for the benefit of my skin and the detriment of everything else

Lately my face has been kind of emo. My pores are huge, my skin is dull, and the bags under my eyes are tote sized. I had tried all the drugstore creams, lotions, and potions but nothing was helping, so I broke out the big guns and made a facial appointment. Today I had that appointment and during it I was told the worst new ever.

"Wow, you have really weird skin. It's good but you've got some spots that feel odd. Nothing bad, just some patches that are off. Do you eat a lot of dairy?"

"Well, I take some milk with my iced coffee. But not much other than that."

"You drink coffee? How much a day?"

"I've had three today."

"Three eight ounce cups?"

"Um, no. More like three twelve ounce cups."

"You've had 36 ounces of coffee TODAY?"

"um, yes?"

"Well, there's your problem, cut out the coffee and your skin will clear up."

Okay, so it's not like I have skin cancer, which I guess would technically be the worst news ever, but no more coffee? Pretty fucking bad.

I live and die by iced coffee. I was happier than a pig in shit when I found out PJ's was selling a 32 ounce iced coffee during the summer. I had quite a few of them while we were in New Orleans for Tru's birthday.


On a normal morning I wake up and literally stumble into the kitchen pawing at the fridge to make myself a cup of iced coffee before I do anything else. I don't feel right until I've sucked down at least half a cup and I realize that makes me sound like I have an addiction and I don't care.

So that's the dilemma I'm facing, give up iced coffee and see if caffeine really causes that much damage to my skin (as well as a list of other body parts that she rattled off) or continue trucking along as if I don't know any better. Honestly I think the decision was made for me as we ran out of iced coffee today and I never had time to run to Whole Foods to restock. You might want to pray for jparks and Truman.

Ugh, this better work otherwise I'm going to be really pissed that I gave up coffee for nothing. And that I still have zits.

as an added bonus it'll protect us from aliens

I'm freshly back from NYC, along with most of the internet. We were all there for a blogging conference which is just about as dorky as it sounds. But dorky or not, it was a really good time and a great chance to meet people that you've read for years but don't know in real life and see friends that live far away. Anyway, that's where I was this past weekend and I would like to go on record and say that NYC is amazing. If we hadn't just moved, I might strong arm jparks into moving there right this second.

The weekend before I left for New York jparks, Tru, and I headed down to Surfside, Texas for a beach weekend with some friends. It was lovely too, although much smaller and less insane. Unless you call jparks getting tarballed and thinking he would have to shave off his leg hair to remove said tar, insane. I just call it funny.

These two very different weekends, both lovely in their own ways, did have one thing in common: really dark bedrooms. In Surfside japrks and I slept in twin bunkbeds in a tiny cave of a room that had no windows. The tiny room was quick to fill up with air conditioned air making it Arctic and The Perfect Sleep Temperature©. That combined with the absolute lack of light and oh, it was perfection. It was the kind of sleep I've daydreamed about since Truman was born. You can safely assume I was sad to leave the little cave room on the beach.

But then I remembered that I was headed to New York, where I had selfishly decided that I was not sharing my hotel room so no one could wake me up early in the mornings or slyly bump the room temp up a few degrees when I wasn't looking. The first thing I did was set the air for 68 and then draw the black out curtains as shut as they would go. It was pretty perfect until the group of girls I was having dinner with one night told me horror stories and I realized I would probably be murdered in my hotel bed. But that's not relevant.

Now I'm back home and the amount of light streaming through my non-curtainable bedroom windows is unacceptable. I told jparks that I don't care how trashy it makes me, I might be foiling our windows, as well as Tru's, soon. I mean, our apartment complex provides sunshades making it nearly impossibly to install curtains and I'm not even sure I would want to spend the money on them since we might not stay here past our year lease, so foil makes sense, right? Please just agree with me so I can sleep in a black room. Also, I'm going to need you to tell me it's not crazy to buy one of those tower single room air conditioners, because this 74 degrees shit isn't cutting it for me. Must! Be! More! Cold!