So, I woke up feeling like crap this morning.
Not ill, exactly, but icky: dragging, depressed,
no energy, like I’d slept on an airport floor.
This was, of course, because YESTERDAY was day
30, the end of my no alcohol/no carbs 30-day challenge. It was a day that happily
coincided with a pie and wine tasting at my gym.
I know what you’re thinking: “There was no pie
and wine tasting at her gym! She just brought pie and wine to the gym and ate
it during spin class!”
But you’d be wrong. There was, in fact, a pie and wine
tasting, held in a small room with about 150 half-starved gym rats, at my gym last night.
The serendipity of such a thing happening on the
last day of my anti-carb fast (and the fact that the Smartboy would definitely have left
me had I denied him his favorite food group, pie), and that it was FREE, obviously
added up, at least in my head, to “It was meant to be.”
I was REALLY looking forward to it, too; a chance
to break what was basically a month-long fast in some serious style.
But guess what?
It wasn’t all that.
The pies, from a new local restaurant called,
preciously, O pie o (get it? Ohio, O pie o), were…fine. One or 2
bites would have been enough to tell me that they were good, but not great, but
I powered through and ate both the goat cheese and leek hand pie (which what
the size and shape of an empanada. Wait, now that I think about it, it was an empanada. I guess pie sounds more like something you can charge $9.50 for.) and the slice of honey-vinegar pie (in which
I tasted neither the honey nor the vinegar). Same with the wine: it was 4 full
servings, 2 of whites (which I wouldn’t even order were it not free) and 2 of
reds, and none of which I would ever buy again.
Given the build-up in my head, the whole thing
was a bit anticlimactic, so the Smartboy and I decided to see a movie at a
nearby theater that’s my favorite because it serves gourmet cupcakes and
Malbec. Yes, I just said that I went to a movie theater not for the movie (My Cousin Rachael, which was well written and acted but which you should see on
DVD) but for the sugar and alcohol, which were…fine. Not as good as I remember
from earlier in the year. But fine.
We ended the night at the Korean place up the
street that stays open until midnight (a miraculous oasis of warmth, light, and
food in a backwater like Cincinnati, where the usual post-9 pm food option is
to, let’s just say, Eat Great Even Late), where I had my very favorite drink of
the moment, a concoction consisting of lychee fruits, jasmine tea, spiced gin,
and all sorts of other things one would never have at home. It was good. But it
wasn’t the fill-up-all-the-empty-places-in-my-soul good that I think I was
looking for.
I made the decision before all this happened that
I was not going to feel bad about it. It was, after all, one of those “parties”
we talked about a few weeks ago: a celebration of the ending of scarcity sort
of thing.
But this morning, I was beating myself black and blue anyway. Not because
I’d eaten something like 3,000 calories worth of refined carbs and imbibed another
2,000 in booze in a 5-hour period, but because I hadn’t actually enjoyed it
that much. Not for lack of trying, mind you; it just wasn’t all that great.
And then there were the physical after-effects.
The feeling of being slightly squishy, out of it,
logy, blue, not completely healthy of mind or body. That feeling took half the
day to go away, and I realized with some horror that that’s how I used to wake up feeling most days. In fact, that’s
what I thought mornings were. I hadn’t realized until today that slowly, over
the last month, I’ve gotten used to waking up pretty clearheaded and cheerful;
it was only the contrast that brought it so clearly to my attention.
So I’m going to try to use this as a reminder for
the future. I would have been just as happy with the evening and a lot MORE
happy with the morning had I TASTED the pies (that place was on my to do list
for the summer anyway), decided that finishing them wasn’t worth the calories,
and moved on. Ditto the wine: a sip was enough to let me know that the whites
weren’t for me and the reds were only so-so. I did enjoy my lychee drink (it’s
called the 1000-tailed fox, if you ever get to 3501 Seoul here in Hyde Park),
so I’d keep that in the partying mix. The cupcake was really just me trying to
have the experience that the pie was supposed to give me, so I could take it or
leave it next time.
Lesson studied and committed to memory. Hope it sticks.
Comments
Post a Comment