Dont Mince Words

When you haven’t had good sex in a very long time, you hit that point where you become OK without it. You get used to it. Or you get a dog to keep your mind off it. But there is that fear, like a diabetic having a small slice of cake, that when you do finally have sex, you are going to crave the whole cake all the time.

It had been a long time for GC as well, so I don’t think either one of us were in a hurry to go there. When we did, it was exactly as I suspected it would be: great and, damn it, great. The sweat wasn’t dry yet and I was the proverbial addict slapping my wrist looking for a vein. I was ready for round two and his eyes were still rolled to the back of his head.

Several days later, he paid me the ultimate compliment. “You have the sex drive of a small latin country.” Not bad considering my primary source of pleasure has been walking my dog. Now I can obsess about the next time I get “walked.”

I grew up in a time when sport bras barely existed; certainly not for d-cups. Sneakers didn’t have shock control and they had little arch support. Well, at least not where my parents shopped. These factors, combined with allergies, made me a hater of gym class.

There were two times a year when I really wanted to skip school just to miss gym and that was during those god forsaken Presidential fitness tests. Girls, you remember, the flex arm hang where you’d try to keep your head above the bar. I was good for about three seconds. But my least favorite test was the 440 run. That one lap around the track made my lungs burn, my nose run, my boobs hurt, and my ankles ache. I was never a runner.

Imagine me 30 years later in a fitness bootcamp. I was nearly paralyzed the first day when the major blew his whistle and we started running down Wilshire Boulevard at 6 a.m. My eighth grade anxiety set in. Armed with great shoes and a killer sport bar, I went as far as I could. I could go miles on the elliptical or treadmill at the gym, but there was just something about hard pavement and bus fumes that made it more difficult.

Three weeks later I was at the front of the line up and made it all the way on a half-mile warm up jog around the LA County Museum of Art. I tried to hang back so I wouldn’t hold up the fast people; however, the major pushed me and I was the pace setter.

I made it, but those magical endorphins never arrived to supply me with a runners high. All I could think about was, “wow, my mother could of never done this at my age.” So, my mindset was not back in eighth grade thinking about my 80 pound classmates who could flex-arm hang for 45 seconds. Nah, my athletic competitive benchmark is just living better than my parents.

If that’s the case, I think it’s cocktail hour.

There are certain addictions we find ways to overcome. Diabetics avoid bakeries. Alcoholics bypass liquor stores. I have avoided eBay for the longest time mainly because I don’t want to be a junk shopoholic. I’ve admired the company for years for giving common consumers the confidence they needed to make purchases on the Internet. But I have not bought a thing. Not until I realized I needed a lunch box.

I was shoving my Target plastic “lunch” bag in our over-crowded office refrigerator when a co-worker with a pink unicorn lunch box followed me. That’s when I realized I needed a lunch box that was easy to distinguish.

What pops into my mind? I know those of you that know me figure SpongeBob, Simpsons, or Hello Kitty. No, my mind went somewhere else – back into a time machine.

Back to 1971. I decided I needed to get the Partridge Family lunch box I never got the first time around. At 9 a.m., I was on eBay bidding in an auction that was ending in 45 minutes. I had heard about these last minute bidding wars. All I knew was, it was payday and I was going to get my damn lunch box.

An hour and $52 later I won the lunch box (with Thermos!) and I received an email from eBay congratulating me on my first purchase and inviting me to “find more great items.” Coming down off my shopping high from the world’s biggest yard sale I realized I had to wait for shipping. There was no immediate gratification like I get at a Nordstrom’s shoe sale. That’s why I’ve actually avoided eBay.

Today, 13 days later, I’m the proud owner of an original Partridge Family lunch box. Its arrival was anticlimactic and less of a high than winning a bidding war. Now I’m washed in stress trying to figure out what to pack for lunch tomorrow. I don’t have any fruit roll-ups, Pop Rocks, Spaghetti-O’s, or the fixings for a peanut butter banana sandwich.