Smile - you jerk.

This morning on my walk to work a woman stepped out into the road to cross the street against the light.  A man waiting to cross, stopped her from stepping in front of a taxi, and instead of saying thank you, this woman was irritated.   I’m sorry lady, but this guy, no matter how strange looking just saved you from getting hit by a car that was not, under any circumstance, going to stop to let you cross.  This woman then spent a very awkward 10-12 seconds trying to ignore this man and pretend he wasn’t staring right at her.  Now, I will admit, that this man seemed to be missing a few elements of social awareness and might not be someone that I’d willingly sit down to lunch with, but he did, keep you from getting hit by a car.  That alone, I think, at the very least deserves a smile.  It doesn’t even have to be a big one – don’t show your teeth – but at least acknowledge what just happened.

That’s what I don’t get.  Granted, it’s a Monday and probably only 1% of people actually want to be going where they’re going – but there’s no need to be a bitch to a stranger who potentially just saved your life – or at least saved you from a $500 ambulance ride.    Even if you’re in the worst mood of all time, don’t be a jerk to someone who just kept you alive.  

Boston.

While running the Chicago marathon for the second time in 2007, I saw a t-shirt that said "A marathon" on the front and "just long enough to experience every emotion..." on the back.

100% accurate.

The strength and courage and stamina and endurance and confidence it takes to train and run a marathon is nothing short of miraculous.  My heart is breaking today as I look at these photos and videos from what happened this afternoon in Boston. 

These people should be celebrating.  They should be limping around from exhaustion and pride and hugging the people they care about.  They should be doing so with joy and gratitude.  Instead, they're doing so in fear, despair and sorrow. 

I don't pray very often, but I am praying today.

I am praying that these people find strength and resolve and courage to heal and trust again.  I am praying for the families of those who were hurt or killed today.  I am praying that our nation continues to educate our children - to teach them to value cultural differences, to find pride in being strong, fearless, smart and different.  In education and appreciation we will find peace.  I pray that this kind of senseless terror never happens again. 

I read somewhere years ago that we should be hugged 11 times a day.  What if that was required? What kind of world would we be living in?  Instead of 1 or 0 hugs, we would get 11 a day.  Every day.  Would we be nicer to each other? More open? More communicative?  Would we feel more valued?

Tomorrow I will hug 11 people. Whether they need it or not.

May God bless everyone in Boston right now.  May God bless everyone - everywhere - help us all find peace.

Eating like a fat kid.

I gained 52 pounds my freshman year of college.  When I went home for Christmas my dad asked me if I'd shrunk my clothes in the wash.  And sadly, I didn't even notice until I developed the pictures from spring break and saw what I looked like in my bikini. 

Growing up I was always really active - soccer, basketball, theatre, marching band, track - and living in a house where there wasn't much junk food, I never really over-ate it.  

Then I went to away to college. 

I have no idea what happened in my brain, but one day I woke up and I started eating like a hoarder.  Ice cream at every meal - cheese on everything, a case of Dr. Thunder (the Walmart version of Dr. Pepper - a whopping 290 calories a can and probably 6 pounds of sugar) a week and tube after tube of Pringles in between. A typical breakfast (and yes, I got up for breakfast every single day) would be a donut, bagel with cream cheese, whatever egg food they were serving that day, bacon, sausage links, a stack of pancakes, a bowl of cereal and of course, a banana.  EVERY day.  For lunch I'd make my own cheese fries by piling my plate high with french fries and then getting a stack of the American cheese slices.  A few fries wrapped in a cheese blanket and then popped right into my food hole.   

If I'm being totally honest, I also did that at dinner.

Oh, and I started drinking alcohol.  Some kids start in high school at parties, but because I never went to any of those, I didn't start drinking until college.  And worked hard to make up for lost time. 

My cousin came to visit toward the end of my first year and we were sitting at lunch having our second serving of ice cream (they had a soft serve machine AND an ice cream cooler - so obviously we needed both), and he looks at me while noshing on his strawberry shortcake cone and says "man, no wonder you got so fat - this is really good".  

That should have been a turning point for me, but sadly, it was not. 

In addition to eating my life away I also stopped exercising.  It wasn't a deliberate choice, but it happened.  The schedule of college life was overwhelming and all my habitual sports were replaced with other things.  Soccer conflicted with Marching Band.  Basketball conflicted with the theatre department.  Track lost to the Radio station and if I'm being honest, I wasn't ever fast enough to matter anywhere on the field.  But day by day, pound by pound I became the fat kid.  

Because I'm so tall, it spread out evenly.  So when I look back at photos of myself back then, I can see that I was over 200 pounds, but people who didn't know me then, just think I was a little chubster. It's taken me ten years to figure out a way to win out over my constant desire to stuff my face - to find a work-out routine that I can stick to.  

But yesterday, it all went to shit.  Yesterday I ate like that oblivious fat kid I thought I'd left behind so long ago. I felt like some starving orphan took over my body.  I do not, however, have the metabolism of said orphan and will be working off the ice cream and buttery pasta and cookies and double helping of french fries and cereal and donut holes for the next several weeks.  I woke up feeling hung-over even though I only had one glass of wine.  My body needs a detox from all that crap I shoved into yesterday - and of course, today is my day off from the gym. 

Just in time for my 10 year college reunion I suppose - heaven forbid I not be the fat version of myself when I walk back on campus.  

Over it.

I’m having one of those days where I just want to quit everything.  Just quit being a responsible adult.  Why doesn’t life ever seem to get any easier?  Every time I feel like I’ve got a leg up on the things that need to happen – I get knocked back down a peg. Or the whole f-ing ladder.

Every time I find myself at home with an hour to spare, I can’t take a nap because the girl who lives below me is practicing (badly, I might add) her jazz vocal exercises.  Every time I wake up early to go to the gym, their power is out and they’re not open at all that.  And every time I change out of my work clothes to get more comfortable for rehearsal, the socks that I chose to put on are so tight and warm and uncomfortable that I have to take them off in the cab on my way home.  Do not wear your warmest winter socks when you know you’ll be working inside a too warm rehearsal studio moving around a lot. 

I quit life.  I want to lie around in my pjs, wrapped in a blanket watching Law and Order: SVU all day.   

The building I work in is building out the floor beneath me and it has been excruciating.  There has been endless drilling and banging and hammering and sawing on the 14^th floor ceiling, and even though I know that it can’t possibly be true, it feels like 100% of the work being done is being done directly beneath my desk.  And even though I sent out an email to my entire team to let them know there’s nothing that can be done about the intrusive noise and excessive rumbling, that we just have to wait it out, I get complaints at least a dozen times a day.  I suppose that being the office manager means I am the sounding board for every unhappy thought and human to walk thru our doors.  I suppose that’s what I signed up for.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised and should be stoic enough to smile and agree and say “gee wiz, I wish that ruckus would stop too” but what I really want to say is slightly more aggressive.  Today the only person I saw that I didn’t want to punch in the face was our UPS delivery man.  He calls me Kelsey.  That is not my name.

Manners

I just read an article about a guy in Arkansas who hired his friend to “attack” him with a knife – all to impress his date.

REALLY?!  Really?  What happened to just being nice?  Or actually listening when you ask a question?  Or holding the door open and letting her enter or exit a room before you do?  Or holding up your end of a conversation?  Or paying attention to her when you’re together instead of getting distracted by your phone? 

Sigh.  I don’t get it.

Is there no one left out there teaching chivalry and kindness?  Do we really believe the only way to impress a girl, is to have a friend to come pretend to stab you so you can show off how brave and manly you are as you fight them  off?  (Poorly, I might add as he still got cut a few times.)  

Getting on and off the subway is a perfect example.  If I am waiting on the platform to get on the train, and stand back to let the passengers get off the train before I try to board – which, assholes, is what you’re supposed to do – people will shove me out of the way to get on the train.  Really?  Is it really that important that you get that seat?  Or the times people will look right at a pregnant woman or elderly person standing, and not offer them their seat.  Why must we all be so selfish?

Though, there was one time last summer when I was in a seat by the door and a man who looked to be in his seventies got on the train with his bags and cane.  I got up and said, “sir, would you like to sit down?” and he immediately started to verbally attack me for assuming he was a cripple.  “Do I look like a fucking cripple to you?!”  “Did I ask you to stand up?!” “Fuck you.”  30 seconds into his rant, I said, still standing and slack-jawed “so…  you don’t want to sit?”, and sat back down.   He stood over me yelling for the rest of my trip.  I hate confrontation. HATE. It.  So with this old man yelling at me, I started to cry.  Which I hated even more. 

So, to this man who got stabbed to impress a girl, (who I just read was unsurprisingly NOT impressed by his antics) I offer you some advice.  Get a grip and learn some manners.  Ladies don’t like getting blood on their clothes.

Vampire in Times Square

You know that kid from the Sixth Sense movie, who sees people that no one else can see?  Sometimes, walking around New York City, I feel like I’m that kid.   I don’t know why it happens, or when, but living in this city somehow dulls our senses to notice anything out of the ordinary, or at least acknowledge that anything special is happening right in front of us.  When I flew back to the city after Christmas, Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise were on my plane.  Now, I understand they’re just people, and don’t want to be pestered, but not one other person on the entire flight seemed to care or notice.  And I’m not even a fan of Katie Holmes, but seriously??  I couldn’t even find one person to make eye contact with about it.  Suri was just eating her animal crackers in the front row of first class, and staring people down as we lowly economy seated people boarded – daring us to acknowledge her.  And every single passenger lost that staring contest.  Lost to a six year old. 

This morning I was walking in Times Square and this guy – who was well over six feet tall seemed to glide right past me – dodging the hundreds of pedestrians and cars and moving like butter through the streets.  He was wearing a full-length black canvas trench coat with silver studs, had long dyed hair with blonde roots and tall Doc Martin style boots.  He had questionable facial hair – someday soon I assume he wants it to be a goatee, but today – not so much. Oh, and dark eye liner – lots of it.   What was fascinating to me about this guy – not that he was dressed like that at 6:45am on a Wednesday, or that he wasn’t obviously coming home from the club or a bar – but that no one else seemed to even notice him.  I think that’s amazing.  We are so focused on our own shit that these incredibly interesting people can swim right around us in a sea of ordinary, and in New York City we condition ourselves to not even notice. 

Maybe it’s my mid-western roots.  Maybe I grew up sheltered and boring.  And, there’s no maybe about the fact that I couldn’t be whiter.  But, in my 2013 quest to find reasons to like living in this cesspool of anger and frustration and noise, I think that its people like this vampire man that make this place unique.  Rushing to get somewhere – perhaps out of the sun to lie in a windowless room – perhaps he’s heading back into or out of the matrix, or perhaps he’s going to work at Toys R Us – but this guy made me smile and no one else even noticed him seamlessly bobbing and weaving through the ordinary dregs walking to work. 

Embarrassed

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I watch The Bachelor.  I don't know why - these people seem so vapid and empty, and yet, part of me is jealous of them.  Why can't I be so idiotic to believe that you can in fact fall in love - like the forever and ever love - in a month.  Oh yeah, also with cameras in your face the whole time, all the while competing for said love with two dozen other people.... I mean, that is totally reasonable, right?

Tonight is the finale - and there's a "live" studio audience watching it in LA - and I'm judging them.  I am sitting on the floor of my living room in my pajamas (and by pajamas I mean yoga pants and an old t-shirt - keep in mind I have never done yoga in my entire life) and I am judging them.  Those women who got all gussied up and are sitting in that studio with Chris Whateverhislastnameis and watching this last episode - I am judging them.  How is that fair?  I'm doing the exact same thing.  The only difference is that I am lying about my bizarre fascination with this trash.  I always want to believe that I'd be the kind of person to own whatever lifestyle choices I make - but this one?  I keep hidden.

Oh my god - now they're doing a "check-in" with the audience.... are you f-ing kidding me?  And now someone just made a comment about how Catherine is "26, and has been waiting for this her whole life.... she's totally ready for this".  wtf?  Why am I angry at these people for thinking 26 is on the path to Old-Maiden-Ship?  Sigh... 26 is not old you ass holes.