Kicking My Own A$$, Part I

I will admit it. I am a food racist.

I love white food.

Bread, pasta, biscuits, cake...all receive a big "Hell Yeah!" from me.

And, as most of you know, it was a long,cold winter and, being unable to grow a fur coat, I have put on another layer of a different sort.

Ten years ago, I could lose fifteen pounds in a couple of months. All I had to do was eat a little less and exercise a little more. But that doesn't work any more. Now I need to try something drastic. My "Kirb Appeal" this summer will be NewThirteen, trying to weigh what I did at 13. (This is a HUGE joke, peeps. At thirteen I weighed 101. Like the song. Now? I would need to remove all my insides PLUS a leg in order to weigh 101. Which I believe would be drastic.) And lest you think I want to LOOK thirteen again? Let me correct you. That would involve braces, headgear, and perhaps the ugliest wire-framed glasses on the planet. Nope--I'll settle for losing 15 pounds and looking 50 instead of 51.

I have done lots of research these first two weeks of summer, and I will be blogging about some of the things I've learned about dieting. (By 'learned' I mean read with a healthy dose of skepticism.) For now the easiest, albiet the most painful, choice is to give up a lot of my white food.

Alas, little Biscuitville, I hardly knew ye.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Menopause.

Why I love menopause:
1. I can use it as an excuse. As in "Hey, I'm sorry I'm late, but I was driving along and all of a sudden I had this terrible hotflash and I had to pull over into the nearest Cook Out and get a peach cobbler shake.
2. I can use it to scare people (particularly those of the male persuasion). As in "Do you REALLY want to mess with a menopausal woman? Go ahead. Go there."

Why I hate menopause:
I look every day of fifty-one.

Why this is a problem:
I was still getting carded into my late thirties. I am not joking. And it wasn't just a clerk or two being nice, either. It was "I'm sorry, ma'am. I need to card everyone who looks like they might be under thirty."

So my challenge to myself this summer is to get my cuteness mojo back. Kinda like Valerie Bertinelli, only blonder.


Because I want to stop looking like this Kirby:




And start looking like this Kirby:

I Win!

I don't know who started it...I have a notion it was my mother...but there's been a lot of discussion regarding "who gets what" after her death. It almost makes sense, now that she's in her late seventies, with multiple health concerns, but this talk began when she was, oh, I don't know....fifty.

(Younger than I am now. And to my kids--if you're reading this? You get NOTHING! I'm taking it all with me. j/k.)

There has been some discussion among my siblings. The protracted discussion (by protracted I mean twenty-year long) has been regarding a certain corner cupboard, which my sister and I both covet. Why? Who the heck knows--it's not an antique, nor is it particularly beautiful, but the scale is perfect and the style beautiful in its simplicity. The inside is wide board tongue-in-groove, painted sage green, and the rest is dark-stained knotty pine. And frankly? I love me some knotty pine.

This corner cupboard was the one piece (besides the bed and sofa) that my mother insisted had to come with her to the old lady apartment. I think she has been putting off making the inevitable: to whom should this corner cupboard be bequeathed?

Recently, the winner of this nice (but not old or particularly valuable) corner cupboard is *Tah-dah* me! And yes, it would look great in my living room. But you know what? In the past twenty years, there have been a lot of changes. And for my brother, sister and me, it's not really all that important who gets the corner cupboard. It's that we can all pitch in together--first during my dad's loss and the subsequent sale of my mom's house, then moving her to an apartment, and now through her health issues. We can sit down together and talk and laugh and there isn't any underlying animosity. (Of course, I am speaking for everyone because I am the big sister. I guess I could be wrong, and they both hate my guts and I just don't know it.) But in so many families, where there is so much bitterness, I figure that corner cupboard or not, I still won.

No, Kiki, do not get your hopes up. The corner cupboard is still coming home with me. ;)

Look into the crystal ball

Spending this week (please bring drugs and/or liquor) with my mother has been like getting a glimpse of the future.

And the future isn't pretty, peeps.

It's not just that your body begins to betray you and you are not young and cute and energetic anymore, as if that's not bad enough.

It's that you become an OLD PERSON.

It was funny...when I told people I was coming back here to care for my mom for a week, they invariably asked her age. And then it was, "Well, that's not old."

I am here to tell you...seventy-seven is old. Your body breaks down, your memory has glitches, and you develop old person habits like accumulating tons of junk "just in case" and that unmistakable "old person smell."

Yesterday, I mentioned that getting old was not for the faint-of-heart. But neither is staring at the person you will most likely become.

I will begin stockpiling liquor as soon as I get home.

Between a Rock and...well...

Todaay, I did something I've done before. And it doesn't get any easier.

I left my mom in the hospital.

Just for the night--she had a procedure today that involved some girl parts. Like she said, it's not as if she's going to use them any more.

And I'll pick her up tomorrow and she'll come home, where I'm supposed to force her to walk around some.

But I could tell that she was scared, and I didn't want to leave.

Taking care of elderly parents wasn't something I ever thought about, when I was in my 20s and 30s--maybe was because I was too busy taking care of my little kids.

But it's something I need to think about now.
Sometimes getting old stinks.

This is interesting...

This is an interesting article from Newsweek. Apparently, I'm not the only one thinking Fifty is the New Thirteen. Okay, so Newsweek says Sixty is the new Eighteen, but still....

Hey, Newsweek...I thought of it first!

I Want to Be in Their Club!

Well, it finally happened.
Two of my favorite authors got together and interviewed each other. It was all I could do to keep from yelling "I WANT TO BE IN YOUR CLUB!"
And I am in a writing club. (I am not in any other clubs. Clubs don't want me. I was briefly in a sorority in college, and one time somebody mentioned I might want to join a book club, but they did not offer theirs. I am in Bunco, which is kind of like a club, but it's mostly for drinking, and that I can do alone.) The writing club let me in because they had to. I paid the money, and now they send me e-mails. I get together twice a month with folks who critique my work, but most of them are either (a) memoirists, or (b) traditional fiction folks, and I am YA.

(YA, for the uninitiated, stands for "Young Adult." It comes in many forms--supernatural, James Bond-y, chick lit for teens, or angst-ridden prose. I don't write any of those. I write weird stuff about kids who are a little different.)

YA doesn't have a club here.
YA has a very cool club somewhere else, too inconvenient for me to join. Like Pheonix, where Stephanie Meyer lives, or Northern New York (Laurie Halse Anderson), or Vermont (Karen Hesse), or 'islands up and down the east coast' (Judy Blume). Hell to the yes (!) for Judy Blume! Islands up and down the east coast?? How much money did a book about a girl who wants her period MAKE you, Judy Blume?? I can write a book about a period--I had thirty-nine years of those mothereffers!

So, because I can't join a YA club (is it because I'm too snarky?), I'd like to join the "funny girls who drink too many Flirtinis and do a little facebooking under the influence" club.

Do they have one of those??