NYC: The Skinny

If I ever manage to suppress my neuroses long enough to leave my children and make a long-delayed trip to NYC, I plan to stalk the hell out of Marinka while I’m there.  If her blog is any indication, hilarious things happen around her every minute of the day, and who wouldn’t want a little taste of that?  Maybe I’ll hop on a plane as soon as I’m done with jury duty.  Yeah, probably not.  I need a bit more therapy first.

NYC:  The Skinny

Disclaimer: This post has some crude humor. In no way am I mocking terrorism or missing children or emaciated celebrities. Humor is just the way that I deal with tough subjects.  But just in case, no way am I putting this post on MY blog. Good luck, Andrea!

Sometimes I get the sense that people think that living in New York City is really fun and glamorous and strewn with celebrities. Well, the last part is true. Last week I saw one of the Olsen twins getting out of the car right in front of me. I was really excited, but mostly because I thought that it was Madeleine McCann and I was starting to prepare for the rewards and accolades that would surely be forthcoming as soon as I liberated her from her driver-kidnapper, but then I realized that she was too tiny to be a six year old, and was, in fact, an Olsen.

But NYC isn’t all fun and games, you know. It’s also fucking terrifying and we’re all pretty much scared shitless over here. Although we know how to use it to our advantage.

A few weeks after 9/11, my friend John and I started a diet. Our stomachs were in knots as a result of the biggest terrorist attack on the United States and the fact that almost daily the streets around our office and homes were blocked off with bomb squads attending to suspicious packages really worked wonders to suppress our appetites. We decided that since the terrorists gave us a jump start on our diets, we might as well roll with it. We figured that a few more months of being on this heightened alert and we’d be in the best shapes of our lives and if the war on terror kept going strong, we’d be a really big splash on the beach and not just when we jumped into the ocean.

Being super smart, however, we worried about dying hungry.

“I mean, what if there is another terrorist attack and we’re killed,” I asked. “Shouldn’t we have some chocolate before we take our last breath?”

John had to concede that there was a lot of wisdom to what I was saying and we agreed that maybe we should carry some small “forbidden” snacks with us at all times, in case of such an emergency.

Unfortunately, as soon as I started to carry a few Hershey’s kisses, it appeared that I was in constant mortal danger. Once, on my way to work, I was certain that I spotted bin Laden sitting across from me on the subway. Somehow he made himself shorter and blond, but those terrorists will stop at nothing to harm to our country. I had to have a few chocolate kisses because I’m not going to be caught dead hungry.

Because I value my life and the terror threat didn’t abate as quickly as I’d hoped, I was forced to upgrade from kisses to fun-sized to regular to King in a matter of weeks. This had an unfortunate effect on the size of my ass. John long decided that I wasn’t a worthy diet partner and went off on his own, so I had to deal with that rejection as well. I highly recommend Reese’s Peanut Butter cups as a salve for a broken heart.

Really, I have no idea how that Olsen girl stays so skinny. She must commute to Afghanistan or something.