Just Another Writer

Photo by smcgee

Despite the Lean Cuisines I eat for lunch and the miles on the treadmill, nary a pound has budged. I’m not going to fool myself and blame my metabolism, though. It’s my brain that’s making my butt big. Here’s some of the extremely ineffectual things I catch myself thinking about food and weight loss:

1. Grocery shopping counts as exercise. Granted, some stores are as big as Maui. Still, pushing around a cart and filling it up with stuff, however healthy, doesn’t really count for much. Especially when you get “just one” candy bar and eat it immediately after shopping.

2. Telling myself, “I’ll never eat again!” Unfortunately, the morning after binging on chips and queso is not the same as the morning after you have had crazed sex with a hot, anonymous stranger or drank five Long Island iced teas (or perhaps both). You can’t just swear off eating like you can drinking. Trust me on this one, I’ve tried. My resolve usually weakens around 10 o’clock.

3. I’ll have “just a bite.” Usually, the bite is of something like Chocolate Turtle Cheesecake. One bite of that stuff has like a zillion calories. Anyway, who can have just one bite?

4. Counting on the energy crisis as a fallback diet plan. At work, we talk a lot about what will happen if food prices rise too much. We talk about the gardens we’ll plant as we nibble at the frosting on the birthday cake left over from last week. I imagine what my body will look like once I’ve eaten zucchini for about six months.

5. Telling myself I’ll get the child’s plate. I did this today at a Mexican restaurant. The child’s plate was considerately served with a huge basket of chips. The food on the plate looked like it would feed a 450 pound child. Maybe it has something to do with living in Texas, where everything, including the people, is bigger. I dunno.

Sometimes I figure the only way I’ll lose weight is if I travel to a 3rd world country and get thrown in jail as a political prisoner or something. Then, after a couple of years, I would be released from prison with much fanfare, and my emaciated (but fashionable) body would be in all of the newspapers.

Well, for one thing, it is difficult to carry a wall clock around with you all the time. Unless you’re Flava Flav. Anyway.

If I didn’t wear a watch, I’d have to have a clock hanging in my room. No way. This would result in all 16 of my students leaning out of their cubicles and complaining about the time every 30 seconds. So there is no clock in my classroom, making a watch an essential part of my daily wardrobe.

I’ve worn the same Pink Panther watch for years, and I’m about ready to update what’s on my wrist. I was looking at
Seiko watches, and this is the one I like the best:

I love this one because it will go with whatever color jewelry I decide to wear (usually silver), and it is water resistant to 30 meters, which ought to cover the times I hop into the shower and forget I’m wearing a watch.

Hey, have you ever heard of skin balance supplements? I hadn’t, until I decided to check out Borba’s website. In addition to a wide variety of high-end
beauty products, they have these Gummi Bear Boosters. How cool is that? Like they say, beauty comes from the inside out, and eating right definitely helps the complexion. These Gummis have green tea extract and grape seed extract, both of which are super-high in antioxidants.

What I am especially interested in, however, is the lip gloss. I am a girl who never goes anywhere without it. I tend to chew on my lower lip, which can make it really chapped. Borba’s line of lip gloss states that they are for “dry, rough, troubled lips”, so I suppose that’s up my alley, even though I have never thought about the psychological state of my lips before. I’m sure they have their troubled moments. The gloss promises to be long-lasting and is chock-full of vitamins to help ease irritation and keep your pucker lookin’ good.

If you spend a hundred dollars or more, they’ll hook you up with a free goody, which changes every month. Definitely worth checking out.

You’d think that by the time you pass your teenage years, you wouldn’t have to worry about your hair looking like you just styled it using a stick of butter. For me, this hasn’t been true. This is not a good thing, because I have longish thick hair that takes forever to blowdry and straighten.

Shampoo graces my head every other day, but sometimes disaster can strike.

My hair looks just awful on the third day. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem, except that last week, I overslept. I woke up, looked at my stringy hair in the mirror, and got ready to call in sick. Then I remembered something that I had read about using cornstarch to degrease hair. I shook some cornstarch in my hair, and presto–it turned gray. It wasn’t as slick, but the color really left something to be desired. Knowing I couldn’t really call into work because of greasy hair, I wrapped a scarf around it and went for an ethnic look that day.

Fortunately, there’s something out there besides corn starch to save your dignity on days like this. It’s Salon Grafix SPShampoo, and it has color matching, which really, really would have came in handy the other day. This is something that I definitely want to have on hand, since that day wasn’t the first day I’ve slept through my alarm.

I can think of some other times when it would come in handy as well. Like when I’ve been racing around at the park all sweaty and the next thing I know my phone is ringing and someone wants me to meet them for dinner in a half hour. Or to have in my bag when I’m traveling. My hair looked horrible when I was in Lisbon in a flat with no hot water and I could only bear to wash it for a minute or so, screaming the entire time. Salon Grafix SPShampoo really would have come in handy then!

There’s definitely something to be said for
dry shampoo. You don’t have to have either time or water, and that covers just about every greasy hair situation that could possibly come up!