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I’m feeling rather…jazzed today. It’s kind of odd because it’s all grey and rainy today. But I think the gloomy weather reset something internally for me. It’s been sunny and nice pretty much every day for the last two weeks and that’s just not how we do it in Pittsburgh. Dashing through the rain from the bus stop, I thought, “Ahhh, yes. This feels right.”

I’m probably just excited about being off Thursday and Friday. Thursday my office is closed for G20 shizz and Friday I’m taking off because I imagine my commute will still be hellish. Plus, the baby has off of school and it’s the husband’s birthday. Getting to spend two days in a row at home with those dudes makes me happy, apparently. Ew.

The rain also gives that first real kiss of autumn. I’m so ready for that season to really get here. I’m getting that baking urge hardcore. I have 10,000 recipes starred in Google Reader that I want to try. I was thinking this morning that I might do some hybrid of NaBloPoMo and Tuesdays with Dorie, where I make myself bake one or two things every weekend and share the results with you. I’m not trying to become a food blogger or anything but fall baking is the awesome and since I’ve been having trouble finding inspiration/energy to post here, the combination seems natural.

So, first of all, regarding this post, thank you all so, so much for commenting and lending your support and understanding. I was literally overwhelmed by all of the people who came out to offer a comment, letting me know that, while crazy, I am not alone.

Still doing Weight Watchers, though a sort of loose version. I adapt it as I need to. I’m slowly losing weight and things feel different this time. I attribute that mostly to my new-found fervor with regard to healthier food. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty frightened by the food industry in the U.S. and all of the icky governmental circle jerks that contribute to it.

So, this time around, going the easy route by stuffing my freezer with Lean Cuisine wasn’t really an option. In fact, since giving up Diet Dr. Pepper, I’ve pretty much done away with all “light” foods. That is, I don’t really buy light versions of foods. I don’t buy diet bread or light or fat-free salad dressings or light butter or skim milk or fat-free cheese or freakish 100-calorie desserts. None of that. (However, I do buy low-fat organic yogurt. Full disclosure, n’at.) I want Food. This has taken some effort on my part because I could eat more if I bought such things, but I just no longer see the point of sustaining myself on edible food-like things, which will inevitably become tiresome.

I’m eating a little less during the day so that I can eat a regular dinner with the dudes. That’s the major change that I’ve made. And you know what? It’s working really well. Mentally, I’m in a much better space. I’ve noticed that I feel satisfied/full much easier. On days when I indulge a little, I feel uncomfortably full and I think for awhile that became my normal “full” feeling. There were a lot of emotions involved, ya know? I would eat past that point for any number of reasons, stress being the main one.

I still genuinely love cooking and baking and, most of all, eating. I’m amassing an insane collection of favorite recipes and even more recipes that I want to try. I just today signed up at Evernote to work on a system of organizing recipes from all of the food blogs that I read because I want to try all of them. (Evernote, by the way, is pretty cool. I don’t know, for my purposes, if it’s a huge departure from the organizing/tagging features on Google Reader, but it’s still very nice.)

I also wanted to touch on a few points that were raised in the post mentioned above. I do not hate my body or the way it is shaped. I used to and believe me the way that I feel about myself now is so much healthier than the way I felt about it for a long, long time. And I kind of feel like I do accept my body and that my desire to lose weight, while certainly tied up in the bullshit that I’ve been dealing with for nearly all of my life, actually comes from a good place, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, I think there’s like…stuff going on in the world besides my ass vigilance. But here’s a (dark, crappy, phone) picture of my cat being forced to wear a babushka.

I’m overweight.

Writing that out is really weird and honestly I think I have an easier time saying it than typing the words.

My BMI puts me firmly in the overweight category, though I don’t put much stock in the BMI. We can look around and see that these categories are very questionable and they really don’t say much, if anything, about a person’s actual health. I am actually leaning toward the obese category and while I will admit to some bad habits that have led to weight gain, I just don’t consider myself obese. I think.

Herein kind of lies the problem.

I was a ballet dancer and, not surprisingly, that really messed with how I ate, how I viewed myself, and how I viewed others. Much of my worth as a dancer (and, therefore, myself) was tied up in whether or not my instructors thought that I was thin enough.

Ultimately, I was fired from my first dancing job for being too fat. At the time, I believed them, but looking back at pictures of me from that time, and knowing that I was maybe 105 lbs. (I’m 5’4″) makes me realize that maybe they were a little…insane. What was especially upsetting about that firing was that they had told me at the beginning of my time there that I needed to lose a lot of weight. And I worked really really hard to get down to their standards. My body just couldn’t do it, though. I’m really just not cut out to be 95 lbs. (which is where I needed to be for them) and be able to, like, dance or sit upright or whatever.

But it wasn’t just that instance that gave me trouble. Because I started dancing when I was very young, I’ve been concerned about my weight and/or actively dieting since I was six or seven years old. Yes, I’m serious.

After I was fired from that dancing job, I decided that ballet wasn’t for me, after all. I wasn’t looking forward to having to move every year and always worrying about having a job. And I realized that my weight would always be an issue and, frankly, I was hungry. After I quit, I kind of just reveled in being able to eat whatever I wanted. I had many happy reunions with hot fudge sundaes that I hadn’t seen in years.

But that lifelong deferral to what someone else determines “thin enough” has stayed with me. I KNOW that it’s all about what you feel comfortable with and what is right for you, but for the most part, my brain believes that there is an objective standard. I’ve been working really hard to shake that belief off, but it’s really hard shutting up a voice that’s been in your brain since you were a kid.

I’ve gone back and forth between wanting desperately to meet this standard that I’m so sure exists and just doing whatever I want. Obviously, what I need to do is find some middle ground where I look out for my health but celebrate my body for what it is.

Lately, I’ve been doing whatever I want. Part of the reason for this is because I have too much going on in life and I know that I don’t have time or energy to obsess over my diet and weight the way that I know I will. As of two weeks ago, I was very, very close to my 9-months-pregnant weight. Granted, I had my son in my early 20s and I’m 30 now, so some extra pounds are to be expected. But I’ve been blatantly ignoring what I eat and how much simply because it is comforting to not think or worry about it.

The thing is, I’ve gone through this cycle many times before. Most recently, in late 2007. After I did Weight Watchers for a few months and lost about 15 pounds, other stuff got in the way and I abandoned the diet. I told myself that if I ever worked on losing the weight again, I wouldn’t publicly declare it because going back and reading several series of posts that go through that predictable process of, “I just started Weight Watchers (again) and I feel great! -> I’m still on WW and I’ve lost this much! I love being healthy! -> I know I haven’t mentioned it in awhile but I’m still kind of doing WW and it’s alright. -> What diet?” is kind of embarrassing.

But here it is: I started Weight Watchers again last week and I’ve lost a few pounds. Whoopee. I’m not setting any expectations for myself and I’m not going to beat myself up if, in the middle of the semester, I realize that I just can’t deal with this right now and I need a pie.

So why am I mentioning it? I don’t know. Because I guess I hope that someone understands.

Because of the short notice, not many people were able to attend the little party at AlphaLab last night, but it was still a very nice time. AlphaLab is an amazing space and we got to meet some of the people who are building their start-ups there. And we had a TON of food. I even gave away some brown sugar pound cupcakes with brown butter glaze to some ladies who were hanging out at the Double Wide Grill and started fantasizing about operating one of those trucks that tweets their location and sells yummy stuff. I think it would be an especially successful venture if I were to troll popular drunkard locations.

I realize that it’s been over a week since I posted here. That’s mostly because things have been pretty uneventful. The picture above is from last Friday morning/afternoon. Faced with a day off for the holiday, I drank just a few beers (honest!) while we were out on Thursday night and woke up the next morning surprised to find myself feeling rather crap-like. Luckily, my cat provided the necessary head-to-head services that I didn’t even know I needed.

Other than that, I got nothing. We got W. from Netflix and I’ve been trying to watch for, literally, weeks and I keep falling asleep. It’s not a particularly bad movie, per se. There are some funny moments. And Josh Brolin’s performance is actually kind of creepily accurate (though the parts of him as young W. are just laughable). I just kinda…don’t care.

We’ve also been watching Arrested Development upon several emphatic suggestions from friends. I was skeptical because we had watched one episode while at the beach with Tracey and Co. a few years ago, but I think it was some random episode and was out of context and I couldn’t figure out why the Bluths were so fucking odd. Seeing it from the beginning though has really made me appreciate it. I’ve been in tears laughing several times and have gone to bed extremely late every night this week because of that fateful, “Let’s just watch one more…” declaration that has got to be close to being a psychological disorder in the DSM, afflicting adults in the era of DVDs.

Also, this:

That is Honey Bourbon Caramel Peach pie and it’s pretty much an orgasm in a dish. I was excited about this pie, not only because it promised to be amazing, but also because I thought I would be able to keep it in a cake stand that I bought a few months ago. For some reason, I keep thinking cake stands are bell jars, even though I know that’s not the case. However, the handles on the pie dish prevented the dome of the bell jar/cake stand from fitting properly…so I stuck my head in the oven.

Also this week we spent a small fortune at Ikea on shelving and other bins and crap in the name of organizing our house and now our house is cluttered with not-yet-assembled flat packs and Allen wrenches. I can’t win.

Today we’re going to a wedding of some friends of ours, so I think I’m going to go and, like, shower or something.

Unrelated to any anniversary activities, last night I made some strawberry honey butter because some strawberries that we got in our CSA box last week were on their last legs. When it was done, I shoved the rubber spatula into the husband’s face and said, “Taste.” He wrinkled up his nose and pushed his head back. “What is it?” I told him and he tentatively stuck his tongue out. “Ugh. It’s good but it’s like eating butter,” he said, like that was a bad thing. I don’t understand his logic.

We had some pretty impressive storms last night. The husband called me from this meeting he was attending in Squirrel Hill and said that things were teetering on apocalyptic over there and that there were reports of tornadoes in the area. Because I have awesome survival skills, I crossed my fingers that the power would stay on long enough for me to Google “what the fuck the do I do during a tornado?” then started furiously searching for a compass app on my iPhone so that I could determine which walls in my basement I needed to avoid. Don’t you want me around for your next natural disaster?

However, the clouds and activity, while notable, didn’t seem tornado-level. So I did the sensible thing and left my child alone in the house with any number of short-circuitable things and went outside and took pictures.

Video, because I like to provide a multimedia experience whenever possible:

Please note that I did not take this picture in black and white. That’s just how ominous it was.

Eeek!

On the upside, I won’t need to water my plants for a few days.

I feel the need to warn you that this post is kind of potty-humor-centric. Sort of a Farrelly Brothers/Judd Apatow movie wrapped in bacon and deep fried. It’s just a collection of weird/gross/immature things that have happened in the past few days.

Under the category of Boogers

The baby likes to help me cook, which is usually a good activity for us to do together (though the oppressively small kitchen and its tendency to drive me to drink sometimes make this impossible because my dear son if you don’t GET OUT OF MY WAY RIGHT NOW I SWEAR TO GOD!). The other night I was making pizza cobbler and the baby was helping me to put the dough on top.

I’ve had a tough time getting him to remember to cover his mouth when he sneezes and when he does I like to point out that that was a good thing. You can already see where this is heading, right? So, he sneezed and covered his mouth…with the hand that was holding a piece of dough.

“Um, it’s good that you covered your mouth but try to do that with the hand that’s NOT holding our dinner. kthxbi.”

Under the category of Crotches

The baby was goofing off the other night while I was nagging him to do something…probably going to bed or getting a shower or something.

And he just wound up and punched me in the crotch.

Like…

It wasn’t a hard punch, so it didn’t hurt. It was more dramatic sparring with a slightly slowed-down, kung fu, “HHHWWWWAAAAHHHH!” flare. But still. Demoralizing.

But I paid it forward. The husband and I have a tendency to act like brothers; lots of pinching and noogies and wedgies and trash-talking. This recently prompted the baby to ask us why we married each other if we hate each other so much. (Spite.)

This afternoon, as we were heading into the baby’s school to pick him up, we were engaged in an epic battle of Stop-Touching-Me-I’m-Not-Touching-You-See-I’m-Not-Touching-You, when I ended things by punching him in the crotch. PWNED.

Under the category of Pubes

I really dislike stray pubes. They’re certainly my least favorite aspect of cleaning the bathroom and I get really skeeved if I come into contact with them. I just hate how they’re so unapologetically coarse and all, “Nyah, I was on a crotch and now I’m on your towel!”

I was in the shower earlier and as I was rinsing off my washrag I noticed a pube on my hand. Ick. So I stuck my hand under the water to rinse it off…and the spray shot it off my hand and right into my eye. I had to dig a pube out of my eyeball. Like, who has that happen to them? Only me. I’m still so irritated about it.

I made cupcakes.

Both my husband and I unintentionally participated in a moronic American St. Patrick’s Day tradition: green or “Irish-themed” garments. He wore a Guinness tshirt and I wore a green sweater. I didn’t think of the significance until someone at work pointed it out, all like, “Oh, of course you’re wearing green because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and you’re Irish!” Grumble.

I did, however, do one corny Irish thing. I made Irish Car Bomb cupcakes, which admittedly have a rather offensive name but are so SO good. I brought some into work yesterday and three people bit into them around the same time and all collectively groaned in delight. I tried one last night but it had been in the fridge and I hadn’t let it warm up enough. The now solid ganache filling fell out and the icing fell off and rolled around on the floor. I had to go searching for it under the couch and that was a proud moment in my life, let me tell ya. “Honey, lift up the couch, my cleavage didn’t catch that mouthful, dammit.”

Anyway, this post is titled “irish kelly” for a reason. Years ago, I was a rather active participant in the “rave scene” (ugh that phrase makes me barf) in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. You may be surprised to know that back in the late 90s and early 00s, Pittsburgh had a thriving dance scene, with multiple large events every weekend and plenty of smaller things during the week. I think between 1999 and 2000, I got a total of 15 hours of sleep.

Now, I’m sure I’ve conjured up plenty of frightening images for you. And while I did partake of the “party favors” for a short period, I was not 20/20 special report fodder. I did not wear pounds of plastic kiddie jewelry, my pants did not double as parachutes, and I did not regularly collapse into a puddle with a chattering jaw and dilated pupils to work on catching mono from a guy named Smurf. I mostly just had a blast being young and taking advantage of my total lack of responsibilities and my now non-existent ability to stay up for as long as I like by going to parties and dancing my butt off.

I did, however, have a “rave name.” Rave names, of course, were the nicknames that people gave to each other to enforce this identity that we were part of “the other,” the alternative, the underground, the secretive, none of which was really true by the late 90s when raving was firmly above ground, peppered with the odd renegade party under a bridge or in a cellar somewhere.

Raving’s inextricable relationship with the nascent internet probably aided the creation of rave names. Party information was passed along via email and message boards and I was on an email list called pb-cle-raves (Pittsburgh-Cleveland Raves) for many years. As nearly everyone with an online identity goes by something other than the name that they were born with, these identities bled into raving.

Many people had nauseatingly sweet and sunny rave names like Sunshine and Bumblebee and Rainbow. Others came into raving in the age of Hackers and cyberpunk (see also: my buddy count zer0), and then there were guys like my husband’s crew of friends, who had rave names like “Hector.”

Mine was Irish Kelly. At the time that I subscribed to pb-cle, my email address was CCeallaigh at AOL (ha!). Ceallaigh is Kelly in Gaelic (so I’m told), but of course someone else on AOL already had that handle, so I added an extra C. Nobody, least of all me, could pronounce that name. To add to the confusion, there was another Kelly who was one of the biggest rave promoters in the city. To differentiate between us, she was Kelly Downlow (her promotion company’s name) and I became Irish Kelly, owing to my Irish-themed n00b email address.

The Google Maps street view of Bangkok Balcony in Squirrel Hill looks like this:

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Bangkok Balcony is not, in fact, a milk truck. If you enter a milk truck and expect to get Thai food, you may be disappointed.

I live to inform.