The South Beach Diet

THE DIET
And so in a sudden turn of events, I've decided to go & do something as silly as starting a blog. I doubt many will read it, I don't know who I'd tell about it, but there are just some days where I'm just bored beyond the telling of it.

So, the South Beach Diet. If I've got anything to talk about, it's this. I started a little over three weeks ago & we're doing it the risky way. And when I say we, I mean that my mother went on this diet & pulled me along with her for moral support - also I went without a fight . . . I could stand to lose a few pounds. The risky way is instead of doing phase one for two weeks & going into phase two, we're staying in phase one.

The risky part is that you could go insane with desire for sugar, drop off the diet completely, & gain all the weight back . . . maybe more. Because phase one is lean meat & vegetables. No fruit. No sugar. No bread. No dairy. No caffine. Oh my God in heaven above stop the pain! For a while it was no big deal. The cravings were gone & people could sit next to me & eat curly fries & I'd enjoy the smell & have no intense desire that operated as torture in my poor little head. Now, the cravings are still keeping their distance when I'm just hanging around knitting or something, but things that are shoved in my face are becoming more & more tempting. Pizza commercials are torture. I've been having dinner with people in the dining hall for social reasons & I have to sit there over my huge plate of broccoli while they have pizza, lasagna, toast, pasta, salad with real cheese & real dressing, whatever it may be, chances are I can't have it. And the renaissance festival is WORSE. They have chocolate covered cheesecake on a stick. Chili in a bread bowl. And I'm carrying around a two pint bottle of vegetable juice to keep myself alive.

And this might all be bearable if I were losing weight at a nice pace. Two pounds a week, maybe? Doesn't even have to be that amazing rate advertised, just a couple pound a week. My mother has lost 15 pounds. I've lost 2.

THE WEEKEND
I had a really great weekend. Saturday, I indulged in the time-honoured tradition of doing jack shit on the weekend. I kept telling myself that I should be knitting, but I wasn't. I was doing nothing. My mother & I watched episodes of Mad About You & MASH all day. I love those days. Thought they're even better when you have nothing to do - as opposed to having something to do & ignoring it to do nothing.

Sunday was very interesting. It was our last trip to the Renaissance Festival this year (All together now - "Awwwww") because next weekend is the last & I won't be able to go next weekend. I'll be in NYC!!! That's something to blog about. Anyway, I met up with a friend that I met about two years ago & hadn't seen since. But he's helped me through things & always kind of been there. But I was really nervous because I just felt like such a child. He's 44 or 45 & I won't even be an adult for another month, so I felt silly, but a lot of the worry went away after I managed to say hello (after staring at the back of his jacket for a solid minute wondering whether to tap him or speak to him). But after the initial greeting it was the same friendship I had with the text on the screen at home. I spent the morning with him on a roller coaster of felling at ease with a friend one moment & entirely inferior the next. But overall, it was a great pleasure. I walked him to the gate & headed to the globe for the afternoon shows so I could grab a good seat during the royal court event (that not many people care for) & keep that seat until Macbeth In 20 Minutes or Less which I managed to record with my digital camera & hopefully I can get a few copies of it to give to David (My script analysis teacher who could not make it) & Robyn (the other script analysis teacher). It's just such a great show. And the script analysis professors have gotta love it. Then we went to the Swami Yomahmi show.

Here's where the day gets interesting. My mother has been drinking. Not a lot. But enough to make her a little louder than she usually is. And SY is talking about how this show is written for the geeks. If you this if you that, if you think the answer is 42, if you have memorized the episode titles of all 78 classic Star Trek episodes - & my mother shouted "79!" & was proclaimed an official geek for catching the "test"

Then I got water all over my shirt when he bit the head off a rubber chicken that was rigged to come off revealing a nozzle that he could aim at the audience & shoot water at us with.

It took us half an hour to get out of the parking lot. My mother got pretty ticked that I was letting everyone in - but really, we weren't going anywhere fast enough for it to make a difference. We got home just in time for the Simpsons. Yes I still watch it. And I will be watching it on December 9th when they air the episode with Kelsey Grammar, David Hyde Pierce, & John Mohoney.

CLASS TODAY
Oh, man. I was so proud of my group's poster. It was going so well. The presentation, everything. Someone was being silly & said, "I feel bad for Samuel Beckett because his name is cut in half." Because it was split between spaces between bars. David (the prof.) leaned in for a closer look & said, "And he's missing a T" Way to go. I misspelled the playwright's name. On top of that, I've developed the habbit (after breaking that of cursing excessively) of saying "F!" when I'm upset, but level-headed enough to say "F" instead of "F**k" So I looked at my mistake & said, "Oh, F." And half the class laughed at my silly little quirk while the other half of the class including David, in perfect unison, said, "No, T!"

THE PETS
Dusty is too silly. We keep saying he's not a cat, he's a dog in a cat's body because he just doesn't act like a cat at all. He's afraid of my hamsters & my bird & he answers (vocally) to his name. He got his claw caught in the sofa as he jumped up to come visit me & fell face first onto the sofa. I fell OFF of the sofa laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. Honestly, you've seen cats trip a bit, stumble maybe, make an amusing recovery, but this poor guy went DOWN. You really had to see it. I found out as I was finishing my poster this morning that Niles is bothered by the sound of colour pencils. He was shrieking at the top of his little birdie lungs, which is pretty damn loud & he just wouldn't deal with it, so I had to go put in earplugs. Poor Niles . . . he kknows that Dusty is a cat, but everyone else knows that he isn't. So Dusty walks by & sniffs a bit at Niles's tail & everyone is calm except poor Niles who slicks all his feathers down, opens his mouth & hisses at dusty who either notices & runs away or doesn't & hangs around while Niles gets more & more nervous. And I LOVE it when Dusty walks by & his tail comes behind him & Niles reaches out & tries to bite his tail. What the hell is that going to do? He's got some guts in him. Someday, he's gonna bite Dusty & dustys gonna get pissed & Niles won't know what to do with it.

Oh, & the "Got your tail" game is nice fun stuff with dusty, but Niles will have none of it. He doesn't like my mother much, but he usually doesn't get particularly mad at her. The other day I was playing with Dusty's tail while he watched me with a sort of bored look & my mother echoed my "Got your tail" & I heard a birdie curse word. He just skwawked like I've never heard him do before. I looked up, & I've never seen him so pissed either.

THE CREATURE
There's something in my linen closet. The plummer came in a while back & ripped out the bottom of the base to the closet & now there's this big dark hole & something is DEFFINITELY living in there & moving about. Ew.