Not a real hangover, I hardly drank this weekend. No, instead, a life hangover. What's the difference, you ask? Well...
A life hangover is usually marked by total body aches that are most commonly caused by too much laughter. Body aches are further compounded by a lack of sleep (usually from staying up late to have a great conversation), contortionist positions (from sharing a bed with two Napoleon-minded doggies), and over-satiation (because all the bestest foods in life deserve to be eaten in massive quantities). A life hangover is directly related to the quality of life lived (the better the life, the harder the hangover), and can only be cured with more great living. Laughing, hugs, tickles, smiles, cuddles, and good food are all recommended to ease the side effects of withdrawal.
We celebrated a wedding this weekend. The happy couple were strangers to us just a few months ago, and now they're practically family. I dropped my awesomeness on Des Moines early Thursday morning to join the festivities preparations and it was go-go-go from the moment my alarm went off in the morning.
Thursday was a blur of shopping lists, driving around town running errands, balloons and streamers, lists of liquor and little drink umbrellas; brisket for breakfast, cake frosting for lunch, rum for dinner, male stripper for dessert. It was people we hardly knew doing things one shouldn't speak of in public. Strangers driving in from across the country to a place they've never been, settling in like tack-on additions to our mod podge family.
Let me tell you, I knew I was in trouble the moment I saw the FIVE GALLON BUCKET of buttercream frosting. That's when the life binge (and subsequent hangover) got its start.
Fuck you Walmart/Sam's Club. Damn buckets of processed "frosting" taste SO DELICIOUS and there's SO MUCH. Fuckers.
Friday there was barely time to sleep in. The morning brought a giant to-do list that we tackled while making new friends. My mom's office building serves as an extension of our home and it's the site where we host our large groups and parties and for that reason I know that a day at the office means time well spent. Never a dull moment there, never. We worked our fingers off until the end of the business day, at which point everyone went home with the intention of continuing the pattern of hard work at home. Instead, the weekend got the best of us and we spent the night on the couch eating pizza and watching Netflix.
[Speaking of Netflix... boyfriend and I keep our Netflix account ONLY because we have a serious addiction to watching series from start-to-finish and we learned the hard way from watching LOST that renting the DVDs from Blockbuster is a seriously stupid and expensive idea. I'm not the biggest fan of the Netflix streaming service, in fact I think it's a colossal waste of money if your interests lie solely in watching mainstream movies, but it has its benefits. For example, last Christmas when I spent a week at my parents' house we encountered the serious problem of wanting to watch a movie on Christmas Eve when the video store had already closed. Dad was willing to drive anywhere in town to find an open rental place but I said, "Hey dude, if you give me ten minutes to set up the Wii in the living room we can just use my Netflix account." He was apprehensive at first (old dudes aren't known for being technologically inclined), but once I got everything set up it took him all of twenty minutes to hand over his credit card and ask me to sign him up for his own account. Six months later, daddy is still raving about the wonders of Netflix. And as an added FYI, he probably watches about 10-15 movies per week (no joke).]
We watched not one but TWO movies and I don't feel any guilt in saying that it was time well spent. I spent the duration of the movies pampering my momma (let's be real here, moms deserve that kind of treatment ALL THE TIME) until my parents were falling asleep on the couch, at which point I tucked them into bed and set my sights on running. I learned a very important lesson on my 6km jaunt around our neighborhood: running at midnight in Iowa City is perfectly acceptable because that's hardly the weirdest thing that happens in a college town at that hour; but running at midnight in a conservative residential neighborhood in a real city Des Moines is generally frowned upon. Many people stepped out on their porch to see what tripped their automatic flood lights, and thankfully I wasn't wearing my contacts or else I might have seen that some of neighborhood watch were carrying guns and/or other weapons. I pretended they were rolling pins and walking sticks.
Saturday was another go on the merry-go-round. The words that come to mind are frenzy, panic, overwhelming, and spray glue. Yes, spray glue. It was wedding day for our good friend and adopted family member, Crystal. She's fresh-out-of-college young, madly in love, and seriously underfunded so her dream wedding was of the DIY variety. Her expectations for this event were not unreasonable, but her resources (namely time and help) were severely limited and the last days were spent furiously putting together more than just loose ends. My mom and I (along with a few other friends) woke early, skipped the ceremony, and worked til the last minute to get things done. In the end we fell short but no one seemed to mind, thankfully. I feel bad that we didn't get to nail the details and present a polished end result, but there came a time during the reception as the guests began to pour in that we realized we had done all we could and it was time to party.
The reason that I mention any of this is simple, it's another one of life's lovely lessons: whatever you're going through with weight loss/maintenance, whether it be exercising or dieting or a combination of both, it's important to stop and smell the roses. I took time to exercise when it could (there was very little of it this weekend, to be honest), I did my best to balance eating well and enjoying the good eats, but at the end of the day what mattered the most is that I enjoyed myself. I didn't fret when I was elbow-deep in a vat of butter cream frosting, and I certainly didn't think twice about licking my fingers afterwards. I didn't sleep as much as I would have liked, and I would have felt better if I had more time to run, but the hours I spent dancing in my heels count as exercise, and the workout I got from laughing my ass off easily counts for a session of ab work.
I'm a perfectionist, anal retentive and detail oriented at that, so it bothers me to apply the mindset "this is as good as it gets" because I will always wish that it was better. Instead of fretting over what could have been, I need to focus my efforts on what will be because the bestest part of living is that there's always more. Never backwards, always onward and upward.
Next up: our gang reuniting for our annual Hootenanny this weekend, then... PITTSBURGH.
Something tells me my diet is shot. Fuck you, summer.
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