Old, Fat and Drunk

Old: It was around the time that my now husband, T, proposed to me that I started to feel like an actual grown up. Since then, I've been waiting for the day that I wake up somewhere in my late forties, the proud parent of a teenager who hates me and the worst part of it all: I look the part. Even at twenty-eight years old, I wake up every morning and look in the mirror expecting this to be the day that I am officially old.

Fat: I've been fat before so I know it well. And while I don't actually enjoy being fat, I certainly enjoy getting fat. I could go 7 rounds with the best of them and find the strength to gnaw on that last helping of Prime Rib even when I am physically uncomfortable from whatever ungodly amount of food I've already eaten. I am missing that mouth-stomach connection that lets a person know what they put in their mouth affects how their stomach will feel. I love getting fat. I hate being fat.

Drunk: Since the very first time, when at 16, my friend and I raided my parent's basement bar and put together a lethal combination of a little pour from every bottle they had so no one single bottle would look any emptier, I've enjoyed a good night of boozing. Sometimes I get too drunk and start a fight with my husband/best friend/a bouncer. Sometimes I don't get drunk enough and decide I'd rather be somewhere else. And sometimes, I get just drunk enough, dance all night and happily skip home sweaty and ready for a 3am feast.

There you have it. Old, Fat and Drunk: Three things I don't aspire to me, but three things I found myself feeling after the 48 hours that made up this weekend. Is this married life?

When I woke up Sunday morning, with bleary eyes and a headache, I had to log on to UnPlain Jane and read what I had written the night before. I remembered the basic premise and bits and pieces of what I wrote, but to be honest, it was somewhat of a blur. It's not that I went out boozing all night, came home tanked and decided to write my blog. I didn't go out at all. Instead I sat on my couch, in front of my laptop and downed a bottle of wine.

As I did this, T sat as his desk doing work and downed his own bottle of wine. Next thing we knew, it was after midnight and we were hammered and looking for more wine. Left with only the option of popping a bottle of expensive champagne that someone had bought us for our wedding, we began racking our brains. For some reason drinking that special bottle of celebration bubbly didn't seem right given that we were a) already hammered and b) had basically only communicated with each other via Instant Messenger all night from our respective computers . Always the optimist, I insisted to T that one of the two wine shops on our block HAD to be open. This is New York and more importantly the guy in the store told me just the other day that he works until 3am every night. (It seemed to make sense at the time.)

T, insisting that I was wrong popped his head out the bedroom and saw that the shop across the street was closed. "Mall za deedle-dum!" I slurred. What I was attempting to say was, "Call the other one!", and either because he was equally inebriated or because I said it at the same volume my grandmother uses when she's talking on 'one of those cell phones', he understood me and started dialing. When nobody answered, we looked at each other silently contemplating getting ourselves dressed and going to see for ourselves, until T came to the rescue remembering we had enough Vodka in the freezer to feed my Russian-waxer's family for a year.

With nothing to mix it with, we clinked our Vodka on the Rocks' together and what happened next was a blur. At some point I went to bed and at some point T fell asleep on the couch watching an infomercial for gardening equipment. He made it into the bedroom sometime around 6am and when we both woke up around three hours later, I had the kind of headache I usually reserve for nights that involve out of town visitors and my need to "show 'em how it's done." As we snuggled up, smelly and hungover to watch a back episode of Scrubs in bed, I realized that some might say we were losers, but given that we had both gotten a bunch of work done the night before, I would just say we are OLD and, of course, DRUNK.

This brings me to FAT. For the six months leading up to our wedding T essentially became Manorexic and I shunned bread like it was a pair of Payless shoes and on January 3, 2009, in the best shape of our lives we tied the knot. As the band packed up, I began shoving chocolate covered pretzels into my mouth with full anticipation that this was the beginning of what would be a two-week binge. All throughout our engagement as we turned down seconds, skipped dessert and ordered our Chinese food steamed, T and I found ourselves talking dreamily about the "Fat Phase" we were going to enter once the glass was broken and the hora was danced. A slight snag on the honeymoon caused us to lose 5 pounds each and we spent the last three days of this vacation gorging ourselves. I wouldn't even allow myself to sleep during the entire 10 and a half hour flight home, but rather I made sure to wake up every hour or so to inhale a cookie or six, because I knew the minute we touched down in NYC, I'd be back on a diet.

And I was. Our flight landed at 6am and I was at the gym by 11. For the next three days I re-shunned bread, ordered my usual steamed vegetable dumplings and turned down dessert. I was down three pounds by Thursday and after watching T make up for those three days of not eating on the honeymoon, I was starting to feel a little deprived. Why should he get to suck down an entire bag of Weight Watchers chocolates without guilt and truly believing that because the bag said Weight Watchers it's OK to eat the whole thing? Why should I, hammered and hungry on Saturday night settle for a 100 calorie bag of popcorn? I shouldn't. And so, Sunday morning when I woke up feeling old and having been drunk, I was well on my way to achieving the Married Trifecta of Old, Fat and Drunk.

We started off our Sunday with brunch with some family members. With a hangover stomach ache as an excuse, I allowed myself to pound through the better part of not one, but two baskets of muffins. And thank god our nephew hasn't yet developed an adult sized appetite because I was more than happy to inhale a good part of the French Toast and Sausage he wasn't going to eat. It was tough because the three year old didn't feel like sharing, but T and I were sneaky enough to steal it off of his plate every time he got preoccupied shouting "Taxi!" out the window. Luckily for us a Taxi drives by every 3 seconds in NYC. Combine that with the fact that I all but licked my own plate clean, we left brunch full enough to warrant a gym visit later in the day.

So after an hour of cardio, during which I could feel the muffins swirling back and forth in my stomach, I felt I had sufficiently thwarted the extra pounds I was eating my way into. Or so I thought. Cut to a few hours later. Enough time had passed since both my workout and my last meal to dissolve my resolve and once again, I was on my way to FAT. It was Sunday night, our first week home had come to and the only way I saw fit to finish out the day was with a fried appetizer, a tortellini dinner and a hearty helping of ice cream for dessert. I'm sometimes amazed that T manages to remain attracted to me after watching me eat. As if fighting with him over the last tortellini wasn't enough, perhaps hopping into bed with a piece of buttered bread would send him over the edge? Not so.

Now here it is, Monday afternoon and I'm sitting on the couch feeling married, which is to say, feeling OLD FAT and DRUNK, well not drunk, but ready for a glass of wine. Luckily we have plans next weekend and that's usually enough motivation to keep me on the straight and narrow in order to look my best by the weekend. What's better is that we're going out and raging Saturday night, so I can wake up Sunday feeling Old and Drunk once again and have the entire day to complete the circle once more. Life is good.