Life Without Beer
February 28, 2012 at 7:37 am | Posted in Fashion, Fitness and Beauty, Life and Living, Playing with Food | 2 CommentsTags: alcohol, beer, empty calories, losing weight, wedding dieting
one of my last beers for the next few months
Following my 29th birthday, I decided to stop drinking beer, at least until after my wedding. I am just finding that it is too much effort to drink beer if I am trying to get intoxicated and the empty calorie intake was overwhelming. I know that in order to fit into my wedding dress, I need to start getting my diet under control, and that might possibly mean removing items from it that I normally ingest. I’m not getting too crazy about my diet just yet, but I wanted to take at least one step towards getting ready to fit into my dress, and quitting beer was a fairly easy thing to cut out…kind of.
You see, me and beer have a long-standing relationship. Ever since the first time I got drunk off of scotch whiskey as a teen and got so unbelievably sick that liquor didn’t seem like the best first choice for drinking. In high school, the drink of choice was typically a 40-ounce of Budweiser or some Old English (there was that Mike’s Hard Lemonade phase but we won’t get into that dark period). When I started to get into the bar/clubbing scene, I added Long Island Iced Teas to my repertoire of go-to drinks.
I started to become more interested in higher quality beer when I got to college. When I wasn’t drinking from a keg, I was at a local brewery sampling fresh brewed beers or at a bar with 30+ beers on tap ready for taste testing. I really liked the raspberry wheat beer that I would regularly sample. I would eventually come up with the beers that I really liked, and for very different reasons. Today, I enjoy a good Stella, Yueng-ling or Blue Moon if I’m looking to get a little tipsy on good beer. Every so often I’ll enjoy a good Boddington’s if it’s on tap. But often, I’ll stick to some basics: Corona and Pabst are always good friends.
But all of that will have to wait. Now I am consciously switching my drink of choice to wine (red or white), and will probably start carefully adding in some liquor drinks for the real rough nights. I will miss the casual brew after a hard day’s work, but I have to make the sacrifice, and hopefully I’ll see some results in the form of getting some weight off.
The Things That You Remember
February 23, 2012 at 7:34 am | Posted in Life and Living | 3 CommentsTags: first kiss, lip synching, making lasting impressions, memories, mind's capacity, selective memory, the things that matter
The mind’s capacity to remember things is somewhat limited. I’m no scientist, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one that has figured out once and for all how much a person can remember, though many studies have been done to show capacity and selective memory.
What I find interesting are the things that people remember about certain situations. I can easily get myself crazy thinking about how something I said came out really stupid, but the person I am talking to may not remember it that way.
My fiance is someone who remembers really interesting details. He’s not very good with names (truth be told it took him a little bit to remember my name when we first met), but he remembers faces and can recognize people just from seeing them once in a photo. As a music and movie fan, he remembers every movie he has seen, in which theater, and who he was with. Same goes for concerts. He knows who he was with and where he was. These are details I don’t always remember, unless something super interesting happens (like how I almost got trampled at a Nine Inch Nails concert — that memory is fresh in mind, or those people who didn’t know MGMT’s music and sat there making out in front of us the whole time).
What I do remember is this. Things like this: The first time I saw my fiance to be; The moment I met my future best friend and maid of honor; my first kiss; the time I received a handwritten letter complete with a break up from my high school boyfriend; the time my good friend showed me self-inflicted cuts on her arms; waiting in the hospital as my college boyfriend got his stomach pumped; catching a fly ball in a softball game in 5th grade; the day I picked up my puppy for the first time; lip synching “I will remember you” in sleep away camp; saying good bye to people I loved who I knew I was never going to see again. I remember moments that made a difference in my life, turning points that at the time I didn’t know were turning points, and moments that I knew would never happen again. I remember people in my life who had an impact on me. I have good memories and I have bad. And I have people in my life to remind me of the things I have forgotten that I need to remember.
And all I can do is hope that I have made a positive impact on most of the people whose paths I was lucky enough to cross.
Second Chances
February 21, 2012 at 7:32 am | Posted in Relationship Woes | Leave a commentTags: dating, life after divorce, nice guys finish last, relationships
It’s a question on every woman’s mind on Valentine’s Day in the 9-5 world. Who’s man is going to make their woman feel really special by sending flowers to her office for all her female colleagues to see? It’s always somebody. So when a friend of mine was the lucky gal this year in her office, everyone was surprised, including my friend. My friend never really spoke about dating anyone. She spoke often about her ex-husband, but never any recent love interests, so I had to prod her for more information, and the story she told me is a true testament to second chances.
The man behind the flowers turns out to be an old friend who she knew when she and her ex-husband-to-be first started dating, back when she was in her mid-twenties. Both men had an interest in her and probably didn’t like each other partially because of that. The man she ended up with was the one who stuck his head out more, the one who had the guts to approach her, the bolder one. A classic case of “nice guys finish last” syndrome.
But the marriage quickly deteriorated. Now a single, attractive woman barely in her forties, perhaps she thought that was all that was meant for her. Perhaps she thought that her life would be complete with the love of her family, friends and cats and the fulfillment of a meaningful job. I can’t say what she thought. But I think there is a light in all of us that deep down shines with hope for a second chance when at first you don’t succeed.
I don’t know how they reunited, but they did, and now the nice guy is coming out with guns blazing. It’s such a spectacular display of wooing the sound of “aww” would make you think a gaggle of girls were surrounding a newborn baby. It’s the romance and the excitement of the possibilities. It’s the effort a man takes to impress you, to make you smile.
Who knows what will come of her second chance, but let it be a lesson to all of us. It’s not over until its over. Life is full of curve balls. You make the best decisions you can in the moment. Don’t regret these decisions. If they weren’t meant to be, you may very well get a second chance to try again.
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