sometimes, new year's resolution = bad

subtitle "Soup 1, Kerry 0"

so as i may have discussed with some or most you (all 3 of you who read this) part of my new year's resolution was to take better care of myself and do all sorts of other good things for me. part of this was to stop being wasteful. by this i mean stop wasting money, stop wasting time, stop wasting everything, which somehow came to include food.

i realized that every week when trash day comes around, i'm *piling* food from my fridge into the trash and it started to get to me and make me feel bad. you know, a) i paid for that, b) people are starving somewhere and c)well there really is no c, but i hate a 2 item list. anyway, so i decided i would start eating more leftovers, stop cooking so damn much stuff at once, and try to be better about making sure i wasn't being totally horridly wasteful.

...it sort of turned into this game of "is this too old to eat?", which is what is currently passing for adventure in the exciting drama filled world of project management and 60 hour work weeks. i've gotten pretty bold and pretty creative, making dinner out of shit i never would have touched previously, all in the name of eliminating prodigality from my life.

tuesday night, i made a very bad judgement call. you know as time goes on, you want to test your limits, see if you can beat your own record, go further than you have before. in this spirit i played the "is this too old to eat" game with what could quite possibly be the oldest thing i've ever eaten- definitely never eaten anything older that i know of. i had made some vegetable soup, sometime last week-ish. i'm not really sure when, but i vaguely think it was sunday when i got home from boston as an attempt to remedy the stomach problems that had plagued me for the length of my aruba trip (eat the soup and be healed. praise be). so assuming it was that day (i'm pretty sure of this), that made my soup roughly 10 days old as of tuesday. i had made it, eaten some sunday and monday, and then pushed it to the back of the fridge and forgotten about it for a week. so i found it this tuesday and there was a ton left- just too much to throw out in good conscience. i felt awful about having forgotten it and i thought it over carefully and decided that there was no meat in it so i probably had some sort of grace period with being able to eat it. it also occurred to me, and i have no idea why this made sense at the time, that having put in extra jalapenos when i made it somehow ensured that germs would not be able to survive. honestly, i have no idea where that one came from, but i totally fell for it. i am a master of self delusion and this is no exception.

so i heated it for a good long while on the stove - just in case - got me a spoon and sat down and played "is this soup too old to eat?" it tasted ok, so i felt pretty ok going for it and i decided that yeah, the soup might have a shelf life of 10 days ish, which was very exciting. so exciting i had a second bowl. yeah. you know where this is going.

so as of yesterday at about 10 am i began to sense that something wasn't right. there was a little rumble in the bronx going on, all sorts of strange noises began issuing forth from my tummy and i began to wonder if playing this game with the soup had been the best decision i could have made. throughout the afternoon, this only got worst until it became clear that the noise inside me was my GI system sending me a resounding "YES" to the question of whether the soup had been too old. as the day went on, it also began to sound like the soup was saying "let me the fuck outta here!!! NOW"

so. yesterday afternoon, evening, night, late night: all earmarked by frequent, repeated trips to el bano. i won't go into detail, we've all been there.

i was supposed to have a date last night. a nice date. dinner and dancing, ooh la la; but no. i decided it best not to risk having something Really Bad happen on the dance floor, and in front of Joe. there were nightmare scenarios running through my head about how this could play out and i decided to cancel- clearly luck is not on my side this week so why push it? i didn't want to tell him the truth (we've only had one date and we're just not "there" yet) so i opted to do that thing where you make 2 unrelated statements that when strung together intimate a 3rd thing, which may or may not be true but you didn't exactly say it so you're not exactly a liar. i just didn't know what else to do. after talking to him, we had tossed around the idea of going out tonight, but i am STILL ILLIN'. i had 3 meetings this morning, a 6, a 7 and an 8 and all 3 hours were painful and nervewracking (or stimulating and exciting if you're in sales) because a) the soup is now loudly kicking and screaming to get out so sitting next to me is all like "gurgle gurgle weeeeeeeeeeeahhhhh" from my belly, b)they were my meetings, so i was in the hot seat and couldn't exactly run out every 5 minutes like i needed to and c) i still don't like 2 item lists. it may have been the most difficult thing i have ever done, keeping my shit together (no pun intended) in this meetings. where there's a will there's a way, at least this morning there was.

side note: i have to wonder what the people in the meetings thought. they were in small rooms. what could they hear, is it just me with the telltale heart (only intestines) who hears the noises? did my facial contortions, or tightly clenched jaw and distant stare give me away? could they tell i was sweating?
i may never know.

to get back on track:
i'm back home now, and marginally more comfortable in my fleece pants and own house but what to do about tonight?? i can make no better case for going out than i could yesterday, but i don't want to cancel on him 2 nights in a row. i know there's medications for this, but i truly fear for what could happen if i trap the soup in my intestines by means chemical or otherwise. i mean if it's tearing up the joint on it's way out, what would it do if it had time to plot?!

Q) how long can old soup stay mad at you?
A) more than 24 hours, that's all i know so far.

i'm seriously beginning to think i might have caught cholera or something - i have been spending an awful lot of time around the hospital lately - but this can not go on. i'm seriously debating getting some sandwich baggies, straws and duct tape and just making myself an IV setup, for which i would use old coat hangers bent together to be the metal wheelie thing to keep the bag up high. i've been trying to stay hydrated, and i feel good about the amount of exercise i'm getting, since my bathroom is upstairs, but i really wanted to go on this date. i'm torn between just coming clean (which carries the fear that he would head for the hills, because really how much information is too much and am i capable of stopping before then) and continuing on with last night's implied need to be here. i am also (because i live on the edge, because i am a rebel, a loner, a wildwoman) still thinking about going for it and hanging out with him tonight. it's just that dinner and dancing is also an option tonight, and there's 1000 what if's going through my head.

what if "something bad" happens (god forbid) while i'm dancing, or what if i laugh too hard and you know, "something bad" happens. say it happens and i am able to make it to the restroom, how long would i be in there, what if there was a line, etc and so on. i know in my brain that i should not be going out tonight, but i also knew that the soup was probably too old - you see this pattern? logical mind knows a bad idea when they see one (*cough* adam *cough*), but stubborn brains says "i can figure this out. this could totally work" (*cough* trying to tow my own car using a dog leash, and with noone inside to brake the damn thing *cough*) you'd think that even sitting here and re-reading everything i've written would be enough to convince me that i should stay home (i've thought that oh, about 12 times today on my way to or from the bathroom) but then there goes the other side of me saying "no, what you need to do to make this work is this..." commence all sorts of whispering to myself, false logistics that i cling to as if they make any sense, and the fascinating dance of the bad decision begins again.

the only thing that might actually keep me here is the knowledge of exactly HOW bad it could be if it's bad. there's some things you can not come back from as someone who's supposed to be sexy. G-n-L* is one of them. bah. will it stop me though? who can say...

*G-n-L is a phrase that was coined by a man i used to work with. it stands for gambling and losing and basically means when you think you have to fart, or might have to poo, so you take the gamble and try to fart- and lose. do the math, i'm not spelling it all out for you, yuck.

sigh.... i still have time to think about it. maybe i'll be better by 5. right?

btw, my new new year's resolution is to throw everything away. i don't eat leftovers any more. ha!