Elyse feels compelled to take a photo of a stranger 2

It’s okay, little dude. I know it’s a long train ride, but once you’re at your stop, Santa will be there with milk and cookies.

Elyse does Bethenny's Skinnygirl Workout

I like Bethenny Frankel and I like yoga. I also like the smell of gasoline and chocolate ice cream, and as you can imagine, those two go horribly together. So does Bethenny and yoga.
I liked this workout in theory, especially the aspect of being able to do 15, 30, and 45 increments. The workout is pretty good as well, challenging enough with interesting shifts from pose to pose. The problem is Bethenny, who I usually like on reality television, but don't when I'm trying to zone out and do some yoga. Her loud voice tears into your zen-like state with arbitrary comments that aren't very helpful but feel more like a constant reminder that THIS IS HER YOGA DVD, HER BRAND. And it's annoying.
Also, the vocal instructions are sometimes unclear, so you're constantly looking at the screen to figure out what you're supposed to be doing, which, in my opinion isn't a strong characteristic for a yoga DVD. 
One positive? Cookie makes an appearance!
I'd suggest this DVD for people that really like Bethenny Frankel and find her acquired brand of charm endearing enough to put up with her endless yapping.

Elyse tries to be a fucking adult

Yesterday I returned two 40 oz., $5 cans of Modelo because they were too expensive. This is a big deal for me. I’m not a huge returner. In fact, I’m a big, let’s just get it done and move on with our lives type of person, which equates to “Oh, HowAboutWe.com automatically charged me an $80 renewal fee for their site even though I don’t use it and forgot to cancel before the deadline. Oh well.” I spend $4 on a latte a day, $40 on wine every week, and $90 on brunch and takeout every weekend. I let Groupons expire and veggies rot in my crisper. I take cabs when I’m too drunk to figure out the GPS on my phone, go to expensive restaurants when I’m flat broke and slap the entire expense on a credit card, and spend $2 an episode on “The Vampire Diaries” on Amazon when I’m bored instead of just waiting for them to come out for free on Netflix. Yes, the fucking Vampire Diaries. There is a gratuitous amount of hot male shirtlessness on that show, okay?

I’m paycheck to paycheck and I act like I don’t know why.

The result of my recklessness has trickled down into other aspects of my life that don’t involve having $60 to my name after paying rent, most recently, my weight.

I went to get a physical last week and I found out that since I moved to New York two years ago, I’ve put on 20 lbs. I was shocked. I knew I had put on weight, but not that much. And it’s a result I should have foreseen a year ago when I began ditching the gym in favor of the thrift shop located directly across the street. I’d literally sign up for a spinning class, go over to the store to kill some time, spend an hour finding the perfect faux fur coat I’d probably wear twice, and ultimately, not work out. Then I’d go home, drink half a bottle of wine, and look at vampire abs before passing out.

Yet, my disinterest in the gym wasn’t a pure result of my laziness, lushness, hedonism, vanity, or materialism, I also I didn’t like my gym. I had been going for a year and found their aerobic classes to be boring, every instructor would do the same kind of class every time I showed up. Wash, repeat, yawn. There was no challenge, their machines would frequently break down, and no one would ever fix them. I started showing up and sitting on a machine I didn’t particularly like just so I could watch re-runs of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” because I don’t have cable. And no one’s going to get thoroughly into a workout when their distracted by Teresa Giudice flipping tables.

So, I quit my gym and started buying Groupons for other gyms in my neighborhood in the hopes that I’d find something I liked. But I was frequently disappointed. So, I started jogging (well, walking and some jogging) and doing at-home workouts. I started eating more pizza because, well, it’s pizza and it wasn’t like I was taking a hardcore boot camp class the morning of to remind myself “hey, you worked your ass off this morning, don’t ruin it by going nuts on this pizza.”

Then, last weekend, days after finding out I gained 20 lbs., I actually found a gym I like. A gym I can see myself going to several times a week that can smack me back into gear. Only problem is, it’s $89 a month. And how can I afford that?

Easy.

I’m going to watch my money. I’m cutting out fancy lattes and bottles of wine during the week. That alone should cover my payment. But I don’t want to it end there. I want to actually start saving money again, maybe even afford to go on a vacation and pay off a credit card or two. Maybe I can afford cable!

So, yesterday, when I bought those two cans of Modelo – which were for cooking by the way, not for boozing – and realized how expensive they were after buying them, my initial reaction was “fuck it.”

It was raining, I wanted to go home, and the overpriced grocery store where I bought them was convenient. I got half way down the block with the pricy 40s (an oxymoron? Not quite, but conceptually, almost) when I stopped dead in my tracks. I wanted to keep walking home, but I couldn’t, not if I wanted to afford this gym. Not if I wanted to change. Not if I wanted to be a fucking adult for once.

 So, I turned around and walked back into the store. I plopped the two tall cans of beer on the counter.

 “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I need to return these. They’re way too expensive."

The cashier looked at me like I was crazy but refunded my money. I left and walked home in the rain instead of taking the subway so I would pass a bodega where I knew they sold the same kind of beer for $3 a pop.

And I know I didn’t save that much, but once my dinner was done last night, it tasted delicious. More so than usual, so I had a tiny extra serving. One day at a time, right?

Elyse tells the fairytale story of a magical princess date: Part I

According to Google: “a happy princess”

This happened over a year ago, but it’s a nightmarish story of online dating disasters – so, enjoy!:

We bounded over a mutual love of turkey sandwiches, the great outdoors, and Bea Arthur. Of course, this all started online. Then it turned into texting and two nights of long phone conversations. I actually liked him, I felt like we had a genuine connection, despite the fact that he had stretched lobes, which grosses me out because I’ve heard plugs make your ears smell like cheese.

We wanted our first date to be at a park, maybe the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, but our schedules were always off. Then we thought it would be nice to meet up at Brooklyn Bridge Park. But, things never panned out. So, one night he ended up riding his bike to my apartment and we went to a bar called Camp. He was pretty high-energy. Sometimes when my roommate’s tiny Italian greyhound, Twiggy

Yo!

acts up, I say “tranquilo” to her (because she speaks Spanish) and she automatically calms the fuck down. I felt like saying “tranquilo” to this dude numerous times. But he was really good looking despite the plugs and having his entire right forearm tattooed black, no actual tattoos, just black, so I rode the wave.

Things were going okay until karaoke started. Cheesy 90s (think: lots of Soul Train) karaoke. So, because we have ears – stretched and un-stretched – we had to leave. We decided, utilizing our whiskey-infused logic that since I lived near a park and we originally wanted our first date to be at a park, it would be nice to go to a park and make-out in private.

He was a weird kisser. He liked to do a lot of tongue-twirling stuff. I took a break from all the tongue rolling and flashed him my panties playfully, because, well, I was drunk. Then two cops showed up.

Why were we in the park at night? Did we not see a very tiny sign on the wide-open gate that says you can’t be in this park past nightfall? Why was I wearing boy shorts when the dress I was wearing clearly called for a thong? We stood next to their patrol car for about 20 minutes getting super un-makeoutty as they checked to make sure I wasn’t a hooker doing a John in a park.

I spent my time standing there wishing I was at home watching an episode of “Firefly” on Netflix. He spent his time yelling at the cops about how his sister-in-law was a cop. We ended up getting citations complete with a court date. Here’s proof!:

Yay!

We walked back to my place, he got his bike, said he’d call, and left.

I ended up watching something on Netflix but it wasn’t “Firefly.” It didn’t seem right to get something I actually wanted that night. So I watched “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” instead and it was awful, which was perfect.

Elyse feels compelled to take a photo of a stranger

My sister once tried this with a parakeet. It had devastating results.

I stop writing in third-person for a post

Look at me. I feel less annoying. La-la-la. ME!

Elyse recommends that you watch “Orange is the New Black”

Like other junkies with a binge-watching addiction, I stumbled upon Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” not by word of mouth, ad, or Facebook updates made by a high school acquaintance who actually writes for the show. I started watching it because I ran out of episodes of “Arrested Development” and Netflix countdown clocked it upon me.

 What the hell does that mean?

 Netflix, the AIDS-monkey originator of binge-watcheritus, shrinks the credits at the end of each episode you stream into a little lonely cube floating at the top right-hand corner of your screen. The next episode is in another cube at the bottom right. In the center is a clock that takes advantage of one’s post-show emotional rush or fresh end-of-series abyss-of-sad by giving you 10 seconds to decide whether you want to find out if Hank from “Breaking Bad” survived a bloody supermarket shoot-down, flush away your sense of emptiness with a new show, or engage in a responsible adult-like activity like going to bed at 2 a.m.. Netflix offered me a preview of its new series, “Orange is the New Black.” So I watched it and like cokehead accepting crack because her dealer’s fresh out of blow, I watched the show. And it felt so good.

To be fair, a crack simile is appropriate when trying to articulate Netflix’s manipulative marketing strategies, it’s not when using it as an analogy to describe the quality of “Orange is the New Black.” This show is not crack. Crack is whack TV like “Dancing with the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills 90210.” Yet, I’m not sure if OTNB is a fine wine of a show either – with only one season in the can, the show just popped it cork and needs some time to breathe. So I’m going to equate this show to a taco. It’s neatly compacted, filled with a variety of flavor, and tasty enough that you automatically want another immediately upon consumption, which is perfect for a Netflix series that premiered with 13 episodes ready to be devoured however one desires.

The show centers on Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a waspy Park Slope princess who makes artisan soap for a living. She’s the type who goes on Master Cleanses, forbids her Jewish wannabe writer fiancé to watch a new episode of “Mad Men” without her, and makes Fairway checkout clerks re-bag her plastic bagged groceries once she’s found the canvas bags that were hidden in the depths of her purse. She is the white, pampered, uppity, educated, self-righteous, phony environmentalist Brooklynite most Netflix viewers know, or as much as we would hate to admit it, are; making Piper the perfect audience surrogate when she is forced to go to prison for international heroin trafficking. That she partook in ten years prior with her lesbian lover.

And the show isn’t afraid to poke fun at Piper’s whiteness either, or let its main character use it as a source of manipulation. It is the layers of characterization like Piper’s that make this show interesting, but “Orange is the New Black” is not just about Piper. It’s about everyone she engages in a women’s prison. Or more importantly, about how someone like Piper – or someone like us – isn’t any better than the rest of the women she’s incarcerated with, from the transgendered beautician to Piper’s drug running ex-girlfriend.

Yet, for all the positives the show has – a great sense of humor, wonderful storytelling abilities, topnotch acting, portrayals of lesbians that extend beyond lesbians just being lesbians, a talented, diverse, and huge female ensemble that includes Laura Prepon, Natasha Lyonne, Natasha Lyonne’s hair, and the voice of Patty Mayonnaise on “Doug,” Constance Shulman (!!!) – it does have flaws greater than Prepon’s eyebrows. For instance, its male characters, specifically a prison guard called “Pornstache,” are one-dimensional and it can be gross (i.e. a scene where Piper is given a tampon sandwich after pissing off the kitchen’s well-connected head chef with ties to the Russian mob). And though the show identifies that clashes in race and class do exist, it hasn’t delved that deeply into the topic yet, which is only a downer because the show is so smart – just like the pairing of horseradish and pickles.

An item that Piper might have picked up at her local farmer’s market and rationed out in small servings in order to savor and extend the amount of time she could enjoy something so delicious, which is how you should watch this show. Don’t devour it whole. Take your time, ignore the damn countdown clock, and enjoy this series. Viva el taco!