"the things you do for a cruise..."

So, I should let you all know that this girl right here is headed out on a cruise this summer. The Boatwright parents announced at Christmas that they were giving the family tickets to a 7-day trip to Cancun, the Cayman Islands, Beliz, and some other places I can’t remember right now. Thanks Mom and Dad! So excited!

Anyhow, Tim was freshly in the picture and so immediately I was all like “Can I bring my boyfriend too!?”. They said yes.

It only took me a couple of months to put together this equation:

If (Tim = photographer) and (Cruise = me in a bathing suit), then (Cruise = pictures of me in a bathing suit)...possibly shared with the world via this cursed interwebbery. For all you girlfriends of mine whom I’ve heard mumble about how lucky I am to have my own personal photographer always snapping my portrait, take note. It’s all fun and games until there’s a bathing suit involved.

The shock and awe of what was coming made my eyes grow to the size of coke bottles and put me in a nervous sweat. I started cursing society for making it socially acceptable to have girls wear next to nothing anytime they’re within 30 feet of a body of water and call it “normal”. I also exhaled a few expletives and devised a plan.

A major diet plan. I dwindled my normal-person groceries down to nothing and then started with serious resolve. I ate nothing but steamed tilapia, asparagus, apples, grilled chicken, cucumbers, fat free cottage cheese and spinach for ten days. Ten days I held strong! Through cookie decorating for Easter, through two birthday parties, through dinner with friends where cheeseburgers were to my left and fragrant tacos were to my right. Through bagel Friday at work. Through it all I held strong. My roommate even offered me chocolate truffles and I held strong.

I did lose weight, it’s true. I fit into my super skinny jeans again and relished waking up every morning to see how much I lost overnight. It was getting ridiculous when yesterday I hit a figurative brick wall so hard I scraped my figurative face on it. I woke up and the scale said the same thing it had for the last three days. I got to work, tired and hungry, and sat at my desk while my co-workers made a Starbucks run. After that, everyone was talking too loud, breathing too loud. The stress of packing up my house to move overloaded my mind. I took a break for lunch and begrudgingly spooned fat free cottage cheese into my mouth and chewed on some passé strawberries. Still hungry, I came back to my desk and tried to work.

An hour later, I was still miserable and only getting more frustrated. The office was cold and I wasn’t regulating my own temperature well enough, so I resorted to tucking a blanket around my lap after going back to the fridge for more cottage cheese.

I suddenly heard laughter, looked up, and saw Marlene and Heather giggling behind an iPhone that was pointed at me. I looked down and realized what I had become: a freezing, irritated, hungry, carbohydrate-deprived girl who was obsessing over every ounce of fat I ingested. This was a problem. Plus, I looked ridiculous scraping the last bit of fat free cottage cheese out of the container while sitting under a blanket in public. Want to see? I'll humor you.

You're welcome. 
So I went home and ate a steak for dinner. Then I went out for coffee and added some cream and sugar to my cup and felt like a normal person again.

And now I’m going to dinner with my friends and I’m going to eat like I’m celebrating balance, because I am.

When I told Tim about all this, his response was the title of this post.