and she was...

21 february 2001....

and i will still be here where the heart is. where the dreams we've been after all come true. you will find me here where the heart is. i'll wait for you, i'll wait for you.

20 february 2000, 4:45pm...

i have a serious problem with food. i cannot say no. i feel like the girl drink drunk in the stock room, like the lady who spikes her lemonade when no one is looking. except that i shove down two pieces of cake behind the wall of my cubicle, crumbs and grease all over my desk.

it's been pretty obvious for a pretty decent amount of time that this food issue was a problem. and every week it seems i come up with a new scheme to control my eating. i don't like being out of control. i don't like being unhealthy. not to mention the fact that i have to wear these black satin pants to a bachelorette party in new york this weekend that were already tight before the food and booze binge in philly with Eden this past weekend.

so my current plan was a sort of soft-core fast/purge routine for the current four day week. get some of those nasty mimosa and mexican food toxins out of my system while encouraging just a little bit of the fat off of my body. here was the plan: gi-normous fruit smoothie of pinapple, mango, and water for breakfast followed by green tea. vegetable heavy lunch with some grain (today pasta with vegetable sauce). hot chai in the afternoon to keep my ass away from the sweets, and a heavy on the stirfry, light on the wild rice dinner, followed by my rice dreams faux ice cream treat. not even starvation there. not even hard.

still didn't stop me from hogging down two (and a half) pieces of test kitchen rejected apple cake.

3:15pm . . . this is what i learned at lunch: stay away from ben and jerry's vanilla ice cream! it is not real ice cream; it is artificial, alien. it tastes more like the metal tub your ice cream might be made in than ice cream itself. singularly nasty. however, double rainbow and hagen daaz make excellent vanilla ice cream. of course, anyone could guess the luscious goodness that is hagen daaz; but i wasn't familiar with double rainbow (a new england thing?), and i highly recommend it.

we had a taste test at lunch. it was a secret one (ie: not everyone was invited) because it was something good, unlike when we tested basalmic vinegar and chicken stock. but i was one of the invitees, and now my body has been re-toxified, cleansed of its cleanliness, as it were. fruit smoothie and curried lentils right down the drain for some dreamy ice cream, but those tastings are one of the best parts of this job (ie: they're interesting and they don't suck).

7 february 2001, 10:07am

i will never get over the people i get into. or at least, so it seems. have you ever gotten those emails where there are a bunch of questions that you answer; and then you send it to your friends, who then send back their answers to you? i've gotten several, and i always do them because i'm vain enough. so i did that yesterday, and this morning there was a response in my box from an ex-dude (never achieved boyfriend status, although, most unfortunately for my love life, he came closer than anyone in a long time). so, still a friend, he has all his little answers, and the part where he's supposed to say something nice about the person who sent it to him, he says i'm a good kisser (and insightful and generous). but the kisser part. i know this is true (and i'm not trying to be vain here, but people keep telling me so) but to hear it said is weird. especially when the email's going to other people. especially when i don't appear to be totally over him because - even though it all blew up in my face in a rather nasty way and even though i can see so clearly all of the things that would eventually make us incompatible - i haven't found someone i want to be with more. and this is not a good thing. where is my love life? why is it mostly stuck in the past?

anywho, that which i have already managed to accomplish for myself today is making a massive juice smoothie for breakfast a la the juice fast i keep not having a full, uninterrupted week to do. it took me the entire second spice girls album (you know you love it!) to cut up a big ole pineapple and skin a mango, but it has been very good. it will probably over-stimulate some insulin secreeting (sp?) gland because i'm not actually going to drink juice for the rest of the day. i'm going to have curried lentils and wild rice for lunch. but i'm feeling very purified for right now.

6 february 2001, 2:05pm

it is only a hair's breathe minute after lunch, and already, i have misplaced my archives, forgotten to save a spreadsheet, and found some weird phone cable on my desk. okay, the middle parts not true; but it sounds better to have an actual list, and it's not like i don't fuck up spreadsheets everyday anyway. but note the new fresh and sweet-smelling clean page here. i have archived (i hope) everything until now in yet one more attempt to inspire regular writing.

so far today, i am continuing to mess up my job. i swear people only walk in my cube when i'm doing email, and i just keep losing formulas and numbers out of my spreadsheet. really, it's so small; i don't know how anyone expect me to see any order in all those numbers. we have a guy here who was recently hired to be the direct mail manager; he's approximately 4'8", wears his cell phone on his belt, has no idea what he's doing, and has been nicknamed (privately of course) schlumpy. he has more responsibility than i do. it's just ridiculous.

anywho, i'm already being bugged about a bunch of customer orders i need to update. fascinating, isn't this? not what one would think she'd be doing with a background in creative writing and international studies, but, hey, that's okay.