OLD • OVERWHELMED • VEGETARIAN • YOGI

• Yoga’s been my first-line exercise for nigh on nine years. Never in my yoga life did I imagine that I’d long for Bikram’s triangle pose. That pose extra sucks. I hate it. (Actually, I hate all 26 postures when I’m in The Room. But Bikram Yoga’s like crack; I can’t help but show up again and again.) Because I want my bum hip to heal, I’m babying it. That means no triangle pose. So while the other 35 people in the room do triangle, I just stand there, perspiring and heaving. I’m jealous of all those sweaty humans. I want to do triangle! I want my thighs to shake. I want to fuse my shoulder and chin. But more than that I want to heal fast. So I refrain.

• I wish I had come up with this instead of hearing it on one of my food shows—“Powdered sugar is what comes out of God’s nose after a night of partying.”

• Here’s something I like about myself: for the most part, I’m not a weak woman. I’m newly divorced (for how long are you “newly” divorced?) and damaged in fresh and thrilling ways. But I am not the kind of woman who disintegrates without a husband. I like living alone. At first, I was a little afraid of it—in some ways I still am—but I’m not incomplete without an arbitrary man in the house. I do divorced okay. (Wait until you heard how I do dating. That’ll make your head spin.)

• Work’s sorta intense right now. There’s much going on all at once. I’ll get everything handled, but, truth be told, I’m a edging on overwhelmed. Overwhelmed doesn’t look good on me. That is, if you end up seeing it. I'm pretty good at hiding that kind of thing.

• I’m what I call an Emotional Vegetarian. I didn’t give up meat for ethical or health reasons. I gave it up ‘cause I believe animals have thoughts and I can’t eat things that think. My Sophie’s what did it. Her definite personality changed how I felt about animals at large. An example: Because she just had a lot of dental work done in her crummy little mouth, Soph had to eat soft food for a couple weeks. Dear Reader, if you haven’t opened a can of soft food in a while, you might be surprised to discover that it looks exactly like people food. Shredded chicken, pasta, carrots, peas. My beast was over the moon. And the other day I went to her bowl and found something most charming: the little dog had eaten around the peas. She’d licked the bowl clean except for twenty-some-odd peas. As a pretty damned persnickety eater myself, it was sort of a proud moment.

• My favorite ice cream(s): Häagen-Dazs Caramel Cone, Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, any and all pink peppermint ice creams, and, if if I'm needing a fat-day ice cream substitute, Häagen-Dazs Lemon Sorbet is more than satisfactory.

• When you get divorced you divide up the friends. At least you do when there was an affair and people have to pick sides. In my case, the only friends I had to surrender were my West Wing friends. If you’ve been around this blog for a while, you know that I love The West Wing. Not a little. A helluva lot. Josh, Donna, Toby, CJ, Leo, Sam—they were my pals, and I lost them in the divorce. See, it wasn’t just my show, it was our show; it was honestly a significant bonding element in our relationship. We loved and learned from it together. I can’t watch that show anymore. I trashed the elaborate boxed set of all seven seasons. And then I trashed the backup set too.

• I tend to get more depressed than usual 'round this time of year. I turn 31 next week. Nothing quite like a birthday to make you feel like an unproductive failure at life.