The Chronicles Of Jessica

Lately I seem to be encountering a lot of people with some kind of odor issue. Like I get on the treadmill; guy gets on next to me with heinous morning breath. And of course since he's exercising and breathing heavily, I'm getting some healthy whiffs. We go to a play, guy next to me with weird musty smell. Last week at the Toad the Wet Sprocket concert, we had finally staked out this awesome spot on the floor where Paul could actually see to his satisfaction, and this guy sidles up to me absolutely reeking of cologne. I kept having to stick my face into my own cleavage so I could breathe. Why do people do that to themselves? Do they expect that they can attract potential sex partners by using massive amounts of strong smelling fumes to disorient them, like chloroform or something? "If I distract them with these vapors they won't notice I have a receding hairline and a black tshirt emblazoned with a wolf howling at the full moon. Genius!"

We've been getting up early in the morning before work to exercise and surprisingly we have managed not to kill one another or any random pedestrians in the process. Neither I nor the Mister are what you could call early risers. We're more the roll-over-at-7-am-decide-to-sleep-for-ten-more-minutes-accidentally-sleep-for-another-two-and-a-half-hours-and-waste-your-whole-day types. But we are in our thirties, and when you are in your thirties you have to exercise a lot or you start to look like Carroll O'Connor. For me it happens very very quickly. After about 5 days with no exercise I have to keep the top button on my pants undone when I'm sitting which invariably makes for an embarrassing moment at work when I realize I forgot to do the button back up when I'm halfway to the copy room. Then I have to try to do my pants up all surreptish, or if there are people around I have to kind of hold my copies awkwardly in front of my abdomen like a twelve year old boy who has the misfortune of being called up to the blackboard while he's having one of those grownup man-time moments. It's frankly less trouble just to exercise.

We went to Chicago for our friend Anish's wedding a few weeks ago, and we seriously ate our way across town. We had to. This person wanted to meet for brunch, that person wanted to meet for dinner. You rarely are actually hungry for three restaurant sized meals per day but what does hunger have to do with it? We were on vacation and there was food everywhere we went. We ate stuff that we would never eat at home, like caramel corn. Who eats that? It wasn't like we were at a carnival, we just bought it on the street near Keland's apartment, where we were staying. Caramel corn! If they'd sold funnel cake we probably would have eaten that too. Kind of the Edmund Hillary approach to feeding ourselves. Needless to say I wore skirts almost the whole trip.

We're back now and more or less back into a routine. But all this upkeep really is exhausting. It just never ends. Try on clothes, buy clothes, wash clothes. Color hair, cut hair, shampoo hair, style hair. Cleanse, exfoliate, moisturize, put on makeup. Shave, buff, wax, trim, pluck. Strength training and cardio. Stretching. Flossing, brushing, gargling. Sometimes I really see the appeal of just completely letting myself go. It would be so easy; the inertia would just take over so fast. One week you're a well-groomed woman in decent shape with clean clothes and two separate eyebrows, the next you're a hirsute lump of widening unbathed flesh unable to leave your bed and washing yourself with a rag on a stick.

Well, off to lunch!

I plump when you cook me.

I've decided that there are only about two weeks out of the year where it is pleasant and enjoyable to be outside. The fourteen days are not consecutive, mind you; they are scattered throughout the year and the odds of you having something fun planned outside on one of them are about the same as Brit's odds of staying on the wagon. The other 351 days of the year it's either raining, bitterly cold, or so hot that as Conan O'Brien once aptly said, "It's like walking through a cab driver's breath."

As you can see from this photo of my mirthful youth, I pretty much incinerate upon exposure to the sun. I'm pretty sure that during the era in which this photo was taken, the conventional wisdom on sun protection was to put baby oil on kids and turn 'em loose in the yard. The only thing that accomplished was to keep me moist while I cooked, not unlike a Butterball turkey or a Ballpark frank.

These days I make sure I have on SPF 30 before I step even one toe into the atmosphere. Of course there's usually at least one incident each summer where I forget this cardinal rule and I wind up looking like an amorous babboon's ass, and feeling like one, for it takes at least three weeks for the damn sunburn to fade and for that whole time, everywhere I go people are squawking the inevitable: "You got some sun!!!"

Yes, I got some sun. What an astute observation. Your mastery of the obvious is breathtaking. How'd you like some aloe vera with lidocaine in your eye, you boob?

We are entering the hot phase here in the District and the mister and I are not pleased. It's easily going to get close to one hundred degrees in the shade most days between here and September, and we live in a third floor walkup with very arthritic air conditioning. It cools the 3 square feet closest to the intake vent and that's about it. Which is worst when we're trying to sleep. Neither of us can stand being hot when we're trying to sleep. We just lie there in our own damp whining and cursing ourselves for choosing this apartment.

We really did choose the worst apartment in Washington, apparently. For the second time. But the apartment we had before with the break-ins and the sketchy neighborhood has now taken second place for worst apartment in Washington. At least we had a washer and dryer there, and it was near a Hooters. (What? We like the wings.) But this place is just a catastrophe. The windows are rattling out of the frames, not to mention disintegrating, the circuit breaker blows if I try to use a hairdryer, the sink backs up if you look at it crossly. Next time we go to choose a new place we're going to go with the one we're the least enthused about. It's the only way to counteract our luck and our (apparently) extremely stupid instincts.