Enigmatic Female

Pursuit of Balance

My life has become unbalanced in the past three or four months. I no longer go to the gym a minimum of three times a week, or drink eight glasses of water a day, or eat seven to nine servings of fruits or vegetables each day. Indeed, I've stalled to a near halt in doing any job-related work of a substantive nature, and have not completed a book since November (although I've started a few, the latest of which is a biograhy of Catherine the Great). These days, my time is spent daydreaming, making extraordinary lists for moving-related tasks, wedding plans, upcoming expenses, and job search findings, and prematurely packing my belongings into boxes that will soon make their way south via parcel post. I travel frequently, if not always in good nature, and have been watching more than my fair share of television, which was almost absent from my previous lifestyle. I spend hours and hours on the phone (nearly 2000 minutes were spent talking to Dallas on the phone last month, which does not include time we spent together, which was approximately 14 days, so when averaged out, we spent over 100 minutes a day talking on the phone). In some sense, this is just another winter -- as it gets colder and darker, I retreat farther and farther from activity and healthy eating, choosing instead to eat McDonald's cheeseburgers and desserts in an attempt to put myself into food hibernation. I must say, it's working well, but now it must end. I've realized that the happier I've been with Dallas, the less image-conscious I've become, resulting in high calorie, pleasure-giving foods like Butterfinger-topped frozen yogurt, guacamole and margaritas, carryout Indian food, and chips, many, many chips. Since there are already all kinds of food and love-related endorphins coursing through my body, there isn't the need for the runner's high I was craving and achieving this fall. The love-endorphins can stay, and I hope they do, but those pesky salt, sugar and fat highs I've been having must go. The post-engagement grace period is over. The wedding is precisely six months away, and I have about 10 or so pounds to lose before my dress fits perfectly (it fits now, but it could be much better in the tummy area -- no bride wants it whispered that she jumped the gun in the pregnancy department). To that end, I am strapping on my running shoes, throwing a new mix of songs onto the iPod Shuffle, and heading out for some sweaty, much-needed pavement pounding.

Boring Update

The job search is well under way. I am waiting (and waiting and waiting) to hear back from two firms that I really liked. If either of them extends me an offer, my search will be over. I am still scheduling interviews with other firms, as I don't want to count any chickens before they hatch. I have started slowly moving stuff out of my office, like my personal books, office supplies (mine, not the firm's), and the assortment of tea and coffee-related paraphernalia I've accumulated over the past year and a half (I'm probably the only person in the firm who finds the coffee machine coffee undrinkable and who solved this problem by installing a Senseo in her office). Wedding plans are going full steam ahead. My older sister is helping us by doing a lot of research and coordinating the thing and all we have to do is make final decisions and write checks. We are going to have a very tiny, family only wedding, which will take place in a beautiful cabin near Boone, North Carolina overlooking the Blue Ridge mountains (my family will stay in the cabin for the weekend, while Dallas's family will stay in another cabin or house nearby) and a small cabin for the first four days of our honeymoon, after which we will return to Dallas for a couple days before heading for the Bellagio in Las Vegas for a little more excitement. Here's a bit of North Carolina wedding trivia for you: in order to get married in North Carolina, the parties to the marriage must have been born opposite sexes.

I'm In Love And He's In Dallas

Today begins a long weekend of interviewing for positions in Dallas; four interviews in six days is a lot, but hopefully the job search, which has been ongoing since early December, will be fruitful and this weekend will be the sum total of interview Hell. Saturday we are picking up the car I bought by phone from my New York office at a dealership in Dallas. Sunday we're painting the living room of "our" house in Dallas. As weird as it is to say "our" house, it's weirder to call it Dallas's house, as I will be living there very soon (hopefully by mid-February). Hopefully I will find time over the next few weeks to update a bit more frequently than I have over the past few weeks. My holiday was rife with stories of drunkenly falling off my grandmother's walker, getting a nasty case of cellulitis in my engagement ring finger the day before Christmas Eve necessitating a trip to a physician on Christmas Eve resulting in a ten day course of antibiotics, and meeting Dallas's extended family and having his granny make jokes about how Dallas knew his dog before he knew me (a timeline that we're not going to  continue trying to convince her is untrue).