"You look great!"
I thanked her. She says that every time we see one another. Today we were standing around in the parking lot because the company's Emergency Response Team (part of the Homeland Security Initiative, I'm sure) had scheduled a fire drill. Frettie saw me, and made her way through the crowds of coffee cup clutching engineers, smokers, admins, and managers over to where I stood.
"No. Really. I am so jealous. But I'm afraid to lose weight. What if I become addicted to it? Did you see that actress from Bridget Jones? She's like a stick! She's addicted to being skinny! I am just fascinated by addictions, you know. Do you think she's anorexic? What if my daughter grows up to become anorexic?"
I didn't have to respond, because Frettie kept up a running monologue until the drill claxons ceased and everyone began to filter in.
"Well, anyway, I'm not going to diet because I become addicted to things too easily and I don't want my daughter to grow up to be anorexic. But you look really, really good. I'm so jealous!"
When I got back to my desk, there was an e-mail from Frettie. She hoped I wasn't mad at her for all this worrying she was doing. She hoped I wasn't mad at her for sending me the gross, gross picture she just sent me. She hoped her daughter didn't end up with anorexia.
The photo showed two skin-covered female skeletons, standing with their arms around one another, posing like they were slinky models. The caption said both were now dead, and that photo, in which both of them could not have weighed more than 80 pounds each, had been taken shortly before they were hospitalized.
That's this month's fret. Last month, Frettie fretted over the fact that she was staying up all night, every night, writing fanfic novels that she never intended to have published. She thought maybe she should get some sleep, but she just felt compelled to write these novels.
Too bad she didn't acquire her writing obsession this month, when she could have put it to work for her in the Nanny NoNo Rah Mo contest thingie some of my misc.writing peep friends are indulging in.
With Frettie's luck, next month will be National Anorexia Awareness month, but she'll be fretting about shooz, or something.
Teehee! My mother's a frettie. Every sentence starts with, "But what if..."
Good on ya for keeping the weight off. Some of it has migrated west, boohoo.
What Frettie was really fishing for, of course, was for you to say, Oh Gertrude, you look so lovely as a plumpie that you shouldn't change a thing! Pay no attention to my svelte, glamorous, sexy body! I'm a dolt! I'm too skinny! You're just right! Just perfect! Fat rules! You did say that, didn't you?
We have ERT drills too. I like to wander away from people I know and watch people I don't. Of which there are about six thousand, so I don't get far percentage-wise before the megaphones say OK, enough, go back to work.
what i want to know is, what good is a fire drill if you know you're going to have it ahead of time? apparently, they've never had real fire drills where i work-planned, i mean. but we get practice through false alarms and occasional bomb scares. this week we had a planned drill where emails were sent, then reminder emails were sent, then the planner of the drill came around to all the supervisors of large areas to remind them about 10 minutes beforehand, and then my dean came by just in case the planner missed someone. sheesh.
I'm our "suite warden" and have to yell at the lawyers to put down their work and get out when the fire drills commence. Very fun. I do *not* like clomping down 8 flights of stairs in my high-heeled pink shooze, however.
[AJ commented:]what i want to know is, what good is a fire drill if you know you're going to have it ahead of time?
The ERT knew about it ahead of time, because they had to. We kinda figured there'd be one, because a week or so ago they sent out a reminder of what we're required to do when we hear the alerts. What they did NOT tell us was to put ear protection devices in our ears -- I'm planning on complaining to OSHA, because my ears were ringing thanks to all the time spent passing by those 80000 dB claxons, and being stuck in the stairwell with all those other cattle, slowly descending to the ground level. It hurt and I fully expected to find blood coming out of my ears by the time I got out of the building.
They also did not tell us exactly when the fire drill would come.