About a month ago I went bridesmaid dress shopping, followed by bridesmaid dress measuring, and got - well, not the shock of my life, obviously, but rather a big one considering the circumstances. We found a pretty and flattering dress and then went shoe-shopping, and it was a very nice afternoon, etc, but I spent the entire thing wishing I was a head in a jar because I suddenly hated my body so badly and it’s pretty difficult to go through Kingsway Garden Mall thinking “Satin, black, pointy, rhinestones allowed, tassels not allowed, closed toe, no more than thirty percent white fabric, two-to-three inch heel, FUCKING CHRIST I AM A BLOB. WHEN THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? WAS I ABDUCTED BY ALIENS AND INJECTED WITH GREEN GOO? HOW AM I EVEN MOVING THROUGH THIS FOG OF SELF-LOATHING?! I WANT A BODYECTOMY… ah, here we go. Oh wait, no wedges allowed either. Stupid sneaky wedges.”

I came home and cried over a big bowl of Halloween candy, mostly Reese’s Peanut-Butter Cups (cause that’s always so helpful and productive when you’re feeling extra-splorky) and then I sat up very straight and said, “Screw it. I’m not that big.”

The following Monday I started going back to the gym and I have been going religiously four times a week for ninety minutes at a shot, eating five to seven daily servings of fruit and vegetables, plus lots of whole grains, plus low-fat dairy and regular servings of fish or lean meat, and telling my family to drop dead when they offer me chocolate, drinking vats of water and snacking on cucumber slices and eating almonds and getting a multivitamin every day and generally doing the whole weight-loss… thing.

In one month I’ve lost three pounds and pretty much all my will to live.

Seriously. I have no energy. I thought eating right and working out was supposed to bloody energize me. Hah! I can barely drag myself out of bed in the morning. I’m dozing off in class. Sometimes I feel too weak to type. (Not right now, obviously.) I moan a lot more than I used to. Where’s my runner’s high, for God’s sake? Where’s my RAARRRR! I CAN TAKE ON THE WURLD! attitude? I thought you got automatically that once you committed to living right. I am paying my damn dues and I want my damn benefits! What is going on here? Don’t tell me I have to keep this up till May.

Around the end of August I thought I’d try tracking my reading over an average period of vacation and school, and I’m up to thirteen books now, the last of which (Saul Bellow, ‘Seize the Day’) I finished on Saturday.

There’s been some good (Terry Pratchett, ‘Going Postal’), some very good (Eugenia Semyonova Ginzburg, ‘Into the Whirlwind’), some extremely bad (J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Silmarillion’), some true (Michael Hart, ‘Diamond: The Story of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair’) and some just plain upsetting (Martin Amis, ‘Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million’).

I still have about twelve hundred books on my shelves to get through, but I haven’t started a new one since ‘Seize the Day’ and now I’m asking you, my humble readers, to recommend new books for me to read over the Xmas break.

Difficulties:
1. All nonfiction authors must be living.
2. All fiction authors must be deceased.
3. You must have read the book yourself.
4. No women authors allowed.

So a couple of weeks ago I was running to an interview from a soils class, wearing stained corduroy pants and a hoodie, thinking, “Why the heck did they only give me two hours’ notice for this thing?” and “I wonder if I should even bother showing up.” The interview seemed to go badly - I looked like a hobo and haphazardly answered all the questions with a frozen smile. Plus, the interviewer was eating lunch. Bad scene.
They called me back a week later and demanded I go to Calgary for a second interview (!!!), so I dropped everything and appeared at a three-hour nightmare panel of death, by the end of which I think I was babbling random words like “Diligence” and “Supervision.”
Apparently this is a good strategy, because I got the job!
Come next May, immediately after Kim ‘Hottie’ Scott’s wedding, I will be moving back to Calgary as a project manager at the world’s biggest oil company!

Postscript: I just came back from celebrating the new job with some fiends at RATT, and must apologize for any drunk-like mistakes in this post.