May My Foodnetwork-Addicted Chef Boyfriend Never Know this About Me

As any hearty Polish girl would believe, the idea of a diet free of complex carbs completely eludes me. I crave the empty satisfaction only noodles, bread, and potatoes can supply. And when I yearn for a certain food, NO ONE will hear the end of it until I get it. That is just how incredibly immature I can be when it comes to delicate matters of the stomach. Just ask me (or anyone recently in my vicinity) about my need for White Chocoloate Macadamian Nut Cookie Dough that led to insane amounts of disappointing trips to several grocery stores, followed by MAD Googling for the suppliers. Oh where are thou sweet goodness! I have a very patient boyfriend, and I thank God every day he will drive my crazed, salivating butt around when I am in a craving frenzy. If that's not a scary picture, I don't know what is, and he deserves an award.

In a feeble attempt to control eating habits, I have been making a lunch and bringing it to work every day to eat after various work out classes. In a moment of desperation this morning, the fridge staring at me more and more empty and hollow each day, I grabbed a package of Top Ramen from the pantry. The package of instant noodles has probably been there since 1999, the last time I consumed this type of food (that would along with cockroaches, would survive full on nuclear war) filled with preservatives. So I figured, yeah, it'll still be good, I'm sure.

Coming back from a rather successful yoga class (which doesn't mean much considering that I am the least flexible person in the entire world, no seriously) I popped that bag of noodles in the microwave, drained the starchy water (see how much healthier that is?), poured in the oh-so-flavorful Spicy Chile Chicken spice packet, and began to reminisce of my days of a poor college student (and then wonder exactly HOW I came to be in a situation where eating Ramen was acceptable again). The first bite, and I was reminded, like running into an old crush, blushingly why I loved Ramen so. Flavor and starch and the crinkliness of the noodles, oh my! I have not been happier today than I was in the 5 minutes it took to devour one whole package myself.

And now I have successfully lost my right to ever be critical about any meal ever prepared by anyone foreverandeverAmen.

Coming to a Crescendo

My addiction for the day is Pandora. It's my way of shucking off my previously horrendous taste in music. You put in an artist that you like, or a song you like, and it creates and plays a station of songs you can listen to that are similar in style to the song/artist you put in. Some are popular songs, some are of the indie-variety. You get to rate which ones you like and which you don't. I have a side bar on my blog now that shows which songs I've enjoyed recently.

• New favorite song I was unaware of before: "Friends" by The Wannadies
• Song I haven't been able to get out of my head for the past week: "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado
• Song that has enticed me to go out and buy the whole CD: "The Adventure" by Angels and Airwaves

Snapshots from Boston (1 month ago)

Dogwoods in Somerville

My father's home growing up

Aunt Evelyn's 80th Birthday (my family, Aunt Evelyn & Aunt Mary)

My Bad Taste In Music (The Y2K Period)

This week I turned 26 years old.

Have you ever noticed how woman always ponder what their mother's were doing, what stage of life they were in, when they were their age? I catch myself thinking, "when my mother was 26, she was married with a toddler." **COMMENCE VIOLENT SHUDDERING NOW**

There is nothing very exciting about turning 26 to me. At 25, atleast there was the roundness of it being the quarter-century mark, the square of 5 (if that statement doesn't close the case on my mathematic OCD, I don't know what does), and the perfect mid-point between raging hormonal college student and working-stiff adult. At 25, my friend Gem and I got together, rented a lake house for a weekend, hired a DJ, threw down 5 kegs and a margarita machine and invited 150 of our closest buds (50% of whom I'd never met) to party like porn-stars all night. It was shamelessly recapturing our youthful drinking days in the most blatantly obvious way. I spent a large portion of that evening vomiting in the sand and rolling in it, but that is a whole different set of lessons learned by my newly-matured self. There was craziness and memory lapses and glow sticks and customized party koozies!

This year is the first year I can say I was a little sad it was my birthday. I know, how selfish is that? But it's the first time I've really FELT my age. I've always felt younger, especially in an office surrounded by middle-age men, but as new hires and interns come in, a new fun generation of college grads, I have been forced to come face to face with the idea that maybe I'm not the gloriously naive spring chicken I was once. I mean that in the best way possible - innocence was bliss! I feel like 26 is the slow descent to 30, which I think for most women sounds like a daunting age. Thirty seems like there should be grand accomplishments attached to that number, along with life progress, and drinking scotch straight. I am definitely in a funk right now in the sense that I'm happy, but it seems like so much around me is changing, amongst friends, family and myself, that I'm trying to slow down and come to grips with it. Each decision I encounter seems to hold a sense of enormity and urgency in it.

More often than not, the decisions also carry a financial element. In my family, I was always the "spender." It was common to throw pointed jokes about my shopping addiction around, usually in contrast to my mother's UNBELIEVABLE efforts towards thriftiness and frugality. The guilt trips my mother used on me about spending money were herculean in nature, and based on the fact that her family is from Poland and lived through THE WAR, I was given the Siberia story more than once in my lifetime. Don't even THINK about just sitting and watching TV; if you're not clipping coupons, you're committing crimes of a wasteful nature, and THAT will not be tolerated. My natural reaction to this behavior as a newly independent woman of 22 with newly acquired job, was to head straight for Neiman Marcus and buy THE purse, the Louis Vuitton I had secretly lusted over for years from a far. What better way to prove my financial independence and worth to the world, right?

I can't help but sadly laugh at myself, only 4 short years ago. I think I wore that purse a handful of times before I sold it 2 years later on ebay. It was too small for daily use (I prefer to travel like a bag lady) and for some reason, it just wasn't as fun as I thought it would be, once the purse was actually in my possession. It boggles my mind that I spent money like that, when now, I have to write a pros-cons list in order to justify a new pair of $80 running shoes. And maybe that is why I feel my age now. This year I took on more responsibilities, and I'm slowly coming to grips with what those responsibilities mean and how they impact my future. It's overwhelming sometimes, and I find myself having fits of anxiety over it. If I'm looking at 22 and laughing at my carefree attitude now, when I'm 30, think how much harder it will be, because I just KNOW I'm going to be looking at 26 the same way.

In an effort to combat the funk, I am trying to look at aging in a more positive way. Even if I can't relive the unburdened days of my early twenties, I can be content with the fact that I no longer listen to music like Hanson, and I still have to drink my scotch with a little water in it.

Movie Critic-ing with Tangents

This past weekend, being as the weather was dismal at best (why must in rain when I want to be by the pool, yet sunny while I'm miserable at work, WHY! The weather is a cruel joke.) I watched several movies. It's hard to find stuff to do indoors for 48 hours that doesn't require endless streams of cash, so I thought I'd use my Netflix account for once.

First movie was Family Stone starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Dermot Mulroney and countless other famous people. I felt the situations were rather underdeveloped and strange in general. It's as if the movie spent so much time developing the neuroses of SJP as a character, that they forgot to leave time to develop the plot enough to be believable. However, this did not stop me from laughing at the situational humor through my tears, and when I say tears, I mean the torrential downfall that was my eye lids for the 102 minute duration. I haven't cried that hard since I saw The Notebook with a group of 5 girls. For that outing, whole cartons of tissue did not suffice. Sometime you just need a good sobbing, shoulder-shaking cry. It matched the weather anyways.

Last night while making dinner, we popped in Out Cold which was the complete opposite spectrum from Family Stone - slapstick humor of sorts - definitely amusing to watch. It was striking how much Bull Mountain, Alaska (the fictional setting of this film) resembled Whitefish, Montana to me. My family has been skiing at Big Mountain in Montana for about 10 years, and it holds a special place in my heart. I love the small town feel, and the fact that it's not commercialized to all hell like most ski resorts I've been to in Colorado. The lift lines are never long, the locals are very friendly, drinking beer is abundant, and let's face it ladies - the men out number the women in this state 5 to 1. The odds are in our favor for holiday romance. Last trip, my sister and I took 2 girl friends with us, and by the end of the week, any time we would walk into any bar after a day getting beat up learning how to snowboard, every one knew us and would yell "Texas!" when we would drag our weary butts in for some alcoholic relief. What Colorado ski resort gives you that kind of warm recognition and welcoming? Not to mention, Montana is home to one of the most amusing and stoned snowboarding instructors of all time - our friend Matty. Matty's words of hallucinogenic wisdom to us:

"It's just you, the board, two edges, and no rules. Welcome to the Dark Side."

With that kind of mantra, who WOULDN'T want to learn how to snowboard??

Big Mountain, March 2005

Lastly, we coughed up the cash and went to the movie theater for Superman Returns. A pretty lengthy movie, action-packed, and earned it's PG-13 rating, not a single cuss-word was uttered (not from the characters anyways, me in the audience? Completely different story). It was ok, but what really bugged me was how blatantly obvious it was that Superman was a digital creation every time he was in that costume. It looked very cartoony to me, but I suppose it was based on the comic books, so what could I expect? My lingering question is still, when did Superman and Lois Lane do the hibbidy-dibbidy? And when they did it, how was it? Because EVERYONE wants to know what Super-sex is like. Do you think they did it while flying?