NOW, MORE THAN EVER,
NOT THE NEW ANYONE

What was up with this week? I felt sort of worn out nearly every night, even when I hadn’t worked out that day.  My guess is that I’ve spent the last few weeks shoving myself along through all the  snowing and the souping, all the while I kept telling myself: this is as hard as it gets; it gets easier after this; if I can do this now just think what a breeze it’ll be in the spring; go me go. And so on.

And then it got warm, and the snow started to melt, and there I was all bundled up tight in my own resolve, which suddenly felt heavy and uncomfortable. I suppose I needed to relax. I skipped a gym night. I got in bed early the other night and read a bunch of East Village Inkys that Chris had gotten me. I think that helped.

*  *  *

We’re still doing the Lifting Weights to Hateful Pop Remixes class (heretofore called Weights & Hates). Wrongy Lady stopped coming to the class a long time ago, as I knew she would. But now we have Crazy Pants. Crazy Pants wears plaid flannel pajama pants and is in his forties, I think. In the class we all use plain old bars and plates specially made for the class, but Crazy Pants brings in a pile of extra stuff from the free-weight area: ankle weights, two pairs of massive iron dumbbells, a big honking 50 lb thingy. It’s all strewn out on the floor next to his step platform. It looks like he’s building a fucking robot. He could keep all this stuff in front of his bench, where it would be more out of everyone’s way, and surely with his strength he could reach a little farther for the seven extra weights his crazy muscles crave, yes? But this is not the way of the Crazy Pants.

He doesn’t come to class to do the class, really. He does a special parallel universe-version of Weights & Hates involving higher weights and fewer reps and lots of random flailing around. Sometimes when we’re between songs and the rest of us are adjusting our bars, he’ll grab his special crazy weights and toss off a quick set of curls or extensions or deadlifts or rows or squats triple axels or lindys or bootyclaps or whatever the hell it is he does. But perhaps he knows what he is doing. And actually, if he came to class every Monday and Wednesday morning like most of the rest of us do, I would have a great deal more respect for him and his manic muscle ways. But he only shows up every now and then, and he’s all, look at me! Gaaarrr! I am working so haarrrd!

Chris has a theory that Crazy Pants puts his pants on in the morning and they tell him what do to and where to go, and he doesn’t get a say in any of it. What if he belongs to several gyms and his pants march him to a different one every day? If so, perhaps you’ve seen him. Tell him we say hello.

1.) YES THERE IS MORE SOUP. You can see the soup here. We made three kinds this weekend, including a recipe which uses two pounds of greens. And while it tastes very nice, maybe you don’t need to see a picture of this soup, because it’s really, really green. And not a jolly green, either; no, this is Heart of Darkness Soup. And we’re going to eat it.

2.) I think I’ve legitimately lost the twenty pounds now. The time I weighed myself after I was sick doesn’t count, since I was just all dried out and as soon as I drank anything I got all big again like a Gro-Beast in water. But now the magic number is back, and it’s shown up on the scale for the past two mornings, so I believe this means, scientifically speaking, that I’ve been able to replicate the results of my very important research study called Let Me Stand on This Thing and See If I’m Still Fat. (Of course I am still fat. But these latest findings are promising.)

3.) Of course we’re all horrified that Britney shaved her head. Why can’t she just develop herself a cute little eating disorder like the other girls? Everyone knows that’s the only respectable way to freak the fuck out. It’s getting really hard to watch and I really hope someone will just step forward and shoot her with a tranquilizer dart and carry her off to someplace quiet.

Tuesday, August 21: I’ll be at Funny Ha-Ha at the Hideout, 1354 Wabansia, Chicago. See me, Alpana Singh, Mark Bazer, and more! Starts at 7pm, $5 suggested donation (goes to charity!).

Thursday, August 23: I’ll be doing the Fixx Reading Series, hosted by Amy Guth. 7:30 pm at The Fixx Coffee Bar, 3053 N Sheffield, Chicago.

And hey! If you want map information and email or RSS notification of future readings (like the one I’ll be doing in October!), check out my author page at BookTour.com.

I hope by now you’ve figured out I’m not using the royal we in this blog. It just means that Chris is here, for most things.

That’s him below in the onion-cutting goggles I got him for Christmas, since we’re making an effort to cook more. (MORE SOUP!) And that’s me in the fancy swim goggles he got me, so that I can swim my little heart out. Perhaps you are thinking, “My, you two are certainly supportive of your mutual goals.”

But more likely you’re thinking that we’re dorks.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DORK! Love, me.

P.S. If you’re looking for my Single Girl Valentines, they’re here on Flickr. Keep up the apathy!

No shit, we went to the gym tonight. This was after both of us got off work early on account of the huge whomping honkload of snow that fell and blew and drifted and still yet this very minute threatens to smother us all like a massive down pillow wielded by a cruel giant nurse. We got all the way home through the snow and somehow I got my car in the garage and wandered through the snowdrifts and made it upstairs and then Chris and I actually made the conscious decision to go back downstairs and get in the car and drive to the gym. And there we did some very nice cardio-kind-of-things while the wind raged outside the big gym windows. And then we drove home and almost didn’t get the car back in the garage. But we did it. WHY DID WE DO IT? I don’t know. But you must understand how I had to report it.

It does help that it’s only a five-minute drive. Well, ten or fifteen minutes in the middle of fuck-all-to-hell winter rush hour traffic, but still. While we were stomping down the snow-drifty back stairs we kept talking, oddly enough, about how awesome it is to be snowed in when the weather is like this, where you just shut yourself in like a frontiersman and watch movies for five hours. And it IS awesome! Especially when you live with Chris! Do you know how many videos he has? And yet we just continued to clamber down the stairs and go to the gym as if we were talking about merely a theoretical universe in which shitloads of snow gets dumped on us and compels us to stay inside. I know, right? Maybe it’s because we know that tomorrow we are going out to dinner and we could use a good cardio kind-of-thing. Or maybe it’s because once I decide to do something I really hate being thwarted. And lo, we were not thwarted.

Of course now we are also very tired, after the snow and the gym and fixing dinner and watching The Boy in the Bubble starring John Travolta. (We found the DVD at a dollar store.)

And now we’re going to sleep.

The weekly mixes at Out of Five: ten people (some are my friends!); ten songs; one theme.

I’ve been making soup on the weekends. Two different kinds of soup, if I can manage it (lately I can), and we have some for dinner Sunday night and then portion out the rest to take to work with our salads. I never used to be a soup person. Soup was all sippy and precious and tedious, and I never quite believed that the food in soup was real food. If anything it was ghost food, sad little wraiths of celery and onion drifting around in a murky brothy underworld. But this was because soup in a can was the only soup I knew. It was also because I used to only like food that could punch me in the stomach from the inside. Soup just wasn’t thuggish enough, unless it had cream or cheese or noodles or dumplings or pizzas floating in it. But hey, these days I like the soup, and it goes well with This Thing I’m Doing, which has gotten me to cook stuff I might not have made otherwise. I suspect that if I didn’t have to cook vegan, I’d be trying to make pitiful low-fat versions of all kinds of cheesy chowdery thug crap, which of course is never as good as the real crap. Theoretically you can make vegan versions of cheesy, chowdery crap, but it’s a pain in the ass, and it tends to involve ingredients that Chris is allergic to, and most days I do my best not to kill him.

So see, I have no choice but to make the black bean soup and the spicy carrot peanut soup and the roasted squash and cauliflower soup and oh, it’s a living hell, I tell you, me in the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon with my hand blender and my enameled cast-iron pot, listening to the radio and wrangling soup. Yesterday I made the tomato soup recipe from the latest issue of BUST, and today I made harira, which has become a This Thing favorite around here. So now we’re set.

I know there’s more to it all than this, but the soup days are doing me good. Yesterday was sort of a hard day—it reminded me I’m still stumbling around after all that’s happened in the last six weeks. I spent half the afternoon taking a nap and the other half in the kitchen with the soup, and yes, that helped. Hence, soup.

It’s nice that the heat is free in this apartment but we can’t turn it the hell down either. We have eight histrionic radiators which make a big hot fuss several times a day, which is great if you are a Sonoran lizard or a fondue or some other kind of heat-loving thing, but not so great otherwise. It gets worse as it gets colder outside, so if you’re cold in your apartment you should come on over, and open your pores and stay awhile. And then we’ll put some of that hot in a Ziploc baggie for you to take home.

Anyway. How are you guys? How about those Bear people not winning that super thing last weekend? We seem to recall hearing something about this.

I’m still doing This Thing I’m Doing, though the week after we hit the hundred-day mark last month Chris and I took a little break. We had Santullo’s and ribs and burgers oh my, and this time my stomach didn’t protest as much as it did over the holidays, so apparently I haven’t completely transformed into a lily-livered herbivore. I’ve been back on the wagon for a couple weeks now, so to speak, but I haven’t made much new progress yet. (Of course, the vegan wagon is probably not a terribly speedy wagon, you know? Because it’s not like you can use oxen to pull it.)

However, in totally old news that I have neglected to tell you, we made it through the “holiday survivor” challenge at our gym. That’s where they give you a nice little gym bag for not gaining several pounds of festive butterfat between late November and mid-January. We also got t-shirts for trying six new classes. I hope we get a chance to earn pants next, since the ones we bring to the gym were simply bought, with dirty old regular money and everything, and how can you expect to have a decent workout if you’re wearing pants you can’t respect? But whatever.

I was freaking out a little by the end of the challenge, because it was happening right around the time I had to fly to Albuquerque again. I wanted to do my final weigh-in before I left on the trip but the perky gym staff kept telling me, “Oh, that’s okay! You can just do it when you get back!” I wanted to tell them that no, they didn’t understand: I signed up for the Holiday Survival Challenge, not the Death Of A Loved One Endurance Challenge. But I got through them both somehow.

A few days after I got back, both Chris and I came down with some kind of buggy stomach thing that compelled us to sleep straight through dinnertime and most of the next day. When I could finally get myself out of bed I padded over to the scale. If I believed what the scale told me, I could say that I’ve lost twenty pounds since October, but of course I was dehydrated and the moment I actually ate something again, that number flitted back into purely hypothetical territory. It’s going to be awhile before it comes up again. In the meantime, though, we’ve been getting back to our Weights/Hateful Pop Remixes class (now with new remixes to hate!), and I swim whenever I can talk myself into it.

Plus, it’s so hot in here that whenever I shift around on the couch it totally counts as Bikram yoga.

she gets to eat ribs. Seriously.

It’s getting better. I have a stack of cards people have sent me (thank you). I have been reading a great many kind emails (ditto). I have a box near my desk that came filled with things to cheer me up: tea and mix CDs and books and pretty soaps and other stuff (thank you Michael and Marianne and Jenny and Patty). I haven’t emptied the box completely; I might still need to have it around. Everything helps: the road trip to Michigan; the memorial service; returning to work.

If you’d like, you can make a donation in my mom’s name to Wellness House in Hinsdale, Illinois. Gifts can be made here in memory of Kathleen McClure.

I’ll be getting back to posting this week. Thank you all for your patience and everything else.