There is nothing more comforting than a well-stocked snack drawer

Especially on a morning that you didn’t eat breakfast.

Aorta stop eatin' junk food

Dad’s surgery was “smooth and easy” according to the surgeon—who may or may not have been referring to the fact that the hospital shaved my dad from the neck down before they poked him in the aorta—and he’s now recovering/waking up in the recovering/waking up room as we continue to stuff our faces in the waiting room.

You might say he’s on the mendo from his endo. But please don’t. Never say that.

Aorta lern my lines

When you got up at 4:30 and had to pack for a day of sitting in the waiting room at the hospital surgery center and you remembered to bring all the important stuff. So that’s good.

Dad is having what’s literally called a “re-do” on a five-year-old abdominal aortic aneurism surgery that had recently started leaking. Two weeks ago he had an exploratory aortogram—which it turns out does not, unfortunately, involve someone showing up at your door in tap shoes and an aorta outfit to sing Happy Birthday or a Valentine’s Day song—and he’s having the surgery today as the final gala event in his five-day 80th birthday celebration.

To complete the circle, I’m sitting in the waiting room memorizing my lines to Aortahoma!

New flavor. Do not recommend.

Unless you have an insatiable thirst for store-brand cough syrup poured into a melted Slurpee that’s sat in a hot car for five days. Followed by four hours of sweaty jitters, of course.

Also: My office bingo card is as winning as a trump spelling be.

I just had 5-Hour Energy for breakfast!

I still haven’t taken the left and right labels off my monitors from when my office moved 18 months ago! Peach-pear La Croix tastes like dust and sadness! Let’s ride bikes! Squirrel!

Gah!

It’s not even 10:00 and I’ve already tried to take a drink of soda with the can completely backward, described a solid-color polo as “soiled,” killed a wombat with my bare hands, downed emergency doses of Gabapentin and 5-Hour Energy, and lied about killing a wombat with my bare hands. WHAT’S NEXT, SATAN?

I’m seven months pop-free today!

I credit my success with gallons of wistfully flavored sparkling water and the occasional (OK, almost daily) intravenous 5-Hour Energy.

For the record, I do not claim the beer bottles lying in repose in my empty Klarbrunn box.

Racing ahead

Among the many, many helpful suggestions people have offered me about conquering this STU! PID! FUC! KING! headache—I’m actually quite humbled by your mass outpouring of concern and the sheer volume of suggestions and I’m sorry that I haven’t personally thanked you all—is trying a mega-dose of caffeine. I’m currently five and a half months pop-free and I’m not about to break my sobriety streak now and I’ve never been able to choke down coffee so I just chugged a 5 Hour Energy even though I don’t feel tired so I’m totally about to live that episode of Desperate Housewives where Felicity Huffman mainlines her kids’ Adderall and stays up all night organizing the toothpicks and doing her kids’ science projects for them—WHICH IN RETROSPECT WAS A SIGN WE ALL MISSED WAKE UP, PEOPLE!—and I still have to work a half day from home to make up for the negative-PTO deficit my NYC canceled flights caused and I really want to pull the weeds and fix the flappy visqueen and displaced pea gravel in our side hosta bed and find more things to clean with my awesome new happy-Mother’s-Day-to-me vacuum and paint my room and finish the build-out behind the house and fix the deficit before the sun goes down and hoo boy I’m off and running where did I put my running shoes oh there they are I’ll see you when we all get to Narnia look out toothpicks here I come!

I’ve somehow reached a point in my life where I unironically think to myself, “I could really go for some 5-Hour Energy and prunes"

Also: Harold has a really disjointed monologue on pages 61-62.

Elf the Musical opening night!

This is the nicest my dressing-room station will look for the next five weeks:

So we have it on good authority ...

(you wouldn’t lie to us, Thomas, would you? because I haven’t had breakfast yet and we just got in line) that this is “the best ride at Disney World”—which, actually, was just confirmed by the repeat riders in front of us in line. Which softens the blow a bit. Plus I reserved our FastPasses online two months ago and it wasn’t even on the menu, which I guess double-confirms.

For a bit of 150-minute perspective: I ran an entire half marathon yesterday in 179 minutes. My 5-Hour Energy will be exactly halfway done keeping me upright by the time we get on the ride. THE ENTIRE AVATAR MOVIE IS JUST 12 MINUTES LONGER THAN WE’LL STAND IN LINE.

Thankfully, the kids in line behind us are whiling away their time with a quiet, respectful game of SCREAM AND SHRIEK LIKE SUGAR-FUELED LITTLE ASSHOLES. We’re all sincerely hoping it goes into overtime. Plus lightning rounds. Plus a final death match. Or perhaps an extra-early death match.

The last time I’ll pin a racing bib to my Summer Of Running Away From Being 50 shirt*

The last half marathon I’ll probably ever run, unless I have a tidal change of heart—and knee pain. Hopefully the last time I’ll compulsively eat like I’m running 20+ miles a week.

4:00 am alarm.

4:30 am bus.

5:30 am gun.

13.1 miles.

LET’S. MAKE. THIS. HAPPEN.

*Plastic “Wishing Star” not included in race. It was a little souvenir given to me for no discernible reason at our Cinderella’s Castle dinner. I put it in this traditional pre-race race-outfit photo to add a literal glimmer of Disney sparkle.

#HowToTurn50

91.7 fm just said “we all know that Haydn was the father of the string quartet"

which made my hair stand up in surprise like in the cartoons because REALLY, 91.7 fm? Did you ask EVERYBODY? And have you done a DNA paternity test? No and no.

But we all DO know that it’s blergy early and just on the warm side of perfect weather and I’m so hopped up on Gu and 5-Hour Energy that I’m shaking—or maybe I’m shaking in anger over 91.7 fm’s blanket-statement reporting—but in any case I’m clearly working overtime to make this Haydn joke work so I’m gonna take my shaky blergy energy and run 7 miles before it gets too warm.

Yawn

When you accidentally took your night bipolar meds—which include the sedating Clozapine—instead of your morning ones plus you didn’t rehydrate nearly enough after your morning run so you’re profoundly sleepy and your entire body feels like an immolated corpse and you need all the stimulation and moisture you can get before work:

And on all days to screw up my meds, I had my three-month psychiatrist appointment this morning. I’m apparently still normal enough to be allowed toroam among the unsuspecting citizenry, but I’ve been having near-blackouts multiple times a day for months and my blood pressure is on the alarmingly low side of normal, so now I have another compelling reason—the other one being I’m 50 and need to be responsible and get a colonoscopy—to visit my GP.

I did NOT just talk about my colon on my blog. Did I?

Anyway, I’ll call to schedule an (yawn) appointment with my (yawn) GP just as (yawn) soon as I rehydrate my (yawn) cells and wake the hell (yawn) up.

Yawn. Colon.