A Girl...

The Smell of Desire

One of my coworkers saw me leave the office at 3 p.m. today and started cracking jokes about how I keep the hours of a woman of elegant leisure. If it'd been true, I might have chuckled and made a move to adjust my imaginary tiara, but the truth of it was that I was just leaving to pick up lunch at 3 p.m., having lasted the day to that point on one cup of cereal, a mug of tea, a granola bar, and two pieces of caramel from our company stash. My latest editorial venture has had me working crazy hours at a crazy pace for weeks on end, and I'm ashamed to report that along with my eating habits, my bathroom habits have suffered as well. You know you're working too hard when you don't have time to pee and you've rationalized a potential bladder rupture as an occupational hazard. I leave for Christmas vacation in twenty-five hours; can I get an advent calendar over here?

One side-effect of eating a late lunch is an even later dinner, which means that at 9 p.m. there's little to no chance that I'm going to put effort into creating a healthy and balanced meal. I usually scramble together more cereal, extra sugar, or perhaps a bowl of cherry tomatoes and an avacado. Add that to my lunchtime feasts of large french fries, a Diet Coke, and more caramels and there's no wonder that in recent photos I resemble a whippet, all sharp angles and sunken feed-me eyes. This is great for Simon, who loves whippets (and Italian greyhounds). Whenever we see one on the street, he's compelled to approach the owner, ask the pooch's name, and then babytalk into its pointy, pointy snout. I, however, think whippets are cute enough, in theory, from a distance, but I stand by my claim that they look decidedly unsnuggly--think a wooden octopus or a teddy bear made of nails. Me and my hyperangularity look even worse when juxaposed with someone who is all the right curves in all the right places.

A few more of the seventy-five pictures I took of someone else's baby are up on Flickr, where you can see them if you have access. (Email if you don't have it but want it.) Evidenced therein are many examples of why, when I have kids, I totally want Simon to babysit them, even if at one point he said, "Babies are like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get until you stick your finger in the creamy middle." He then proceeded to sing the baby a song that involved rhyming "tush" with "shush" and, people, let me tell you, it was MAGIC. "We're bonding, yo," he informed me as he can-canned her legs in a rhythm the Rocketts would be jealous of. And even though he monopolized the baby the entire night, I was just happy that she didn't screech whenever I glanced in her general direction, which is usually how those things go. Dogs smell fear; babies smell obsession. I bet I stunk like a landfill. A landfill full of raging hormones.