Snacks | Another Wordpress Blog

So, I went into the hospital at 138.5 pounds. Since then, exactly one month ago, the lowest I’ve gotten is 128. And I’ll get to 128 and be happy and think, “I’m almost there! Project Heifer is almost done and I can call it a successful mission!” and then something like 500 rum and cokes happen, and boom. I’m 131. This is so crazy making.

I forgot the worst thing about dieting which is, you have to eat in very specific, non-usual ways for any weight to come off, for days and days at a time. But to go up like 2 or 3 pounds, all you have to do is have ONE normal meal–like dinner with dessert and wine. And boom! You fast forward to where you were four days ago. I.e., fat.

I got some extra perkies from the doctor, that should help Project Heifer along. Man narcotics are so awesome for losing weight!

My last blog post included a little part about being wistful for the time to do nothing. I didn’t expound on it too much because I’m sort of worried my blog has been too sad and depressy lately. But then my friend Jill wrote a post on the same feeling, and captured a lot of what I would have said if I hadn’t been trying to spare all you readers from my deep thoughts. Read it!
Thing I just IM-ed to Evany Thomas which made me laugh and laugh:

being pregnant means you barely have to blog anymore! just keep those ultrasounds coming!
you could do a perez hilton thing where you put cocaine marks near the fetus’ nose, for hilarity

After a full month at home, all the little things I do to pass the time or unwind from work…well, I’ve done them all to the extent that I am finally truly bored of them. My favorite little flash game on the web, the solitaire and Texas Hold ‘Em on my Sidekick, the Sunday New York Times, reruns of House and CSI.

And, it’s harder to lose myself hanging out with friends–everyone has a significant other, or babies, or lives far away. (To me both the East Bay and the Sunset are far, far away.) The days of hooking up for brunch and then wandering around thrift stores in the mission for 5 hours are gone, forever. Even if we all lived right next to each other I think the days of just doing nothing, together, are gone.

The other night Evany was over and we were killing time before she had to pick someone up at the airport (I live kind of near, and almost always on the way to, the SF airport). At one point we were lying in my bed watching TV with a space heater blowing hot air on our feet and giggling about nothing. THAT’S WHAT I MISS! There is a hole in my heart for that kind of perfect together nothingness.

Many people say, quite kindly, that I am a talented writer and I should finish my book. And you know what? If I am done distracting myself with flash games, and if my socializing has ebbed away to a thin stream, then why the fuck not? I keep avoiding it because obviously the whole story has changed–the book is about the dot-com boom of the late 90s–but maybe it’s set in now times and there are flashbacks?  Maybe the book takes place over the course of ten years? Who knows. But I think this might be truly the only thing I have going these days, and I’m going to jump back in, even though writing TORTURES ME. Fuck it’s hard.

Talked to a friend today a lot about relationships. There are so many aspects of being alive and in a relationship and happy and they don’t all happen to the same people at the same time. What is going to happen in MY life? No idea. And at the same time, probably exactly what is happening now. I don’t know. I’m pensive.

I call Percocets “perkies.” And usually within about 15 minutes of me getting out of bed, it’s perkie time! The morning is when it hurts the most. However I am weaning myself off the perkies, partially because I want them to last and partially because I really don’t need them that much anymore. I am healing quite nicely! So, sometimes I don’t take a perkie till around 3pm. And around 5pm, I turn to…wine! The perkie extender. Just one glass of wine (wine does not taste that good to me right now so it takes me over an hour to finish a glass of wine) extends the magical properties of the perkie for like 2 more hours! I am proud of my efficiency here.

Project Heifer is coming along; I was down to 130 on Saturday morning, but then Shane Ginsberg came over with a 3-piece fried chicken dinner (sides: mac and cheese and red beans and rice) just for me and I ate most of it. Plus martinis! We were watching the Steve McQueen version of the Thomas Crowne Affair and watching movies from the sixties always puts one in the mood for a classic cocktail. Anyhoo, the day after Shane came over my weight was up to 131.5! I’ve only just today gotten it back to 130 again. Boo! I am behind schedule!

When I start work again I’ve got to start bringing my own lunch at least 3 days a week. You never know how many calories something has unless you make it yourself. There is a reason restaurant food tastes so good–it has a bunch of sneaky fat in it. I really do want to get down to 125 at the very least!
I’ve started working a tiny bit; checking email and responding to it. Things are mellow at the office and that is nice.

Okay boring dispach over!

The good news is, I’m starting to feel a lot better! I’m going up and down stairs, the burning pain is fading.

The bad news: I’m going to start getting bored. Please entertain me!

The doctor called yesterday, to see how I was doing. I told her that one side of the incision really hurt, way more than the other side, super burning hurting. And she says, “Oh, well the tumor had attached itself to some of your organs, so I had to cut it away.” And in my head, visions of her scalpel just scrape, scrape, scraping away.

(I just spent ten minutes trying to figure out which organs are near the uterus, and it looks like it’s mainly the colon down there. THIS is a super detailed diagram which is a little too gross to embed in my blog. Check it out!)

Tomorrow is the day I think I’m going to try going down stairs. Although to Ivan that probably means that I can do laundry again (my current excuse being that I can’t get to the machines). Ha, so I brought home this little bell that we had at work, the kind that sits on the counter and you ring it for service? The idea was that if I needed something, I would ring the bell and Ivan would come running. Ooooooh, he did NOT like that. He looked at it and said, “you better only ring that for emergencies and blowjobs.” It has not been rung.

I’m all tea drinky now! I like the chai, I like the genmaicha (brown rice and green tea). I love coffee but I don’t actually need to drink it and everyone always goes on and on about how tea is so great for you, so I’m doing that now.

Oh and shit, I forgot that I have to complete an online traffic school course in the next four days. Does someone want to come over and do it for me? Smiley? I’ll give you chocolate!

Project Heifer is in full swing. Since I first got weighed, six days ago at the hospital, and realized I was an actual cow, I’ve lost FIVE pounds! Which would actually make me look a lot different if only they were subtracted from my normal weight. Subtracted from the cow weight, I am still a pound and a half over my usual high-end weight.

People that know me know I love chocolate. I LOVES IT! And so it has been steadily arriving in my house, making it difficult to stay on my liquid diet. Funny or Die sent me a bunch of super yummy chocolates including toffee, which is the only thing I ate in such excess when I worked at the bakery that I made myself physically sick. Susan Dunn sent a pound of truffles. Ivan got me 2 pounds of See’s. Kate brought me a chocolate bar and a bunch of squares of chocolate. Mom brought me an apple crisp (not chocolate but still sugar). IT IS AN EMBARASSMENT OF RICHES!

Fortunately drugs are a very good appetite suppressant. Just ask any model. During a period of time in my twenties when I was, uh, “friendly” with speed, my average weight was 115. (If only it didn’t make you crazy and paranoid, rob you of your ability to laugh, make you look ancient, and ruin your teeth, it really would be an excellent addition to any diet plan.) Percocet is working well in that regard. The thing is, I might not be actually hungry, but knowing for a FACT that there are about 6 pounds of chocolates in the house is a real challenge. Please come over and eat some!

Man, you never realize how many people at work read your blog until you write about your vagina. Who knew? Sorry dudes! Here’s another nugget to chew on: I have not pooped since I went into the hospital! For some reason that fact horrifies Ivan. They gave me stool softener at the hospital and Ivan was like “YOU HAVE TO TAKE IT! TAKE ANOTHER!” I guess pooping is super important to men.

My incision really BURNS. The end.

The doctor said that the tumor was bigger than the uterus! Man I wish I could have seen it. Sounds so gross and awesome!

The operating room looked just like they do on TV–everyone in masks and huge overhead lights and a metal table with instrument trays on it. That was the scariest part, being wheeled onto the set of “ER.”

I was in the hospital two nights, hooked up to a morphine drip. You can only demand morphine every eight minutes. The first night I woke up every half hour from the pain, pushed the morphine button, and went back to sleep until it wore off (30 minutes). Even though there isn’t anything to do at the hospital, being on narcotics meant that I was not dissatisfied with the lack of stimulus. Also, I had awesome visitors who brought me awesome gifts: Caroleen brought a stuffed toy uterus! Rachel brought WINE! Veronica brought CLARA who made me a cute necklace! Evany brought a scary teeth-whitening laser and a long, fake hair ponytail hair clip! Kate brought boxes of food! And Heidi brought weird magazines (Tiger Beat?)! And everyone contributed a trashy celeb magazine or two. So I’m all up to date on how Jennifer Aniston is doing FINE. Seriously, stop talking about it. She is fine. Really! Brad who!?

That said, on Saturday when I knew I was going to go home I was SO READY. My day nurse was sort of clueless so I had to basically tell her to call my doctor and find out what the plan was for my release. (My night nurses were all very awesome especially Lily, sorry about barfing on you.)  I was sprung by 3pm and Ivan came and got me and we filled my prescriptions and it was so nice to be home.

After sleeping all night the first night home (Sunday night), I woke up for the first time without any pain medication at all in my system and I could barely walk. When Evany saw me on Friday she was surprised that I could sit up and get in and out of bed by myself. Turns out my extraordinary mobility was 100% due to the morphine drip! Now that I don’t have the needle in me, I walk like an old woman and sitting and standing and walking and sneezing and everything feel like I am getting knifed.

The scar is enormous, and my whole stomach is distended, probably because all the organs that are left got jostled during surgery and they are not used to being jostled in that way. The nurse AND the doctor kept telling me how my scar was so tiny–and maybe for this procedure it’s tiny, but it looks so big to me. It’s not in the place I thought it would be, either…although it is in the place where logically it should be, so I guess I just wasn’t thinking. I thought it would be off to one side, like an appendectomy scar. Nope! it’s right above Cootertown. And a lot closer to the town square of Cootertown than I thought–I thought it would be in the outlying counties. Nope.

Alright you can stop picturing my vagina now. Sorry about that. But I really was surprised.

I’ve been sleeping a lot, my friends all offer to come over but I’m not sure I am ready yet–it’s nice to know that at any minute I can just shut my eyes and nap for however long I need to. Pilot is at the kennel for daycare which is great, but the house is so quiet! I had big visions of what I was going to do with my time off, like start a new novel, organize my office, get rid of old clothes, but I think it’s way too early for that. I don’t even know what I want to do–do I want to lie in bed or on the couch? Do I want to watch TV or play computer games? No idea.

Oh and another bummer, when I got weighed at the hospital I was 138 pounds, my highest in like a decade! I had no idea I’d gotten so fat! I knew I was on the heavy end of my normal range (128-132) and I hadn’t been weighing myself because I thought the scale would say 132. I mentioned it to Ivan and he said, yeah, you are the heaviest you’ve ever been since I’ve known you. And I thanked him for not saying anything, there are very specific periods of time where I am willing to hear negative truths about stuff like that. And he said, well I tell you look good because you do look good to me. So nice!

I think I sort of let myself go a bit, knowing that I’d lose a little weight due to the surgery. Well, now that I realize how far gone I got, I’m reigning it in. I was planning on just eating soup and liquids for the first week or two anyways but now I’m going to do that till I hit 125 pounds. And then I might keep it up till I get to 120! Actually 120 is not that great a weight for me because my clothes don’t fit right and my chest gets bony. But I might go that low just to counteract my horror at getting so big. Anyways, I’m down 2 pounds so far. By the end of the week it should be 5, end of next week, 10. I’ll keep you updated on the situation.

Again, comments don’t work here and I’m too lazy to update my version of Wordpress so send me anything at the normal email address. It’s in the last post if you’ve forgotten it.

The internet delivers to me news about people I know, through Twitter and Flickr and instant messaging and blogs. People are having babies and falling in love and getting their hair cut and sending roses to each other and being mean.

I’m getting a blood test today (that I was supposed to get on Wednesday, but the Ultimate Period was so crazy painful I couldn’t handle it–I can’t take asprin or Advil so I had to “feel the feelings.”) for the surgery. I’m drinking coffee and hoping it makes my headache go away. I am planning on visiting Heidi later, I have all my leftover tampons wrapped up to give to her! Lucky Heidi. Ha.

I feel weird and alone today! Ivan’s gone, I missed Evany’s party last night, I’ve been in a Dunn cloud in Santa Cruz for the last few days. And I know I should go out and maybe civilization (or some rock radio) will cheer me up, but here I am, on teh internetz, reading about what all of you guys are up to today on Twitter, and Flickr, and blogs.

Also, Twitter makes me feel like I’m not funny anymore. I’m not good at that one-liner, super inappropriate and sarcastic zinger that is so well delivered in 140 characters. I’m better at in-context, on the spot improv kind of funny. So now there’s that–I’m alone, spying on people on the internet, and unfunny. Seriously, I have got to get out of the house, now.

Bye! Oh and thank you for those people who wrote me about the baby terrarium. It was appreciated!

It’s not the penultimate period, that was last month. Right now, as I type, I am having my Last Period Ever.

On December 4, my uterus will be skillfully cut out of my body and put on a metal tray. I have requested that the uterus be photographed; the surgeon said, with a small amount of what felt like eye rolling on my side of the phone, “if there is a camera in the operating room, I will take a picture.” But they WILL weigh it. I’d love to hit a pound, but realistically, it’ll probably be six ounces.

I have no idea if I am freaking out or not…I’ve never been overnight in a hospital! I’ll be at 3700 California, Pacific Medical Center, btw. And afterwards I have no idea how I’ll feel? It’s like a c-section, but instead of taking out a baby they take out the baby MAKER. Or maybe it’s a baby baker? A baby terrerium?

Anyhoo, that’s what’s up with me. Et tu? Comments are broken on this blog so send mail to me at liz at lizdunn youknow what (dotcom!)

Recently my car got keyed. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten keyed in San Francisco; during the “mission yuppie eradication” period in 2001, my BMW got keyed. (That made me wish that I could post my resume on my car–dudes, I used to work at the Warfield as a cocktail waitress! I’ve been living in this town since 1991! I’m not ruining this town!)

This time, it was right in front of my house, on my sparkling new Audi A3. But it wasn’t just a long key mark–someone scratched “3 jobs” into the paint. WTF?

Both the carwash in San Francisco and the paint place in Palo Alto had seen the exact same message scratched in cars, so it’s a little trend, I guess, all over the peninsula. I searched to see if there was information about what exactly three jobs means–it can’t be a “buy American” thing, can it? Who in California cares about jobs Detroit? But, if it’s not about buying American then what could it possibly mean? Probably just that people are dicks.

As Evany wrote about in this very funny blog post, Cafe Gratitude is this raw, vegan, smug cafe where all the items on the menu have names like “I am Beautiful” or “I am Delicious.” And I’d heard from all my friends that have visited Cafe Gratitude that the counter staff makes you say their name of the dish, so rather than “I’ll have the hummus pita wrap” they won’t start making it until you say “I’ll have the I am Bountiful” or whatever.

So last weekend I was walking by, with Pilot and Josh Smith, and I really needed to pee, so I figured I’d go in, I’d order something little, and use their bathroom. (I am Bursting with Urine.) I went in and didn’t see a big chalkboard of menu items or anything so I just loitered around the bar area until a harried counterperson looked at me. “May I have a wheatgrass juice?” She’s all, “sure, one ounce or two?” “Two.” It wasn’t till later when I looked at my receipt that I realized she was supposed to force me to say “I am Renewed.” I was oddly disappointed that I didn’t warrant fucking with! Can they see in my steely, cynical eyes that it’s not going to sink in?

So I got super extra fuming mad yesterday. Looking in my purse, my Sidekick demanded that I twitter my emotions! And twitter them I did! And today people are wondering, what the fuck happened out there in New York City to make you tweet such angry tweets?

If you have never watched Arrested Development then you will not understand the full nuances of my references to the Bluths. Please go rent it and watch it, not for me, but because after you watch it you’ll stop thinking that you’ve wasted your life on nothing, and realize you’ve wasted your life dealing with the craziness of the people you are related to, and it was unavoidable so you might as well just accept it.

Like Lucille Bluth, my mother is relentlessly critical, and hypersensitive to any criticism toward her. She took us (me, my sister, my sister’s stepdaughter) to see August: Osage County which is all about a horrible, selfish, critical mother and her daughters. My sister and mom were jokingly referring to me in the name of one of the daughters in the play who is bossy and impossible. An hour or two later we were at a restaurant when I point out some similarities between my mom and the mom in the play, in what I thought was the same joking vein. Wow. I got my head bitten off so hard, I can’t even really describe it–my mom became super angry and defensive, saying over and over “well I’m sorry I’m not perfect” and “you certainly weren’t perfect either you know” and when I tried to explain, hey, I just thought we were poking each other with little humorous truths but in a loving way, and BTW you were doing it to me just an hour ago, she barked at me “Just don’t say another thing. Don’t say another thing. Don’t say another thing!”

My friend JB showed up right at that minute, so I acted as normal as I could for the next 20 minutes or so, finished my drink, ate my food. My sister’s stepdaughter said something about how her stepmother (my sister) was cooler (to travel to NYC with) than her mother and my mother said “well a stepmother doesn’t have to deal with how ungrateful daughters are.” At that point I pulled a bunch of twenty dollar bills out of my purse and handed them to my sister and said my goodbyes.

Being super mad at your mom reduces you back to when you were 16 years old. Like Michael Bluth! You do immature things and act in an entirely reactive way. For me, just as if I were 16, I went out with JB and stayed out as late as I could and drank as many drinks as I could. And came home and *almost* booked a ticket back to SF early. Credit cards should have breathalyzers on them. But I’ve been in this rage sinkhole enough times to know: just go to sleep and you can always book that ticket in the morning.

The most Arrested Development moment was when my mom called me in the morning to fight with me some more. We have adjoining rooms and I’d locked my door to her room, but we still shared a wall; so as we were yelling at each other, I could hear her voice in the next room in addition to her voice in the phone. Infuriating and ridiculous all at once. And when I got off the phone I wanted to call Ivan and complain about her but I couldn’t because she could hear every word! So I just took a long shower instead. Basically I am trapped just like in highschool all over again and it still sucks.

We patched it up enough today to see another play and have dinner. I’m still mad and yet also cognizant that this is my life; this is my parent, what kind of stand can I possibly take regarding her total narcissistic, thin-skinned, Queen Baby disposition? I think I just have to live with it.

I realize that reading this doesn’t in any way convey how horrifying it was when she got total Crazy Eyes and yelled at me, with 40 years of fury all built up, in a public place with people staring and trying to look away. I think any one of you could have said the same things and it would have been not nearly as upsetting. But as Evany Thomas always says, your parents know exactly how to push your buttons because they CREATED your buttons. So if this all seems dumb to you think of a thing your parent says to you that just drives you over the edge and then mentally copy and paste it over this blog entry.

1. leave work early

2. go to Serpentine and drink delicious margaritas made with fresh sqeezed lemons and limes and huerredero tequila

3. get home and mix vodka with Kombucha gingerade, for a total wellness fail

4. eat salad because i’m still fucking vegan

5. rolaids

6. halcyon

7. asprin

8. old school with will ferrell is on tv!

I was on a panel for the first time ever, at PSFK! I will now link to some of the coverage of my teensy weensy panel in case you have any interest:

Core77’s blog

DesignCentre’s blog

A picture from a conference-goer where you can see my cute shoes better

One thing I said got some gasps and “ooh”s from the audience, when we were discussing web 1.0 and everyone working constantly. I said that in web 2.0, there wasn’t this cult of “who can work the most” martyrdom (which Miette, my old bakery, totally subscribed to and it sucked). And really, if you are spending 14 hours a day at your job, you probably aren’t very good at it. Like Megan at Miette, she’d spend two hours frosting cakes when it was really a 30-minute project, or she’d bake a huge batch of 14 cakes from a recipe she’d never tried before, and then when they didn’t turn out, she’d throw them all away. At Excite everyone made a point to be online until like 1am and then back online at 7am and send around business articles so it would look like they were constantly working. And those articles weren’t even that interesting. Why not just get some sleep and do actual work that helps the company succeed?

In fact 37 signals has been trying this experiment where people only work 4 days a week. It’s pretty intriguing–not sure it would work at my job, where you have phone calls and stuff with external partners who expect you to be there on Mondays and Fridays. But I definitely agree with the assertion that no one is actually putting in 8 hours of focused, productive work each day, every day. Like right now I’m at work, yet blogging to you lovely people!

What else happened last week? I had all these topics queued up in my head to write about but the only one that I can recall now is the most spectacular bird shit ever, which pummeled my car last weekend. I was driving with Heidi, and she was talking, and there was this huge THWACK! and a big patch of British-racing-green birdpoo splayed out across my windshield. Naturally Heidi kept talking but I made her stop and observe this crazy dark green poop. I said, “Didn’t you hear that sound it made when it hit the windshield?” and she said, “I just thought you hit the dashboard really hard or something.”

liz and our new friend at liz’s post panel gawker drinks

Originally uploaded by evanyevany.

The guy behind me was a creepy pervert, topics he chose to discuss with me included how could he get his girlfriend to talk dirty to him, will anal stimulation during heterosexual intercourse turn him gay, and some other banal stuff I can’t remember. We would have moved away but a) the party was super packed and b) we had seats and c) he kept wading through the crowd to the bar bringing us drinks which had the desired effect, ie, prolonging his audience by exactly one drink length.

liz and our new friend at liz’s post panel gawker drinks

Originally uploaded by evanyevany.

She is an awesome lesbian! HEARTS!

OMG. It was a comedy wonderland. I flew down to LA to go to the premiere of the new Will Ferrell and John C Reilly film, Stepbrothers. The movie was awesome, I was laughing and clapping almost the whole time (there is a dark story arc in the middle with less laughing). Here are the people I saw at the premiere after-party (at which PABLO CRUISE played!?) in the order that I saw them:
David Hasselhoff
Ron Jeremy
Jane Lynch
Jemain from Flight of the Conchords
Andy Samberg
David Koechner (from Anchorman)
Ed Helms (from The Office)
Will Ferrell
John C Reilly
Adam McKay
Judd Apatow
Rob Huebel (from Human Giant)
Aziz Ansari (from Human Giant)
Paul Scheer (from Human Giant)
Martin Starr (from Freaks & Geeks and Knocked Up)
Charlyne Yi (from Knocked Up)
Eric Wareheim (from Tim & Eric and those Absolut commercials with Zach Galifinakas)

And best of all: DR. KEN!

Because stories and telling stories is really all human civilization is, and has ever been. It’s what we all want–TV shows and novels and even celebrity magazines, they all just tell us stories. We’re just big children wanting to hear a story.

I really do like it when someone tells me a good story. I started reading The Dirt (autobiography of Motley Crue) on vacation and it has me enthralled. As does “Notes on a Scandal” the movie with Judi Densch and Cate Blanchette, a first person narrative.