Why I look so tired today

My marathon training group runs together on Saturday mornings, and I try to run by myself (or with unsuspecting friends I manage to drag along with me) on Monday and Wednesday nights. My mom was visiting on Monday this week—and it was cold and rainy and blah and we wanted to have dinner anyway—so I totally blew off that run.

Which meant I had to make up for two runs last night so I could be all recovered for this Saturday’s 10-miler. Which was fine; last night was beautiful and breezy and the perfect temperature to chug along for as long as I needed to.

But any good run requires a good pre-emptive poop. And I was just warming up to sing the take-a-poop song last night when the phone rang. It was Romantic Date Guy, who you recall is on a four-week business trip in a city that was the eponymous setting for a long-running TV drama in the 1970s and 1980s—a detail I’m including in this sentence only so I can use the word eponymous.

By the time RDG and I had discussed our days and declared how much we missed each other and swooned at the sound of each other’s voices (you could very accurately describe our saccharine romance as swoon-fed), a good hour had gone by, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of doing a long run in the dark without even taking my pre-emptive poop—a detail I’m including in this sentence only so I can use the word pre-emptive again. And maybe poop too.

But I did my run and it felt awesome and I was hungry enough when I got home that I was ready to eat everything in the house—which, fortunately, is my goal anyway so I don’t have to pack hundreds of cans of diced tomatoes and water-packed chicken and boxes of pasta when I move into my Two-Bathroomed Barbie Dream Condo next month.

Speaking of cans of diced tomatoes and water-packed chicken and boxes of pasta, I whipped up a delicious tomato-chicken-pasta-various-spices-I-found-in-the-cupboard dish last night. I’m that innovative in the kitchen.

Speaking of domestic innovation, I also watched Project Runway for the first time last night. I’d seen about five minutes of the first season, where some mincy little blond had a five-alarm nervous breakdown about … um … zippers … or something equally important in the grand scheme of life. Since I don’t find zipper-induced nervous breakdowns particularly entertaining or compelling or even worth sacrificing my valuable Internet-surfing time for, I’d never watched the show again.

But RDG loves the show, so I made a TiVo Season Pass for it a few weeks ago, and—since at this point I'd probably give the man both my kidneys if he asked nicely and maybe rubbed my feet again—I decided the least I could do was give the show a try late last night over homemade (ahem) tomato chicken pasta with various spices I found in the cupboard.

And I have to admit it was pretty interesting. So interesting, in fact, that at 1:00 this morning I decided to watch just one more episode. And now I’ve seen enough of the show that I have the dubious talent of being able to name a handful of the people on it right off the top of my head:

Jeffrey, whose designs seem very cool to these untrained and only barely interested eyes, but whose neck tattoos make his chin recede in an alarming way.
Laura, the self-proclaimed Keeper Of All Empirical Truth who was obviously cast as the resident bitch.
Vincent, the resident Eeyore who needs to STAND UP STRAIGHT ALREADY.
Kayne, whose cock-eyed optimism and sunny disposition have to work overtime to compensate for his Liberace taste.
Judge Michael, whose pedestrian sense of humor probably really challenges the editors who try to make him come off as clever.
Matriarch Tim, whose unfailingly precise consonants and the dire way he whispers the word zaftig no doubt kept him off his high-school football team.

But suddenly it was 2:00 in the morning, and I had to summon every ounce of my strength and fortitude to drag my bleary-eyed, pasta-bloated, run-weary, sweat-crusted self (with a newfound flair for fashion!) to bed.

And that, my friends, is why I look so tired today.