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So this picture portrays what I would like to be doing right now. Eating pie and drinking a double tall soy half syrup pumpkin spice latte (what? I worked at Starbucks). Or at the very least some coffee. Or a fishbowl of red wine. With a side of french fries. And cake.

What I do NOT want to be doing right now is sipping herbal tea and picking at a pomegranate. On a Friday night. Not that there is anything wrong with herbal tea or pomegranates. They just aren’t what I want. They are what I need. Which is no fun.

You see, I had a little health scare/wake-up call yesterday. I’ll spare you the details – because they’re gross – but let’s put it this way: My double tall soy half syrup pumpkin spice latte and three pieces of pie for breakfast days are fast coming to an end. My body is rebelling against everything I put in it that is not healthy. And to be honest, I totally saw this coming. Since July, I have done nothing but feed myself pub food and an absolutely ridiculous amount of alcohol. Having the bf run off for a year did not, unsurprisingly, help this situation. I may or may not have been consuming a glass (read: bottle) of wine every evening. I may or may not have been digesting a couple (read: platefuls) of fries every day. The signs of shutdown began demonstrating themselves about two weeks ago. My efforts to stun them senseless with beer have clearly backfired. And see, unlike normal people, I don’t gain crazy amounts of weight if I eat crap all day long. My shutdowns are always internal. Which means it’s easier for me to dismiss them as stress/lack of sleep/sex withdrawal and avoid the problem. Until yesterday. Fack. Worse, this shutdown is different from previous ones in that it is much, much, much more serious. Which means that I’m getting older. Which I knew but had chosen to ignore. Again, until yesterday. Double fack.

So now I’m faced with little option but to cut out all of my favourites. Not permanently mind you. I’m not a fan of the whole cold-turkey-never-again way of doing things because of the inevitable disappointment that follows unrealistic expectations. But I’m actually going to have to make a concerted effort to minimize my intake of the following: alcohol, sugar, deep-fried anything, dairy, cigarettes, and (gasp!) coffee. These goodies, I’ve been told, will have to be replaced with the following: water, fruit, oatmeal, veg, clean air, and peppermint tea. Yawn.

I find my current pubfood/booze/coffee withdrawal very troubling. For example, I am now very aware of the fact that I come from a family of drinkers. On both sides, although one side would have you believe otherwise because the immediate ones don’t drink a thing. The other side is chalk full of alcoholics/pseudo-alcoholics. Parties are awesome. But I’m starting to wonder how many of them have internal health problems that I don’t know about. Am I just the weakling in the family, unable to maintain a pseudo-alcoholic lifestyle past 30? How depressing. I didn’t have a single glass of wine today and I gotta tell you, it sucked. That can’t be normal.

I’m also more aware of my addictive tendencies in other areas. There’s a reason I never touched hard drugs. In my short 28 years, I have been seriously addicted to the following:
1) chocolate covered almonds – I ate five boxes. At once. When I was 12. I was sick for days. To this day, I cannot eat just one chocolate covered almond. I never keep them in the house and when the band students are selling them door to door, I shut the blinds and hold my breath until they go away.

2) cigarettes – oh how I love cigarettes. If cigarettes were good-for-you sticks, I’d be the healthiest woman on the planet. But they aren’t. And I know that they stink and I hate when people smoke in the morning when I’m walking to work and I have to breathe the stench in. But there is something so wonderful about sitting on a balcony with a big glass of red, a good book, and a cigarette.

3) coffee – at my worst, I was drinking 5 16 oz cups of coffee per day and while drinking said coffee, I would start to get depressed when the cup was half empty because that meant the joy was ending. I have managed to get myself down to 2 16 oz mugs per day but I crave it constantly.

4) unhealthy relationships – this sounds ridiculous but I think this is an actual addiction. My last relationship was like coffee; even though I felt kind of sick all the time, I still craved more of it. Because I could remember a time when I loved it and it didn’t feel awful. I can remember a time with coffee when it did not give me heartburn or gut rot. In my last relationship, I could remember a time when I did not want to tear my own hair out all the time. Argh.

All of this awareness is just too much. I liked it better when I was able to firmly ignore all of these inconvenient facts about my life. Now, I clearly have a problem. And I’m being forced to fix it. And this post is going nowhere. I just needed to vent the fact that from here on, Ezmy is going to have to be healthy. Yippee. Healthy and irritatingly lonely. All posts from now on will be fueled by hemp, apples, and mint tea rather than cigarettes, coffee and red wine. I apologize in advance if they are boring.