LOVE:

Spring:

I have felt like I’ve been waiting all my life for spring to arrive. There have been days in the past month that have held some promise of warmth, but those days were few and far between and my delight was fleeting. The winter has trudged on interminably with snow falling again and again. Just the past week I had to scrape my windshield and several schools near me were shuttered for the day. It’s absurd. It’s nearly the end of April! But now, I think spring is truly and finally here. The forecast looks good and the temperature is reaching up to seventy degrees! I could cry. Yesterday I had too much work to do, but I finally decided to push it to the side and hurry outdoors for a long overdue walk. It had been far too long. In the endless winter months, I had forgotten how good it felt to walk and walk and walk. I love nothing more than walking. If there was a career where I just walked all over the place, I would love nothing more. Maybe I should become a mail delivery person? Somewhere nice, though. Always nice. And the second that I got outside, I felt quite drunk on sunshine. It was intoxicating. I couldn’t stop smiling. The sounds (the half that I could hear since I’m deaf now) and colors and the breeze blowing through my hair was everything I have been needing. I have been so bleak lately, but this hour out in the countryside restored a great chunk of who I used to be. I sat decadently in a nearby cemetery and watched as the sun sank into barren fields. The heavens were a riot of color and it felt like I had been thrust into an impressionistic painting. I felt quite alive. And that night, I crashed gratefully onto my couch, overjoyed at the delicious feeling of exhaustion that comes from an excess of walking. Now that spring has really and truly sprung, I am so joyous. So happy. And so ready to never go back indoors.

Micellar Water:

Ever since I lived in Paris, I have been obsessed with a magazine called Public. It is a trashy gossip magazine that I would pick up each week on my way home from class at Le Cordon Bleu and then devour on the Métro. I would read each issue from cover to cover and I credit those wonderful magazines with helping me read French with some level of fluency. They’re full of slang words and cultural references I would never have picked up otherwise. When I returned to the United States, this is one of the parts of my Parisian life that I missed the most. Now each issue is automatically downloaded to my iPad and I live in the future and everything is awesome. Over the past year, I have noticed a huge number of beauty lotions and potions in the magazine — and you know that I’m a complete and total ho for beauty lotions and potions. Clay masks are incredibly popular in France, but so too is something called eau micellaire, and there are ads for it in nearly every issue of Public. I looked it up and discovered that it was nothing more than a light suspension of oil and water that helps wipe makeup off, but it also hydrates and refreshes the skin. I was intrigued, and the other day I finally saw some at the shop so I threw it into my basket thinking about how French I was soon going to feel. I was probably slightly over the top. I mean, I was, it’s not even a probably thing: I’m the definition of hyperbole. Ever since breaking the seal, I have become obsessed. After dampening a cotton pad with the micellar water, you wipe it all over your face and you feel gorgeous and amazing and your skin feels supple and hydrated. It’s fabulous. And you feel utterly Parisian. I do it every time I come home now! It’s such a nice way to refresh your skin and keep it from looking oily. The bottle that I bought has some kind of mattifying agent in it, and I am over the moon. With my serums, Korean masks, snail extract lotion, and now micellar water, I am living the dream and living my very best life. You should too!

Mexico City’s Nearness: 

[I know I’ve written about this before but I’m so excited that I can hardly stand it.] I screamed this morning when I looked at my phone. I have a countdown app that tells me exactly how many weeks and hours and days and seconds it is until an event is coming up. It helps the time pass and it’s fun to think that I’ll be away this summer for more days than I have left until my plane takes off. Anyway, today it is thirty-nine more days until I’m on the plane for my two month stay in blessed Mexico City. I am becoming almost intoxicated by its very nearness. It feels like it’s already here! I need to do so much shopping before I go! I need a SIM card and new pants and some boots! Every day, I find myself drooling over pictures on Instagram from the dozens of Mexico City accounts that I follow. I want to be everywhere and doing everything. I have a list growing that is truly massive and is starting to be comparable to the monstrous one that I have for Paris. It’s filled with more places than I will ever get to. That’s perfectly okay. And in thirty-nine days, I can decadently wake up late, go to the markets, walk until my feet fall off, and eat my body weight in street food. It is going to be the epitome of decadence. And I need to get away so very badly. I know how entitled that sounds, but it’s getting to the point of the year where I’m feeling like I’m losing my mind. I already lost my hearing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  so the mind can’t be too far behind. I don’t have much else to say about this, but my enthusiasm is completely overwhelmingly. It will be here before I know it and then when I’m abroad, I can live my life. I feel like I only really and truly get to come alive in the summertime. That’s probably a bad sign about the quality of my life. But who cares? At least for those wonderful days in the south, I will thrive. It can’t come soon enough!

My New Miracle Diet:

This isn’t really a miracle diet, but I could probably write a book about it and be a bestselling author. I have been trying to get a reign in on my health because I have been doing about nothing but eating lately. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s not good for my health and I have not felt all that healthy. I think my newfound deafness caused some rather profound depression. It was a dark time, reader, but things are starting to look up. I mean, I’m still deaf and have a constant ringing in my ear that sounds like an airplane taking off, but I’m in a better mood. I seem to be adapting to this new disability and coping better and quicker than I ever expected. Anyway, the weather is finally nice, like I just wrote about, so I have been itching to go outside. Ever since the mercury rose, I have been back out on my walks. I’m getting well over 10,000 steps per day and all the rings on my Apple Watch are being closed. It makes me feel quite well and alive and glad. And I’m ravenous. I can’t stop eating. Just yesterday I ate three donuts, fistfuls of peanuts, an entire frozen pizza, half a pint of ice cream, and then an entire meal from Olive Garden, and then two or four or five margaritas. And I have never felt better. Honestly. I’ve been devouring so much food and hitting my exercise goals and it must be some kind of perfect combination. I’m not weighing myself because I’m surely gaining weight, but I feel so much better than I have in months! I call it my miracle diet because I just keep eating. My body seems to appreciate the insane number of donuts I’ve consumed this week. I feel fitter now than I did when I was counting calories. I don’t get it. But I’m not going to stop. 

MEH:

Pescatarianism: 

I have mentioned my intention to add fish back into my diet probably a hundred times. Since I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I have endeavored to follow an adapted Mediterranean diet. Olive oil and red wine and loads of vegetables and all that. I’m doing that quite nicely and happily. An important aspect of this plan is its heavy reliance on fish. I have not fully adopted it because I have been a vegetarian for nearly seven years. Vegetarianism is a way of life that completely satisfies me, it makes me feel healthy, and I like that my tastes have changed so exquisitely since removing meat from my diet. But I have this lingering suspicion that I should probably experiment a bit with fish. It’s really the only thing that I missed when I first stopped eating animal flesh. So once in a while, I have gotten a fish taco, and I felt kind of guilty at first, but now I don’t. You can’t really cuddle with a cod, you know? I don’t eat fish often, but I do once in a while, so I suppose I’m no longer a vegetarian. I feel as if I’ve lost a part of my identity now that I’m a pescatarian. I don’t know if I will be one forever, but I’m going to give it a solid try. The other night I was at a Mexican restaurant and had something called a mojarra. It was covered in some kind of garlic sauce and it was legit lit. And more often than I should, I’ll swing by McDonald’s for a Filet-O-Fish. Those should honestly not be as good as they are. They’ve become my guilty pleasure. And since I don’t really feel all that guilty, I suppose it’s just solid pleasure. I’m not thrilled to be a pescatarian, but I’m fine with it. So I’m meh.