A Collection of Randomocity

While at camp, we bunked (literally, bunked) in cement-floored cabins. And when I have an infection, I'm like a 90-year-old man with a bad prostate: Gotta get up several times a night to visit the smallest room. (That waking-up thing should've been my first clue that I need a doc, right?) So my feet would hit the floor before my head woke up, and I'd shuffle my feet around the icy concrete, scuffling around for my flip flops.

After we returned home I took my drugs and went straight to bed. Woke up in the dark, swung my feet to the floor, and shrieked. I was standing on a hairy animal! "Rat!" was my first thought.

Then I realized it was my bedroom carpet.

Never mind.

* * *

So the other day I was reading an article about some silly forgettable celebrity of average height and weight. Apparently, after a year of being out of work, the poor unfortunate woman gained a couple of pants sizes. The article was written to celebrate the fact that she'd undergone surgery (surgery!) to regain her girlish figure. Here's how the writer put it: "After the show was cancelled the formerly svelte star ballooned to 180 pounds."

Ballooned? Ballooned!?!?

Are they kidding?

For the sake of maybe two or three stone, the woman risked her life to have someone put her under anesthetic and knife her?

I had to take a walk to avoid punching the woman's photo on my computer screen.

A hundred and eighty pounds. Celebrity culture is nuts.

* * *

Yesterday my friend K. and I visited a fresh produce stand. K has joined my gym and intends to win the next Biggest Loser competition. She'll kick my backside because she's much more steely minded than I am. We foraged for breakfast (Raspberries! Plums! Donut peaches!) and went up front to pay. The cashier/owner overheard us plotting K's strategy for winning the competition and inquired. K. bragged on me to the woman, who then began interrogating me about how to lose weight.

"Eat raw food!" we chorused. The woman does own a produce stand, after all.

"But," she said, "what about protein?"

K. and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. "Aren't we supposed to be asking YOU that? You sell produce!"

I looked the lady dead in the eye and asked "Where do cows get protein?"

I love watching someone undergo Aha Erlebnis -- that Eureka! moment when the jaw drops and realization sets in. "Grass!" she shouted. K. and I both grinned. I told her about amino acids and the fact that humans have to break down animal protein to its component parts and then reassemble it to get human-accessible aminos, the building blocks of protein -- all of which are readily available in fresh produce. "Now you can change the name of your produce stand to Protein Stand," we told her. "You'll be rich!"

"You've inspired me!" she told us as we walked away. "I need to lose 40 pounds. I'm going to do it!"

What a cheater.

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Today's sound track: For all my girlfriends, especially K., my fruit-stand lady, and a celebrity who was doing fine before the knife: Bruno Mars, Just the Way You Are! The video will blow your mind.