Liz Lemon

Steve’s out of town this week at an all-expense paid stay at a snooty resort in the mountains to participate in an academic seminar in a tent in the woods (and it’s not as rustic as it sounds—they have electricity and wi-fi in addition to coffee and scones). And in his absence, I’ve learned something important about myself—outside of the fact that I for sure picked the wrong discipline. I don’t eat very well when left to my own devices. Sure, I sort of picked up on this in grad school, but there I found the perfect solution. I would simply run until I couldn’t run anymore and then I would be ravenously hungry pretty much 24/7. I ate everything, and everything tasted great. (Sometimes I would even deliberately run more so that I would be even hungrier if I knew I was going to be eating something I especially liked.)

But I also realized that in addition to an “eating week” (D coined the term in a fit of genius, and I’m totally embracing it) I also have a “nothing sounds that great week” or if you prefer a “I can’t be bothered week.” And unfortunately that week is this week. When Steve is around my “I can’t be bothered week” isn’t usually a big deal because, just as he was resolutely confused when I tried to explain the concept of “eating week,” he remains hungry during the times when nothing sounds good to me. He’s hungry; we eat; we both feel better. If I can’t be bothered to cook anything, he’ll order us a pizza or take me to get pho. It’s a sensible, masculine sort of approach to the problem.

I, on the other hand, handle it less well. Last night after I got home from work and an hour on the sofa watching reruns of the Big Bang Theory, I realized it was after seven and I should probably eat dinner. Jimmy Johns stymied me with some glitch in their online ordering system and since calling would have required getting off the sofa and finding my phone I decided to just lie there for another half hour. By then even I had to acknowledge that if I didn’t eat soon I’d get seriously cranky, so I wandered into the kitchen and ate the following (in more or less this order): a lemon poppy seed cookie, three fruit jellies, half a box of leftover macaroni and cheese that absolutely should have been thrown out after I ate the first half, and a raw tomato. The tomato was for sure an afterthought that ran along the lines of: I should eat something that is made out of a plant, but our fruit basket is empty except for those three tomatoes. This may demonstrate that I’ve grown since my early days of grad school, but apparently not much.