the usual monday update

Oh, what's happened since we last spoke?

Saturday evening, after working out and talking to the Benevolent L on the phone and doing some errands, I got to ratchet up my karma points! (I like to think of this in video game terms, as if I have just drunk a potion that gives me strength or more lives or something. Heh.) There I was, standing in the bus stop, when from across the street comes the perfect specimen of a skinny little white trash girl around D's age, smoking and crying and, yes, thumbing. As she gets close enough to me, she asks if this bus will get her where she wishes to go and if it is coming soon. I tell her yes and I hope so, respectively. She says she's going to thumb. But when no one wants to give a ride to a skinny little crying woman, she reconsiders and parks herself in the bus stop with me. She asks what time it is, and when she sees me take out my cell phone to check, she reconsiders her plan for the second time. She asks if I would call a taxi for her. After negotiating where she wants to be picked up and where she's going and looking up the number, I am about to place the call when I see the bus coming. She decides she'll get on, but she has no money. (Which calls into question whether she was just planning on blowing the cab driver, but whatever.) Don't worry, I tell her, I'll pay for you with my card, because you look like you're having a hard time. She agrees and asks if she has makeup all over her face. I gently point out where she has mascara and eye liner smudged under her eyes. Hey, we've all been there. Then, on the bus, she asks if she can use my phone. Well, sure. This leads to an almost ten minute call to (if we can judge from the "I love you, baby"s) a man, in which she instructs him to please answer her cell if it rings and assures him she will be there soon though she has *no* idea where/what street she is on now. Then I had to take my phone back and get off the bus. If the Benevolent L had been with me, she'd have gotten all the details of what tragedy had befallen this young woman, but I believe in allowing crying strangers their privacy even if I am spotting $1.25 for them to get home. So you will all have to make up your own story about this, even as you lament the fact you never take public transportation and/or don't live in the hood and thereby never have this shit happen to you!

Then yesterday morning I had my first weight training session at the Y. My trainer Liz had all us ladies start out with five pound weights (except for one older lady with some physical limitations she'd worked with before, who had 2s.) I was feeling all smug because the 5s were way too easy for me and Liz moved me up to 8s--and I swear I coulda done 10s, but she wanted us to start light yesterday and work on our form first. This morning, however, the DOMS is making me go, holy shit! maybe you shouldn't have been so smug, Andrea. She also told us to eat protein within a half an hour after lifting, which I didn't because I was going into town right from the gym to meet up with M2 and eventually have lunch. So my muscles probably hurt today because I didn't feed them properly, not because I'm weak like little girl. Ha! That's my story and I am sticking to it.

Lunch with M2 was lovely, but the problem with our eating together is that our dietary patterns are distinctly opposite. M2 is a vegetarian and I am...not. I suggested we go out for Indian because I know that's always good for her and it was sounding awfully tasty to me. But I then ate more refined carbs in one sitting than I have in four months. I'm sure my muscles needed that too, right? Samosas, mmmmmm. (Proving once again that deep-frying makes everything better, including lentils.)

So, happy Monday, bitches! Rock on and all that.

xoxo