Chirky

This is not new information: I have a sensitive stomach.

The time wherein I must wear a swimsuit is quickly approaching, and I feel wholly unprepared. Yesterday morning I woke up, immediately marched into the living room, laid on the floor with my feet in the air and did 150 crunches. Because, certainly, that set alone will diminish any love bumpers and give me washboard abs.

The day before yesterday I woke up too late to go to the gym, but not too late to rearrange the living room before I popped in The Firm DVD and sculpted my entire body, particularly focusing on my legs. Therefore, shouldn't they now be long and lean, soft and hairless, with a golden tan?

Today, I am attempting to do that which I have not done in - oh, gosh. Wait. Oh, okay. I'm alright now. I was going to say in ten years, and I had to sit silently staring at the right side of my cubicle wall while I calculated. It's only been nine years, which sounds far better than ten years. Ten implies a decade. Sort of like one hundred cents sounds like it is more than one dollar. Just because it's a bigger number.

During my freshman year of college, when others were gaining their freshman-fifteen, I spent my time like this: in the gym, sometimes at class, in the gym some more, and on Thursday and Saturday nights, at a fraternity party. I'm not saying whether I ever woke up in the bushes or stumbled and fell as I walked over a perfectly even driveway or got a little too close to fire and singed my hair, because whether those events actually happened is unrelated to what I am attempting today.

Don't say a word, Amanda Sue.

So when I was a freshman in college I dated a guy who was a bodybuilder, and because we were dating I did some of the same things he did, for example, drinking protein shakes. Well, he drank protein shakes and I drank "lean" shakes. And they tasted great! Or, perhaps my tastebuds had dulled after too many Thursday and Saturday nights. But recently Roger has started drinking them, and by recently I mean for the past two months AT LEAST, and he's lost more weight than I would like advertise, particularly when compared to my meager drop.

Today I thought to myself, "If Roger does it, and if I could do it in college, I can do it today!" Thus, I am drinking a chocolate shake for lunch, which is unquestionably what has been missing from my weight loss regime.

Except I didn't have a bottle with a lid that I could use to mix the powder into my milk, so I tried to use a fork to mash up the powdery bits and to stir into a nice, frothy chocolate shake.

Have I ever told you that I chew my food? I chew soup, I chew ice cream, I chew pudding. I know there is really no substance in those foods to chew, but somehow I manage. I started mashing the shake around in my mouth to get the lumps out and realized how gross it made the shake taste, especially when I realized I was drinking a lumpy substance. It was like drinking chicken dumpling soup, without the chicken and with the dumplings cut into tiny pieces. And it was just wrong.

And so I started gagging. But just a little bit. Just enough to turn my stomach and make me want to stop drinking the shake.

I couldn't get that taste out of my mouth, probably because I was still drinking the shake, so I decided to try to "chug" it the way I did during my freshman year in college.

When I chugged my apple juice, I mean. What were you thinking?

I started cheering for myself, saying things such as, "Just try not to taste it." and "Drink it without thinking about it." and "You can finish it!" and "You can do it!", except when I said the last phrase, it was more like, "You can dooooooo-eet!", and also maybe with a little bit of a Spanish accent.

So, when you see me on television eating tarantulas, and wading through sewage, remember that it all started here. With the chocolate shake. And the lumps. And the sculpting of my muscles.