Foods Jamie Oliver would be ashamed of me for eating, but which I JUST CANNOT GIVE UP ENTIRELY, okay?  Some things are TOO DELICIOUS:

• Circus Peanuts
• Pizzeria Pretzel combos
• Green jello with mini marshmallows
• Cheddar sauce (a la Arbys) on french fries
• Circus animal cookies.
• Those rye chips in Gardettos snack mix
• Cool whip  (I’M SO ASHAMED.  I’ll go turn in my foodie street cred card now.)

What totally disgusting, chemical-laden, embarrassing-to-admit foods do you secretly love?

* Ten points to anyone who remembers this classic quote from an even more classic movie.

When you pass the race photographer on mile nine and decide that it would be really funny/cool to make a badass face at him, reconsider.  No, seriously:

Bring Kleenex.  At the last second before leaving the hotel, I stuck a couple of Kleenexes in my pocket.  This came in very handy when the porta potties near the starting line ran out of toilet paper and there were huge long lines of women waiting for the few that still had paper.  I was able to dash into one of the ones that had none, bypassing the line.

If you’ve trained over the winter in Chicago, you may feel like a total weather badass, but you will be ill-prepared for heat.  Remember to drink water, probably at every station, so you don’t enter mile 11 feeling like a dessicated lump.

If at all possible, run in a city with many delicious options for entirely decadent post-race food.  This might be the only time you can have a huge fried oyster po’boy totally guilt-free.  Followed by beignets.  According to Erin’s Body Bugg, we burned a couple thousand calories running that thing, and I made every effort to eat them all back that afternoon.

Bring a sherpa/fan/individual cheerleading section.  Alice came down to cheer us on and I swear to god, seeing her homemade poster saying “go pseudo!” 100 yards from the finish line was the only thing that gave me the boost to sprint for the end.  Plus, she very kindly carried my gear bag for me so I could avoid gear check.  PLUS she kept me company so I didn’t have to wander around the city alone with my nerves on Saturday.  And she drank Pimms Cups with me out of plastic cups in the middle of the day.  Good friend, that Alice.

Do not schedule your flight out of town for the night of the race.  You will sit down in your plane seat, bound for a work trip to California, and four hours later you will actually have to grab onto the seat in front of you and hoist yourself up by your arms to disembark, because your legs will have frozen in protest and be unwilling to help.

Relatedly: don’t go on a work trip to California the day after the race.

Run with friends.  I joined this NOLA training group kind of on a whim, but I’m so glad I did.  I got to train with the lovely and amazing Danielle and Erin, and we shuffled through the starting corrals together with Linda, which helped calm my nerves, and then afterwards I got to hang out with AB and Vince, the funniest residents of Monroe, Louisiana that I’ve ever met.  I was proud of myself for running, but it was the crowd that made the whole thing into a party.

You CAN do this.  I ran my first 5K, a torturous, sputtering affair, less than a year ago.  I spent the first 30 years of my life telling anyone who would listen how unathletic I am, how I have asthma, how I can’t run outside.   And then, I did this.  I’m still kind of stunned.

I’m back from my trip to New Orleans for the half marathon, which was followed immediately by a business trip to California.  You know what New Orleans and California have in common? No snow.  Also: delicious foods that I can’t get in Chicago.  (Though those foods are not similar to each other: I’m left craving hush puppies and beignets from New Orleans and from L.A., those fabulous huge salads full of produce that one can only dream about during a Chicago winter.  And pinkberry.)

I’ll definitely want to tell you more about the half marathon (with pictures! of me making goofy faces!) but for now it appears that I am late for work.  Which I have to walk through the snow to get to.  Not that I’m bitter.

• Milk, spilled, with accompanying shards of glass
• Rodent, dead
• Condom (SERIOUSLY?)
• Piles of vomit, now desicated and frozen and generally disgusting (2)

Look, management company.  I do not ask for much.  I do not care about Christmas décor in the lobby, or the frequency with which you shampoo the hallway carpets, or the speed with which you deliver package notices.  But for the love of all that is holy, could someone PLEASE clean up the vomit in the parking garage? Please? It’s foul.

• Book club
• Charity event
• Dinner with a friend
• Speaking at a nonprofit
• Preparing 6 cases for work trip next week
• Flying to new Orleans for half marathon then straight to California for work trip

I have nervous tummy just looking at that list.  Send help.

Things did not go according to plan.

As we were on the plane home (one of those small regional get types, the claustraphobic kind where it’s too small to stand fully upright) I was felled by the first stomach flu I believe I’ve ever had as an adult.  Holy GOD I am ill-equipped to deal with constant nausea and its effects.  I can take the searing pain of a sinus headache or the incessant burn of a sore throat for days, but after just a few hours of feeling on the verge of puking I was ready to call it quits.

I’ll spare you the details, but I do want to share the one positive discovery I made during the following two days of abject misery:  Coke, regular Coke, is a miracle drug.

We are not regular consumers of regular Coke around here.  We sometimes have diet in the house, but I generally view the regular stuff as too tempting and too full of unnecessary sugar, and since I do the food shopping- it’s generally not here.  As I was whining about my certain imminent death to one of my friends, she said “make John go to the store and get you a Coke.”

So I did, and let me tell you: when even water is making your stomach feel like death, a few sips of regular Coke is like magic elixer.  It stays down.  It makes you feel revived.  It causes you to reconsider all those unfriendly things you’ve said about high fructose corn syrup and unnatural caramel coloring over the years.  It is, in short, miraculous.

(According to a doctor friend, if you’re so sick that you can’t keep fluids down at all, you should dissolve a little salt into a room-temperature Coke and drink it slowly to help your body regain its water and salt balance.  I believe him, but that sounds gross, and I wasn’t on the verge of hospitalization for dehydration or anything, so I skipped the salt part.  I tell you this in the interest of thoroughness.)

I’m not back to 100% yet but I’m feeling better, and a big project at work went dramatically wrong yesterday, so I’m going in today.  I think I should make it the whole day.  Who knows, by the end of it I may even be ready to tell you about what we ate and drank in Nashville without feeling like I need to hurl.

I t seems we often end up with sort of non-traditional Valentine’s plans.  Last year on V-Day we had some friends over for dinner.  A few years ago we bought several kinds of fancy cheese and conducted a cheese tasting on our couch, in our pajamas.  Nine years ago, I performed in the Vagina Monologues.  Yes, I tend to avoid the “dress up for a fancy restaurant” kinds of dates.  (On Valentine’s Day only- any other day when you want to take me to Alinea?  Sold!)

But one traditional Valentine’s thing that I am happy to embrace?  This:

This, my friends, is a two pound box of Sees candy.  I won it from the Clever Girls, and I am simply delighted.  John and I, being former California residents, LOVE Sees, and it makes me sad that we don’t have it in the Midwest.  So this is amazing:

I’ve already told John that if he eats the butterscotch squares, he’s dead to me.  I mean, I love him and all, but there are limits.

This weekend fell decidedly, deliciously in the Type 2 column, and as I sit here munching on a leftover third of a burrito from lunch (see “no groceries,” supra), I can’t really believe what-all I crammed into the hours between 5pm on Friday and 6:30 frickin am this morning.  (Why yes I DID go to work at 6:30 am! How did you guess?  And no, I’m not in the least bitter about it, thanks for asking!)  There was happy hour and brunch with friends and a coffee date and another brunch with friends and a superbowl party featuring homemade wings and gumbo and soft pretzels, plus a cutie 3 month old baby.  Not too shabby.

But the highlight, unsurprisingly, was the lovely day and night I spent with a truly, astonishingly fun group of women who’d come in from ALL OVER THE WORLD (what, we had a canadian, that makes us international) to hang out.  Being a total moron I forgot my camera, and being a totally exhausted space case I’m forgetting all the nice things I wanted to say about them but suffice it to say that hanging out with these women was the kind of experience I used to daydream about when I was a teenager- a smart, racaously funny group of women who can talk about things both silly and serious for hours and hours while drinking wine and enjoying cheese fondue.  A little cliche and predictable for a girls weekend, you say, with the wine and the fondue?  DO NOT CARE.  WAS BLISS.

Making friends as an adult is hard, yo, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have found these ladies.

Then, after an evening where I mixed beer, whiskey, baileys (ew), wine, tequila (not my idea) and more beer, I somehow woke up with a headache.  I cannot fathom why.

On Wednesday, Marge started crying, rather noisily, at her desk.  My coworker and I went out to investigate (we are not made of stone) and found her mopping at her eyes with paper towels (we are not made of stone, but we are not made of money, either, and we were out of Kleenex.  At Marge’s suggestion, I went down to procurement and got some raggedy one-ply tissues, which were a minor improvement over the paper towels, plus now I know they have tissues in procurement.  Never have to buy office tissues again, bitches!)

It turns out that Marge’s father is very sick.  He’s probably dying.  Poor Marge and her sister are trying to set up hospice care so he can get out of the hospital and come home.  We heard about this in some detail on Wednesday when the crying jag happened.  Then again on Wednesday afternoon as we came back from lunch.  Then again on Wednesday evening as Marge was leaving for the day.

Thursday he was worse.  Marge is a mess.  She cried several times at work.  She left early to go home and help her sister finalize plans for bringing their dad home.  As she was leaving, she said they weren’t sure he was going to make it through the night.

I feel terrible for Marge.  This is a very difficult thing she’s going through.  But I also…how do I put this delicately…. I don’t really KNOW Marge.  I cannot think of much I can say that would be comforting.  You know who I do know?  My boss.  You know what I know about him?  He is not the sort to really take a shine to his employees spending an hour over the course of the work day nodding sympathetically and listening to the woes of a substitute secretary.  Yesterday, I heard Marge talking to him for at least fifteen minutes about her dad.  You don’t know my boss, but trust me when I say that a fifteen minute conversation about ANYTHING would make him twitchy- he’s a fast-moving guy- and I could hear him getting more and more impatient as the conversation ran on and on.

Today is Marge’s last day with us, probably.  Our regular secretary is scheduled to come back on Monday.  But I wonder: how best to handle it when a near-stranger tells you a LOT about a very difficult family situation? At work? Where your boss would like you to be, you know, working?  I do not want to abandon Marge- she seems like a lovely lady and she’s clearly struggling- but I’m just not sure what to say.  What is the proper way to give support (and potentially condolences) to a near-stranger who has a demonstrated ability to talk at some length and in tremendous detail about a very difficult family situation?  Can I continue to nod sympathetically and say “mmm,” and “oh, that’s hard,” or is there something more specific, perhaps, that I should offer?  Potentially something that will get me back to my desk in under 30 minutes?  Or should I just say eff it to my work and give her as much time as she needs to talk it out?  Truly, give me a script here, people.  I’m at a loss.

Night Train: Chatters

Day Train: iPods to block out the other throngs of commuters

Night Train: iPods for singing along to

Day Train: Coffee in a commuter mug or a Dunkin cup

Night Train: Old Granddad or a tall can of Miller Lite in a paper bag

Day Train: “Tickets please”

Night Train: “Where you going, sweetheart?”

Day Train: Universal agreement to all just look straight ahead, engaging with no one

Night Train: Apparently everyone else considers this to be some sort of weird people SOCIAL HOUR oh my god.

In conclusion: Do not forget your iPod on a late night train.  Also: wear a hood, a hat, and practice your fake sleeping.  You’re going to need it.