C'mon and Marry Me BiIILLL!

OMG I can't wait

Get your tickets to the opening of the gates of heaven

"THE Spirtual Event of 2008" - JC

Rainbows and Butterflies Bitches!

4 Stages, 34 DJ's, 80,000 watts, Personal light shows

Get ready to show us your TITS!

Hot chicken, cold beer

Way better than Burning Man

Featuring a bottomless peach schnapps fountain


*writing credit goes to Mark on all of these.

According to this article the national high school graduation rate is estimated to be 71%. I can’t help but think about what kind of life you end up leading without even a high school diploma. What kind of job can you get? Maybe 7-8 dollars/hour and work your way up eventually to 10-12? That’s hardly enough for a single person to live on, and not nearly enough if you end up having kids. I suppose there’s the criminal contingent that turns to theft and drug dealing and other schemes to bring home the bacon, but as illuminated in Freakonomics, most drug dealers aren’t making much money at all. And there are the occasional entrepreneurial types that end up starting their own business and becoming wildly successful. But I’m gonna guess that they don’t make up a statistically significant portion of the dropouts. This prompted me to do some Googling to find out what high school dropouts end up doing with their lives. One thing I hadn’t thought of is that as technology improves, low level jobs decrease. Here’s a statistic:

In 1971, male dropouts, working full time, earned $35,087 (in 2002 dollars), falling to $23,903 in 2002, a decline in earnings of 35 percent. Earnings for female dropouts fell from $19,888 to $17,114.

Yikes!

Inspired by this blog, I gave some thought to scenes I hope pop up as my life flashes before my eyes.

Numbers 1-25:

1. After the proposal on the cold windy beach, finishing our picnic in the car all giddy while the dog bounced around in the back seat.
2. Singing drunken karaoke until closing with my friends.
3. In the Campanile courtyard, champagne and strawberries with my family and friends right after my graduation ceremony.
4. Doing the second scuba dive in Thailand even though I was terrified.
5. Road tripping to Seattle with Chloe, eating chips and listening to DMB.
6. The view as I first cross westbound onto the 520 bridge.
7. The first day on houseboat, after everything is unpacked and everyone has just opened their first beer.
8. The moment Hobo sat on my lap in the car after we got him from the shelter.
9. Seeing a magnolia tree in full blossom for the first time.
10. The last weekend at the Walnut House.
11. Driving through the Redwood Forest with Helen, open sun roof, sun sparkling through the trees.
12. My first truly passionate kiss.
13. Getting the phone call from the Microsoft recruiter offering me the job.
14. Goofing around with my sisters on the beach; all of us laughing.
15. Topless beach in Nice.
16. Smoking cigarettes with Glenda on the balcony of our apartment in Japan.
17. In Italy, riding the merry-go-round in the small empty playground high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean.
18. Carving pumpkins with Mark on our first Halloween and the ensuing photo shoot.
19. Throwing away my last pack of cigarettes at LAX.
20. Gazing at the starry sky on the beach in Jamaica, pleasantly inebriated.
21. Fumi haggling on my behalf at the Honda dealership.
22. Eating Dick's at 2 am with friends, obnoxious and drunk.
23. 006 Bond NYE Party
24. My Grandma standing on the porch waving good bye until my car turns the corner even though it's 4 in the morning.
25. Speaking French and realizing I wasn't thinking the words in English first.

You should try it.

In the process of all this wedding planning, I keep having a similar freak out over and over. When I look at wedding materials, whether it be blogs or magazines or theknot, the weddings they feature are so perfect. The invitations are handmade and designed by the couple. Seating is assigned with escort cards displayed in novel ways while the tables are cleverly named and feature place cards. The table settings are elaborate and match the color themes and the flowers are exquisitely designed. This makes me start to freak out. Why? Because I’m not assigning seating, I’m using the linens and china provided by the venue, I’m going to do the flowers myself and I bought the invitations online. When I start to think about how well designed these weddings are, I start to feel torn up. I feel torn up because I want to have enough taste and talent to orchestrate such an affair. But it’s never gonna happen. For starters, I’m just not willing to spend the kind of money it would require to get all fancy pants like that. And on another level, I feel like a lot of that stuff is unnecessary and that I prefer to focus on the stuff that really makes the wedding great. But I mostly struggle with feeling like maybe my “design sense” or “taste” isn’t good enough to pull off even the details I deem important in the way I would like. I guess it's hard to envision how it will all come together.

When you plan a wedding, there's no way you can exhaustively research all your options because there are so many that you'd go crazy. So, in a lot of cases, I've just deemed something "good enough" and decided on it.  Sometimes I start questioning if I could have found something better or done something differently, but I have to nip that kind of thinking in the bud because that way lies madness. I remind myself to stick by the decisions I made and remember my motto that really all that matters is the guests and the booze. Still doesn't stop me from getting myself into a tizzy occasionally about how I should maybe special order chairs since the venue's are just plain plastic or maybe I should hire a real florist, etc. And the whole circular thought loop begins and I have to talk myself down one more time.

We did decide on the honeymoon! Argentina! We'll defer the honeymoon until September so that it'll be spring there. I'm going to take three weeks off. We'll probably only go to Argentina for two weeks and then spend the last week hanging around at home and maybe take a mini camping trip somewhere local with the dog. I can't even tell you how much I'm looking forward to that much time off. A week is the longest duration of vacation I've taken off since 2003.

As much as I love all kinds of foods, I think I could pretty easily live the rest of my life eating only a subset of foods:

1. All things potato - French fries, tater tots, fully loaded baked potatoes, potato chips and hashbrowns
2. Salad with all the trimmings (ripe tomatoes, egg, olives, cucumber, avocado, croutons, walnuts, ranch dressing, etc)
3. A variety of cheeses and crackers
4. Mission-style burritos with a side of homemade tortilla chips w/tomatillo salsa
5. For beverages: beer, vodka martinis, Coke Zero and various teas
6. Macaroni and Cheese
7. Take 5 candy bars and chocolate chip cookies
8. Strawberries, pears, bananas and grapes
9. Sushi
10. Pizza (pepperoni, mushroom, black olives)

Sadly, in order to lose the 12lbs I've lost in the last 5 months, I've eaten most of those things pretty rarely. BUT. The only reason I've been successful in losing that weight is because I do eat all of those things sometimes. I just don't think I could succeed in eating healthy most of the time if I couldn't on occasion indulge in all those yummy yummy things that are bad for me.

What I really eat most of the time:

1. Vegetable & beef, chicken or tofu stirfries on rice
2. For breakfast: oatmeal, yogurt, egg scrambles with veggies
3. Lean Cuisines
4. For snacks: string cheese, 90 calorie granola bars, pretzels
7. Salad w/o ranch dressing or croutons
8. Whole wheat bread
9. Pasta w/marinara sauce
10. Fish & sushi
11. Lots of fruit and vegetables
12. For beverages: 90 calorie skinny vanilla lattes, tea, coke zero, vodka martinis
13. Tacos made with corn tortillas - light on the sour cream and the cheese

I eat a lot of other stuff in small doses, but those are the staples. Mostly, though, I was able to lose the weight by changing a few key things:

1. Eating breakfast. I never used to eat breakfast on work days and by lunch I'd be starving. Now I eat instant oatmeal everyday. Sometimes fruit, but mostly oatmeal. Sometimes I don't feel like eating anything for breakfast, but I still make myself eat the oatmeal because it really sets the stage for not overindulging the rest of the day.
2. Bringing my lunch to work. I used to eat at the MS cafeteria and that usually entailed fare like grilled cheese sandwichs and tater tots dipped in ranch. Now I bring my lunch to work and it's usually a lean cuisine or leftovers from the night before along with fruit and a granola bar.
3. Speaking of leftovers, I made a rule where I would only cook "healthy" dishes at home and save indulgences for eating out. I used to like to cook a lot of "white trash" dishes at home that involved cheese and sour cream and all kinds of calorie busters like that. Now I don't. I also don't buy potato chips or cookies or other bad snacks - again, I only eat those on an arbitrary basis outside of the house. Keeping the food in the house healthy has really reduced the frequency of eating that stuff while still allowing me to occasionally have them.

So now I weigh only 3 lbs more than when I graduated college (3lbs to goal weight!) and none of my pants fit. About 9 months ago, I had a moment where I decided I would probably never weigh less than I did then and should just get rid of all of my skinnier clothes. And then 3 months later, I embarked on this lifestyle change. Duh. It's ok for the most part since those clothes were probably dated and out of style, but I could really use a few pairs of those pants back. Now I need to go shopping but it seems daunting to have to buy all new stuff - I guess I just need to start with a couple of pairs of pants that I won't spend all day hiking up.

I don't really think my weight loss is all that noticeable to anyone except me, but it feels nice to have succeeded at something that I felt for awhile I couldn't change. It's weird how it's not a big brainteaser how to lose weight, but when you're staring it down, it kinda feels impossible. I feel like I cracked the puzzle for me. I know that I can easily keep this weight off because I've made changes that I can live with and didn't go into total deprivation to get here. A world without french fries is not a world I want to be a part of. :)