Confessions Of A Splenda Stealer

I am my own worst enemy.

I know I’m tired when I all of a sudden realize that my eyes are closed and my mouth is gaping open, while I’m sitting and facing my computer screen. Why am I so tired, you may ask? Such a simple question deserves a simple answer, and there is one—I didn’t go to sleep until 2am.

The next logical question would be to ask, what I was doing up until 2am, but then my answer gets hairy. I really have no idea. I wasn’t even watching television (though it was on in the background). I honestly just love that time of night. I attribute this behavior to my acute case of night owl syndrome that I have pretty much had since birth. I’ve never gone to bed early or at a reasonable hour.

I believe it’s a common thought that many little kids want to stay up because they think their parents have parties where party guests gorge themselves on cookies and cakes while wearing colorful feather boas and tiaras and stay up alllll night to run around and play tag or something. Not me. I just couldn’t sleep. Anytime my head hit the pillow, I had all these deep, serious thoughts about life and death and just could not drift off. It’s no wonder my nickname when I was little was Miss Serious.

Now that no one can tell me when to go to bed, I usually let my body tell me by staying up as late as I possibly can before my head just drops to my pillow, on my bed or on the sofa. I never plan for sleep. I just exhaust myself so that the sleep just captures me in one full swoop, til I wake up confused on the sofa at 7am with the tv and lights on, then tiptoe to my room for another half hour til I’m really supposed to get up. If I could, I would stay up all night because, sadly enough, I also love being an early riser.

I’m quite possibly the dumbest person alive. Who likes to be a night-owl AND an early riser? Yet, I feel incredibly independent during these hours and oddly enough, these prove to be my most creative hours. I find the darkness of night and the dewey air and pink skies of the early morning invigorating. If I had the choice, I would sleep during the typical, conventional, and non-alluring hours with direct sunlight from 9-5 pm, and stay up all night.

Think about it. When has anything remotely interesting happened during these hours? Yes, yes, anything business or finance or market related of course will happen during these hours, but what writer or artist has ever captured something thought-provoking or passionate or mysterious during 9-5? The best works of art or scenes in films or chapters in books happen in the middle of the night. Even photographers will tell you that direct light it the worst light to capture a subject in film. Of course, that is such an extreme and general claim and probably half-true, but you know what? I’m tired and I don’t care.

If I ever get to live out my dream, some may call me a hermit. Or a vampire. Or maybe they’ll think I just really hate other people.

I like to think I’m a team player. Go team Blair. Go Giants (or Redskins if my Dad is reading). Go Man U (if Matt is reading).

And now…GO YELLOW!!

From the NYTimes article in this week’s Dining section:

courtesy NYTimes.com

For the last decade the big three — pink packets of saccharin, aspartame in blue and sucralose in yellow — have fought to a kind of stalemate. But now a new player, dressed in green, hopes to shift the balance of power, opening up the $1.2-billion-a-year world of fake sugar to all kinds of changes.

The Food and Drug Administration agreed in December that rebaudioside A, an extract from the leaves of the stevia plant, is safe to add to food and drinks.

And: The makers of Splenda, which holds more than 60 percent of the retail market, have just introduced Sun Crystals, a mix of sugar and stevia that has five calories per serving. Sugar has 15 calories per teaspoon.

Confessions of a Sun Crystals Stealer? Confessions of a Stevia Stealer? I’m going to start sounding like patchouli wearing crystal meth addict.

This Splenda Stealer is getting nervous.

Thank you, you beautiful weather, you. Yes, I’m pointing at the sun and laughing. It’s Friday, gorgeous out, and I’m losing my mind.

Since the weather appears to be behaving today, I will not let the little things get to me today. I refuse to bitch about the following: it’s wonderful out and it’s so cold in my office I’m wearing my crew team hoodie from college, I finished my lunch at 12:05 PM and I’m still hungry, I have nothing to do at work, and I had a woman fall on me when I HAD to take the subway due to my damn foot.

If the sun weren’t out today, I would whine my little heart out. But, if it was crappy out, this would be my rant. I’m not realllly ranting of course, this is all just a hypothetical whine.

Because of my club foot, I am reduced to taking the subway. I take the PATH into the 33rd St. station, then I limp over to the F train platform, where I can hop on either the F, V, B, or D, to Bryant Park, then TRANSFER to the 7, which pulls me right into Grand Central, a block from my office. Annoying, but I’ve done it so many times I know how far down to walk to get into the car that will open directly in front of the subway exit I want. When you can pinpoint that on a subway, you know you are a regular on that line.

Clad with bags because I’m going home to dog-sit this weekend, the extra weight was making my foot whimper, so I HAD to take the subway, though I really craved to walk in the beautiful sunshine. All is well, you know, as fine as the subway can be, until I hop on the 7. I usually stand, but I had to sit because of my foot (no whining, just commenting). Along comes this herd/family of sweatpant-wearers and they slowly climb into the car, where they just stand in the middle of the car, speaking in a language I couldn’t quite place. Fine fine. Whatever. I’ve traveled in other countries too, and I could tell their cautious looks and hesitant entrance into the car was just because they were hoping they got on the correct line to get to, oh, I don’t know, possibly Rockefellar Center or something. But generally, when the doors close, that typically means that the subway is about to take off. This isn’t always immediate. But I’m fairly certain that it is general, universal knowledge that once you step into a subway car, a train, a cab, etc., once the doors close, you will soon be on your way to your destination.

This family didn’t quite get the memo, and so when the subway started down the tracks, this family was left to fend itself against science. As I learned in high school physics, according to Newton’s first law of motion, every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. That’s why WE SHOULD HOLD ONTO THE BARS IN THE SUBWAY OR SIT DOWN. I assume it was the mother of the family, but for some reason she didn’t remember her Newton’s laws or F=MA (force equals multiplying the mass of the object by the acceleration of the object) and so I became the external force that stopped her from sailing down the remainder of the car, meaning, she FELL ON ME, complete with a three year old child in her arms. OOOF.

She was apologetic, so I’m not going to say anything cruel, but it’s incidences like this that make my commute all the more colorful, like the time I had to grab on to the escalator railing when I used to use the Port Authority bus terminal.

I don’t really have a great ending for this story, but at least if this were a rant, I’d feel much better documenting it for entertainment purposes.

61 degrees and sunny. 61 degrees and sunny...

Oh, how frequently my lunch breaks turn into shopping breaks. At least most of the clothing stores in my office’s neck of the woods in Midtown basically consist of H&M, Banana and Republic, Zara, and Lord & Taylor. And Sephora. If I were near more expensive stores, that would be potentially disastrous/depressing. At least I can find good deals at these stores, most of the time.

Today was definitely a shopping break, rather, a shopping excursion. Every once in a while I will click around the internets to look for sample sales. I found one that was actually close to my office, and the blurb said something about $80 scarves going for $10. Sold.

After about 40 minutes (most of that time spent waiting on a ridiculously long line in a teeny, hot and stuffy room, then waiting another 15 min for someone to break my $20 bill) I ended up with this pretty thang to wrap around myself:

It doesn’t really go with my dress or coat that I’m wearing today, but I can’t wait to pair it with my non-patterned tops. The scarves are by Bindya Lula, who makes a line made and sold out of NYC for stores like Nordstroms and Anthropologie. This is from her Lula line, the more “downtown” version of her upscale (uptown?) Bindya scarves.

The scarf I came to work in was actually a really pretty blue pashmina, that I got for an even better deal: someone left it at my apt. after my St. Patty’s shindig. After a month of it sitting folded in my kitchen with no claims, it has officially been brought into my rotation of accessories. Just another reason to throw a party: people leave crap at your apt. that you get to keep.

By the way Mike, I still have your sunglasses. They don’t frame my face that well. You’re lucky.