The Britney Comeback -- A Risk Analysis

Risk Statement	Impact (1-5)	Probability (1-5)	Exposure: ImpactxProbability	Mitigation Action
Popstar not capable of getting through interview without using the "word" 'y'all.'	3	5	15	Immediately begin covert pro-south advertising campaign called "Y'all are people too" or "Let me hear y'all yee-haw!" in hopes of endearing the music listening public to the vernacular and dialect of rural Louisiana
Abs not what they used to be. Popstar resistant to crunches, fickle public resistant to pudgy pop stars.	4	4	16	Convert popstar to Buddhism, leak story that belly is homage to her spiritual leader.
Popstar may become or may already be pregnant with the baby of her skeezy paparazzi boyfriend.	3	5	15	Chastity belt.
Popstar apt to flash her girly bits without warning.	3	4	12	Chastity belt mitigation suggested for above risk should address this as well. 2 birds, 1 very strong piece of metal.
Cheetos addiction leads to unsightly orange stains on clothing.	4	5	20	Signature color!

Bloggers for Charity Book

Bloggers for Charity is putting together a book to benefit War Child International. War Child International is an international network of charity organizations devoting to helping children who are affected by war. I've submitted a piece to the book and you can too! Instructions here.

2 Inferior Posts in a Row. Blame Lisa.

Lunch Day 2. The leftover restaurant food theme continues, this time with Bindi Masala from Delhi Palace in Jackson Heights. For my nonIndian readers (Everyone except Kajal and even she might be Puerto Rican) that means "Really yummy okra. No seriously, it's good. Yes good okra. No, it's not even fried. It's totally good. Seriously." I would have certainly eaten all of it last night had I not had samosa chat and 1/3 of a dosa and some naan to fill me up. (I am seriously considering forgoing Friday's weekly weigh in -- ahhhhh denial you are my best friend.).

I offered to order and pick up take out last night on my way over to Amy and Joe's palatial Jackson Height's co-op for our evening plans of catching up on Lost. This is the nicest thing I have offered to do ever because I hate calling to order food. I can't explain this other than to say that I generally don't love talking on the phone especially when the phone call is being used just to relay info (as opposed to chatting) and I do not understand why all takeout places do not accept email orders. Ordering Indian food can be especially stressful since many of the dishes use words that my very caucasian tongue is not capable of pronouncing and there is a possibility (though a much smaller possibility that when ordering say, Chinese) that the person on the other end of the phone will not speak English or will have a thick enough accent that I will not be able to understand them. When this happens I usually just order a number 1 and bail out but when ordering for other this is not a viable plan ("oh look, 3 number 1s! how did that happen?!"). So I went to plan B -- ask my Indian friend (Ms. Boriqua) to practice pronunciation with me. Sadly she was next to no help, claiming that many of the words used were somehow not words in her vocabularly and implying that they could be from a secret different kind of Indian which momentarily had me excited about the prospect of a Native American restaurant right here in New York City (mmmm Fry Bread).

Lunch today was eaten in front of the weekly Settler's of Catan match where, as expected, there was at least 5 jokes made based on someone's acquisition of/need for/offering of wood. As I am always the only girl playing there might have been some sheepish blushing in my direction but in actuality there was none -- probably because I am also the person most likely to giggle at a good "I got wood!" joke. I got my ass kicked for the 400th time in a row.

Lunch posts are always boring: 2
No they're not!: 0

The Quality of this Post May Disprove its Content

There's a blogging advice book on the market (yes, that day has come) called, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch which is devoted to the topic of how bloggers too often write about boring crap. I haven't read the book since I prefer to draw uninformed conclusions but the author claims to offer interesting writing topics to snaz up your boring old blog. I'm all but positive that she forgot to advocate for public nudity or embarking on a series of awful relationships and thank god -- I need to retain my niche. Anyway, I suspect the book is mostly correct -- there are a lot of boring blogs out there -- however I also suspect that the problem is not a lack of interesting topics, it's the bad writing. Lisa and I were chatting on Friday and hypothesized that certainly lunch could make for an interesting post since really good writing is rarely based on having a good topic (though a good topic probably makes good writing easier to come by) so why not write about your lunch? Because we are huge rebels (who also love to eat stuff, especially at the noon hour!) we agreed to both write posts about lunch and since Lisa is a bit of an over achiever she decided to write FIVE posts about lunch. And since Lisa is also an evil bitch who wants me to lose all of my readers she decided I was also writing five posts about lunch. We'll see.

Today's lunch is leftover cassoulet from last weeks inaugural meeting of the Wine Club spin off "Eating Fancy Food and Gossiping About Celebrities Club" which was held at the restaurant AOC. How bourgeois do I sound with my frenchie lunch? I also just finished the Julia Child autobiography, My Life in France so I'm pretty much an expert on all edible French things. For those nonexperts reading this post cassoulet is a French tomato based casserole with white beans, duck confit and sausage and pork fat (read: ambrosia of the gods). My leftover portion of France's version of Hamburger Helper (queue all of France hating me, but those Pierres need to cut me a break -- cassoulet comes in canned form! You don't even add your own freshly ground ecoli infested chuck!) is smaller than I would like (since I would *like* to eat a bucketful) but I'm fairly certain that the calorie content is more than sufficient to constitute a full lunch. That said I foresee myself breaking into my stash of granola bars or possible sneaking downstairs for a PB&J come 3:00pm (so much for maintaining that fancy food allure). The best part of the cassoulet was the sausage which I ate every morsel of in the restaurant last week so today I am left with a piece of pork fat and a few bits of duck meat and a lot of white beans. Luckily the sauce makes the beans pretty yummy and also has the wonderful side effect of fooling my coworkers into believing that I am eating a very healthy lunch despite the fact that everything in my Tupperware is coated in a loving blanket of fat.

I am normally pretty disciplined about making some sort of healthy food on the weekend and eating it all week for lunch, this, along with my "oatmeal or cold cereal with 6+ grams of dietary fiber for breakfast" rule is my weight maintenance plan and generally offsets the evenings full of Indian take out and cornmeal pancakes made with 3/4 stick of butter (and consumed watching skinny chicks on Top Model). But the last 2 weekends have been busy (Especially this past Saturday when I had to not only lounge around in bed until 1pm but also needed to watch The Real Dirt on Farmer John and the Jamaica episode of No Reservations -- I really over booked myself) and I fear that the lack of healthy lunch combined with the fact that my new freezer totally keeps ice cream frozen (a feature not offered by the old model so obviously I had to buy a tub of Neopolitan Dynamite and eat it everyday) will result in me gaining about 50lbs. I may have to counter with a couple of liquid dinners or by farming myself out as a wet nurse.

I still contend that an interesting "what I had for lunch" post is perfectly possible... even if this is not that post.

Brianna and Amy Go on Vacation

Possible reasons why the check out clerk at the grocery store in Light House Point Florida (where it is 80 degrees in February -- everyone living north of the Mason Dixon is a sucker) exclaimed, "You've gotta be kidding me!" upon examining my ID.

• Amy was changing footwear (from flip flops to sneakers) in line.
  

• I was wearing a t shirt with the words "Guess what?" followed by an arrow pointing to the picture of a chicken's rear end (thanks for the birthday gift Kajal!)

• Just before paying I commented to Amy, "Imitation crab is the one constant in our friendship."

• The booze that Amy and I were purchasing at 11:30am on a Tuesday was a bottle of strawberry flavored "sparkling wine"

Shockingly she didn't call the cops (or the "Living Martyrs" whose van we passed on the road -- apparently God no longer requires you to die in order to achieve martyr status provided you're willing to be a huge dick while alive).

Finally, An Update on My Bras

You may have noticed that over the past 9 months I've become quite the Richie. I've spent over $100 on one pair of jeans and recently purchased boots for $175! I am even considering replacing my now ripped $20 Target rain boots with a $100 pair of Hunters. In the past I have often refused to purchase a full priced item on principle alone mostly because I get more satisfaction from the feeling of getting a good deal than the feeling of having purchased something I really love. And while I still religiously stalk the JCrew online sale (where someone needs to mark down the cashmere henleys below $100) I also have cautiously begun trying on clothing that isn't even on the sale rack and I have to admit that sometimes pricier goods really are nicer. As I have commented in the past the most troubling and unrewarding world of shopping is that of bras. There is no other places where sizes vary so drastically, where pretty almost always equals nonfunctional, where nothing ever seems to go on sale. And of course there is no more well scrutinized female body part then the breast. And thus is created a horribly unsatisfying shopping experience. Last week, partially inspired by new willingness to spend real money on items of clothing, I decided to finally give the expensive bras a chance to wow me so on Friday I tentatively jumped on Oprah's Good Ship Pricey Bra by taking a trip the the Upper West Side's famous brassier-ery, The Town Shop.

After rushing out of work at 5:15 due to the shop's ridiculously early closing time I walked into the store and pretty much announced to the entire staff that I hated all of my bras which, I assume, is exactly what they want to hear -- I figured why not play into the myth and get the full experience? A young latina sales girl had me in a dressing room and naked from the waist up within five minutes of entering the shop which is about the time I realized that all of my rushing had overpowered my 10 hours old deodorant. I assume that sales ladies at a lingerie shop see a lot of breasts and are therefore unimpressed with the idiosyncrasies of my own boobs (which are completely normal. Seriously! Don't look at me like that!) but is it safe to also assume that they are A-OK with an end of day musk? Let's just hope there's not some secret bra fitter blog out there with a Friday entry about a particularly aromatic customer. Anyway -- they do a lot of staring at your boobs in the Town Shop. If you're the kind of girl who can't get comfortable in the large open dressing room in Filene's Basement or who shies away from the mirror when getting out of the shower you might want to ingest a few shots of liquid courage or possibly a couple of Valium before taking off on your own bra shopping sojourn. La Chica de Bras now knows my breasts much more intimately than any of the boys who have been lucky enough to see them in the past few years and possible better than my OBGYN, my favorite bikini top and my future offspring put together.

They don't do any measuring at the Town Shop which I assume is supposed to make me feel more confident because these women are just so adept at fitting boobies into brassieres that measuring tapes are almost archaic but I would have felt more comfortable if the official assessment of my gifts were a bit more quantifiable. I was last measured at Bloomingdales in December of 05 where they downgraded my new post weightloss breasts from 34Ds to 32Cs which seemed about right to me. But over the last couple of years I've noticed a disturbing mass boob exodus from the confines of the 32C bras. In the morning everything will be fine, the bra comfortable, the sweater puppies contained, etc. And then, around noon, I'd glance downward and notice that a jail break was in progress. Somehow I'd have half a boob in and half out thus creating the illusion of 3 or 4 boobs where once there were 2 (And sadly more boobs is somehow not better than fewer). So clearly there was a problem and despite ample evidence to the contrary it seemed unlikely that my boobs were inflating as the day progressed.

I cannot deny that even without the reassuring comfort of numbers the bras that Lil' Miss Titsling brought back to my dressing room fit pretty well. For reasons that I am completely incapable of deducing she insisted on putting each bra on for me and behaved as if we were squeezing my barrel-like chest into a corset -- I believe at one point she had her foot up on a chair for leverage as she pulled the band around to the final hook. This show was wholly unnecessary as I was capable of easily hooking each bra without so much as a grunt. Perhaps other women feel better about getting all spend-y on bras if it seems that the store staff is seriously exerting themselves. The most concerning event was when the sales lady referred to my right breast as my "titty" which I'm trying to convince myself is a technical term.

At the end of the day I went in for the bra equivalent of buying every album ever released by a new favorite artist and purchased THREE (only vaguely grandma inspired) bras for a shocking $196. So the obvious question is do these new riggings increase my boobage stock by $200? Hard to say. I asked a coworker to check out my rack (it's a casual work environment.) and while she agreed that "they look good!" she claims to not have been regularly checking them out in the past and so could not offer a comparison. Clearly this girl is a huge liar. I can tell you one thing for certain -- there ain't no rocking on this ship. The girls are strapped in and immobile. I think this is generally a good thing.

With Abs Like This Who Needs Shirts?

Some Guy in a Bowflex Commercial: I gave all of my fat clothes to my fat friends!

Brianna: "hey fatties, I brought you some more shirts to grow out of!"

Mike: "Don't thank me now!"

Brianna: "Thank me later when I give you my old fat girlfriends!"

Mike: "Y'all can be my wingmen, which is funny because nothing that big could ever get off the ground!"