making friends with ibuprofen

To: Laurie
From: Charlie
Re: “Fat Chance”

So quitting coffee during the week was supposed to jump start another effort to live a healthier life. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting – that maybe without the delicious, wonderful taste of coffee in my system, I would wake up one of these days a completely changed person – you know the kind -- who don't crave sweets or drink coffee and who feel unfulfilled if they don’t get their daily five mile run in before work, who happily snack on celery sticks, don't drink coffee andwho's outfit is always effortlessly coordinated with hair that's always smoothl and perfect no matter what they've been doing.

Have to admit, hasn’t really happened yet. Still just as likely to slurp down extra chocolate-y hot chocolate in the morning as I am to look distrustfully at the celery sticks, and my hair has not been smooth OR perfect once this week, even without the coffee. But I’m working on my running! I still haven’t woken up in the morning excited for my run, but I’ve been trying to brainwash myself so I feel guilty and sad if I skip a run.

NOT ANYMORE.

Got up early the other morning, to fit in the run before work, and about halfway through I stopped to take off my sweatshirt. Managed to lose my balance and, Laurie, long story short? I dislocated my shoulder.

It is almost enough to drive me back to drinking (loving, sweet, darling, delicious) coffee. It might make me a caffeine junkie, true, but it doesn't cause me bodily harm. Think I’m done with feeling guilty if I don’t run every day, and might even be done with it for good. Bring ON that extra chocolate-y hot chocolate!

25

To: Laurie

From: Charlie

Re: "25"

I KNOW you already know practically everything about me, but indulge me -- the "twenty five things" list going around lets me make a list that isn't about chores!

1. I have given up drinking coffee during the week, on account of the fact that the number of times I refilled my mug throughout the day was creeping from two or three up to ten or eleven. I thought that quitting cold turkey would help jump start attempt number fifty to live a healthier life, but all it's done is let me know how much I miss the taste of coffee.

2. Coffee is now a treat I let myself have only on the weekends, and it makes doing anything -- lying in bed, curled up over the newspaper in the morning, walking around downtown, hunting for antiques -- that much better.

3. For a very long time I hated "Classic Victorian Literature," and actively avoided anything I decided that fell under that category. As my mother was constantly was constantly trying to have me love anything and everything Austen related, I became an indiscriminate reader in retaliation -- I would read biographies, historical fiction, textbooks, ridiculous fiction, science fiction and lots of fantasy, all provided the book in question wasn't written by a celebrated Victorian author. It wasn't until the summer going into my junior year of high school that I had a terrible ear infection that kept me up all night. Desperate for something to distract me from the pain in my head, I read the only thing in the entire summer house I had not even touched before -- "Sense and Sensibility."

4. Reading the book didn't make me an instant fan of Austen, but I grudgingly began to admit that maybe all that nonsense about the Victorian Classics might be based on a grain of truth. The beginning of the end.

5.I think one of the reasons I love Bronte so much is that there's a similar sense of wildness and imagination in her work as there was in the science fiction and fantasy novels I grew up trying to live out in the woods behind my house.

6. During high school I tried my hardest to prove religion wrong, and develop a clear and concise reasoning that would convince everyone I knew, including the nuns, as to why the Catholic Church was a bunch of crap.

7. I ended up graduating college with two degrees -- one in English, as a Victorianist, and one in Religious Studies, with a double focus on theology and scripture.

8. Sometimes I worry that the reason I don't travel much is that I am afraid I will fall in love with a place so much I won't ever come back home.

9. I have countless tubes of red red red lipstick, but there is almost nothing on earth that has yet to convince me to wear them out in public.

10. I do not particularly enjoy going on boats in the deep ocean (cruise ships are completely out of the question), but I do not think I will ever get enough of being close to the ocean.

11. I think autumn is my favourite season because my birthday falls in the middle, and because I am incapable of seeing the combination of a fall blue sky behind autumn leaves and not smiling.

12. You can measure my stress levels by how clean the house and bathrooms are, and by the number and type of baked or cooked items strewn about the house.

13. Even though I fall in and out of love with songs very easily, my very top favourite song ever has stayed the same since the hot, sticky summer afternoon when I was fifteen and walking the five miles to my best friend's house in a pair of ridiculous new flip flops. I had just made a mix CD of completely new songs I had never heard before and had it playing on loop. I remember looking at the clouds over my head to distract me from the blisters that were developing on the top of my feet (I still have the scars!) when the song came on. I never even heard the rest of the CD - that song was on repeat for the rest of the summer, and for the rest of high school, I would play it every morning before I got out of the car. My father says when he hears the song, he cannot not think of the summer I was sixteen and learning to drive, because that was the only thing I would play in the car. He doesn't know it, but that is the song we are going to dance to at my wedding. I think we will both be crying.

14. I cannot stop collecting quotes. Not even the trite little sayings at the end of tea bags ("Sing from your heart," "Share your strengths, not your weaknesses") are safe.

15. Starting this year, instead of cutting my hair whenever I get bored with it, I plan on dying it.

16. I am nervous about this, since the last time I did anything dramatic involving both my hair and dyes, my hair was bright fuchsia for a couple of couple of months. While I absolutely loved the bright pink color, I also accidentally bleached all the hair underneath the pink, so once the pink color was gone, I had streaks of big, brassy blonde everywhere. I did not love that.

17. Along with my deep and secret (not anymore) love for red lips, I have a penchant for lovely liquid eyeliner. Provided it has some shade of pink, I do not think I have met a blush I do not like and I collect lip glosses as though they were pennies. I am trying to cut down on my makeup collection because --

18. I hardly wear any makeup.

19. I refuse to spell the word 'grey' with an 'a.'

20. I tend to crush more on literary characters than I do on people in real life. So far, every time I meet a person who resembles Francis Lymond of Culter, my One True (Literary) Love, we end up screaming at each other. I haven't figured out what this means, other than I am unlikely to run into a blond Scottish lord with entitlement issues anytime soon.

21. The rest of my literary loves (I am all for free love! Lots and lots of literary free love!) tend to be some combination of the aforementioned Lymond and Dickon from The Secret Garden.

22. I think the smell of warm hay and horses is one of, if not the, sweetest smells I've ever encountered.

23. I am a terrible hypocrite and although I am absolutely pants at spelling, it drives me up a wall when other people do not spell simple words correctly. Even worse, though, is when people forget the rules for differentiating 'you're' and 'your.' (Now that I've written this, I am bound to mess up and use 'your' and 'you're' incorrectly, I just KNOW it.)

24. The summer spent in England with you was the best summer of my life.

25. When I am homesick, I miss the smell of the English countryside, the smell of the ocean, the feel of my dogs lying on my feet, the gingery, garlicky smell of my kitchen, my family and having tea and scones with lots of jam late in the afternoon with you.