I wasn’t going to send an email today, but then I remembered it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which is kind of a big deal in my very Irish family (ahem, it’s actually St. Paddy’s Day). No real big insights today, just some Lols for you ;)
Anyway, my dad is 100% Irish and has brought my brothers and I up with a reverence for all things Ireland,
and even sent my best friend and I to Ireland for my 21st birthday.
It was in Dublin that I got my first and only tattoo of a Celtic shamrock, and where I spent many nights drinking many beers. Also hit the Guinness factory, as one does when visiting Ireland, and have plenty of memories to show for it.
See, my best friend Sally and I headed to Ireland for 8 days after spending the summer living on Martha’s Vineyard, working for minimum
wage and partying pretty much every night. I remember when I moved to the Vineyard, I actually brought my rowing ergometer with me because as I was a rower in college, I thought I’d use it to “stay in shape” over the summer.
Lol.
That thing never got touched. The only things that did get touched were 30-packs of Bud Light.
The summer was one I’ll never forget, mostly because we had the time of our lives, met so many
interesting people and left it all on the table – besides, it was kind of our last-hurrah summer before we went back to our senior year of college and entered “the real world.”
But I also remember it was the a time in my life when two other things happened:
- I didn’t exercise at all for an extended period of time. And honestly threw everything out the window in terms of health and fitness and just said, eff it. And indeed had the pounds and bloat to show
for it – I actually couldn’t fit into pants by the end of the summer, so was forced to just wear sundresses.
- It was the first time I dieted.
You might be asking how those two things can both be true. Well, with regard to dieting, it was toward the end of the summer that Sally and I started realizing we couldn’t fit into any clothes we’d brought to the Island, so we decided to “do Atkins.”
This was right in the middle of the low-carb craze, and
though we didn’t read the actual book, we thought, “How hard can this be? All we have to do is eat cheese and meat and we’ll lose weight!”
Lol.
Well, eat we did. We’d each eat a few hotdogs every day, many hunks of cheese, some other proteins mixed in, but one thing didn’t change: we were still drinking a million beers every night.
That was not-so-much Atkins.
We rounded out the summer heading to
Ireland for a week, and continued the indulging:
