No Method, Just Madness

So…like MONTHS ago, I was tagged by two lovely blamigos (blog + amigos = blamigos),¹ Claudia and Catherine, to do two different memes. One was The Five Random Things About You meme and the other was The Seven Random Things About You meme. Because I’m extremely tardy at getting ‘round to doing this and because I’m simply not interesting enough to come up with TWELVE random things about myself…I’ve decided to do The-Sum-Of-The-Two-Memes-Divided-By-Two Number Of Random Things About You Meme. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of this meme in the same way that you hear about all the others that circulate through the blogosphere like a bad case of The Clap, it’s because (shh) I just made it up. Because I’m ALL MATHEMATICAL LIKE THAT. And also because I could only come up with six things anyway. Oh, and one of them is a little white lie. Be the first one to tell me which one you think it is and perchance there will be a prize in it for you…

• I recently burned my left hand trying to open the fireplace vent AFTER lighting a nice, robust fire (note to self: next time open the vent before lighting the friggin’ fire). Now I have a lovely, gnarly, scabby wound on the dorsum of my hand and I can’t tell if it’s the garnet in my ring that brings out the red in my wound or the red in my wound that brings out my garnet. Either way…totally hot.
• I very nearly crapped myself when I learned how much wedding gowns were these days. (It’s a dress, People! Not an ancient artifact from the Han Dynasty! Sweet JESUS!) So I made it my mission to find a dress for under $1000. Not only did I succeed, but I succeeded on my first day of dress shopping. Hooray!
• When I was getting measured form my wedding gown, both the tailor and I discovered that the circumference of my ass is a full 12 inches larger than the circumference of my waist. That unnecessary tidbit of information ALMOST made me swear off cheese forever. (Almost.)
• Rather than giving up cheese I decided to join a boot camp fitness training program. Which basically means that now I pay a dude in bright orange sneakers (Fashion no-no? Or Fashion yes-yes? Hard to say…he does kind of work them.) to torture me two times a week with lunges and hill sprints and lunges and squats and lunges and sit-ups and lunges and bicep curls. And lunges…did I mention the lunges? Good times.
• In the interest of FINALLY finishing up my SCUBA diving open water certification, I went and had my ENT doctor friend check out my right tympanic membrane (as a follow up to his last exam) to make sure that it had sealed back up. (You recall The Great Perforation of 2007, don’t you?) I was disappointed to learn that it has healed but is not completely closed! There will be no diving in my future, which is a great disappointment to me. When The Brit and I are in Bora Bora on our honeymoon and he is out diving, I will just have to drown my sorrows in Polynesian cocktails. Boo friggin’ hoo.
• I really, really dislike voice mail. Anyone who knows me knows to either text message me or call back later. Leaving a voice message is futile. It’ll only serve as a placeholder in my mailbox. Until, that is, my mailbox fills up…then it’ll stay in there until I muster up the energy to delete it along with all the others in one fell swoop. It’s oddly liberating to delete 36 voicemails in one go. Kinda like going commando but with less chafing.

May the best blontestant win!

1. Don’t mind this new blanguage (blog + language = blanguage) that I seem to be amusing myself with these days. Surely, it too shall pass.  I hope.

EXTREMELY BELATED UPDATE!!!
Rattie was the first to guess and the first to guess correctly! My right TM has healed up just fine, and I look forward to popping the left one when I try for my open water cert again in March! (I kid…I’d rather not pop the left one! Enough with the perforations!) This, of course, means that yes, I DID burn my hand, I DID INDEED find a wedding gown for under $1000 on the first day of dress shopping, my ass IS 12” bigger than my waist, I AM doing boot camp (seriously…TWELVE INCHES???), and I absolutely ABHOR voice mail. So call me some time! Rattie, you’ll get your prize soon. (And by soon, I mean, quite possibly for Christmas.)

Please excuse the prolonged absence from my usual blogishness. It’s just that January is always the sort of month in which there really is mostly madness and very little method to speak of. I try to take preemptive measures like making lists, labeling my calendar, setting alarms, and just generally running around in a constant low-grade panic level (beats the episodic, high-grade panic level)…all in the hopes of ensuring that the madness at least unfurls in some sort of organized fashion. But it never really works. Besides, I’ve decided that KNOWING about the madness, the precise moment that it will transpire, before it actually happens?? Yeah…that’s totally overrated. It just causes you to clench your jaw unknowingly. And then, let’s be honest, it’s all just a great big slippery slope from there…with daily tension headaches at the top, the consumption of inordinate amounts of cheese and/or pickles somewhere in the middle there¹, and the inevitable decompensation into a near vegetative state at the bottom. My roommates and The Brit watched last month as I became a permanent fixture on the living room couch, surrounded only by my matrix of surgical text books and test prep booklets…and about a dozen mostly-empty tea mugs. “Cubana Gringa?” they’d say as they’d apprehensively check my carotid pulse. Somewhat heart-warmed by their concern for my wellbeing, I’d bestow upon them a pearl of surgical knowledge that they probably could’ve done without…like: “Oh hey! Be glad you don’t have an acute diverticular bleed with bright red blood per rectum² because then you might need a hemicolectomy and a colostomy and NOBODY LIKES TO CRAP OUT OF A HOLE IN THEIR ABDOMEN!!!” Needless to say, there were a lot of unnecessary public health announcements in our household during the month of January. Some of which were at rather ungodly hours of the morning. You’re welcome, dear roommates. You’re welcome!

The other additional stressor last month was that, on top of studying for a surgical exam and eating pickles full time, a certain someone had a 30^th birthday extravaganza that wasn’t going to plan itself.³ The Brit had done such a good job pulling off my 30^th birthday seven months ago…and then don’t EVEN get me started on that marriage proposal…so I figured he deserved a great big birthday “do”…even if his “do” did quite inconveniently fall on the same exact day as my surgical exam.⁴ (I wish that was a joke. But seriously…The Same Day! I’ve been meaning to have a word with his Mum on this matter.) Luckily, I started planning The Brit’s birthday a couple months ahead. Emails were sent. Video footage was obtained from many of The Brit’s friends and family from around the world. Photos from ancient albums were scanned in. A friend with professional-grade film editing skills and a clear (and probably crack-induced) ignorance of the colossal undertaking was commissioned with little more than a polite request on my part (I didn’t even have to show a little leg! Ha! What a sucker!). A private theater space was rented. The older brother was flown in on frequent flyer miles. Some study time was compromised for the purposes of cooking insane amounts of food. And the end result was a ridiculous surprise party and an amazing, funny, tear jerker of a 30^th Birthday movie mockumentary about The Brit. I think it’s safe to say he enjoyed his birthday. How we managed to pull it all off, I will never know…nor do I care to. In fact, we shall never speak of The Great Insanity of January 2008 ever again. (Though, apparently, we WILL watch the birthday movie over and over…The Brit’s watched it 6 times since the “premiere.”)

The Brit and I have since created a pact: The Let’s Lay Off the Frickin’ Ridiculous Surprises of 2008 Act. Next year, I’ll throw this year’s leftover candles in his general direction, buy him a beer, and call it a day. Hooray!

But, so ANYWAY! January is over and I’m ready to turn this mother out, yo! It’s 2008 right? Check. Ok…so thanks to the two of you (three of you, if we count Mamacusa) who cared enough to ask if I’d given up the blogging gig. Whether the prospect of it inspired feigned or legitimate disappointment, you put to rest my fears that this had permanently become the sort of blog that only a mother could love…which it kinda is, I gotta be honest with you, but alas! We shall avert our gaze and pretend we do not know this! And with that…the usual obnoxiousness resumes here and now. Well…not NOW now, but soon. (Which is like now, but just a little later.)

Now go vote in the polls! (NOW now.) And a Happy Super Tuesday to you…

1. Purely hypothetical, of course.
2. Known in the industry as BRBPR…we’re ALL UP in those acronyms, yo.
3. Which is not to say I didn’t try to convince it to.
4. It’s not a party…it’s a “do,” in case you didn’t know. Other things I’ve learned since dating a Brit? A bachelor party is a “Stag Do.” And a bachelorette party? A “Hens Do.” I think I shall be a great disappointment to my future British in-laws when I call my bachelorette party “Ma Bitches and Ho’s Night…Awwww YEAH.”