Fidelity, Closet Space, and Other Conundrums

Three day weekends are obviously the only way to go - one day to rest from the week prior, one day for errands, and one day for fun.  When I rule the education world, all weeks will be 4-day work weeks.  Today, sadly, was certainly my Errands Day, with one specific task in mind: take on my closet. 

New York's apartments mirror the same architectural mindset of the island as a whole - limited horizontal space means that one must build up, and my closet is no exception.  Not being the 5'10" my childhood self was convinced I was fated to be, much of that vertical space is difficult to interact with daily.  Which is why at 10AM, my room looked like this:



 My mother would be so embarrassed.

But wouldn't you know it?  For an investment of a measly $50 and 2 hours, one can construct a closet that looks like this:

Magical, isn't it?

And while a messy, unorganized closet is terrifying, even more so is the brilliant adventure that I suggested Manfriend and I embark upon a while back. (Why are all the stupid ideas always mine?)  In an attempt to prompt more significant conversation over our latest long distance stint, I suggested we read a book together.  (Prior conversations were always disturbingly full of a similar lexicon excercised by my teenage self while conversing with my parents.  Think: The day was fine.  I did some stuff.  It was pretty lame.  May I please be excused?)  I had read wonderful things about Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen, and bonus points - my principal had read it, so I could borrow it from her AND have things about which to converse with both her and Manfriend.  A win, win, win!

Wrong.

The book is amazing, verbose, and has an inventive point of view in the narrator, but hits a little too close to home in a few ways.  The main character, Patty, was a college athlete, hugely competitive, and has a less-than-ideal adult relationship with her father.  She moves into suburbia and attempts to create the ideal family (not unlike what my future plans used to be for my adult life.)  While the similarities pretty much stop there, I've just finished the introduction to her infidelity with her husband's best friend. (Easy, Killer.  I haven't ruined anything - she tells you this is coming within the first 30 pages of the book.)  Suddenly my head is swimming with textually-based questions - how is it possible that both men are so taken with such a whiny, wallowing woman?  She's a former athlete - how is she lacking any form of self-respect?  How is it that she is able to shower her husband with even more affection after sleeping with his best friend?  How does one get to a point in one's marriage where "sleepwalking" into another man's bed becomes a plausible option?  

These inquiries into the motivations of characters' developments quickly become more text-to-self than I would prefer.  Having never been monogomy's number one fan (college friends will tell you - I was adamant that I would never be ridiculous enough to marry.  Men are the enemy and cannot be trusted.) this has done some strange things to my psyche.  I find myself asking, "Why can't I see all of Manfriend's Facebook pictures?  What is he hiding?"  "I wonder if that man and woman making out in the next train car are driven by the added adrenaline of having an affair?"  "I don't like to eat the same thing every day, day after day for breakfast.  Could this be a manifestation of my Patty-like potential?"

Manfriend, probably very perceptively, is several pages behind me and has put off our discussion of this latest development.  Which is convenient for me - it gives me more time to fiendishly soul-search about the perplexing paradoxes of marriage.  Oh, so healthy.         

Good Thing I Left LA...

...before I got soft.  Because would I be in trouble.

Rewind to last Wednesday morning at 8:15.  There's a knock at the door and my very tall, broad ManFriend sends me to answer it.  How heroic.  "Make sure you look in the peephole!" he advises from the warmth of the bed. 

"Police!  Open up!" 

Awesome. 

Long story short - apparently a man on the floor above us kidnapped a transvestite who then escaped and alerted the police to the fact that this man had a large number of grenades in his apartment.  (Cue The Jersey Shore jokes...)  I suppose to take advantage of the element of surprise, NYPD thought 8AM would be the prime time to charge. 

Fast forward to today, walking home from yoga, I found myself surrounded by a large shadow.  Not particularly odd given the setting.  (As my fifth grade students can tell you, setting = time and place.  Time for this - 8:45PM.  Place - New York City.  Shadow - not unusual.)  Also, we had just suffered the Snow-Pocalypse so a shadow of snow was not out of the question. 

Was it snow?  An amazing, beautiful building?  Nope - it was trash.  Piles and piles of trash as tall as I am.  And running in front of my path was my nightmare - two rats. 

Really, New York?!  Really?!  I love you the most, but today it's for the reason that I loved my crew coach - you're making me tougher.

Quick FBD update - Day 2 of the Anti-Bloat phase.  I weighed in a whole half pound lighter this morning than I had the morning prior (the initial day) was 150.  I'm two 100% mastery days in as of tonight.  As always, stay tuned...

Hubris, Arrogance, and Narcissism in Unprecedented Amounts

That must be what I had been feeling when I decided to undergo a full diet overhaul just before the holidays.  Between the tastings with our caterer, Italian Christmas Eve dinner (literally seven courses), delicious Christmas dinner, and a New Year's with the boys - who eat a lot, and often - I may not have given the FBD the best go at things. 

My first clue was a conversation I had with my lovely Grandmother, who had to ask me five different times how my weight watching was going.  It took that long for me to realize that:

1) I had put my aspirations for a 135 pound figure out on the Internet for public consumption.

2) Because of this fact, she was being neither cheeky nor invasive by asking, but simply interested in my progress and most importantly
3) Clearly the work necessary for such a full-body transformation was too far from my mind. 

So in the spirit of the 2011 clean slate, I'm giving it another go, beginning with the Anti-Bloat 4-day overhaul.  I have, however, re-committed to following things to the T. 

This is the line-up: 

While Whole Foods didn't have everything I needed, I was able to construct four 300 calorie meals for the next four days.   I've been sure to script an Excel spreadsheet complete with my day-to-day meals, and will be on the scale bright and early tomorrow morning.  My return to Manhattan has predictably shamed me into several days of yoga and lighter meals, so I should be close to the 148 measurements I saw when I began around a month ago.  One very exciting fact (because, let's face it, the next four days will be pretty bland) is that my bill was only:

So even now, Whole Foods doesn't have to be as expensive as typically expected. 

2011 promises to be a year of firsts.  I am learning that in order for this to also be the year I break the 140lb mark in my 20s, it will also have to be at least a month or so of tailoring my social life, putting my eating and yoga on the front burner, and taking time to give this metamorphosis the attention it needs.  Stay tuned for the more regular updates (one of the many New Year's Resolutions I'll be attempting to implement in this new decade.)  Stay tuned...