Weekend Mishaps

Hi all—it's occurring to me that basically all I write about anymore are calories, weight, therapy, dietary, etc. and that's probably boring at best, and triggering at worst. Sometimes my eating disordered brain takes over. ED-Head, my dietician calls it. I hate the whole idea of identifying "Ed" as some autonomous malevolent abusive figure (which some people might find helpful to do for themselves in recovery, but I do NOT), so I'm not going to plead total innocence and blame all the crazy-talk on him, but at times I do find myself speaking from a more eating disordered place. And all the ranting and rationalizing about gaining weight and upping calories and on and on and on that I've been doing lately feels pretty eating disordered. I want to rein that in a little and apologize to you guys if it's been triggering or unhelpful or monotonous or whatever in any way.

Moving on. Today Is B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L outside. Sunny and breezy and perfect. First day below 100 degrees all week, I think. I didn't grow up here and I'm not used to this awful, awful heat we've been having. Usually I'm freezing cold and bundle up when everyone else is in t-shirts, but apparently I'm not one for tropical conditions either. But today, oh my is it lovely outside. Too bad I've spent approximately four hours in my kitchen trying to bake a damn cake. My uncle's birthday is this weekend (he lives in College City) so I tried to make him a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Simple, right? Um, no. First the middle got all bubbly and deformed and gross-looking, so I let it cool thinking it would deflate. It didn't. Then I tried to take it out of the pan, and it all stuck to the bottom even though I totally greased it beforehand. But I figured whatever, I'll just cover it up with frosting. Well, then the frosting was a fail too and got super gummy and dry. When I tried to spread it, the top of the cake got literally shredded to pieces. Oh and then, somehow, the cake broke in half. Still scratching my head on how that one even happened. A pastry chef, I am not.

The great irony of eating disorders is that they can drive you to eat some pretty gross stuff (pickles and mustard, anyone?) and do some pretty shameful things with food (hiding, mutilating, discarding, purging). But this cake - prepared with all kinds of good intentions - was a doozy. I ended up having to toss the whole thing, which bothered my conscious a bit because it was probably still completely edible even though it looked horrendous, but I panicked. Birthday treat attempt #2 is brownies, stay tuned...

Another fail of the weekend: my roommate was out of town last night, so I was here alone reading a creepy murder mystery that had me all spooked and edgy. Then I started hearing this periodic chirping. Of course, badass that I am, my first instinct was to grab a pair of plastic scissors (scissors? really?) and tiptoe around the apartment ready to do battle with an axe murderer until I discovered that duh, it was the smoke detector. I vaguely remembered my mom once telling me that the smoke detector would beep when the battery was dying, so I figured that was the problem. But then my brain start racing and having all these thoughts like but what if it's heat built up from making dinner five hours ago and there's a real fire and I'm stuck up here by myself and the whole building burns down all because I DIDN'T PAY ATTENTION TO THE SMOKE DETECTOR?!?! I called my dad in a panic, then panicked even more when he didn't pick up the first time (maybe because it was past midnight and Papa Bear has an early bedtime). Long story short, he called me back and had to talk me through the process of putting down the scissors, climbing on a chair, unscrewing the smoke detector, and removing the battery - which was, indeed, dead.

In summary:
a) I am not a pastry chef
b) My self-defense instincts are lacking
c) I almost burned down the apartment

UPDATE: The brownies were a success!