. If there were a real possibility that I could be, well... like I said, canary-shaped hole and fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu*k word balloon. So it's just as well that I'm not; I don't like running and swearing. (I kid. I love to swear.) Also, I'm certain The Cat would NOT approve of bringing a flesh-covered "kitten" into the fold. According to him, there's only enough love and attention for him.

And there you have it. The situation. I am perfectly content with the way that things are (job not included). But I am a little sad nonetheless, as I'm pretty sure that being With Child would have provided me with some EXCELLENT poop stories. Absolutely excellent.

Touch But A Cobweb In Westminster Hall

Hear ye, hear ye! The word of the day is VERMIN.

Mr. Mystery's back yard is a veritable dumping ground for all things unwanted. Because his house backs onto a communal alley and because his yard is open (ie: unfenced) and because it's nigh unto impossible to get your household trash (nevermind bulk trash) picked up in D.C., people like to toss whatever they don't want into his yard. It's easier to pass the buck than to take care of your garbage like an adult. A word to all of Mr. Mystery's neighbors: dump anything else in the man's yard and I will go postal on your ass. OhyesIwill. So with all of the clandestine dumping, it came as no surprise when Mr. Mystery received a warning about the bulk trash in his back yard.

Always happy to throw things away and even happier to go my favorite place, I was giddy - GIDDY! - about the prospect of cleaning out the backyard. Friday night found me happily humming while my boyfriend hauled crap-that-did-not-belong-to-him from his backyard out to the trunk of my car. The methodical opening and closing of the back door, his stomp-stomp-stomp through the house, and then the opening of the front door was broken up at one point by the sound of squeals and shrieks. Mr. Mystery came back in the house and announced matter-of-factly, "The girls next door found a rat in their house. They trapped it in a box."

Oh. I was ALL over that.

"I WANT TO SEE IT!" I yelled, and followed after him.

Turns out that the rat had not just been in their house, but had actually been in one of the girls' boots. To her surprise (and dismay), she got a little something extra when she went to put her shoe on. And now the shoe, along with the rat inside of it, was caught in a box.

Fascinated, Mr. Mystery and I went to work.

We flipped the box over. We opened the top carefully. We looked for the rat. We did not see the rat, but we saw the boot. We guessed the rat was still inside of the boot. I reached in and picked up the boot. I shook. And shook. And shook and shook and shook. Mr. Mystery took over and shook the boot. A tail appeared. And then little paws. And then the entire rat, at which point I jumped up and started shrieking with the rest of the girls, doing a wild two-step on the sidewalk.

The rat took off full-tilt-boogie up the street, running for all its worth.

Suddenly silent, we all stared at the retreating tail of the now-free rat.

"Should we go after it?" asked one of the girls. Hell if I knew. What does one do with a single rat in a city full of vermin? Catch it and hang its head on a tiny stake in the front yard as a warning to all other rats? THOU SHALT NOT COME HERE, RATS, lest we go all Lord of the Flies on your furry butts.

The tediousness of running after a rat didn't measure up to the benefit of catching said rat and the fruitlessness of killing one rat in a gajillion, so we all shivered our individual grossed-out shivers and returned to our homes.

Monday morning I was woken up by a shuffle-shuffle-shuffle-SQUEAK! sound coming from the bedroom wall. Alert and thoroughly ooked out, I tapped Mr. Mystery on the back of the head. "Hello?" he asked sleepily. "Shhhhh!" I whispered hysterically. "LISTEN!"

Shuffle-shuffle-shuffle-SQUEAK!

"There's... something... in the... wall!" I stage-whispered dramatically.

He listened for a moment. Shuffle-shuffle-shuffle-SQUEAK! "Uh huh," Mr. Mystery replied. "There is." And then he rolled over, pulled the blankets up to his chin, and began snoring.

I laid there for a while listening to the vermin partying in the wall, imagining all sorts of frightening things like tiny paws walking across my face while I slept, rat tails draped over the cutlery in the kitchen, and smooshy rodents a-livin' in my shoes. I was horrified.

I'm not really sure what to do. When you live in a city you're at the mercy of the outside world. Without protection, you find people dumping trash in your yard and rats living in your walls. Your space and your possessions are no longer yours alone, but instead become communal property. You share your yard with your neighbors' trash and your boots with the rats. If one person fails to keep a tidy house and allows their residence to become a breeding ground for roaches, you get to entertain roaches, too.

I am trying to come to terms with this, but finding it difficult. I don't know what the solution is, so until I figure it out I'm going to keep dumping the trash and nesting like a maniac. I might also, perhaps, put out some glue traps.

Some great. Big. Glue traps.

Gratitude extended to paulbaines.co.uk for the image. Read his interesting post on Blek Le Rat and stenciled street art.

Daily Photos: November 13, 2009

Oh Diabetik, how I love your marshmallow Peep street art. You make my walks in D.C. such a delight.

A Little Nut Holding Its Ground

I have noticed a trend in my posting lately, most of it having to do with The Crazy and the way I deal (or not deal) with The Crazy. I don't really like this trend as I'm afraid it makes me look like a ginormous whine-o loser who can't handle her poop like a grown-up. But if the shoe fits...

Also, it fills my heart with fear that you fine people will start to get tired of my whining and will tell me, "Shut the bunk up, Canary, you're boring the whites off of our friggin' eyeballs."

But since I think I'm on the verge of a mini nervous breakdown (the kind that requires an entire gallon of Edy's and some Pillsbury cookie dough but not forced institutionalization) and since I need to spill the words out of my body the same way an enema spills the poop out of your chute, I'm saying, "To hell with it," and am now telling you that I am FREAKING OUT LOSING MY SHIT OMG. I'm also telling you a lot about poop, it seems, though I could tell you a WHOLE LOT MORE. Right Mr. Mystery? Right? I could tell them a whole lot about poop. (He knows. I talk about poop a lot.)

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Not the poop part because I really do talk a lot about poop, but rather the part about losing my poop. That part is a wee stretch of the truth. The truth is that while I am LOSING MY SHIT OMG it's not happening all at once. Rather, I feel a small puncture in my inner lining and the shit is oozing out of me in miniscule increments - sort of like diverticulitis - and no one but me, God, a CT scan and a colonoscopy can see it. So if I were to run up to you, waving my arms and shouting, "I AM LOSING MY SHIT OMG!" you would likely look me up and down, see that I haven't lost a limb, and then say, "Oh Canary! How you joke!"

And yet I am not joking. Instead I am yelling, "The shit! It's a-leakin' out!" But the primary response I get to this is, "Canary-girl! But aren't you a funny one!" Mrs. Lady called me "scintillating" today. SCINTILLATING. My, but I love that woman. The only thing? She told me this after I put my head on the arm of her couch and wailed, "But I've got a blister on my heel! ON! MY! HEEEEEEEEL!"

You may be wondering what the heel blister has to do with poop and my LOSING MY MIND and also how can wailing about blisters make one "scintillating." I wondered the same thing.

So here's the whole blister scenario, but be warned because its story is buried underneath a lot of other stuff and my brain isn't functioning well enough to put the story into a logical sequence.

I joined Weight Watchers about seven weeks ago and was doing pretty well. Lost 15 pounds. I kept this mostly to myself because I wanted it to be something I did for me and also? I tend to fail at things like this and I didn't want to see the "yeah, right" look on people's faces when I announced that I wasn't eating that second cupcake because I was trying to loooooooose weeeeeeeeeeeight. So "mum" was my word and I just did my thing. A few close (non-judgmental) friends knew and I leaned on them for support.

But after losing 15 pounds, people start to notice that your ass is smaller and they start to ask you where your ass went and you start to feel pretty good about losing your ass so you tell them about Weight Watchers. And then you go to your meeting and for the first time since starting seven weeks prior YOU GAIN WEIGHT.

And you immediately think that you jinxed yourself by telling people that you were trying to lose weight.

And you get discouraged because your f'ed up brain, the one with The Crazy, starts in on its pre-recorded soundtrack of "Failure, Failure" set to the tune of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler.

So you wallow for a day or two and then try to get some perspective. You reframe your thoughts. You tell yourself, "Self! Stop wallowing and get some perspective! Reframe! REFRAME!" So you go walking during lunchtime to 1) burn calories and 2) get some fresh air and 3) hopefully also get some perspective.

And you get a big-ass blister on your heel.

And then you tell your therapist that you believe the blister to be the physical manifestation of your belief that you ultimately will fail, that all of your efforts will be in vain and will also hurt like mothafucker and that the blister is just trying to help that failure along. Speed it up a little. You tell your therapist that you believe the blister to be sentient, and that it is transmitting little failure messages to your brain. You mention Fiddler. You may even mention to her how Caroline Ingalls almost cut off her leg and you think that perhaps lancing the blister might silence the failure lambs.

And that's when your therapist would lean forward in her chair, fix you with an uncomfortably intense stare, and tell you that you're "scintillating."

And you start to wonder if she was really listening to the story, because the story was far from scintillating. In fact, it was sort of the opposite of scintillating. It was gnitallitnics (which is "scintillating" spelled backwards and also super fun to say.)

The story was, to be blunt, MANIC.

And you realize that perhaps the decrease in your head meds has had a bigger effect on you than you think. But you say, "SCREW THAT!" because you SO WANT TO NOT BE ON MEDS even though you know the meds keep you from ingesting an entire bottle of Tylenol PM and/or a gallon of Edy's and a roll of cookie dough. So you choose instead to be SCINTILLATING instead of MANIC. Because really, can't they really be one and the same? Those crazy people on the bus that mutter to themselves, they're not INSANE, they're just really good conversationalists.

And that, my good people, is what they call REFRAMING.

Wait... what was I talking about? Poop?

Damn it. I lost my train of thought. Oh wells. The end.

Daily Photo: Saturday, November 7, 2009

"Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?!" Friendly faces in the strangest of places.

Chili Update: And The Winner Is...

WOOO! My chili was well-received by my colleagues! Though I did not win a ribbon, I did have the 4th highest number of votes.

That was some tough competition, let me tell you. The winner duped us all by LYING and telling us that his chili contained spicy pork sausage and ground beef. We all ooh'ed and aah'ed over the lively flavor of his chili, wondering aloud what ingredients he used to give it its sweetness and tangy zip. Once the winner was announced and Mr. Chili Liar was bedecked in his ribbon, he revealed the truth: that WASN'T sausage and ground beef in the chili.

It was wild boar and venison.

I pantomimed hurling into the nearest trash bin.

"I knew if I told you that it was venison, you wouldn't try it," he explained.

And he was right. We all feared Mr. Chili Liar, aka: Mr. Hunting Man, would try to slip some deer into our food and he knew it. Had we known that deer was in there, none of us would have eaten it. (I'm not all that bothered by the wild boar, as I consider that to be fancy bacon. With tusks.) So lie he did and win he did because venison and wild boar aside, that was some damn good chili.

And Now You're Telling Me You're All Out?

Today is my office's first-ever chili cook-off. The event is our effort to boost morale and give everyone a chance to show off their culinary skills. With everyone working their asses off like they have been, chili and cornbread are deserved.

My role in this, in addition to being a chili-cooker, was to create the awards and decor. Seeing as how we're chillin' in one of our conference rooms, there isn't much one can do about decor. There are only so many solutions one can provide in a room with flourescent lighting and furnished with a marbled formica conference table. But I did my best, ladies and gents, and in an hour my coworkers and I will sit down to 967,421 gallons of chili, 13 batches of cornbread, 6 tubs of sour cream, 37 bags of Tostitos, and 26 bags of cheddar cheese.

Mr. Mystery has already been informed that we are having chili for dinner tonight.

And for breakfast tomorrow.

And for the rest of our lives.

Some photos for you, my lovelies. I have to admit that I am particularly in love with my first, second, and third place ribbons (crafted with love and an ass-load of hot glue), and hope that I win one so that I get to hang it on my office wall and use it to mock the inferior chili-making skills of my colleagues.And here is my chili, contestant #2, all 4 gallons of it. My secret ingredients? Cumin and curry. Oh! And also sage-flavored sausage. No recipe is complete without sausage. Delicioso, mis amigos. Delicioso.