Overindulged

It's been a hard 4th year here at ChezIrishRed. When we started grad school we went with the notion that we'd be going though it together, in roughly the same time frame and would be able to support and understand one another. The problem with this thinking is that we've hit patches where what would be much nicer than having someone be able to relate to your stress/work load, but wasn't equally (or more) stressed out with their own. Fall/winter was rough on me and L just turned in a conference paper he's been working his butt-off on. (side note: there are many times I'm jealous of L's EE program - the office, the window, the money w/o TAing... but watching him spend 5, 14-18 hour days trying to find the error in his code - is it a typo? a wrong slash? is the math bad in the first place? - reminds me of how lucky I am that in my work I will never wake up in the morning I find that the words have disappeared from my book, or that they decided to arrange themselves in a different order, or that one semicolon out of place would prevent my entire article/chapter/diss from, say, printing).

We've coped with the last few months with less grace than I'd like to admit and an ample supply of cookies and booze. You see, when I was anxious in Winter I lost weight (why, oh why can't that be my default mode), being stressed in the Spring has made me into the Cookie Monster. I love the buttery, brown sugary, chocolaty goodness and I've had a hard time stopping. Fortunately I learned an important lesson in attempting to double a recipe after drinking 1/2 a bottle of wine, and accidentially tripled the sugar in my latest batch. In addition to realizing drunken math is a bad idea, the overly sweet taste seems to have overloaded me. Proof: I still have 1/2 a batch of dough that I haven't 1) eaten straight from the freezer, 2) made into cookies. The other challenge is that we live in a country and age group in which the things you do to relax/hang out, are drink and eat. And I love drinking and eating, and I'm exercising at least 6 days out of 7! But as a recent NY Times article pointed out, even if you run 10 miles a day, it's ridiculously easy to eat the calories for 20 miles a day. Between the comfort of food (one of the problems with being a good cook), and the warm relaxation that comes with beer and wine - I've overindulged.

The stress levels seem to be receding (at least temporarily), I think/hope we've developed some new relationship techniques for dealing with one another when we're under the gun, and it's time to be more strict on the consumption. I'm calling myself out in this post b/c I've said this twice already this quarter and it hasn't worked.