Making Small Talk

A new Pret a Manger opened up across the street from my office, and this has created much excitement and joy within me.
 
If you've never eaten at a Pret, you just don't know what you're missing. Everything is laid out on display in gorgeous little cardboard boxes, just waiting to be snatched up and eaten. Sandwiches such as the New York Brunch on Rye; turkey and cheese with onions and mayo.  Or Avocado and Parmesan on whole wheat, with basil and pine nuts. Salads that have giant avocados, or big chunks of fresh parmesan cheese...yea I could go on and on.
 
Today, I went out to lunch late, and I was starving. I ran into the new Pret and my eye settled on a grilled chicken salad with avocado, walnuts, and dried cranberries.  To top it off, I grabbed a sesame dressing that looked to die for.
 
Eager to stuff my piehole, I skipped onto the elevator, bag in hand, proudly displaying the Pret a Manger logo.  A chatty coworker got on with me. 
 
"Oh, you went to Pret for lunch I see?" he asked.
 
I smiled and proudly showed him the contents of my lunch.
 
"Yea. I went there today and it gave me the shits".
 
Excuse me?
 
"Uh, well maybe it just didn't agree with you?" I stammered.
 
"My friend who came with me got the shits from it too.  We both had salads.  Chicken over greens with nuts, or something.  Yea. I had the runs for days."
 
I stared down at my salad, my lovely salad that now seemed tainted to me.  All I could picture was big, green nasty bacteria running around in my sesame dressing..and my coworker on the toilet.
 
"I'm sure your salad is fine," he smiled.
 
DOUCHE.

To Whom it May Concern

In case anyone was wondering, yes sir, I am still alive.

I survived the Triathlon, and then went on vacation for a week.

But I'm back now, and shall carry on as always. pinky swear!

Help!

Tuesday afternoon I started to feel like I was coming down with something really evil, like strep throat or pleurisy...my throat was killing me and I had a slight fever. It made it hard to enjoy my bday dinner and whatever should have happened afterwards, in fact, sadly I was in bed by 1Opm...Wednesday I woke up feeling much better, less of a sore throat, no fever. I even felt well enough to go for a 4 mile run.

This morning, I feel like someone poured cement down my throat and it's starting to harden. I can't breathe. I feel like a bobblehead. When I open my mouth to speak {and mind you, I'm in my apartment by myself, so I'm sitting here basically talking to myself like a loser} I sound like a 7O year old woman who smokes 3 packs of Marlboro Reds an hour.

I cannot, cannot, will not, cannot be sick. Not today. Not now. Not three days before the
Nautica NYC Triathlon

I really feel like I might cry.

In addition to needing to spend all of Sunday morning being Little Miss Athlete, I'm supposed to be leaving for the Outer Banks on Tuesday.

Anyone got any remedies for getting rid of a cold? I'll do anything. I'll even eat a frog if i have to.

Older and Wiser

On my way to my running class tonight, I passed a couple of dudes standing on the sidewalk. I was wearing tight little bike shorts and as I jogged by I tensed up, knowing the inevitable was about to take place.

'You got a fat ass. A nice, fat ass."

Yea man. I know. I've heard it all before. Don't you just WISH you could plant your face smack dab in the middle of its juicy goodness?

I think about how I used to respond to outbursts such as these-basically I would burst into tears and worry to death about how a stranger on the street used the word "fat" with regard to me. The horror.

Now, I take it for what it is, a moronic asshole who thinks that using the word "fat" is complimentary, for one thing, and for another thing, who gives a crap? i DO have a fat ass! I walk proudly, ass protruding, for the world to see. There's nothing I can do about it, so I embrace it.

It got me thinking about how, as much as I hate getting older, I really have changed in a lot of ways, when I think about who I was 1O or even 5 years ago.. the fact that I'm doing this triathlon, an event that would have scared the fuck out of me once upon a time...the fact that I was able to sit and have lunch with an old friend yesterday and have a face-to-face talk about why we had lost touch for several years (painful reasons and not easy to talk about--definitely a conversation that I would have been more comfortable having via email back in the day}, visiting a tattoo parlor with said friend to get myself one step closer to finally getting that Godamn tattoo I keep rambling about {I did not get the tattoo yet, but I will, I WILL}, allowing myself to be in a great relationship and KNOWING its great, and relishing it. Bottom line, I feel that I have been challenging myself more and pushing myself past normal comfort zones. That, to me, is a huge accomplishment.

But, because I'm still 12 years old at heart, I need to cut myself off here so I can finally catch the first two episodes of "Scott Baio 45 and Single". Some things will never change--my love for Scott Baio is one of them!

Oh poo!!

So, last week I was in paramus, NJ, covering a photo shoot for one of our clients. This particular client has a place right on Rte 17, and so that is where I spent my Thursday and Friday. Standing on the side of a zooming motorway, watching someone take pretty, pretty pictures of a rental car office. Now you KNOW you wish you were me, admit it.

At any rate, I pretty much lived my life for those two days out of a motorhome not unlike this one--



Its where all the magic happens. It's where you eat, where you hang out during down time, and where you use the rest room.

After a pretty stressful week and worrying about the upcoming birthday AND my triathlon next week, I've been all out of whack. Which includes my, er, bowels. Things just haven't been right in the tummy for a while and well, let's just say I've been backed up..so I'm sitting in the motorhome when suddenly I feel activity in my abdomen.

No!

I am not pooing in the motorhome. I'm not doing it. I will hold it until I get home but I am just...not...pooing in the motorhome!!!

First off--this is what the bathroom looks like, for the most part--



It's really tiny, and the door is usually just a sliding accordian type of thing, that doesn't block sound.

In addition, the toilet doesn't actually flush, you just press a pedal down and all the waste falls into a hole below.

And here I am, with three days of poo just DYING to come out and say hello...and I've got nowhere to go, but the motherfucking motorhome.

FUCK ME.

Thankfully, no one was in the motorhome save the driver, and he was sacked out in the front with his headphones on watching rap videos. He was never gonna know what what was going down. So I stealthily let myself into the tiny little bathroom and hoped for the best.

3 days worth of poo later, I thought I was home free. I tapped down on the pedal with my foot, and voila, all traces of my existence were gone. Easy as pie.

Except for the skidmarks. NO! Not that!!!

Now I was in a bit of a pickle. I could just leave them there, because who would know they were mine? No one saw me go in, right? But in good faith, I couldn't be the girl who skidmarked up the motorhome toilet. I just wasn't comfortable with that.

so I tried a couple times to push down the pedal and see what happened. Nada.

Short of going in and cleaning the toilet myself, what the hell was a girl supposed to do???

Finally, I wet a mound of paper towels and threw it in there, and then flushed it . Voila. It did the trick. I was homefree. Until I saw the sign above the sink. "DO NOT EVER THROW TOWEL IN TOILET. EVER." Great. Not only did I clog up the only toilet with 5 pounds of crap, I now broke it by throwing a big wet ball of paper towels down it.

I ran out of there like a bat out of hell and never looked back. I scrambled down the steps and snuck back to the photo shoot and there I stayed for the next two days.

Motorhome? What motorhome?

There's Nothing Worse

There's nothing worse than having amazing sex after a few days dry spell right before a family-fun filled weekend. You're in the moment, you're feeling great, and all you want to do is bite the fuck out of your boyfriend. You just want to sink your teeth into his luscious creamy neck and leave your mark there, and you know what? You can't. Because you're spending the weekend with various family members for various reasons and God forbid someone's Mamma sees the giant hickey that I wanted so badly to leave there.

There's nothing worse!

Go Shorty, It's Your Birthday

Yesterday morning while getting ready to go visit Beehive's sister and newest of the Baby Beehives, my darling boy turned to me and said, "Aw, you have sleepy eyes," and handed me some eye stress gel.

I checked my face out in the bathroom mirror and I just looked busted. Those were no sleepy eyes...those were old people bags!

This, combined with my birthday coming up tomorrow, set me over the edge. I tried to fight it, but next thing I know, he's asking me what's wrong and I burst out hysterically crying.

"i'm OLD" I sobbed.

Now, admittedly, I have REALLY bad pms this week {yes, grandma over here still has her menses. Crazy, I know} so every little thing has been blown out of proportion beyond even my own comprehension. But I honestly hadn't really thought about the number. I'm usually pretty excited about my birthday, and I'm all about celebrating it--but this year, not so much.

Funny, I always loved to see the look on people's faces when I would bust out with my real age. There was always that look of utter disbelief, followed by gushes of "WOW. You look great!" and topped off with "You Cougar!" when sighted with whatever young stud of the hour I happened to have by my side.

My current long-term young stud was perplexed at my sudden outburst, and in a fit of panic, began to laugh at my angst. This only fueled my hysteria even more. In the most unladylike of ways, I curled up in a ball on the bed, in his arms, and wailed. Snot coming out of every pore, he just let me be until I was spent, sniffling and snorting like a French Bull Dog with asthma.

In my head I started to tick off all the things I "forgot" to do so far in my life--

-Get married and have lots of kids. Check.
-Make tons and tons of money. Check.
-Save tons and tons of aforementioned money. Check.
-Live in big, giant house and have vacation home on side. Check.
-Find cure for cancer or other big disease. Check.

Now, as the rapist likes to say, "What are you, ninety years old and about to die?"

Sometimes, I certainly feel that way.

At any rate, I got myself together and was able to keep all crying jags in check during our visit upstate. I splashed around in the pool with all the Beehive nephews and felt great. See? I'm not old! Old people aren't fun! Old people don't splash around in the pool with reckless abandon! Old people sit in the shade and watch others have fun...

"You're face is getting wrinkly" says Beehive Nephew #1.

Kid, you picked the WRONG day to say that!!

Ugh.

Update

So it would probably be an understatement for me to announce that I have severe, painful writer's block.
 
I know I haven't been around in a couple of weeks, and this is not because I've stopped loving you all. 
 
I guess I could blog about my training...but been there done that...
 
I suppose I could talk some more about my sex life and love of the wonderous Beehive, but I imagine you're sick of hearing about that too.
 
I realize that I never blogged about the Blogger's Night that I attended last week, but my friend Gail, who does read this, will call me a NYERD if I talk about it, and who needs that? ;)
 
I WANTED to blog about the dead mouse that I found in my bedroom Sat night, but someone else beat me to it, with a way cooler mouse story than I could ever hope to relay.
 
Thankfully, I just spent the last week and a half working on the most insane project ever, I fully intend on telling you all about it one of these days.

But not tonight. I'm friggin tired. I'm sunburned. While all of you spend your carefree Friday nights getting shitfaced with reckless abandon, I crawled into my apartment after a 12 hr photo shoot, only to have to wake up at the crack of dawn, again, tomorrow.

plus my computer is being retarded, and I'm thoroughly annoyed right now. peace out fuckers. I'll talk to you laters.