This Is My Brain without Diet Coke

I was in New York last week to attend a conference and, while there, I didn't have a single Diet Coke. I drank a lot of water and a lot of other things but no Diet Coke and I didn't realize it until I was at the airport to return home. So, I immediately bought a Diet Coke because it's important to give yourself what you forgot you wanted. I also bought some pretzels because one night several nights before, I was sitting in a bar with friends and said, "Wow. I really wish I had some pretzels." There were no pretzels to be had then but, at the airport, there were and though I didn't want them, I was so impressed with my memory and my ability to delay gratification that I bought them to go with the Diet Coke I felt obligated to have. This is how you do self-care. I sat down with my Diet Coke and pretzels and ate and drank like it was my duty to American capitalism and I had an epiphany--Diet Coke tastes like chemicals and eating pretzel bites is like eating bread rocks. I did finish the pretzels because I have a fear of being trapped on a plane while hungry and being forced to root around in the seat pocket for a stray bag of peanuts or a slightly fuzzy M&M but I could not drink the Diet Coke and I took this as a sign that it was time for me to give up Diet Coke.

This is my journey and my internal thoughts along the way...

Day 1

6:00 am: Today is the day! I am giving up Diet Coke! This is so exciting. I am going to finish this coffee and then go running and then I am going to write 229 blog posts!

10:30 am: I smell like sweat and I'm too tired to walk to the shower. Why am I so tired? Can I go to bed now? I will shower...I will...soon...

12:30 pm: I have showered and I am clean and now I get to have lunch! After lunch I will write 112 posts because I need to be realistic and I haven't written anything yet.

12:45 pm: This is the saddest lunch ever. A sandwich and chips and no Diet Coke. Sad. I am sad. Everything is sad. This dining room table is sad. Why am I so sad?

1:00 pm: I am thirsty. I now understand how people lost in the desert feel except that I am in my house and it's not hot and there isn't any sand here. Why am I so thirsty? I had coffee and...I haven't had anything to drink but coffee. I don't understand how to make the thirst go away.

2:00 pm: WATER! I need to drink water! But I hate water because it has no taste. It's like air. Actually, it is air except for those hydrogen molecules but does hydrogen have a taste? NO IT DOES NOT. I will drink water. I will drink a big glass of water because I know that this is what human bodies need to survive but I will resent it.

8:00 pm: Yay! I get to meet a friend for appetizers!

Galit: I'll have a Diet Coke.

Vikki: I'lll have...water.

Galit: Just water?

Vikki: I gave up Diet Coke. I want to order onion rings but I don't think I can eat onion rings and drink water. You have to have a Diet Coke with onion rings...and french fries...and popcorn. You can't eat any of those things with water!

Galit: I know! Get a club soda with lime!

Vikki: That's a great idea!

11:00 pm: Club soda is amazing! I will drink it all the time! Life is good!

Day 2

All day: This is ridiculous. I don't even drink that much Diet Coke. This shouldn't be this hard. How many do I usually have a day? One? I'm sure I've never had more than one ever. I would remember if I drank a lot of it, right? Unless I have Diet Coke related dementia then I wouldn't remember it. That's not funny. No, I am sure I have never had more than one a day, maybe no more than one every couple of days! Drinking one every once in awhile is no big deal. I could do that. I could cut back to that...I mean go back to that previous pattern of drinking no more than one every once in awhile. Why should I deny myself? Because I know it's bad for me and my friends think it's poison. Fine. I won't have any. I will drink this club soda with lime and then, on my way to get Zeca at camp, I will get coffee. Are you happy, brain?

Day 3

Morning: I never drank Diet Coke in the morning so why am I even thinking about it right now?

Afternoon: This is stupid...worse than the time I went vegan just because I was bored.

That's it so far. I've only made it three days and have lost a tiny bit of my will to live but I'm sure I'll rally! I have to rally. Seriously. Someone help me rally.

Is That a Turtle on Rihanna's Butt?

This morning, I sat down at my desk for the first time in weeks. May is a blur. There was Mom2.0 and then Listen To Your Mother and then Luisa left for Portugal and school is ending so the kids have all the end of the year things. At some point, my desk became a mess. It was covered in scratch paper with notes and passwords and unopened copies of The Missouri Review (I was recently rejected there) and Minecraft coordinates (I've been meaning to leave a cake in the tree house of one of the new moms who joined our server) and a check I need to deposit and a thing of Tums and a stack of cassette tapes I still need to listen to and receipts to enter into a spreadsheet. The chaos of my desk has been daunting and the best way to deal with that was to avoid the desk. Obviously. But today, I sat down and started cleaning my desk and then I looked at iTunes to research a post I'm writing for another site and things were going so well and then I found myself watching every Rihanna video ever made on YouTube. I was mesmerized by her green coat in Bitch Better Have My Money and spent more time than I should admit wishing that I could pull off such an outfit. Then, I eventually ran across Where Have You Been and became fascinated with Rihanna's ass. Though I'm sure I'm not the first to make such a statement, I am probably the only one to wonder aloud (and on social media) if there was a turtle on her ass in the first part of the video. I watched it several times in order to determine if it's a turtle or a tail or a strange armadillo-like bikini bottom. See for yourself and weigh in:

https://youtu.be/HBxt_v0WF6Y

The more videos I watched and the more I talked about the videos I watched and the cleaner my desk became, the more I felt like writing! My brain was alive with the sound of music and images of green coats and turtles on butts! And that's when I realized that this is my writing process. It's messy and seems completely counterintuitive and counterproductive and every other kind of counter their is but it's mine.

I've been writing in bed lately and it hasn't been working. Bed is for things like Netflix and Candy Crush. Yes, that's what lesbians do in bed in case anyone asks you. Clearly, my "process" requires that I sit at my desk and ponder music videos. It gets ye olde synapses firing. So, my turtle-free butt is in my chair and I am at my desk and I am ready to roll.

Where Are The Words?

I have written every day this week. "But where are the words?" you ask in your adorable sleepy voice.

Yeah, you have a sleepy voice even though it's 11 a.m. but I won't judge you for sleeping in and being lazy because I am an unconditionally loving person and I've had enough coffee for both of us.

The answer to your question is, "Everywhere."

As you can see, I am a deep thinker and enjoy answering seemingly simple questions with existential hogwash.

Hogwash is a word a serious writer would use, especially if the writer lives on a farm and writes about hogs.

I don't live on a farm but I used to live on a piece of land my parents referred to as The Farm. I don't know why they called it that since we didn't grow crops or have any animals other than the mean shetland pony my father won in a poker game.

But I can use "hogwash" if I want to and who are you to judge, Reader with the Sleepy Voice?

The point of this post (and I know we are all wondering about that...including me...) is that I have written elsewhere. That's right...I stashed the words in other places.

I wrote about the plight of second children and the fact that it took us 10 years to make Zeca's baby book:

Then, you bring home the second dog and it’s a little bit overwhelming and you realize that having two dogs is more work than having one. In fact, you realize that there is some sort of weird mathmagical thing that happens where adding one more dog exponentially increases the amount of chaos in your life.

It’s the same with kids.

Of course, dogs and kids aren’t exactly the same. For one thing, you can put a dog in a kennel when you leave the house for mimosas. But, the strange mathmagic does apply to kids and that’s why second kids get screwed.

I also wrote about parenting everyday heartbreak because kids have a lot of feelings:

There are hard things that happen to kids–bullying and playground fights and violence. There are times of transition–divorces and separations, the death of a loved one. There are significant struggles–learning differences and mental and physical health issues. Most parents, when faced with these big things, know what to do and say to help their kids through them but what about the everyday heartbreak?

I also wrote a few thousand words that no one has seen--super secret words. Maybe about farm living and washing hogs. Or maybe about pinwheels...or pinworms. For the record, pinworms are not as pretty.

See? Words everywhere.

Speaking of words, we expect our daughter (who doesn't like to read) to read 30 minutes every night. Last night, she grabbed a book and joined me on the couch for our reading time and do you know what book she read? The dictionary. Did she learn new words? No, she did not. She read about presidents (there was a section in the back) and studied the Periodic Table of Elements and then read the introduction to the dictionary aloud.

There is no point to that story other than the dictionary is full of words and my daughter is weird. So there's that.

This is the part of the post where I tie everything together but I think we all know there is no way to do that because this is one of those posts. So, just raise your eyebrows and smile at the screen and then drink some coffee. After that, shake your head like this post was just a fever dream.