Work was brutal today, traffic worse. I made it to yoga practice but only by practically running people over on my way, which is kind of counter-yoga. Got home late, ate some uninspiring salad, did another 90 minutes of work. Thought off and on most of the time--yeah, even during yoga--how much I wanted a…
Honor System Strawberries
There is a large, beautiful lake a five-minute walk from my office. I have worked in that building for almost three years, stared vaguely out at the lake hundreds of times, but it really didn't exist for me for me except as a concept. Certainly I had never actually been there. I thought I had…
Around the world in… (you know the rest)
Today is my 80th day. Eighty days! Even 81 days ago I never would have expected to be here. I would have seen it as undertaking a long ocean swim (shades of Diana Nyad) without proper training. I would have said I either flat-out couldn't do it, or that I could do it but it…
Day 72
Just being sober seems really easy now that I've given up sugar for the whole month of September too. So there's that.
Day 70
It's been 70 days since I had a drink. Last weekend I had to attend three work-related social events, or as I have come to think of them, drinking occasions. And not just drinking occasions, but drinking occasions with novelists (I work in publishing). Scores of them. On an all-expenses-paid boondoggle. I've done my fair…
Day 25: Mixology
I was taken aback this evening to realize the tasty mocktail I felt clever and smug for inventing is, in fact, a Shirley Temple. Aside from the revelation that I'm not a genius mixologist, life is sort of fine. I'm in some kind of liminal stage where sobriety is starting to feel like my default setting,…
Day 20: On My Impressive Capacity for Self-Pity
It's Day 20 and boy oh boy, am I feeling sorry for myself. The level of self-pity is impressive, really. The thing is, it's not exactly because I want to drink. I kind of don't want to drink. It's because I want something else to fill that space and I haven't figured out what it…
Continue reading ➞ Day 20: On My Impressive Capacity for Self-Pity
Warning: Alanis Morissette Coming At You
I apologize in advance for quoting Alanis Morissette at you. I'd like to think of myself as someone who quotes Lydia Davis at you instead, and if she ever has anything fucking useful to say about sobriety, maybe I will. But in the meantime--you know that song 'Thank You'? Where she's telling herself to get…
The Sobriety Diet
I'm not sure this twenty pounds is going to 'just fall off' as advertised if I continue to eat my weight in ice cream. Hmm.
Day 14: My Fiance
I have a large dog, an eighty-pound Golden Retriever with one of those big block heads, and he is just the tiniest bit maniacally, single-mindedly fixated on me, the only mother he remembers. An Anne Lamott line about her toddler son gazing at her 'like a mournful fiancee' once sent me running up all the…
