On a scale of 1 to “it’s inoperable,” this is probably about a 6, in terms of things I do not want my doctor to say to me. And yet he did say that to me, while holding my lab in his hand, just two days ago.

“What does that mean?” I said. “Is that bad?”

“Well,” he harrumphed. “I mean, don’t worry about it. You’re not … you’re not going to turn into a pumpkin or anything.”

In fact, we both knew that my turning into a pumpkin was precisely what had caused this problem. I wasn’t being totally honest when I asked him what that meant. I know what that means. It means you’re pre-diabetic, which is not good news, especially if your dad is diabetic. And his grandmother was diabetic. And your uncle is diabetic. You get the picture. Basically, if you want to clear out a Hubley family reunion in a hurry, all you have to do is yell, “THAT COFFEE IS FULL OF REAL SUGAR!” and everyone will go running for their insulin or metformin or what-have-you.

Still, I gave stupid another go. “Hey,” I said. “Just as long as I’m not, you know, pre-diabetic or anything!”

Crickets.

So. Pre-diabetic then. Anything I can do?

He shrugged. “It’s not … you don’t need to worry right now. I mean, you’ll be fine … for the next year or two.”

I am 35 years old.

I should mention here that my doctor is the tops. He wasn’t bullshitting around with me because he didn’t want to have a hard conversation. In fact, I suspect that he was trying to be kind to me, because he knows how hard I’ve worked to keep my weight under 200 pounds since my thyroid crapped out a few years ago.

“OK, let’s say I lost 20 pounds,” I suggested. “Might that help.”

“Sure!” he said, as if he felt that was just as likely as my growing a unicorn horn and using it to catch hula hoops in front of the statue of Columbus outside his office.

So I went home. I waited to feel terrible, but actually, I felt sort of accepting. OK, pre-diabetes. Basically, I was thinking a simple flow-chart, the kind they made us do in fifth grade, once all our imaginary families had died of cholera in Oregon Trail. I loved flow-charts, and spent a lot of time thinking of ways to make my real life fit into them. It actually did help with decision making.

My flow-chart for pre-diabetes looked like this:

It seemed workable. I texted Sgt. Lucky and announced that I would be losing 20 pounds, due to a scary sounding condition he’d never heard of. Once the heart attack subsided, he was pretty calm about it.

I called my sister and she was super mad. “You have fruit and nuts for breakfast,” she said. “How can you be pre-diabetic?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem fair. But that’s genes for ya.”

“Well, you’ll always be my little Diabeetus cat,” she said. “My little Wilford Brimley.”

This is truly, and I am not kidding, what family is for.

Later, I made it a Hubley hat trick and called my folks, who were much less concerned.

“I don’t believe in pre-diabetes,” Ma Smash, our nurse, said. “You’re diabetic or you’re not, and 103 fasting isn’t diabetic.”

“You probably have some glucose issues,” Pa Smash said. “Just about everyone who isn’t at the weight they want to be will have those, at one time or another. But I’d kill everyone in this neighborhood for sugars like that, and you’re doing everything right.”

Family, man. Who needs sugar when I have a whole team of sweeties? Love ‘em.

Image via Memestick.

Sgt Lucky and I were discussing this the other day. I mentioned that when I was a kid, I used to dress up like Maleficent.

“My dad brought us these old clothes and things, and we had a dress-up box,” I told him. “I used to run around with a velvet drape pulled up around my head like a cowl, being Maleficent.”

Sgt Lucky shook his head. “I don’t know why you worry about aging.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been training your whole life to become an old drag queen.”

Weirdly, that cheered me up. Cowls for everyone!

Image: Disneyvillians.net

Motivating Employees: Holiday Gifts that Employees Will Love

What Is Your Favorite Cheap Beauty Product?

Stocking Stuffers Under $5

5 Products: Cheap Makeup for New Year’s Eve

11 Pedicure Tools Under $10

Burt’s Bees Baby Bee Fragrance-Free Lotion

CoverGirl Professional All-in-One Curved Brush Mascara

Weapons of Mass Cubicle Destruction

The 5 Most Creative 2012 Calendars for Your Office Cubicle

The Ultimate Office Recycling: Office Furniture Made Out of Paper

From Occupy Wall Street Protestor to Cubicle Dweller

5 TV Shows That Have Made Cubicles Fun Again

That’s it for right now. Oh, and if you’re so inclined, hit me on Twitter @jenniesmash. I’m actually trying to use it. Being a mogul is hard, and abbreviations are required.

You are terrible at the internet. Also, probably at life, but that’s just a guess. I’m sure about the internet thing, though.

Sincerely,

A person who could not find porn if it hit her in the face, and yet would know better than to look for it on this blog.

Compensation: Why Average Salaries Lag at Small Companies

Jobs for Veterans: How Hiring Veterans Can Boost Business

Jobs That Died in 2011

The 10 Best Skin Care Products Under 10 Dollars

10 Cheap Sweater Dresses

The Best Cheap Job Interview Outfit

Taj Boston Hotel Review

You can also find a giant picture of my head with a lot of words under it, here: http://budgetstyle.about.com/. And if you wish to receive a newsletter from me in which I discuss my habitual cheapness, you can sign up for it here: http://budgetstyle.about.com/gi/pages/stay.htm

Some of these go back to when I was trying to freelance and work full-time, which is why it makes me tired just to look at them. As much as I’m getting nervous to be at the end of my severance, I’m glad I’ve got a lot of different things going on.

The big thing I’ve learned so far about freelancing is that even if you’re super organized, and the editors are super organized and everyone is lovely and well-meaning, something will happen to make it so that you don’t get paid for two months. My money-hoarding habit is starting to look less and less like a crazy way to be.

Quick summary from the ever-useful Metafilter: Back in October, NYT columnist David Brooks asked his older readers (aged 70+) to send him “life reports.” He wanted them to appraise their lives, in an effort to glean some life lessons for all of us to learn by. After receiving thousands of replies, he published his assessment of them a couple weeks ago, in two columns (Part 1: Nov 24, 2011; Part 2: Nov 28, 2011). He’s also selected specific ones and published them on his blog.

I’m interested in this on its own obvious merits, but I would also like to do something similar with my 35-year-old friends. We should have at least half as many life lessons to impart. What say you all?

In my mind, all babies talk like Stewie on Family Guy.

Anyway, I knew how he felt. In the old days, I spent the holidays feeling like I was waiting at a bus stop for a bus that was never going to come. Or that worse yet, it would come, and it would be full of cranky people who’d been shopping all day; people without jobs but with laps full of parcels, and faces with permanent scowls. People who were thinking about credit card debt instead of egg nog, or maybe thinking about egg nog because of their credit card debt.

If there are two kinds of people — those who hate Christmas and those who love it — I was definitely on Team Christmas Hate.

Then I met Adam.

My friend and traveling companion Adam loves Christmas the way that kids love Christmas. He loves Christmas trees, so we got one for our very first Christmas. It was my first since high school. He loves presents, so we give them to each other, even this year when we have no money and everything we need. Adam taught me, all over again, that presents must be wrapped ahead of time and prominently displayed under the tree. We’ll bake cookies for our landlord and make champagne punch for our friends, and we’ll drink egg nog, despite the fact that I still find it a little weird, like the top of a dessert served in a cocktail glass.

My favorite part of all of this? Adam’s an atheist. Also, he’s not a big fan of social gatherings on a large scale. Put that together and you have a person who should hate Christmas. But he doesn’t.

The night we put up our first tree, we turned out all the lights and sat on the couch and look at it.

“What should we name it?” I asked him.

“It has a name?”

“I think it should.”

“OK.”

“Let’s call it Frasier,” I suggested, somewhat unimaginatively.

“OK. And next year, we can have Frasier Two.”

“Then Frasier the Third.”

“And so on. Exactly.”

It was very quiet in our little two-room apartment, even though we lived one block from a busy city avenue. With all the lights off, no TV, no computer, all I could hear was the rush of the air in my ears and the almost inaudible hum of electricity coursing through the building. If I listened long enough, I thought, I would start to hear the pulse of blood in my beloved’s veins as he took my hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said. Although of course, I should have been thanking him.

This post appeared in slightly different form in another blog two years ago. Today, we put up Frasier the Third. He is quite stately.

This morning, I woke up and had a vague memory of having a nightmare during the night. I think it stuck to my brain mainly because Adam had to wake me up and calm me down. While I was drifting back to sleep, I remembered what I’d dreamed, and thought, “Ha, that’s funny. My mind is now squishing together all of my favorite TV shows while I’m sleeping.”

When I woke up, I texted Adam, who was up and about much earlier. “Do you remember me having a nightmare?” I asked. “I think I dreamed about zombie Parks and Recreation.”

A few minutes later, he burst into the apartment, holding his phone up and pointing to my text. “Are you serious about this?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because I had a dream about zombie Parks and Recreation. Ron Swanson pinned a zombie with a crowbar and was trying to stab it in the head with a hunting knife.”

“WHOA. That is way more interesting than my dream. Mine was just … oh, look, it’s Parks and Recreation, but with zombies. Although, sadly, I think in my dream the Parks world was real life. Which probably tells you something about my obsession with that show.”

“Do you think we talked about it?” he asked. “Like, did you tell me about your dream and then I started having the same dream?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I think maybe we’re in the same sleep space now, headwise, and we’re just going to become Voltron — we’ll fold up together and become Robot Jendam and take over the world.”

“Well, OK. I’m fine with that.”

Image: Awkward Moments in Pause

Coworker Dennis: Mine now says, “Hey gurrrl!” on start up.

God, I miss the days when Coworker Dennis was actually a coworker. Although since I’ll be working at home and he’ll be in the UK, we can just pretend that we’re still working in the same office and communicating solely by IM. Which is what we did. When we worked in the same office.

This is what happens when you objectify Barbie.

“How can you not know how to find porn?” he asked, as if it were the part of the TV movie in which he discovers that I never learned to read.

“I am from New England,” I said with great dignity. “We are born wearing plastic underpants like Barbie. Also, we do not have nipples.”

But anyway, I’ve gotten off-track. My actual point is that there are several things that I am embarrassed to disclose about myself, and that I will now do so on the internet for all of us to pick apart. So basically, let’s party like it’s 2003, I guess. It’ll be fun!

1. I am almost always completely obsessed with a TV show. It’s just one show at a time, because I am a serial monogamist. I start out by watching it, and then add it to my Netflix Instant rotation, and then devolve into this pathetic creature who has to follow tumblrs and livejournals dedicated to the show, generally one couple on the show in particular. Right now, that show is Parks and Recreation and that couple is Leslie and Ben. I am so obsessed with these two that it might become a problem in my marriage if it weren’t for the fact that Ben Wyatt is basically my husband in a skinny tie. I haven’t yet started writing fan fiction for my favorite series, but it doesn’t sound anywhere near as insane as it once did, so get ready for that stage of my spiral into insanity.
2. There are many words I can’t spell at all, including “embarrass,” which I always have to look up. I am an editor.
3. I’m such a socially awkward penguin, I can’t do almost anything of a physical nature with any kind of grace or skill. This includes, but is not limited to, dancing, running, skating, standing still for long periods of time, riding a bike, driving a car, and walking upstairs without stumbling over a riser and falling flat on my face. Fortunately, no one ever wants to go dancing, or to get some exercise, or to take a long ride in a car in which the various drivers present should switch off. Oh, wait, that actually happens all the time.
4. Similarly, I have no sense of direction, and am clumsy. If you go camping with me, I will get lost and then fall in a hole. It’s one of the few things you can depend upon in this inconstant world. I have actually done this twice in my life, despite only having gone camping maybe ten times ever.
5. I am fickle. I need to travel to new places on a semi-regular basis in order to not be a bitch to everyone around me. Actually, they don’t even need to be brand-new; they just need to be a place where my things don’t live.

   With all this in mind, you’d think the holidays would be a lot of fun for me, as long as I don’t get lost on the way to dinner. Still, there’s always the possibility that someone will ask you to dance, jog, or drive.

   Image: Fark

   
   ]]> http://jenniesmash.com/2011/11/23/5-things-that-embarrass-me-about-me/feed/ 3 Jennie Smash Les-scènes-de-crimes-de-Barbie-style-Dexter-3