Hot People See the Light

The last few days have been kind of a life clean-up in the aftermath of my major projects for the spring season. January to the end of May have been a series one-thing-after-another in both work and life. When I was in university, this after-the-crazy-subsides time was usually followed by a few weeks of listless depression and total lack of motivation in finding a summer job.

Well...the job keeps going (although, some days I wonder; I often take bets on Thursday for how many people booked on Friday will actually show up), so that's one problem solved. But last year, the sads had definitely set in around this time. So far this year, it hasn't happened.

So what's different?

Well...I think an obvious answer is the fact that I'm pretty comfortably attached right now. My lack of attachment was a source of major concern for me just about a year ago. But...a year ago, I kinda thought I was attached. Plus I really don't feel like it would be truthful to say that my lack of sads is entirely dependent on my being in a comfortable relationship. But it certainly helps.

No, I think that despite the fact that I've not been to the gym in an innumerable quantity of days, and despite the fact that I've not seriously worn makeup on a regular basis since...well, ever (how do people do it? I JUST DON'T HAVE TIME EVERY MORNING), I just feel more comfortable in my skin. When I first started this blog, I didn't know who I was. Without that knowledge, I couldn't really settle comfortably on anything or anyone. And I'm pretty sure that's where the sads came from. In the last year, I've found things I'm comfortable doing, and people I'm comfortable doing them with. It's awesome.

It's so awesome, I'm even doing a few things I'm not totally comfortable with. I played softball for the first time last week since I was in junior high. It went...well, about as well as softball did WHEN I was in junior high. So...pretty poorly. BUT, despite a little bit of pre-game anxiety, I always had in the back of my mind that the people I was playing with weren't hanging out with me because of my baseball skills but because they kinda want to hang out with me. And for the first time in my life, I don't doubt this (all the time).

Sure, I still have (many) moments of personality anxiety. And sometimes they're hilarious. And don't worry - you'll still get a full report of those activities. So stay tuned, kids.

***In other news, though I haven't learned to play guitar or be ab-tastic, I did have a counselling session with a client the other day almost entirely in (not entirely grammatically correct) French. Hurray me!

Hot People Find The Fire

I was supposed to go to the gym today. I have decided that I will not be doing so. Today was crap. So was half of yesterday, actually.

But it makes me worried. It doesn't seem to take much for me to want avoid expending some energy. Finding your motivation in February is difficult. There's no sun, and it's effing cold here. Back in September I had glorious notions that I'd be skiing and snowshoeing and skating...but now I mostly just want to curl up under a blanket and drink milky tea. In fact, if I could skip work to do that, that'd be even better.

So...how do I make sure that this isn't a permanent state of affairs? Well...I don't really know. But I've got a pretty good idea. Way back in September, when I was all dreamy about what a Great Canadian Winter life I'd be leading, I took some pictures of myself. They were meant to be "before" comparison pictures to illustrate exactly how successful I'd been with Plan Abtastic. Then, of course, that plan was an epic failure. I took another one today...an "after" shot...for comparison. Only, instead of the "after" meaning "after lots of exercise and sensible eating", it means "after overcommitting myself, being more or less sedentary, and eating a steady diet of microwave dinners, pizza, subway and candy for breakfast".

Before
























After











Now, I don't want to get into the fine details of the analysis of exactly what's happened physically. And I'm sure my eyes are exaggerating the differences between the two pictures, but I think we can agree that one is preferable to the other. And it's not the "After" shot. In fact, I don't think the jeans I'm wearing in the before shot even fit anymore. But THIS. IS. MOTIVATING. This happened over a matter of months, and, frankly, it makes me frightened about what a year (or more) could do.

Now, I know I'm not supposed to be motivated by fear. I've been to several seminars given by highly respected behaviour change specialists suggesting that it's a bad idea to use fear to get people to do stuff. But I'm pretty sure the only thing that's going to work is to burn these pictures onto the insides of my eyelids and resolve to go. That's the only fire that's going to get me there.


...but not today. Today was crap.

Hot People Contain Their Glee

First of all, I'm learning that not a lot of heterosexual males around these parts share my devotion to that television show. Alas, I indulge that guilty pleasure alone, ensconced in the comfort of a throw blanket in my office staring, eyes-wide, at my computer screen.

But that's not really what I mean. I had a date last night (this time I KNOW it was a date). I was pretty effing excited about a. the date in general...cuz...I mean, well, you know how it's been, and b. the person with whom I was having the date. He's pretty cute. And pretty sweet. And I'm pretty sure the date went really well. And...well, see here's the problem.

I am having a REALLY hard time playing it cool. I feel as though my previous experience hasn't really prepared me for this "dating" thing. Having had one major relationship spanning ages 20-25, much of my formative dating years were missed. And that relationship began kind of like this: First, we didn't know each other. Then we knew each other and we were (more-or-less) in a relationship. There wasn't really that getting-to-know-you dating period where you know you like each other but you don't spend every waking minute together, which is where I'm pretty sure I am now. Since that relationship ended, sure, I've had dates, but since I think REALLY highly of myself and have super high standards (maybe THAT's why I'm still single) I really just wanted those dates to be over and never happen again. So I can't even draw from previous fledgling dating experience because it nearly always flopped from the first moment.

I'm also a little concerned about the hotness goal now. I've been as much as told that I've "attained hotness," but as I've said before, I don't feel really good about deciding that I've reached a goal because someone (even a boy I really like) else told me I'd done it. That's not to say I didn't REALLY enjoy hearing it, but I think you know what I mean.

As a result, I'm pretty much totally at a loss. I am simultaneously deliriously happy, terrified, tentative and reckless. And I'd really like all those feelings to ensconce themselves within my psyche in a manner similar to my ensconcement of myself for private Glee viewings. I think they're failing at this.

Hot People Don't Have Crushed Souls or Phantom Appendages

Warning: the following is going to get pretty emo pretty quickly.

Ok - life is a disaster again. Complete and utter crap. While I could handle it if it was just one of the two, having both of the following problems at the same time is uber-painful. Uber.

A. I hate my job. It eats my soul.

I guess I haven't really talked much about my job here, except that I have one. I am a dietetic intern, which means that one day, I'll be a nutritionist. If you don't think I'm crazy enough to want a job telling people how to eat food they don't like, you might be convinced of my craziness when you learn that to qualify as a nutritionist, you must complete 40 weeks of unpaid internship. UNPAID. I'm on my last stint of this at the moment and things are starting to get a little bumpy.

Right now, my actual job description is to complete projects given to me by my supervisor which will increase the efficiency, profitability and social capital of the retail and patient food services at a local hospital. Or rather, find ways of squeezing money out of sick people, hardworking healthcare professionals and taxpayers while at the same time giving them an artificial warm and fuzzy feeling about us. Right now, my functional job description is to do whatever type of kitchen-bitch-work this hilariously understaffed department needs done. This means that instead of doing projects that make me feel like a bad person, I'm pushing trays covered with the food scraps of swine flu patients through a dishwashing machine. So fulfilling. And, of course, there's that hairnet I've grown so attached to.

None of this would be so bad if my boss actually made me feel like I'm doing a good job at any of it. She has two qualities that make me feel like a super-failure pretty much every day. First of all, she handily neglects to inform me of important information regarding the operations of the kitchen or the deadlines by which she would like things completed. The obvious answer to this is to ask a many questions as possible, but when you don't know what you don't know, this gets kind of difficult. It also often results in my being caught having left something out of my project reports because I didn't know that she was expecting its inclusion. Secondly, she provides me with NO feedback unless something is abhorrent to her. I'm sure I'm doing SOME things right, but I'll be damned if I know which things they are.

B. Love hurts.

Recent epiphany: I can't hack this whole "casual" thing. It just makes me so unbearably emo.

After meeting someone I kind of dig, my usual thought process is as follows:

"This is great! No commitments or expectations. This is just going to be casual and won't lead to anything. It'll totally be fun."

After saying goodbye to someone I kind of dig, the thought process has changed slightly:

"That was totally fun, but it was only casual and didn't lead to anything. Now there aren't any commitments or expectations...great."

Of course, I never tell HIM that's how I feel.

In conclusion, I'm totally crazy. And lame. I don't know how I do this to myself, but I form ridiculous emotional attachments to men that give NO indication of wanting to be attached to me (clarification: I mean ridiculous insofar as I've made an attachment. I do not mean ridiculous as in ridiculously emotional, read: stalkerish). This might have something to do with me expressing a desire for nothing more than casual from the outset. Possibly.

A solution-focused person would tell me that the easy mitigation of this problem IS to tell the dude how I feel...but it seems that, nearly every time, I've chosen perfectly to make this effort futile as well. They almost ALWAYS live in a city several hours away from me and (I find out AFTER all offending deeds have been completed) have possible (their words) or suspected (my words) wives or girlfriends, and sometimes fake phone numbers. Although nearly EVERY movie I've ever seen suggests to me that they leave their terrible (ok - probably not actually true) ladies for the star of the show (clearly, this is me), I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be some kind of fantasy created by the film industry to keep women like me unbalanced (see: above contention that perfectly innocent and likely quite lovely girlfriends are terrible) and docile (see: the fact that I do this to myself ALL THE EFFING TIME). They almost always seem to be musicians too, but I think that's another issue altogether.

The result is that I spend weeks (!) being sad about how this completely one-sided relationship doesn't have a B-side, vainly hoping for some kind of contact, because, you know, it might work out between us eventually...see? I don't even believe myself.

In conclusion, I am THIS close to setting up an online dating profile. While some might say this is the last refuge of the desperate and sad, at least everyone's looking for the same thing on those sites (right?), and anyway, I think I've more or less illustrated my desperate sadness in the last several paragraphs. And if those E-Harmony commercials are to be believed, ALL the subscribers are impossibly good-looking. Score! Also, I'm pretty sure venturing into the world of online dating opens up a whole crapload of opportunity for blog-worthy retardedness.

Hot People Definitely Don't Go Cougar Clubbing

While there's something to be said for being one of the five prettiest girls at the club, sometimes it just doesn't mean that much.

For example, last night my roommate and I were invited out by a woman nearly twice our age to go out with some of her friends. My roommate unknowingly accepted an invitation out to the club because she thought she was being invited for dinner...not one to pass up free food, she accepted before she knew what she was getting into. Since we've been pretty much caged up in our apartments for the last few weeks, I thought it would be fun to tag along anyway...you know, see the sights of our new city.

Ok, so I should start off by letting you know that we were looking pretty fine (I think so anyway...). Observe. I was pretty proud of my outfit choice and my continued makeup skillz (note my use of blending brush in this gratuitously narcissistic self-portrait)
Don't I look intense? Yeah...but anyway, I understand that I may not look hot just yet by many people's standards, but you really just have to understand where we were. First, meet our chaperone.
We were greeted first by her mushroom cloud of perfume (I say mushroom cloud because it was strong enough to knock us over when we opened the door to her car), then by her delightful hairdo. From this angle it looks almost reasonable, but let me tell you, from the back view you can see that parts of it stand a full four inches above her head. FOUR INCHES!!! It was amazing to behold...not to mention nearly impossible to smother my gleeful laughter at beholding it. She, and she alone, must be the driving force behind Vidal Sassoon's continued success in the world of hairspray.

Upon realizing who we were spending our evening with, I decided that there was really nothing for it but to get completely drunk'd. This may have been my greatest mistake. By the time we got in the cars to go from our hostess' fine abode (it really was quite nice) to "the club" I'm pretty sure walking (let alone anything that might involve any sort of gross motor skill) was more or less out of the question.

I said at the beginning that we were among the five hottest people in the bar. I think your introduction to my hostess has put that into perspective, but if it does not, perhaps the fact that the result of me trying to look sexy (at least I think that's what I'm trying to do here...the two drinks in one hand really adds to my appeal, no?) had only negligible effect on my standings in the hotness rankings.

That being said, I learned many things last night.

1. The DJs here will play anything you want if you first bait them about how the DJs where you're from do it better, then subsequently provide them with hugs (I'm not really sure that EVERY hug was worth the songs he played).

2. The stripper pole is harder to use than hoe-bags in shresses make it seem.

3. Even if you dance with the best looking single guy in the club, it doesn't really count for much if he's clad head-to-toe in denim. (I actually also danced with another man who was much better looking, but my roommate was too intoxicated to use my camera properly, so unfortunately, no record was kept of that delightful encounter). I'm not sure what we're doing here...

4. ALWAYS have a quarter in your pocket for when shit gets real (or in this case, you start to realize that you're not only among the prettiest, you're actually also among the youngest people around, by a sizeable margin). It's also helpful to remember a cab number or two.

So in conclusion, our first night on the town was a moderate success, but I think we'll try somewhere a little more age appropriate next time...and possibly will forego hearing Flo Rida's "Get Low" if it means I can keep my hugs to myself.