I’ve done very little today at work.  You’d think that productivity would be up the Monday following a three-day weekend.  Certainly I would.  But my immediate boss is out today, so I’m not worried that he might pop into my cubicle at any moment to check in.  Don’t get me wrong I’ve done a few things, but my mind is elsewhere today.

I used my holiday on Friday to continue with my wedding dress shopping saga and went to the big box store of bridal salons: David’s Bridal.  I had heard stories that ran the gamut before going.  One of my friends even bought her dress there.  I was cautiously optimistic, hoping to at least have the opportunity to try a few things on that actually fit, whether or not I ended up liking them.  But there were certainly a few styles (available in plus sizes) that interested me.

Placed on the waiting list (I was a walk-in), I took the time to browse the catalog and cruise the racks to look at the dresses in the flesh.  I figured there was perhaps one style that wasn’t available in a size remotely in my world.  Boy was I wrong.  In fact, it was just the opposite.  My bridal “consultant” was only able to bring herself to bring me ONE of the styles I was eyeballing.  ONE.  Two hours, one dress later, and probably needless to say, I felt quite dejected.  My second outing with a bad result; I’m still waiting to get a call from the consultant at my first bridal salon visit…three weeks ago tomorrow.  Thank goodness I’m not holding my breath.

So to keep my mind off of being a naked bride, I’m trying to focus on my continued efforts to be a buff naked bride.  Much like my thoughts of quitting caffeinated coffee, at times I think I may eat too much sugar.  Saturday I noticed that Trader Joes was carrying Agave Nectar (or was it Syrup?), so this morning I looked into sweetener alternatives.  I’ve tasted Stevia and it’s nasty.  I don’t like the usual suspects (pink, blue and yellow packets) because they taste just as they are: artificial.  Plus I’ve read that they can throw your metabolism out of whack anyway. I ultimately decided that it’s just too much work to find adequate substitutes.  I’ll stick to the real thing for now.

Plus, Fella and I watched “I Can Make You Thin” on TLC Saturday afternoon after a friend had told me she watched it earlier in the week.  I’m trying to incorporate Paul McKenna’s 4 golden rules into my WW plan (although I haven’t been exactly following the plan to a T lately).  Very commonsensical tips.

A few days ago I decided to follow a link, I think from and RSS feed, to use Dr. Weil’s Vitamin Advisor.  I don’t take any vitamins at present.  I saw him on a segment of Martha Stewart a year ago and he mentioned that a lot of the vitamins on the market lack the right concentrations and blends.  So I was curious what this advisor would say. 

Well of course it just recommends the good doctor’s own supplements and here’s how to order personalized packs of all you need for just [the cost of a cup of coffee a day].   But I found out that these are available at Whole Foods Market and there just happens to be one of those on my way home from the gym.  By the looks of it, the recommendation is 11 different vitamins and supplements per day for me.  Plus my allergy pill that’s a lucky number 13 pills daily (at least for several months that allergies run).

I’ve also been thinking about alternative ways of treating health issues.  I can have periodic skin problems, which was particularly bad about a week ago.  So I of course Googled all about how to naturally balance hormones which, as it turns out, can be helped with a good many of the supplements recommended by the good Dr. Weil.  

Then yesterday I read an article in Better Homes & Gardens on natural allergy remedies.  And I’m curious about it, but I don’t know if I’m quite curious enough to make the switch to au naturel. 

With all this business about vitamins and natural remedies running through my mind, I fear that I’m one step away from saying: “Hmm…Patchouli…that smells nice!”  Ugh, I think I threw up in my mouth a little just now.

After today, my work week is half over!  I love me some short weeks and long weekends.  Even though the reason we get Friday off is a pretty big deal for all of Christianity.  At mass last weekend, I almost felt compelled to add The Passion to our Netflix queue.  If I recall correctly, Fella has not seen it.  And even my, for all intents and purposes, agnostic father saw it in the theater with his two Catholic girls. (That’d be Mama Zest and yours zestfully).

But I have yet to take any steps to update our queue.  At this point, I highly doubt that I will.

I’ve been trying to clean up my dietary life.  As many of my loyal readers know, I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with the world-famous WW program since about the 8th Grade.  Right now we are on-again and I have been pretty faithful to regularly attending meetings.  The numbers on the scale haven’t been as faithfully declining as I would like, but slow and steady eventually finishes the race.

For other reasons that I can’t exactly explain, I’ve jumped on the making better dietary choices bandwagon.  One day I just realized that I needed to eat more foods occurring in nature and fewer 100 Calorie Packs.  The bottom line was also that I plain wasn’t getting enough fruit in my diet.  And I’ve been doing well with that.  Instead of a snack size bag of microwave popcorn in the afternoon, I reach for an apple or a banana and PB (albeit highly processed PB—baby steps, people).  And I’ve found that for the most part, I’m not really missing the snacks that I’ve cut back on.   

Another thing that I would like to tackle, but have no idea how to approach: caffeine.  I’d like to limit my caffeine intake.  As it stands now, I drink two cups of coffee daily.  Inevitably there are days when I add a diet soda in the afternoon and rare occasions when I may indulge in some foofie blended coffee drink after lunch.  Even rarer still is finding that I need a third cup of coffee to get through the afternoon, but it happens once in a blue moon.

I thoroughly enjoy a good, strong cup of coffee; in fact I think it’s an inherited trait.  But I also realize that I am quite dependent on the caffeine portion of my daily coffee program.  Just ask my rebound headaches when I’ve missed a daily fix.  My fear, of course, is that I will rarely be able to have an enjoyable cup of coffee if I switch to decaf (which we all know still contains caffeine anyway).  At least not one that isn’t made at home using a spendy, but comparably flavored, decaf coffee.

So right now I’m not sure if I’m ready to walk away from regular leaded coffee.  It hasn’t been recommended to me to quit, so it’s not as though I’m ignoring a diagnosed physical problem.  But there are questionable health items that have prompted my attention to a potential change.  For now I won’t make my co-workers, family, and friends suffer through Zesty’s Coffee Rehab.

My friends and I used to really do it up on St. Patty’s Day.  It was pretty much The Event of the year for us.  It was a “holiday” that didn’t have family obligations restricting our ability to truly celebrate with only one another.  And it was bliss.

We would take the day off from work or school, if we weren’t among the lucky to be on Spring Break from one or the other at that time.  Sometimes we even took the next day off, for good measure.  We would meet central at one girlfriend’s house or another, drink our breakfast of champs, and hop on the train into San Francisco, often with a road soda in hand for the ride, conveniently disguised in a paper coffee cup, plastic sipper lid and all.

Our first destination was the annual live broadcast by local faves S and NN.  Oftentimes we made it there just as the broadcast was ending, but one time that I can vaguely recall, another friend got herself a moment of radio fame answering a trivia question.  Responding to something, at least.   All I can remember is that her answer was characteristically witty.  Another year we captured the attention of several fire fighters who also made that destination an annual tradition.  We saw them there at least two years in a row, them being the latter years of our tradition.

Our second stop on the SPD’s partyathon was afternoon cocktails at a local institution on Powell Street best known as the Gold Dust Lounge.  Some ventured a champagne cocktail, others an Irish coffee to keep it festive, while yet others kept it real with another pint.  The last year that the celebration was fully in tact, my Irish coffee spilled all down my festive green-striped shirt.  It didn’t phase me or anyone I encountered from there on out, for that matter.  One year we even ran into members of the Morning Show there.  Clearly the word got out that the GDL was the after-party place to see and be seen (which I like to credit to our influence, even if it’s far from the true).

Sometime before the commute-hour, we make our way to the BART train to head east to our usual stomping grounds.  Sometimes we had time to catch a catnap and recupe, but usually we only had time to grab a bite and keep the party train rolling on.

Our favorite local bar band usually played at whichever bar tended to be our current haunt of choice around town.  We would spend the rest of the night dancing and drinking whiskey, hoping the bartender wouldn’t cut us off just yet.  One by one, our friends who didn’t have the fortune of the next day off would drop out of the race and head home.   But by last call there were at least two of us still standing and able to cross the finish line.

A few years ago, our plans started to change.  Friends got married, starting having families and the core participants kinda just fell away from the tradition.  I think we all carry a bit of longing for those times still, and I wondered today if there will ever be a time that we will decide to reclaim the tradition, even if only in part.  I hope there will come a day when we can, but if not, I will at least still carry the memories of SPD’s passed.

***

I just got home from my 2008 celebration.  I arrived at our friendly neighborhood bar a few hours and several BAC points late.  It was quite surreal walking in cold to festivities in full swing.  But I have other things to be working on right now; I was late because working out was a priority today.  And I was home at the stroke of 11pm because making it to my 8am dentist appointment in the morning is another.  Not to mention, the town was crawling with five-oh.  Making it home unscathed: highest of priorities.

So yes, maybe we are old.  But I still hold out hope that we will someday reclaim our rightful place on SPD.  With careful orchestration, it will happen, if even to add one last day of memories to the vault.

Engineering a Fork in the Road

So I want to be my own boss.  The problem is, I don’t do anything or know anything or have any skill sufficiently specialized to commoditize.  I consider myself a Jill of many trades, mistress of none.  Kinda makes it hard to figure out.

OMG, someone’s eating something in the office that’s making me want a gyro.  And now my co-worker is eating a mandarin.  Orange, not person (man, I’m hilarious).  Now I need one, too.

I went to a Pilates class at the gym tonight.  The one that I went to last week, but turned out to not be a Pilates class.  And it was brutal.  Both last week’s non-Pilates class and this week’s actual Pilates class.  Brutal.  I’m worried that I’m not gonna be able to use my arms tomorrow.

Oh yes, and my apologies to my classmates for whatever mayhem may have been occurring around my posterior.  It has a mind of its own sometimes.

Too much?  Overshare?  C’mon, you know you laughed.  Just a little?

I keep starting entries and not finishing them.  That’s not true, i finished one off them today, but it so went in a direction that I wasn’t expecting, that I just can’t bring myself to actually post it.

I’ve been in a very contemplative mood lately.  I’m just dissatisfied with the direction life is going in right now.  My desk job is just not fulfilling anymore.  So that’s what I’m thinking a lot about lately.  And wondering, Will I ever freaking figure it out?

The summer between Frosh/Soph years of high school, I took a trip back to my hometown in Illinois to visit my childhood best friend (CBF), grandparents, and various other dear relatives.  In a tradition quite unfamiliar to my west coast cohorts, my old neighborhood block held their annual Block Party while I was visiting.

As a kid, I relished the annual Block Party.  The thoroughfare was blocked from traffic, which gave us kids carte blanche access to the street with our bikes, Big Wheels, jump ropes, boom boxes—you name it, we took it to the street that day.  As you can imagine, at the tender age of 15 (and visiting from out of state), I didn’t exactly care to ride up and down the street aimlessly.  I was trusted to do that at anytime by then.

“What did I do then?” you ask.  Well, mingled with my friend, her older sister, and the adults, I guess.  I was often the lone friend that would rather sit around with my friends’ parents rather than be upstairs playing videogames and the like with my peers.  I just wasn’t that into videogames.  And the like.

One of the old neighbors (old as in used to live on the block, but moved across town), presumably after he’s had a few Old Style Lights, “You know, I really thought you were a brat when you were a little kid.  I’m glad to see you’ve grown out of it.”

I was a little bit horrified by his comment.  I had never been called a brat, except maybe jokingly, in all my 15 years.  I asked Old Neighbor to elaborate and shed some light on his recollection of the child Zest.  All he could add was that he essentially thought I was a cocky little thang that pranced (or as my parents would remember–cart-wheeled) up and down the block; that he worried I would be a bad influence on CBF, who was to Old Neighbor, the girl next door.

Wow.  I had no idea in all the years that had passed since he moved from the neighborhood until that moment that I was remotely looked upon as a brat.  I wasn’t spoiled.  I didn’t have any more material wealth than CBF (in fact she and her siblings had way better toys than I ever did).  The only thing that I can guess made him resent my presence was that I was a happy, pretty, little blonde girl naïve to the not-so-happy-pretty-little-blond-girl-world in which Old Neighbor lived.

If I’m not mistaken, I think I have recently learned that he is a pretty prolific libertarian journalist.  I’m sure there’s some irony in that somewhere, but I’m too lazy to do the math.  But I digress.

So not in all of my 30 years, have I since been called a brat (except for jokingly, because face it—I can be a complete smartass).  That is, until today.  And this accusation came from the unlikeliest of places.

Today, I was called a brat by The One, The Only…the Fella.

To be fair, he actually said “bratty,” but still.  It got me wondering, have I actually been a brat all these years without even knowing it?  Now I may not be the best judge, but maybe twice in 30 years does not an absolute make.

I finally (FINALLY!) got my last Christmas present today.  I hemmed, I hawed all the way to a new TiVo!  Goodbye shows ending at eleven, hello more workouts five a.m.!

I’ve received a couple of comments about the lapses of time between my posts recently.  The truth of it all is that I haven’t felt as though I had anything of import to write about.  Things that have been going on in my life have been relatively routine.  And I don’t want to relive the monotony of my routine life by writing about it, let alone subject my loyal readers to such. 

Another fact is that I frankly don’t have a lot of expendable time on my hands, either.  On average, I spend a total of two mind-numbing hours in the car five days a week.  No real blog-worthy fodder happens on my drive.  In fact, were I to venture an entry about my commute, it would undoubtedly drive loyal readers…into wild fits of road rage.  Because that is the only excitement I experience on my drive: my own unrelenting road rage. Granted, my affliction is manifested only in spurts of benign yelling fits at the source frustrating my drive home (usually a slow driver in the fast lane or a carpool driving in front of me, which means not in the high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane created especially for said vehicle).   I digress. 

In addition to the tedium that havocs my drives home, at the end of my daily journey I’m so worn out by the aforementioned fits of road rage and/or the illogical two-to-three mile bumper-to-bumper portion of the evening, I have lost any semblance of a coherent thought that I may have had at any point leading up to my arrival home.  And once home I quickly fall into zone-out…zone.

I’d definitely like to make a concerted effort to write more.  So here goes…

Feb. 22, 2008: Oh the Shame…
This morning I actually found myself listening to a 3rd Eye Blind song on the radio.  In my defense, admittedly a very flimsy defense at that, there was nothing else on the other stations programmed on my iPod, save for commercials–the same commercials that I hear day-in-and-day-out.  Normally, I would opt to listen to the commercials over 3eb.  For some reason, today it was more than I could bear.

I am the person who willingly went to the 3eb/Eve 6 concert with her sorority sisters because for some foolish reason it seemed a better option than staying home alone on a Friday night.  I mocked the performers and performances.  I mocked the shrieking pre-teens surrounding me.  I prayed for more and more beer.  But as much as he might like to think, Stephan Jenkins could not turn water into wine.

I heckled the opening band under my breath, because they were so young.  And I had heard they got into a scuffle the night before while staying with friends who went to my college.  It was probably the biggest waste of a night ever.  I can’t quite recall (good sign), but by God I hope I got ridiculously inebriated after the show.

Oh thank goodness the theme from Superman is now on one of my other stations.

My co-workers have both been out of the office the last two days and it’s lonely.  Is it 5 o’clock yet?

Feb. 21, 2008: Headed for the Future
We’re headed for the future,
And the future’s now

I was looking at my calendar today, realizing that the February bar exam is less than one week away.  Once again, I will not be partaking in said administration of the exam.  I decided back in October/November that I just couldn’t add it to the various other items I was already juggling.  I would only be cheating (and torturing) myself again.  But I know I want to take the exam again, so it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. 

I like my job quite well, but certain aspects of it are already starting to wear on me a little.  There are times when I feel like I’m treated as an inferior, rather than an equal.  The only things that distinguish me from some of my “superiors” are experience and/or the bar exam.  So I thnk it’s understandable that I desire relatively equal treatment.  I realize there’s a pecking order, but it sometimes feels more like a caste system.  Of which I’m not very fond.

So lately I’ve had my future on my mind.  I’ll probably continue to revisit the idea of retaking the bar exam every six months, but my instinct tells me to wait.  At least until I’m not juggling an upcoming wedding, weekend visits with Fella (whom I don’t see enough of as it is), and the rest of life in general.  Even though it means that I’ll be waiting another full year before I sit for the exam again.  So I have 12 months to strategize for my next all-out assault.  I probably need that much time to practice juggling.

Couch to 5k, that is, because my body has betrayed me.  The heel pain caused by plantar fasciitis  was more than I could bear as the intervals of jogging increased in duration.  And I have a high tolerence for pain, so you know it had to be pretty bad.  So bad in fact, that while generally the pain subsides by the following day, it’s a week since my last workout and my heel still hurts.

And my heart hurts a little, too, because I was really into the training this time around.

Yes, I intend to go to see a doctor about this.  But first I have to find one.

On another, totally unrelated note, this evening we’re going to see a performance of The Emperor (aka Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5) in Berkeley.  Fella loves this piece and I’m excited we’re going.  Plus we’re going out for a nice dinner beforehand, too.  I like nice dinners out.