Apparently there isn’t anything I can do to stop you pregnant ladies from working out like the rest of us normals, so whatever, I’ve made my peace with the fact that I’m going to see you at the gym. But the next time I see one of you with a kettlebell, I am going to take it away from you.

Sometime in February, I was spending a Saturday night doing my favourite thing: lying on the couch watching TV and periodically checking Twitter, only to scroll past my friend Melissa rhapsodizing about the lemon meringue donut from Dough. Knowing she lives in another part of town, I mentioned the superior donuts at Bomboloni, not far from here. Melissa was, justifiably, offended that I thought she didn’t already know about them. The exchange gave me an idea: a New York City Donut Crawl — like a pub crawl, but with donuts. Melissa was in. Sarah jumped on too. The date was set for April 17.

Hatching this whole plan was really out of character for me because I’m kind of a health nut. HAHA just kidding, I had spent the previous weekend gorging on Easter candy at my sister’s house, so I might have paid some Twitter lip service to the idea that I was going to end the day sick, but I was pretty confident that, having not eaten anything since a very full lunch late-ish on Saturday, I’d be able to put away a good number of donuts over the course of the day. We stopped at Bomboloni and picked up a few to bring to our first stop; Sarah was bringing a representative sample from the 7th Avenue Donut Shop in Park Slope, and Melissa was bringing some from Dough.

At Doughnut Plant — where the line snaked well out the door – we were seriously, SERIOUSLY spoiled for choice. Since Melissa had asked for a Toasted Sesame, which had been my original choice, I went with the Vahlrona Chocolate instead; Sarah’s original idea was to compare the classic glazed across as many stores as she could, so I got her one of the Vanilla Bean Glazed. We took our four shops’ worth of donuts to a nearby park so that we could eat and Melissa’s son — let’s call him Woolyknickers Jr. — could run around.

I am ashamed to admit how quickly I slowed down. I ate the whole Vahlrona — it was very melty and wouldn’t have kept — but then we all started picking at the various varieties. From Bomboloni, I had brought Cotton Candy (which I thought a kid of Junior’s age would like), Raspberry, Nutella, and Toasted Marshmallow. From Dough, Melissa had brought the famous Lemon Meringue, as well as Chocolate Chipotle, Blood Orange, Dulce de Leche, Hibiscus, and Lemon Poppyseed.

I picked at a few (all amazing) before getting bold and going for the Lemon Meringue and OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. It’s a fluffy yeast donut filled with tangy lemon curd and topped with a giant dollop of toasty-topped meringue. I am a fierce partisan of Bomboloni’s Toasted Marshmallow and their Raspberry, but Melissa was right: the Lemon Meringue was unreal. I have to call it the day’s Best In Show.

From the park near Doughnut Plant, we walked up to Dessert Truck Works on Clinton Street. They only had two varieties of filled donuts — Nutella and Vanilla Creme — but they’re made to order and rolled in coarse sugar, so when they are delivered to you, they’re sweet and warm and smell unbelievable. Dave had mostly been documenting the day (all the photos are, of course, his), but he made an exception to try the Nutella.

At this point, Sarah had to peel off to go back to Brooklyn, so though we had one last stop to make (at the old-school Donut Pub), we marked the day by flashing our new Donut Crawl gang sign, courtesy of Dave.

Melissa was bringing the spoils (literally) of our gluttony back to her husband, but outside Donut Pub, I tried a bite of the Toasted Sesame and named it the day’s second-place finisher; Bomboloni’s Raspberry came in third. And then Melissa and Junior went back to Williamsburg and Dave and I walked home. All told, between all the bits I tried, I probably ate a total of four donuts…but most importantly, I confirmed that time spent eating donuts anywhere other than specialty artisanal shops is, quite simply, wasted.

Obviously, we need to do a Bagel Crawl next. I’ll probably be ready this time next year.

I don’t know who you’re trying to impress, all working out and shit, but you’re pregnant. GO HOME.

I gather that for some people, 2010 has been a disappointment. But my 2010 has been pretty great. I got my green card! I got to take the summer off, like a kid, and then started a job I adore. With Joe and Dave, I started a podcast people seem to like. I saw lots of my family (particularly my perfect, brilliant niece). I saw JabbaWockeeZ live in Las Vegas AND my niece’s first dance recital in Mississauga. I got to see friends in Los Angeles and Austin and Toronto. Lips got “Bad Romance”! And after two consecutive Christmases where our travel plans were scuttled by (first) weather and (then) a failed terror attack, we somehow avoided New York’s snowpocalypse entirely and are, as I write this, finishing out the year in Maui.

That was the good stuff. Here’s the bad: 2010 was the year my body decided it’d had enough of my bullshit.

Around the time I quit my job at Sling, I started feeling discomfort in my left hip. It wasn’t excruciating pain or anything, but I’d be stiff in the morning and sometimes have to brace myself getting up from a chair. Hip pain is not new: I was actually born with both hips dislocated and had to wear a brace for the first months of my life. But in past periods when I’d had hip pain, it was equally in both hips. I suspected that it was my own fault: at Sling, I would sit at my desk either with my legs crossed under me, or with my left knee bent, sitting on my left ankle. Though why the pain would start once I stopped abusing my joints didn’t make sense. Except, okay, I guess I would also sleep on my stomach with my left leg bent, and sit on the couch with my laptop on my folded legs, slouched over on my right hip. Plus my posture was, and is, horrible.

What also happened my first week of unemployment was a visit from my parents, which is when my mom told me she needed hip-replacement surgery (which she had, successfully, this week). I’m not a hypochondriac, but that spooked me: my mom’s pain was congenital and degenerative and therefore I might have the same thing, just years and years earlier. I was so scared, in fact, that I didn’t go see a doctor to see what my deal was.

I did, however, start working out with a trainer again, for the first time since leaving Canada over three years ago. I did it for all the usual reasons, of course, but also because I had noticed that my hip would feel better after I’d take a walk or something, and figured more exercise would make things more better. Which it did, at first…

…but then my hip pain in the morning would be unbearable. The life of a work-at-home blogger (or, at least, this one), is: you roll out of bed and go straight to your computer to start reading your feeds; at some point in the day, you remember to eat some breakfast and maybe shower or whatever. But after being awakened before the alarm by pain, I would hobble out of bed, head for my desk, and quickly realize sitting at my desk chair was not going to happen; instead, I would spend the first hour or so after waking standing at the kitchen counter or lying on my stomach on the floor. My trainer could see I was hugely asymmetrical, favouring my right leg whenever she would isolate my sides. And there were some fairly simple exercises that I just couldn’t do.

Finally, I realized I needed to seek medical attention, and got a good news/bad news diagnosis. It wasn’t actually my hip that’s the problem: it’s my glute (a.k.a. my left butt cheek). At some point in the long-distant past, I tweaked my back, and — according to a physical therapist friend — actually screwed up the right side, so that the left had to compensate. Result: pain. (Specifically, the best guess right now seems to be that it’s sciatica.)

Now that the issue has been identified, I’ve been able to mitigate it in some ways. I carry Excedrin Back & Body. I bought an ergonomic wedge for my desk chair to ensure I always sit with my knees lower than my hips. I started using an anti-RSI program on my computer that forces me to take breaks, and has been fantastic: I stop to stretch on the floor and often eat my breakfast pacing the length of the kitchen. And I start most days sitting my stiff left butt cheek on an ice pack. The pain hasn’t gotten better yet, exactly, but it hasn’t gotten worse either, and that alone is great.

Even so, my body found a really great way to fuck me. What makes it feel the best: working out, walking, standing. What makes it feel the worst: lounging, sleeping, sitting in a comfy chair. All the professionals I’ve spoken to have told me, in pretty much these words, “The worst thing you can do is nothing.” But nothing is like MY FAVOURITE THING TO DO.

It has been interesting, if nothing else, to be this conscious of my body and attentive to the way different variables affect it. Also, an affliction that has the power to make me go to the actual gym on my actual vacation is actually a blessing in a pretty good disguise. Still, I’m hoping 2011 will be the year I get back in proper balance, so that when I pack for my NEXT New Year’s Eve in Hawaii (starting the campaign now), I can leave the ice pack at home.

Like most normal people (right?), I continue to have school-themed anxiety dreams, well past my graduation. I never had the one where you show up naked, but I’ve certainly had the one where you have to write the final exam for a class you haven’t taken. Way more frequent for me, for whatever reason, is the one where it’s not even time for the exam yet when I belatedly realize I’ve been registered for a class that I mysteriously have not been attending. (The real irony that this should still be part of my dream life thirteen years after I was last enrolled in any kind of school is that, throughout my undergrad education, my dad was the university registrar, so that if that had somehow actually ever happened, he probably could have taken care of it for me.)

Lately, though, I’ve noticed a new kind of anxiety dream recurring. I’ll be going about the weird business of my dream, whatever it may be, when I realize it’s afternoon on a weekday and I forgot to go to work. The rest of the dream then turns into me trying to think up plausible reasons I can email to my actual, real-life boss and my actual, real-life reports for why I just straight-up blew off work that day. Last night, it was that my dream-husband, actual Larry David, had fallen out of bed and struck his head on the floor with sufficient force to break the skin of his poor old bald pate, so I had to take him to the hospital. What made that a pretty good excuse is that all of that had occurred in my dream, except the part where I took Larry to get his injury checked out by a medical professional. Even in my own dreams, I’m a crappy wife!

Anyway: if my subconscious is anxious about work (which is happening now) rather than school (which, as I mentioned, I haven’t attended since the Pleistocene Era), maybe this means I’m finally growing up? Don’t tell me if it’s not.

Kim [who is currently pregnant with twin boys]: “I was just reading about circumcision.”

Me: “Ah.”

[long pause]

Me: “Controversial issue!”

[longer pause]

Me: “Apparently I’m Larry King?”

If you watched MTV in the ’90s, you saw Dave Holmes hosting various shows and events and suchlike. But since then, he has continued getting more and more awesome. Holmes has one of the most consistently entertaining feeds on all of Twitter — the likes of which should be the envy of every celebrity who uses the service (as my esteemed former colleague Linda Holmes (no relation) observed a few months ag0). He’s a frequent (brilliant) guest on Never Not Funny. He’s an engaging blogger. And he’s a philanthropist! As if just running the New York Marathon didn’t make him enough of a hero (it does), Holmes wrote today that he’s raising money for The Aubrey Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Why should you support Holmes, other than the obvious reasons (such as, you like children, and hate cancer)? I’ll let him tell you. But…you could end up with a song written about you, which is cool.

Do you like judging people? I do. It’s one reason I DVRed the latest episode of 20/20 based on a teaser for this segment, which if you haven’t already seen it you must watch immediately. (The other reason I DVRed it is that one of my other usual Friday Night JudgmentFest standbys — Supernanny — was a rerun. Thank God for What Not To Wear.)

So the segment — in case you think you’re too busy to follow a link — is about women who buy super-realistic baby dolls and treat them like real babies: they buy them new baby clothes, they take them out to the park, they set up nurseries for them, they HAVE BIRTHDAY PARTIES FOR THEM with THEIR ACTUAL HUMAN GRANDCHILDREN AS GUESTS. One woman in the segment likes to fool strangers into thinking whatever doll she has out that day — because SHE HAS MORE THAN ONE — is a real child, and fully admits that when she’s out with one of her dolls and no one comments on it, she feels let down. Surprise! She’s a childless forty-nine-year-old. Another surprise! Her husband declined to appear in the segment. Really, the situation here is that (a) people have more money than sense, and (b) they need therapy and aren’t getting it from the producers of 20/20.

Obviously, the segment is fucking amazing. Check it out.

Oprah’s whole shtick, pretty much, is pretending to be a regular woman even though she is a billionaire; it’s why her show has gotten particularly hilarious lately now that the economy’s falling apart and she acts like she’s all concerned about her budget. But, as The Frisky pointed out quite nicely today, the one facet of her persona that actually rings true is her struggle with her weight. It’s the one challenge Oprah can’t buy her way out of. Even if she hires an organic vegan chef, she can decide she wants a pail of cheese grits and fire him. She can hire the ass-kickingest trainer on the planet, but if that trainer tells Oprah to switch out the five-pound weights for the tens, she can just refuse to do it. As much as I can say that I wouldn’t have a problem if I could afford to hire people to keep me on track, it evidently isn’t true, because if Oprah can’t get on top of her disordered eating, probably no one can.

So maybe Oprah shouldn’t have set herself up as the exemplar of living one’s best life? I’m just saying.

Anyway, I sincerely wish Oprah the best of luck in taking back control over her weight, because it’s really goddamn hard. But this is a bad way to start:

You guys, how Photoshopped is the Oprah on the left? Her belly was never that flat. Frankly, I watched the show last week; I think the Oprah on the right has been slimmed down a little too. And given how many times she’s had bra-fitting episodes, I seriously don’t know how she is STILL wearing the wrong size.

And if you’re casting about for gift ideas, believe me when I say I am completely sincere in suggesting someone get me this. I am sweaty all the time. I’m so sweaty that yesterday, when I was interviewed with Adam for a documentary about Hey! It’s That Guy!s, in an un-air-conditioned room, I had to reapply makeup after like every question (and therefore probably will look like a powdered donut on the final footage). I’m so sweaty that when I have to meet someone new and the weather is hotter than, say, 16 degrees Celsius (61 Fahrenheit), Dave won’t let me leave the apartment unless I’ve informed him of my plan to mitigate my sweat after my transit to the appointment. I’m so sweaty that ever since I read in New York magazine that you can stop sweat by getting Botox in your pits, it’s all I think about.

So this shirt would be a good option for me. Too bad it doesn’t have boob darts.