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Christmas in Excel

It begins.

Yesterday I officially started my Christmas list.

Not my Christmas list, but my Christmas list for others. You see, as the Type A portion of my brain grows into an insatiable monster and begins to eat away at the only bits of Type B that remain in my brain squiggles, it has begun to pour over into every single area of my life. I don’t really know when it all started. I remember one time being incredibly Type B. My room was constantly a mess, I never showered, I was always doing things last-minute and pulling all-nighters to complete tasks, and couldn’t ever find anything I needed.

And then somehow, one day, I began to change. I got a dry-erase board and mapped out my months. I started working up a loose idea of a budget every few weeks. I started keeping little to-do lists on post-its. And I began to track my Christmas gift ideas in an Excel spreadsheet.

No joke – straight up Excelin’ it like a nerdy nerd.

Last year, I made a table for each member of my family in Excel and color coded each. I had a column for gift ideas, a column for ones I had secured already, and a running total of how much was spent out of how much I was willing to allot. And while it was lovely and organized, and almost too-devised, apparently my Type A brain monster is growing this year and isn’t satisfied to simply have an Excel sheet, but wants me to start the game 5 months in advance. 5 months in advance!

It seems to be a familial trait. My grandmother shops for Christmas gifts 11 months in advance and my mother has begun to do the same. Or maybe it’s just an old person trait. Perhaps this is just another example of my rapidly advancing age.

I’m a little frightened to know what the Type A monster will be like in even just five years. If I graduated from Christmas Excel spreadsheets to buying 5 months in advance in only a year, it’s just a matter of time before I’m making my bed, regularly doing my laundry, and making something more than a bowl of Frosted Flakes for dinner. Maybe…I’m actually becoming an adult?

Gross. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, adulthood, holidays, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

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Family Holidays Are Making Me Fat

4 Jul

Photo by "mind on fire". Click the image to check out their Flickr Photostream.

It is so incredibly difficult to celebrate a holiday amongst family without being a fatty fat.

A ‘fatty fat’ is a technical term for one who feels ashamedly fat.

This weekend has been filled to the brim with a variety of fatty fat activities, including (but not limited to) alcohol-spiked fruit dip, appetizers of all kinds, hearty cholesterol-filled breakfasts every morning, drinks in the evening and one whopper of a July 4th picnic meal that included German potato salad, 3-inch thick grilled steaks, salmon, corn-on-the-cob, and strawberry shortcake.

Lord, help my arteries.

The problem with celebrating with family is that there are innate obstacles that prevent you from maintaining your diet/healthy lifestyle/attempt to consume less than 3,000 calories in a day. Let’s review some:

The food is damn delicious. Your family is all in one place, which means that somewhere in that mix is someone who has the most recent or most authentic version of your grandma’s something-or-other and it’s fantastic. And fattening. Because when your grandmother had it back in her day, kids still ran around outside to burn off calories instead of sitting inside playing a game about running around and burning off calories.

The guilt is overwhelming. With all the blood, sweat, stress, and tears that your family puts into preparing food, you can at least eat it. Who cares if you cry? Who cares if you have a high cholesterol? No one, that’s who. Eat it, say it’s delicious, and then go to the spare bedroom and rock yourself in a fetal position. That is, if you can move your fat far enough out of the way to do so.

The skillful use of classic bandwagon tactics. Everyone else is eating it and if you don’t, you’ll make them feel badly about themselves. So stop ruining everyone’s good time. Does this sound familiar?: “Look at grandpa – grandpa has a slew of health problems. He’s practically dead already and he’s decided that by golly, he’s going to enjoy life. So why can’t you? Lighten up and live a little.”

You tell yourself you deserve it. The reason doesn’t matter. You have a ton of them at the ready: you work hard all year long, you never see so-and-so, you never do such-and-such, you’ll just cheat this weekend, you’ll skip breakfast tomorrow, you’ve been doing so well, you should celebrate your recent weight loss, life is short, and on and on without end. You want delicious food, you find a reason you deserve delicious food, you eat delicious food. And then cradle your gut in your arms.

This time only comes once a year. This would be fine if it were true, but it’s not. This time comes lots of times a year. New Year’s, Easter, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas – about every other month there’s an excuse to get everyone together and gorge on a smorgasbord of fatty foods. And not to mention the holidays you split between families. I can’t tell you how many times my stomach has been subjected to two Christmases or two Thanksgivings. I’ve committed sins of the stomach that even a year’s worth of running couldn’t right, and I’m willing to bet you have too.

And so I’ll be driving back to my house today with the car hanging just a little lower than it did when I came. As if the food weren’t tempting enough the first time around, the backseat will be loaded with enough fatty fat leftovers to fuel me for a week. And if I wouldn’t eat them cold right out of the fridge, they might actually make it that long.

I suppose I should go about setting up a rigorous fat-blasting routine for these next few weeks. I can’t imagine how long it will take me to get back to where I was before any holiday fat madness ensued. Even if I get back to that place, I’ll have to blast even more fat away in preparation for upcoming holidays.

After all, Labor Day is right around the corner. ♣

Today’s RAK: Planning some heavy relaxation time for someone in need.

Tags: 365 Project, family, food, holidays, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

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My Martin Luther King Jr. Tree

9 Jan

My Christmas decorations are still up.

As I type, my Christmas tree is leaning in my general direction as if begging me to spare it the embarrassment of being seen outside its proper timeframe.

I’m usually pretty good about this sort of thing. Though I’m no Martha Stewart, I like to consider myself somewhat skilled in the way of domestic goddessry. It’s just that at this particular moment, my movement in the apartment can be tracked by a trail of used tissues and drips of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy Ice Cream and taking down my Christmas tree is not high on my priority list this weekend.

What if I just leave it up all year? And not in the way that my white trash hometown leaves up their Christmas decorations on their trailers all year, but in the way that maybe I can help this tree aspire to more than it ever imagined when it was birthed at the synthetic tree-making factory. I’ll bet when it was in the truck on the way to Wally World, it had no idea that it would only see the light of day for one month, max. It is my duty to help this tree meet its personal goals.

Of course, one glaring problem is the fact that I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day (more on that next month, I’m sure) and we have basically no other holidays between now and Easter. Whoever laid out the American holiday calendar severely favored the latter part of the year. Of course, I have the option to decorate it in time for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but aside from little scrolls bearing stories of victory for blacks in history, I have little to work with in the way of decoration.

Keeping my tree in my living room also poses another wee issue in that I live in an area of the city that is rich with Orthodox Jews. I’m talkin’ old school Jews. Even our Dunkin’ Donuts is kosher. I have the feeling that keeping a “holiday tree” vibrantly displayed in my window might make certain members of my neighborhood feel that I’m pushing the issue. Besides, it’s not like any of my neighbors are going to venture indoors to find that for 11 months out of the year, it’s not actually a Christmas tree but a MLKEasterSpringIndependenceDayBirthdayLaborDayHalloween tree.

Perhaps I should just take it down.

The only thing I’m looking forward to about tearing down the leftovers of Christmas cheer is that it’s that time of year where I put little surprises in the stockings so that next year at Christmas I’m greeted with money and cryptic notes from the Jackie of the past. That’s correct: I use my stockings as a mini time capsules.

All right, I’m about to be buried in the huge mountain of used tissues that has accumulated in this time I have been stationary. I have to move on to throw off my trackers. You know, in case the Jewish neighbors are hunting me down for my Christian decoration deadline violation. ♣

Hey, I made buttons today. And I think that’s awesome. Check out the beautiful stalker tools on the top right. And many thanks to this Jackie for having the only how-to that put it in terms my small brain could comprehend.