My badly sprained left thumb (volleyball, yet again) has made typing pretty painful last few weeks – the brace doesn’t help. Typos abound; this is pretty much the millionth draft of this post. But from here at the Rams game, at halftime, I feel like there is something I MUST say:

E, if you ever propose to me, in a stadium, under any circumstances, I will say no.

Men of the world, take note.

(But I very badly want to be on a Kiss Cam. Just once. Are those things mutually exclusive? Just wondering.)

I used to get the worst migraines AFTER finals in college. When all academics were said and one for the term, I’d come home and spend 24-36 hours pretty much dead in bed, whimpering in pain. Never before, when I was nervous and cramming facts into my head. Never during, where I was sweating and trying desperately to recall something, ANYTHING that might be right. Nope. Always AFTER the worst was over, it would hit me.

I finished NaNoWriMo at 1:12 am CST on Sunday, November 29th. Didn’t sleep till four, I was so excited. And in the morning, when all the drama  of the deadline was over, the nerve attack hit.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d been off work for five days. What had I forgotten to do? What was coming up Monday? Did I have meetings? Deadlines? Had I remembered to put everything on my to-do list?

I started to feel a bit psycho.

Then I started thinking about my manuscript. Was it even any good? How much did I really like? If I lop out the crap – oh geeze, only 34,000 good words? What if I never finish it? What if I finish it and it sucks – AND what if I finish it and it sucks and I send it to a publisher and they send it back with a “yeah, right” note on a used cocktail napkin?

PANIC. PANIC. PANIC. PANIC.

E was off work on Sunday so I sought comfort with him. But everything he tried to do to relax me just made me more uptight. Footrub suddenly hurt. Back scratching suddenly stung. Head rub made me dizzy. Beer upset my stomach. I even turned down a chicken quesadilla Hot Pocket because I was so queasy.

“GAAAAH!” I screeched at one point. “What is WRONG with me?”

“I don’t know why you’re so nervous about everything today,” he said glumly. “It’s my day off work and I thought we – ”

“I just have so much to do at work tomorrow and I’m afraid I’ll forget something important and I really should have gone in on Wednesday and the newsletter isn’t done and I think I forgot to feed the cat and – ”

“I know how we can relax a bit,” he said, smiling impishly, reaching over to pet my leg.

I jumped. He tried to rub my shoulders and I tensed up. He kissed my neck and it tickled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling back, “I don’t know why I can’t calm down, I’m just so worked up, like it’s physically affecting me and I know it doesn’t make any sense…”

“Baby, I’m just trying to help and you’re so worked up.”

“I know. And I know you’re… well… FRUSTRATED, but I’m just not in the mood to… you know.”

“I know,” he said, and looked away.

So I gave him a hand job.

Because, you know, my hands were shaking anyway. It worked out well for both of us.

Then I got my Klonopin prescription refilled on Monday, and now everyone is fine.

——————————

This is my first TMI Thursday. Not much to it, I know, but I don’t really write much about hand jobs (anymore) so this is the best I can do at present.

My boyfriend and I work pretty much opposite schedules, which means it can be hard for us to find time to spend together, especially time we can spend with just each other and not the group of friends who also want to see him on his off time. Because he’s in the restaurant business, he goes into work in the late afternoon when I’m leaving my desk job, he’s coming home when I’m going to bed, and I’m leaving in the morning when he’s still snoring.

We both have off during the day on Saturday and Sunday (when he is asleep till noon) and on evenings Monday and Tuesday. It’s not a ton of time, and since we don’t live together we don’t even get to see each other for those five minutes that our paths cross during waking hours on the other days. And Monday nights are volleyball with a big group, and Sundays are football with friends, etc.

It sucks a bit.

But as much as I value the time I do get to spend with him, I no longer feel inclined to make that alone time into a big production. Yesterday is a good example:

E: What do you want to do tonight?
Me: Go to a movie?
E: There’s nothing to see.
Me: Dunno then, whatever, we could just chill.
E: No, we should Do Something.

And probably a dozen more times over the course of the evening that we spent doing nothing but watching TV, he repeated “we should go Do Something” even though we couldn’t think of anything to do.

I don’t care if we don’t Do Something every time we hang out. I like hanging out and watching TV with him, not leaving the house, not having deep, meaningful discussions, not spending a bunch of money. I like sitting on the couch and reading while he holds my feet at the other end and watches something I’m not interested in.

I can appreciate more that casual time is still important time and we don’t need to Do Something to make our limited time together into something meaningful. I think it’s sweet that he wants to do things for me and so on, but I’m tired of the push to make things into a production. Sometimes it makes me feel like we’re failing to make the best of our time, and that’s frustrating.

When we’ve been married for a zillion years, remind me of this post and I’ll long for the days when he wanted everything to be special bonding time. But for now…

Honey, can we just SIT DOWN for awhile? Just you and me? Let’s eat what’s already in the house and watch a movie one of us owns or something on TV. Let’s not do anything tonight.

That last post, the happy one about the awesomeness of the new apartment?

It went a bit downhill from there.

It’s not the apartment itself, really, just the moving process and every snafu, glitch, and bump in the road for the last two weeks. I’ve been intentionally holding out on blogging these experiences because I was Little Miss Bitchy McNegative pretty much 24/7 and I didn’t want this to become my complaint platform. Mama said if you don’t have something nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all.*

So I whined to E instead, as he is required by terms of the boyfriend contract to listen and comfort and carry heavy things.

But the house sale is closed and everything is moved, and I’ve been looking for the positive side of these things that have caused me so much stress. I might write later about the whole experience, including the negatives,  when I can laugh about them and not just whine and complain. But there have been a few real blessings in disguise and I’m focusing on those right now on the slow journey back to sanity.

I locked myself out of the new apartment.

On Day One, I found myself in the back stairwell of the four-flat, with no house keys, car keys, or cell phone. How was I supposed to know the back door would immediately latch behind me? I walked out to the front yard and pondered my second floor balcony. If I could get up there, I could get in through the unlocked screen door. The grade of the yard rendered my six-foot ladder useless, and the overhang of the balcony made a climb pretty much impossible for me. Damn.

I knocked on my second-floor neighbor’s door. Her balcony is separated from mine by a jumpable fence, so I thought I could just go through there. And she wasn’t home.

So I was standing dumbly on the sidewalk, looking up and wondering if the corner shop down the street would let me use their phone to call a locksmith, when a couple that looked like they’d just stepped out of an REI catalog stepped out of the house next door to take their huge, friendly dog for a walk.

We got to chatting and I asked them if they knew of a locksmith or would be willing to let me use their phone. And good god, the guy half of the couple took off down the driveway and retrieved a freaking fireman’s ladder from their garage while the giant dog tried to make friends with me by rubbing up on my legs like a cat and almost knocking me over.

So up I went, and promised them cookies as soon as I find my baking stuff in the mountain of boxes. It was a hell of a way to meet neighbors, but it’s nice to find out that you live near such good people. And a massive dog.

The landlords didn’t paint the walls.

There was a wee misunderstanding about that. During the walk-through, I commented about the state of the walls and that they would need to be re-painted and I would like colors. The landlord told me to pick out my colors from Sherwin Williams and she’d take care of it.

She meant she’d take care of getting me the paint at their hefty discount.

I now have four very large buckets in my study and I was MAAAAAD.

The last thing I wanted to worry about with all the moving craziness was having to paint every room in a whole apartment. I felt gypped.

The blessing in disguise is that I’ve looked and looked at these rooms as I’ve been setting things up, and the more I ponder my decorating, the more I want to flip-flop some of the colors from their original plans. Blue in the living room and bathroom now, yellow in the kitchen and hall instead of vice versa.

So I’ll have to work a little, but it’s not like I don’t know how to paint. And now it will be the way I really want it.

———————

*Like I REALLY abide by that, right?

It’s official: I do not fit into any of my dressy dress pants. AGAIN. This is the second round I’ve outgrown in 12 months. I have exactly two pairs of pants that I can wear to work, both casual chinos that do not make me look important. This is unacceptable.

The most common place for a woman to gain weight is around her hips and thighs. This is also the unhealthiest place for her to gain weight. And it’s the ONLY place I’ve gained weight, resulting in a curiously pear-shaped frame that’s still skinny on the top (sigh) and towards the ankles.

Even if my pants did fit – and even if I had oodles of money to buy new pants and not worry about that anymore – I know I’ve developed a pretty unhealthy lifestyle lately. I eat crappy food and drink beer and god knows I don’t exercise. The fact that I’ve gained 25 pounds in the last year and a half is a red flag – something about my body is changing, so something about my lifestyle must change too, right? Many people who are really overweight got that way because they didn’t attack the problem when it was manageable. I don’t feel like I’m in danger of becoming obese… but who thinks that when they’re still pretty close to their healthy weight range?

Uh, no one.

So we eat and eat and sit on our couches and barstools and gain just one more pound at a time. I’ve rolled with the good metabolism for long enough; now my luck is wearing off and my once rock-solid abs are hiding under a little layer of mush.

E and I have decided to make some changes together. He’s a lot like me, habit-wise: beer and crap food and laziness. We play volleyball and walk to and from the bars for exercise. So we have decided:

• Light beer only from now on. We will accomplish this by sharing a pitcher of Bud Light so neither of us is tempted to make that second glass a Budweiser (him) or a Landshark (me).
• Take walks together. Ride the bike (him only, because I can’t – bad knee).
• Eat grilled chicken strips instead of fried (seriously, we eat a lot of chicken strips so this is huge).
• Buy Lean Pockets instead of Hot Pockets. Stock the house with healthier snacks overall.
• Find a new vegetable to like AND EAT IT.

He’s also said he won’t go through the free buffet at the Very Nice Restaurant more than once per shift. I’ve added a few little things of my own too. I know I don’t really need to lose much weight (10 pounds would make me happy and put me in a healthy-weight range) but I do need to stop being such a sedentary bum. I’ve always been kind of a slacker in the exercise department and for twenty-eight years I’ve gotten away with it because that’s how my family rolls. We start off skinny, sometimes too skinny, and it’s not the Freshman Fifteen but the late twenties that pack ‘em on. Add that to the family history of high blood pressure (check), weight gain (check) and high cholesterol (safe so far) and it’s pretty clear that the time for change is now.

I don’t want to end up struggling to lose 50 or 60 pounds down the road. I know that if I do better now, I probably will never have to do that.

So I am going to…

• Clip on that iPod-looking pedometer from the Wal-Mart swag bag at BlogHer and make sure I walk at least 2 miles per day.
• Walk to and from the work parking garage as long as it is not raining and I am not wearing dress shoes.
• Look at books about healthier eating habits that are not super-restrictive, like the F-Factor Diet and the Small Changes, Big Results method. Then I will try to do those things.
• Not eat candy.
• Get some of those Skechers Shape-Ups so I can tone my muscles more as I walk AND improve my posture and my abs. They’re supposed to be easier on my bad knee too. (I will keep you posted on how those work out.)

Today I weigh 137 pounds, top of the healthy range for my five feet and three and a half inches. It ends here. “Operation PANTS” has begun.

Got any tips for a lazy girl who doesn’t like vegetables and can’t afford a trainer?