Poverexic in NYC

— COUNTDOWN TO J’S WEDDING —

Yesterday, I didn’t finish my Tasty King house special soup.  I am a SICK human being.  Absolutely disgusting.  If I saw me today, I wouldn’t recognize me.  Unbelievable, but yesterday I could only stomach half of my house special soup, then I tried to finish the rest later and just couldn’t, so I had no other option but to throw it out.  I really have mixed feelings about the past several days of illness… I unnecessarily throw out food, yet at the same time, I have only been eating one soup for the entire day for like 4 days straight, combined with a carton of Tropicana OJ a day and like 5 different kinds of meds and vitamins and preventatives.  I am so full of water weight right now.

On a related note, check out these very fitting cartoons from CollegeHumor that describe my life:

College Humor 1

College Humor 2

Last night I rejected a free meal.  S invited us over for a pre-Christmas Eve feast of turkey and ham galore, and I just couldn’t make it.  That’s when I know I’m REALLY sick.  The dinner was at 8pm, and I was in bed by 7:45pm.  This is so pathetic.  Now I am really regretting that free lunch from boss J.  That may have been the worst idea in the history of my life.  Now I’m declining other free meals left and right.  And I had to spend over $8 on Tylenol Cold that could have been better spent on 1.5 Tasty King Lunch Specials.  This whole thing is so not to my benefit!!!!!

The only thing that’s making me feel better is the very generous $25 gift certificate to Whole Foods from my sister that I found in the mail.  BEST CHRISTMAS GIFT EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!  How does everyone know the best gift you could ever give me is food.  I am so psyched about this.  I wish Santa existed so he could bring me free delivery every single day for the rest of my life.  Now that would be a REAL Christmas miracle.

Best all-staff email ever today from CFO’s admin:

SUBJECT:  pizza for lunch today?

BODY:  Please let me know by 12 pm noon today if you’d like pizza for a 1 pm lunch in the café from CFO A.

GASPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP THIS IS THE NICEST GESTURE EVER FROM CFO A, HE IS MY FAV C-SUITE!!!!!!!!!  The pizza came a little late (but no worries), and apparently there was enough pizza for everyone to have 2 slices, so I naturally calculated that to mean most of the girls would just take 1 slice, so I took the liberty of grabbing 2 slices now and a 3rd slice shortly thereafter.

I was trying to spread out my eating schedule as I usually do, so it was like 3pm by the time I got around to heating up my 3rd slice in the toaster oven.  I was excitedly waiting for the oven to go pop when CFO A walks into the kitchen, catches me heating up my pizza slice, and comments “Still eating?”  GASP he totally caught me off guard but he was like god to me at this point.  I must have thanked him like 5 times for “making my day” with this “incredible pizza, I was so hungry, this was so nice of you.”  Apparently word about my incred eating habits had made its way up the company ladder to the EVPs, partners and C-suites (in a positive, “this L girl is hilarious” way), so CFO A wasn’t surprised at all by the way I reacted to his kind gesture.

So, I think boss J got me sick.  I woke up this morning with a scratchy throat, and I mentioned it to boss J at work and she goes “Oh no, I hope I didn’t get you sick.”  WHAT??  YOU’RE SICK??  “Yeah, I’ve been sick since last Thursday.”  WHAT???  Um hello WE SHARED AN ENTIRE ITALIAN MEAL YESTERDAY.  WTF.  Wouldn’t you usually give fair warning and be like “Hey FYI I’m sick, not sure if you want to share food with me.”  I mean, if it’s free, I probably would have eaten it anyway, but at least that way it would have been my own choice.  If I’m sick through the holidays, I might have to say that I actually regret having had that free lunch with boss J.  And then, the world as it is will be over.

Anyway, I would have been more pissed if it weren’t for the fact that one of our celebrity media trainers sent us an entire huge holiday gift basket of goodies and boss S brought us homemade brownies and toffee bark.  That made up for my initial anger at my tentative sickness.  I was sifting through the basket along with the rest of the office — while everyone else was immediately going for the chocolates and cookies, something else caught my eye: A PACKAGE OF SMOKED SALMON.  OMG.  MEAT.  I snatched it in a second, but I didn’t really have to worry since apparently no one else was concerned with that packaged bag of smoked salmon packed full of preservatives.  I showed all my team members what I had won and all the girls just looked at me with utter disgust and mumbled “SICK.”  Yes, I was sick.  But boy was that salmon fishily delicious.

Then for dinner roommate M made delicious pizza cupcakes again.  Here’s roommate K’s artistic reaction when roommate M announced our dinner plans:

ME WANT-Y

And so I had 3 pizza cupcakes (of 1. ground beef, 2. mushrooms and 3. tomato/basil/mozzarella), accompanied by 4 glasses of wine, 2 multivitamins, 2 Zicams and 2 echinacea tablets.

Last week boss J suggested we go for lunch on Monday (ie today).  Normally you would think I would be super excited about this, but lately whenever boss J suggests we “go for lunch/dinner,” it means I’m in trouble, usually because I’ve gotten complaints about being a bitchy manager from the people below me.  I don’t know why anyone would ever complain that I’m a bitch.

Anyway, so when we went for lunch today at this cute little Italian restaurant near our office, Via dei Mille, I couldn’t even fully enjoy the meal because every moment that went by I was just waiting for boss J to be like, “So I was speaking to admin A the other day…”

Kidding!  I totally fully enjoyed it because the meal was free and the food was incred.  I actually don’t know why the restaurant was so empty, but boss J and I were literally the only 2 people at the restaurant (which really sketched us out at first), which left the waiter/manager guy to not leave us alone for a single minute during the entirety of the meal.  He literally pulled up a chair and joined us for lunch.  Good thing he was a charming Italian otherwise you can only imagine the bitch I would have normally been.  Good thing also that we were two lovely ladies because the charming Italian gave us free bellinis on the house and extra bread with this delicious olive oil dipping sauce with some other deliciousness in it and tons of parmesan cheese and entertained us with stories about some girl he fell in love with because she gave him a really delicious chocolate cake.  I hope he was not being metaphorical.  As he was telling these stories, I was thinking to myself that I probably would have been very attracted to this charming Italian had it not been for the fact that a) I was with my boss who – like my mother – thinks I’ve never kissed a boy, b) he was a waiter, and c) he was a foreigner.

Anyway for our main dish I got an incred linguine dish with salmon and spinach, boss J got a linguine dish with clams, and for dessert we split a chocolate souffle with toffee and ice cream.  And turns out after all that I wasn’t in trouble for anything — boss J was just taking me out for a holiday “thanks for all your hard work” lunch.  I tried to offer to pay, but she refused.  YES.  I secretly would have preferred a holiday “thanks for all your hard work” bonus, but I guess this was the next best thing.

On a side note, I got my results back from my physical, and my cholesterol is – as I had expected – absolutely flawless with my HDL at 98 and LDL at 42.  I AM SUPERHUMAN AND TASTY KING WILL NEVER DESTROY ME!

This weekend was mixed in terms of poverexia and anti-poverexia.  The weekend started out poverexic friendly when we had our annual company holiday party on Friday, and the pre-festivities started out at the office at 4pm with trays and trays of jumbo shrimp and bottles and bottles of champagne and other goodies such as veggie platters, chips, brownies, cookies, M&Ms, popcorn, etc etc etc.  The pre-party was only 30 minutes long so I really had to work to shovel everything I could into my mouth and/or purse in very little time.  While I observed that most people – including my team members – daintily picked only 3-4 shrimpy shrimps for their plate, I grabbed at least a dozen.  They were super jumbo and super delicious.  And then I grabbed several chocolates, Sobe waters and diet cokes and hid them in my purse for later.

The party itself was held at Soho House in the Meat Packing.  I would have normally been very upset at the fact that our company dropped shitloads of moola on a party at friggen SOHO HOUSE in these tough economic times (clearly everyone would have just preferred to actually get raises over having a nice holiday party), but apparently we got an “incredible discount” because of our connections.  Fantastic.  I still would have rather gotten a raise over going to this party.  Either way, the party was nice and I enjoyed it – I admit it.  I mean I’m ultimately not going to complain about an open bar event where I can chug down Kettle One dirty martinis and eat as many delicious sliders as I want.  Those sliders were really delicious.  Almost as good as the donut sliders that L made the other day, but not quite.  These had normal buns.

I unfortunately had to leave the party early because I obviously had Friday night plans, and who throws a company party on a Friday evening anyway – clearly we all have lives.  This weekend was especially special though because it was roommate K’s birthday, and so the anti-poverexia began.

We started out the festivities with the Pencils of Promise masquerade ball on Friday night which I paid $65 for that went to charity and poor kids and other things in life that I dislike, but I do enjoy good company and a good open bar event, especially when it’s sponsored by Johnnie Walker.  So to celebrate life, I downed 7 Johnnie-and-cokes throughout the course of the night and was still feeling fine because of all the food from my company party that I had in my stomach that was just absorbing all the alcohol like a sponge.

Then on Saturday roommates K, L, M and I went out to Cafe Loup in the West Village to celebrate K’s birthday and got escargot, foie gras fritters, and the biggest bowl of mussels with a side of fries I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  It was the most cash I had dropped on a dinner since roommate L’s birthday in April 2009, and it was so worth it.  I literally thought I was going to O when the fried foie gras hit my tongue.

All in all, this was a great weekend of food, despite the mixed feelings about the poverexic weekend ultimately ending up as an anti-poverexic weekend.  And that fried foie gras really made my life.

Today was my rescheduled physical.  My appointment was at 1:30pm, and I wasn’t supposed to eat anything before then because they were drawing my blood for cholesterol.  I was so hungry.  So I filled up my body with 6 cups of water between the hours of 9am and 1:30pm for 3 reasons: 1) to fill my belly and get rid of the hunger, 2) to prump up my veins (because I have baby veins), and 3) to flush out all my cholesterol.  I can’t wait for my results on Monday.

When I got back to the office from my appointment, I was ravenous so good thing there was AN ENTIRE TRAY OF CHIPS AND 3 TRAYS OF REALLY GOOD SALSA AND GUAC WAITING FOR ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I immediately inhaled 3 large plates.  It was so good.  They were like GOOD chips, you know, not crappy stale ones, really good crisp multicolored ones with sprinkles of grated cheese and really fresh salsa with chunks of tomatoes and pepers and other deliciousness.  It was even better when a few hours later I discovered an entire bowl of Caesar salad that no one had touched, so I took the entire bowl and ate it for dinner.  The best part is, I still have an entire plate of leftovers from that meeting yesterday when admin A double ordered — I’m saving that for lunch tomorrow, and then for dinner we have our ANNUAL COMPANY HOLIDAY PARTY!!!!!!!  Success.

Holiday time is so deceptive.  You think you’re getting so many free gifts, but in turn you’re spending just as much on gifts to others so we all lose.  Booo.  😦

Last Friday we had our first round of annual Secret Snowflake and I got the best gift ever — a huge plastic bowl that said SOMEONE WAS HUNGRY! with a can of sour cream and onion Pringles.  GASPPPPP best small gift ever and so perfect for me.  I immediately finished the entire can of Pringles in one sitting.  Someone WAS hungry!!!  I thought I was a winner that day but then I remembered that I too had spent the $5 maximum on my Secret Snowflake except my gift wasn’t as thoughtful (I just got her a bag of M&Ms… I didn’t know we were supposed to put so much thought into these gifts.)  So there was no net gain.

And then today was our second and final round of Secret Snowflake, and I got yet another really good gift — a $20 gift certificate to Trader Joe’s!!!!!!!!!!  YESSSSSSS.  I was super excited.  $20 worth of free food!!!!!  It was like my birthday all over again!!!  But then I thought about it some more, and I had spent the $20 max on my Secret Snowflake gift too (which was much better and more thought-out than my first gift — I got her a martini glass set and a small bottle of Smirnoff because she was the bartender making those Yahootinis at our work party the other day, really proud of myself).  Once again, no net gain… so we all lose.  Booo.  😦

However, I DID scores some truly free goodies later in the day when I found out admin A had accidentally ordered food for an entire meeting when someone else had already ordered food for that same meeting.  A DOUBLE ORDER!!!!!!!!!!!  WHAT!!!!!!!  That’s the best mistake anyone could ever make!!!!!!!  I was waiting all day for that and when it came, boy did I take advantage of it.  I stole two sandwiches, a plate of pasta, a plate of salad, a cup full of Chex Mix and Sun Chips, and a cup full of strawberries.  Then I ate half of that throughout the day to keep my metabolism up, then saved the rest for tomorrow to be economical.  THEN!  A few hours later a vendor came to our office and gifted us two boxes of delicious cupcakes, and boss S let me take home an entire box because none of the other girls wanted them.  HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!

This past Saturday was Santacon = a full day of bar hopping in Santa costumes.

Santacon

Santacon this year was great for poverexia because the day full of drinking made me forget about hunger.  All day on Saturday I hopped around from bar to bar scoring free beers and shots of Peppermint Schnapps with chocolate syrup from random strangers.  I guess we did stop by a restaurant at some point and ordered some chicken fingers and potato skins with the entire group, but 1 chicken finger and 2 potato skins later I was completely full for the rest of the day.  YESSS.

This was a huge improvement from Santacon last year which was the most anti-poverexic experience I had in 2008 when I got completely blackout, threw up a really nice fish taco dinner that K had bought me to thank me for letting her stay at my place, and wasn’t able to stomach any food or drinks for the remainder of the night at a holiday party with amazing-looking food and at a $75 open-bar charity event that I had already bought tickets for.  What an embarrassing performance, and all because of Santacon.

This year was much better.