Last week, I slogged my way through the five stages of grief, and I did it all mostly in one of two robes. It was fine. It served its purpose. There were children here, and still are, so I would shower and change into a respectable pair of stretch pants and clean shirt around noonish. You know, “be the change,” and all that. They still mostly just wore underwear, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, guys.
This week, I started off yesterday with a 15-minute HIIT workout after reading this great article from my number one news source, Dollar Shave Club (I splurged and bought the $9.99 lifetime access app that lets you customize HIIT timers and that’s a whole boring subject I may try to make more fun later but we’re not there yet) and then showered. But then? Guys, then? I decided to put on jeans. The kind with a zipper and a button.
And I don’t know that I need to tell you what happened next because I feel like we know each other, but for those of you who have seen Somewhere in Time (my mom and that girl I went to college with), my reaction was a lot like when Christopher Reeve found the penny from 1978 in his pocket but he was like in 1900, and it totally blew up his world and he was basically catatonic after that.
I mean, I’m not STUPID. I chose my stretchiest jeans. My fattest jeans.
And they were still very, very tight. And then I weighed myself. Somehow, being in my mid-40s, moving very, very little, eating a lot of donuts, and circling back on that non-movement thing has resulted in a respectable little weight gain. Freshman 15? More like Covid 19, amirite!?
I adjusted my settings in My Fitness Pal from Very Active to Very Big Cause for Alarm, and it smugly told me I better think about 1200 calories a day or bigger pants. I don’t want to shop right now, because it’s dangerous, so it looks like I’m back to stretch pants.
But I have a lot more to think about than how much I hate jeans. I got to do some fun stuff last week, too. My friend Eli Cunningham (super funny dude) asked me to submit a movie review for Queen City Comedy, which I did, only I’m not tech savvy and I’m not good at practicing what I want to say, so the result was a minute of me in my bedroom at midnight with the laptop camera on and focused somewhere around my middle with me leaning into the frame and deadass winging it. It ended up being a fun show overall though. There’s a whole lot of funny people in Springfield, and I love that they got to showcase the talent for all of us on shut-in status.
I also get to do virtual classic movie and tv trivia for a retirement community here in Springfield, and that’s going to be a lot of fun. I hope. God, I hope. Anyway, it’s happening.
Finally, my salvation, the Alamo Springfield Film Club, is made up of other people who love movies and love to talk about them, so we’ve been taking advantage of a great app called Netflix Party. We’ve done The Platform and Red Dawn (1984, WOLVERINES!) thus far, and I love the ability to sidebar roast/comment/emote while the movie plays. We’re also doing a book club-like hot take, in which we watch an assigned movie on our own and then have a discussion on either Zoom or Google Hangouts for an hour afterward. We’re doing the absolutely unbelievable The Peanut Butter Solution on Wednesday (no April Fool’s about that!) and The Graduate on Friday.
But I’m also working on me, as should we all. I decided over the weekend that I’d learn to French-braid my hair. How I’ve been starting is telling myself, okay, watch videos, and then searching Reddit for videos, and then finding a YouTube braiding sensation named Madison or something who shows you the intricate finger movements up close that French-braiding your own hair requires, and then regular-braiding strands of hair in the front and calling it good. I feel like it’s going well.
And, oh, hey! The OTHER thing I’m doing involves utilizing the drawer of Ipsy products I’ve amassed in the last nine months. I like Ipsy a lot, and I really like my friend Heather Busch for being such a forward thinker back in 2013 and trying to tell us all how great it was. It only took me another six years to remember, and now I’m hooked. So I signed up for a bag of products that were cruelty-free and vegan, and I get five of them every month in a cute bag. And I use about two of them.
So today I used a bunch of them, and had all the time in the world, and came to realize that I rush my makeup routine because I’m not that into it. So I stopped about eight minutes in, which felt like an extravagant amount of time.
Anyway, what are you guys doing? Hit me up metaphorically sometime.