Gawk-her

I am not a celebrity gawker.  The main reason being that in my fourteen years as a New Yorker, my brushes with the glitterati have been limited to spotting that guy who played Paulie in the Rocky series.  Yeah, I’m not even going to look up his real name on IMDB because really, would you recognize it if I told you?  I spotted Jeannine Garofalo coming out of Crunch Gym several years ago.  Oh yeah, and once, I was annoyed by Jim Carrey who can’t seem to cut the over-the-top-aren’t-I-funny-schtick even when the cameras aren’t rolling.  Until today, my friends, my celeb run-ins have been strictly B-list.*

There was that one time I was Val Kilmer’s sex slave flight attendant and served him drinks and dinner at 40,000 feet.  But my flight attendant celebrity sightings don’t count.  I’m talking about walking down the streets of NYC.  My streets. 

But today, today I was a gawker.  Today, Dingo Girl and I stalked Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.  Dingo Girl and I rounded a corner and there was Kurt in all his rugged handsomeness and Goldie in all her Goldiness.  Being a New Yorker I played it cool and acted all unimpressed while inwardly I was doing cartwheels and back flips.  Note that, had I decided to show my inward glee outwardly by actually performing a cartwheel or back flip, this blog entry would be about that miracle or, more likely, my subsequent visit to the emergency room.  Sorry Kurt and Goldie. 

Dingo Girl was either truly unimpressed or intent on helping me to maintain my façade of normalcy by stopping to pee every five feet.  Although I take my camera everywhere, I just couldn’t bring myself to snap a picture of them.  They were trying to enjoy a beautiful day in the city and I was trying to maintain my masquerade as a cosmopolitan city girl. I think Dingo Girl pulled it off better than I did. But, because I’m all about pleasing you, I did find a picture someone else took of them today.  Readers reader Mom, meet my friend Google Maps.  Can you see Kurt and Goldie? 

*As in: Please be gone; I can’t believe someone would pay to see them; I am befuddled that they have managed to make a career of this; etc.

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The Last Supper

I don’t know how it happened, one minute I was emailing my friend Wheaties about our upcoming trip to Philly and the next I was committing myself to run a marathon with her in November.  “With” should be translated to mean, we’ll both be running on the same continent.  See, Wheaties has been a marathoner and triathlete for years.  She runs, bikes, and swims — for fun!  The only running I do is for the subway and I consider life sweet if I’m swimming in a good bottle of Pinot Noir by the end of the evening.  As for bikes, I haven’t ridden one in years.  Biking in NYC is out of the question unless you’re a courier.  NYC couriers have balls of steel.  It may make sitting on their bikes a bit uncomfortable but it also enables them to dart between buses and cars within an ass hair of death without batting an eye. 

With all this in mind, the thought that once the race started I would actually be within shouting distance of Wheaties is laughable.  But, the thought that I could actually train for and run a marathon by November appealed to me.  As did the marathon location: Florence, Italy!  Yes, the marathon is in Florence, Italy.  If that’s not motivation to get off my ass then you really need to just stick a feeding tube down my throat and turn me over every two hours so that I don’t get bed sores.

On Saturday, I went to Barnes and Noble and got a great book on training for marathons.  I then headed to Paragon Sporting Goods, the mecca for all things athletic in NYC.  The crowds were insane and intimidating.  All the customers seemed to know exactly what they were looking for and did not mind pushing me aside to get it.  And then, a ray of light from heaven showed me the way.  His name was Carlos.  Carlos was fantastic!  I told him my goal (26 miles through the beauty of Florence) and my current level of activity (pub crawls through Little Italy).  After trying on at least eleven pairs of shoes, I finally settled on the white and blue Saucony Progrid Guide.  They feel like air.  Or at least as if my feet have wings.  I am Mercury!  If I don’t run the marathon, I can at least deliver flowers for FTD.  Carlos gave me some running pointers and I was on my way.  It was a gorgeous day and, on my way home as I strolled through the farmers market in Union Square smelling the flowers and avoiding the temptation of home baked goods, I felt that anything was possible — even running a marathon. 

Later that evening, Mr. Dingo suggested that we go out for my last calorie-laden, trans-fat saturated, no holds barred meal.  We went to Brother Jimmy’s.  Yes, there are better places for BBQ in NYC but Brother Jimmy’s is located a few blocks away from the real culinary goal of the evening — Cold Stone Creamery.  Brother Jimmy’s is a loud, crowded, twenty-something hang-out but, when the smorgasbord we ordered appeared, all the noise faded into the distance.  It was like a romantic movie scene where the lovers spy each other and the focus is narrowed to their dreamy faces as everything around the edges gets all fuzzy and out of focus.  It took me a few seconds to realize the Mr. Dingo was talking to me, “Dingo.  Dingo!  We’re supposed to share that appetizer platter!” Spoil sport.  Take a look at this and tell me: is there enough for two people?!?

There was this weird fire thingy in the middle.  I don’t know what it was for.  Mr. Dingo suggested that it was placed there to prevent me from reaching over and taking his share of the food.  Good idea, that. 

I was full, distended tummy full, by the time we finished the appetizers.  When the entrees came I made an attempt to eat, knowing that in a few days I would be looking back at this meal with longing.  I also had to save room for Cold Stone’s Cake Batter Ice Cream.  I made a valiant effort to eat but ended up with a rather large doggy bag to take home to Dingo Girl.

Walking to Cold Stone after that meal was painful.  I felt like Violet Beauregarde after eating Willy Wonka’s Three-Course Dinner Gum.  Just roll this ol’ blueberry down the street, Mr. Dingo!  My tummy hurt.  I think I got stretch marks from all the BBQ I ate.  Cold Stone was delish but I couldn’t finish.  My stretch marks got stretch marks.  Yes, it was an exercise in gluttony but at least it was exercise, right?

I know that the next few months will test my determination, stamina, endurance, and Mr. Dingo.  Wheaties is going to help me train via internet and I hope that, by the time we meet in Philly this May, I’ll be able to run a few miles with her.  One of my biggest hurdles will be overcoming my mental quirks.  I tend to take on too much but become frustrated when I just can’t seem to do everything at my top form, and then I grow discouraged and disappointed in myself.  Oh boy, is it fun to live with me then!  It’s like a constant state of PMS.  Mr. Dingo, however, is a trooper.  I am sure that his preparation for this Florence marathon will consist of lots of wine and whine — and I think you know who’s doing the latter. 

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Finding My Chi

I am going to a yoga class this morning.  I’ve been doing yoga off and on for the past several years — more off than on due to time constraints, but I love how regular practice makes me feel.  I also love the non-competitiveness of yoga.  A competitive person by nature, yoga is not a level playing field in which I can one day hope to “win.” I am not, and will never be, one of those women who can put her leg behind her head — Mr. Dingo has made peace with that — but in the classes I’ve attended, it’s feeling good in your own skin that is cause for celebration and not whether you can braid your hair with your toes.

I am looking forward to starting yoga again.  The years and calcification are catching up to me.  I move with all the stiffness of a zombie; not one of those new fangled George Romero Dawn of the Dead (2004) fast-moving zombies but one of the Night of the Living Dead (1976) ghouls — arms fully extended, knees locked.  I’m too young for this stiffness but I’ve always been this way.  At five years old, while other girls were aspiring to be the next Nadia Comaneci (yes, I’m that old) or starring in Swan Lake, my dance instructor told my mom that, “Dingo’s talents lie in other areas.” She did not specify exactly what those other areas were.  Although Mom tried to hide it, I could tell she was crushed.  Not because she had the stage mother aspirations of the other moms at my dance studio, but because she loved making the costumes for my dance recitals.  She truly missed her calling.  Mom belongs in NYC making costumes for Broadway.  Still, there were days in grade school when I thought that going to school dressed as a pirate right down to the eye patch was a bit much.  And, in retrospect, my mom standing in the hall for costume changes — going, for instance, from the Cat in the Hat for English to a pilgrim for History — now does seem excessive.

Years later I discovered yoga.  At that point it wasn’t that I wanted to look like a Degas portrait as much as I wanted to be able to bend over and tie my shoes without pulling a muscle.  Yoga was incredible.  It took me months to gain flexibility but my body felt good.  I felt good.  So I’m off to the yoga studio this morning.  If I haven’t sprained my fingers or torn a ligament, I will give you an update later this evening or tomorrow.

For now, meditate on the peaceful expression of the Yoga Frog gracefully executing Tree Pose on my terrace.

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Me and My Peeps

Mr. Dingo left for a week-long business trip.  In Miami.  Yes, Miami.  I’m not feeling too bad for him.  It’s 40 degrees here.  It’s in the mid-70s in Miami.  Yeah, not feeling for you Mr. Dingo.  Part of me wanted to make this trip with him, but the other part of me, the part that can’t fit into my sassy pink bikini, is glad that I don’t have to put my ass-ets on display right now.  Mr. Dingo is a fantastic cook.  When he’s gone my dining options are limited to salads and sandwiches.  This is the perfect time to prepare for our trip to Vegas.  I’m going to use this week of salad and sandwiches to kick start my healthy living plan.  You know, the plan I talked about on Sunday.  You did read Sunday’s post didn’t you?  No?  Okay, I’ll give you a few minutes to scroll down and read it.

…Your’re back.  That was quick. Okay, so as part of my healthy living plan I’m cutting back on the sweets.  I’ve got a mad sweet tooth.  In the interest of full disclosure, Mr. Dingo left a Snickers Bar on his desk.  I snickered as I ate it.  But that’s it, I promise.  No more sweets.  Except for Peeps.  I love Peeps.  Those damn yellow chicks are sugary, marshmallowy, teeth-aching goodness.  Not only has the calendar screwed up my sleep with Daylight Savings Time, but it’s placed Easter and my healthy living plan in direct confrontation.  Good v. Evil.  Just between you and me, Satan would have had an easier time tempting Jesus in the wilderness if he had just offered him some Peeps. 

To thwart the confectionary allure of yellow chicks and pink bunnies, I stocked up on fruits and veggies yesterday.  I may pick at the fruit but I’m pretty confident that the carrots and red peppers will live to be an overripe old age in my rotter.  Admit it; you have a rotter in your fridge as well.  Oh, the Maytag and Kenmore PR machine may call it a “crisper”, but we all know that once those veggies hit that drawer, they never see the light of day.

I’ve also incorporated exercise into my healthy living plan.  I had to pick my dropped jaw off the floor at least one hundred times while watching High School Reunion.  That’ll do wonders for the abs.  Have you seen this train wreck show?  In a nutshell, fifteen high school stereotypes (the jock, the outcast, the spoiled girl, the popular girl, etc) are plucked from the 1987 class of a Dallas, Texas high school and whisked away to a beautiful mansion in Hawaii.  Drama ensues.  The drama is about as manufactured as my Peeps and not nearly as tasty.  You can click here if you want to know more but believe me, you don’t. 

What makes people attend their high school reunions?  I know I went to mine just to show people how much I had changed from the skinny, insecure, big-haired, brainiac they knew.  Isn’t that a dumb reason to spend two hundred dollars on a dress, more bucks on a plane ticket, and a sleepless night?  Why in the world did I care about the opinions of people I hadn’t seen in 10 years a long time?  I didn’t love high school but I didn’t hate it either.  I was definitely glad to move on.  I hadn’t thought about most of my former classmates in years, yet when the reunion notice came I broke out into a cold sweat.  Had I changed enough I wondered?  Was it a change for the better?  Will the pretty girl have just gotten prettier, making my carefully applied make-up look like spackle on a monkey?  Will the quarterback still ignore me, perhaps bumping my arm and spilling my watered down drink all over my new dress as he launches for a chest bump with his former wide receiver?  Will they think that I am still the brainiac and ask me questions to test me?  By the power of Peeps, I hoped not.  In the intervening years, I’d replaced vital, need to know facts about chemical formulas, historical dates, and word problems involving trains leaving stations and widget production with useless trivia:  elephants are the only land mammals that can’t jump, a mosquito has 47 teeth, Da Vinci spent 12 years painting Mona Lisa’s lips.  I could go on and on.  This info won’t help me on my English Subject Matter GRE, but if Alex Trebek calls, I may be able to forgo Ph.D. work altogether.  But I digress….

I went to my reunion.  It conformed to every stereotype.  The pretty girl was working on her third divorce and prowling the room to find her next sugar daddy.  The quarterback had reached manatee proportions.  He and the rest of the team sat in the corner nursing their beers and their broken dreams with constant replays of high school games.  The nerd made lots of money in the dot com boom.  What is the brainiac supposed to become?  I don’t know.  I think I defied their expectations.  I was voted “Most Improved”.  Most Improved?  Most Improved!? It was meant as a compliment and years ago I would’ve basked in the title and hoped it came with a glittering tiara.  But as an adult, Most Improved, my ass.  Who were these people to keep judging me and why did I fall for it again?  Hadn’t I learned anything in the intervening years?  Yes, I had.  And so I left the reunion snagging some chocolate-covered strawberries on the way out.  Snagging all the chocolate-covered strawberries on the way out.  Did you know that a strawberry is not a true berry because its approximately 200 seeds are on the outside?

So I watched High School Reunion, smug and snug.  Snug.  The tightening of my waistband as I performed another waist bend to scoop my eyes off the floor after a particularly robust eye roll — really, this show is that ridiculous — brought my arrogance crashing to the ground.  My healthy living plan — exercise and eating right was really a mini-plan (and, you may have noticed, not a very successful one).  A plan to make me sleek and bikini ready to sit by a pool in Vegas to be judged thin and pretty by people I don’t know.  And yes, this time I want to be judged Most Improved.  Apparently, my Peeps, in all their artificial flavors and coloring are the only things keeping it real. 

This hypocrisy is brought to you by the letter “H”.

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Craptacular

I haven’t posted much this craptacular week.  Certain family situations had my hackles raised and claws drawn.  I might let you get away with a minor slight against Texas, but don’t mess with my Mama.  The helplessness of not being able to do anything for her but offer words of support angered me almost as much as the jackass that’s making her life difficult right now.  That the jackass happens to be another family member doesn’t help matters.  Maybe one of you out there is wondering whether I’m referring to you.  Well, if you have to wonder… So, I spewed enough acid in my potential posts to peel multiple layers of polyurethane off my hardwood floors (at one point when I was writing, Mr. Dingo mentioned, quite spontaneously, that he had never liked the monsters in Aliens).  And then I deleted my words in case there was a possibility that I would have to eat them later.  A few days before posting my first blog entry last month I read Julie Pippert’s post about How To Talk About Other People On Your Blog.  It was a thought-provoking post about how we blog about our personal histories and the people in our lives.  I’ve since printed out her Seven Guidelines and have it taped by my desk until I can make it to the tattoo parlor to have them etched into my forearm.  Even if I’d never read Julie’s post , I hope that I would’ve deleted my angry rants before posting them, but it’s nice to have a reminder for those times when the angel on my shoulder is taking a day off and the devil is dancing up and down on the SUBMIT key.

In other crapitudinous news, Dingo Girl decided that the dog food and copius table scraps we usually feed her just weren’t good enough.  She decided to go for “the other white meat” and took a chunk out of a friend of ours.  Just because I cracked a lame but somewhat racially charged joke about it, believe me, it’s nothing to laugh about.  Having your dog bite someone is intolerable.  The fact that we live in NYC and a simple walk around the block puts us in contact with mouth-watering hordes at roughly every mealtime makes the situation all the more dire.  Beyond the scrumptiousness of this particular friend — whom Mr. Dingo and I have often commented would go well with a nice Chianti, lightly dusted with rice flour and quickly sautéed with cherry tomatoes and a light cream sauce — we don’t know what triggered her bite.  She hasn’t been feeling well lately and has been unusually skittish during our walks.  She constantly looks over her shoulder as if she’s being tailed and will dart away at the slightest sound and unexpected movement.  When this first began to happen, I thought, “She has those keen dog senses!  She knows something I don’t!  We had better run!” And the two of us would bolt down the street together screaming, running from nothing in particular.  Today, a guy wearing a hockey mask carrying a machete dripping blood could suddenly appear behind us causing her to freak out.  I would ignore her warning with a yawn and sigh.  She has set me up to be one of those stupid, oblivious people in horror movies!  Well, anyway, her skittishness has made me wonder what she gets into during the day when I’m at work.  Maybe The Vampire has recruited her into his secret agent network or something.  Or maybe she watches Nancy Grace on CNN all morning and has come to realize that evil lurks around every corner, but all we can do about it is cry and cry.

Up until now I’ve taken Dingo Girl on shopping expeditions.  That’s one of the great things about NYC.  Most stores allow canine companions and many have water bowls at the door and delicious treats behind the counter.  Among Dingo Girl’s favorite shopping haunts are Home Depot and Bed Bath and Beyond.  Dingo Girl is all into the DIY thing.  And if shopping for my DIY efforts isn’t enough to satisfy Dingo Girl’s appetite for treats, my execution of the actual DIY labor may distract me long enough so that she can sneak into Not a Dingo’s litter box for a feline fudge brownie.  Yum.  Often, though, we work as a team.  I create while she destroys.  If I get new curtains, that means she can lay on the old curtains and chew on the hardware.  If I buy new pillows, that means she can rip up the old pillows.  This may not sound appropriate to you, but that could only mean that you have never experienced it.  You see, together, we are the godlike creator/destroyer.  We are the Phoenix, rising from the ashes we fashion.  We are Shiva.  We are Bob Villa!

I spent two days calling trainers/behaviorists who work with aggressive dogs.  That was one of the hardest things to overcome — the label of “aggressive dog.” One trainer understood my qualms about labeling Dingo Girl and rephrased it, “so you have a dog that has exhibited aggressive behavior.” Yes, that’s more like it, though I prefer to think that she was inappropriately confrontational or unnecessarily argumentative.  Maybe the ultimate irony is that she now gets a trainer because she had a fit of rebellion, lashing out at authority in the form of a pulpy little human hand?  Well, after a lot of research and calling around I found someone I trust to help us.  This particular behaviorist doesn’t come cheap, but the cheap ones all asked if Dingo Girl bruised easily.  Really, for what we’re paying this behaviorist, I think Mr. Dingo and I should get to bite her.  We’ve just finished paying Dingo Girl’s surgical bills and thought that this month would be the month we get a little cushion.  Instead, this month is the month that Mr. Dingo and I have to decide who is going to sell their kidney.  I sold my soul last month, I think it’s Mr. Dingo’s turn to put up. 

So, those two things are what drove me into writing reclusiveness last week.  I didn’t know how to write about them and I was throwing myself a pity party.  Be glad I didn’t invite you to the party.  It was a last minute thing and all I had on hand were feline fudge brownies.

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