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”.