Month: October 2011

Times I Get Insecure at CrossFit… Am I Boring You? Because I’m Boring Myself

Wow. Context. Context is everything, isn’t it? See, because if you know me, you knew that my “Guidelines for Dealing with Fat CrossFitters” post wasn’t about not wanting people to cheer for me during WODs; it wasn’t about other people at all—certainly not about guidelines for dealing with fat CrossFitters. It was about my ridiculous insecurities.

So, some of you are asking yourselves, why did she title it such? Why did she frame it that way? Well, here’s a rewrite of that post:

Times I Get Insecure at CrossFit

1. When I’m running because I’m slow.

2. When I’m last during WODs.

3. When pictures of me working out get posted online.

4. When people lie and say I look skinny.

There is absolutely nothing funny or provocative about that version. Many of you told me you found the first draft funny, and it was definitely provocative. How do I know?

Here's a normal traffic pattern to my blog.

I usually get about 80 visits on days that I post, 30 or so on days I don’t.

Here's the one from last week.

Yep. One thousand, five hundred eighty visits.

More than 1,400 of those visits were referred by the CrossFit mainsite, who linked to my post on Thursday. And hey, yay! Of course I want people to read my stuff. But really? It was posted with another link, one published by an actual CrossFit franchise, with the question:

“These are two blogposts with strong opinions… Do you take a strong stance in your posts? Or do you try to stay neutral and not risk offending members or potential members?”

OK, valid question for somebody running a CrossFit gym, but for my blog? What the hell do I care about staying neutral? And besides, what stance? I was not actually arguing that these are policies that CrossFit gyms should adopt. Even when I post about CrossFit, my blog is not about CrossFit; it’s about me. “Guidelines for Dealing with Fat CrossFitters” was not about CrossFit; it was about me.

Some of you are going, “Hmph!, that’s kind of narcissistic of you,” and you’re 100% right. (But if you’re one of those people who got offended or angered by the post, guess what: you made the post about you… Hmph!, that’s kind of narcissistic of you. Ha ha!) One of these days I’ll learn how to write about other things, but right now I’m, as they say, writing what I know.

Anyway, do I wish that no one could ever see me run? Yes, I do. But I know people cheer because they want to be supportive.

Am I embarrassed when three people are watching within a five-foot radius as I finish the WOD? Yes, I am. But I get that they believe they’re being motivational.

Do I hate it when people post photos on Facebook and it turns out I look less like Annie Sakamoto and more like

Jiminy Glick?

Sure. But I know how to cyber-scream at them until they delete the most embarrassing ones. (I did that to Coach Dave just the other day: “What the HELL, Dave? Do you WANT me to have low self-esteem?” And he’s a shweetie and took them down.)

Do I wish people would not comment on whatever their perception of my weight is? Mos def. But I get it; our society says it’s OK to do that.

Despite all that, do I love CrossFit, in particular my CrossFit and the athletes and coaches there? Damn right.

The most remarkable thing about this whole deal is how little my feelings have gotten hurt. Ninety-nine percent of the people who condemned the post and me, they don’t know me, so big deal. The only hurty spot was that one of my coaches fell into the condemnation category, but I just had to readjust my perception of our relationship. A person I’m very close to called me early in the week and the first thing she said was, “Whoa. [That coach] really doesn’t get you, does she?” And I had to admit, no, she didn’t. Not in this case. But that’s OK. She’s still an incredible coach and a totally fun gal to hang out with. She gets me other times. We’re still friends. It’s not all about people getting me. It’s not even about me.

Except on this blog, where it is.

It’s all about me.

[ADDENDUM: The coach’s totally valid points are (1) I don’t get her either because, while I see how someone might not like the post, I’m still confused about how a person could have been offended by it (we’re going to talk about it), and (2) when I tell stories about myself that involve other people—even when they’re not named—the blog becomes not just about me, but about them too. I didn’t think about it that way.]

Guidelines for Reeding Mah Blog Gooder

Before you comment on my Guidelines for Dealing with Fat CrossFitters post, I’d like to say a few words.

First, I never said I don’t want to be cheered for. I get that that’s what some people are reading, but it ain’t what I wrote. Don’t believe me? Reread the post. I didn’t say it. In fact, I stated exactly how I wanted to be encouraged.

Second, please read all the other comments before you decide to add your two cents. Getting some repeat business up in there.

Third, if this is your first time to the blog, I suggest you not read this post in isolation. If you want to read about why I love CrossFit, read this, this, this, or this. If you want to get my sense of humor, read this. If you want to understand my particular brand of crazy, read this or this. If you want to know why I’m fat, even though I CrossFit, read this. If you want to read how my dog is an awesome (non-fat) CrossFitter, read this. If you want to read a story about farts (totally unrelated to CrossFit), read this.

Ask the AB: How to Tip Your Waitress

In this segment of our broadcast, I like to answer questions asked by the audience. Also questions asked by no one, as is the case in this one. This particular post is dedicated to waiters/waitresses/ waitrons/servers/people-who’ll-be-taking-care-of-you-tonight and contains a few brief lessons on how to tip them.

Step 1: Tip them.

That’s right. We live in America. I don’t care if you’re from another country, or your mama raised you thrifty, or in your American subculture “we don’t tip”. Tip the damn waitress.

Maybe you think you don’t need to. Waiting tables is not that hard, right? Well, other than being personable, remembering orders, entering them into a computer, dealing with kitchen staff (which can be a challenge, cain’t it, Margo?), delivering food and drinks, making sure the customers’ needs are met, and being on their feet all night, you’re right. Nothing to it.

Step 2: Tip them 20%. 

That’s right. We live in America. A standard tip is now 20%. If the service is truly shitty, talk to the manager. Otherwise, look at the total on your bill, shift the decimal one place to the left, and then double that amount.

Maybe you think you don’t need to. They get a paycheck after all. Yes. Guess how much the hourly wage for a server is in NC. Two dollars and thirteen cents an hour.

$2.13

Employers are allowed to do that because it’s assumed waitstaff will receive tips. (See Step #1.)

[If at your Sunday brunch you think, “It’s a buffet! They don’t have to do that much!”, remember they still have to be there, and they’re still getting paid $2.13 an hour.]

Step 3: Tip them cash.

I know, I know—we live in America. We like to pay with plastic. Pay the tip in cash.

Maybe you think you don’t need to. But sometimes, when the customers have been drunk and belligerent, and the kitchen has screwed up a couple orders, and the servers have had to bus and reset all their own tables the whole shift because the busboy got busted for having a pound of weed in his Tercel, that wad of cash is the only thing that’ll make them get out of bed and serve your ass again the next day.

There you go. You didn’t ask the Avid Bruxist, and I graciously answered.

Guidelines for Dealing with Fat CrossFitters

[UPDATE: Read the post. Not the commentary in your head about the post. The actual post. Then read this. THEN, if you still feel like it, go ahead and comment. Some o’ yous are saying that I’m saying shit that I’m not actually saying.]

I am a fat CrossFitter. And I love it. Not the being fat. The CrossFitting. I love that I can clean and jerk 113 pounds and deadlift 213. I love that when I started, I was doing black-band (a.k.a. Johnny Jump-up) pull-ups, and now I use the blue. I love that I do nothing but bona fide push-ups. I love that I can hold a handstand against a wall for over a minute and a freestanding one for a couple seconds. I love CrossFit.

And I love you, my coaches and fellow athletes. Probably 94% of the reason I go is because I get to hang out with y’all.

But there’s some etiquette that I think is lacking in the community in general. It’s OK—don’t blame yourself—you didn’t know. I didn’t know not to drop an empty bar until somebody told me.

So here are some suggestions. And I think I speak for many fat CrossFitters.

1. RUNNING

See how I’m running half as fast as everybody else? Yeah, that’s actually my dead sprint. You’re thinking, “No…that can’t possibly…” Yep. It’s true. I’m pushing myself as hard as I possibly can.

Coaches, have some technical critique? Good. Say it. Keep it brief. Make it simple. And don’t give me more than one to think about. Just one. Remember, I’m about to die here.

Fellow athletes, think you need to cheer me on? If you really need to for you, go ahead. But if you don’t, that means I can pretend that nobody sees exactly how slow I am.

2. WODs

Notice how everybody’s finished with the WOD, and I still have an entire round left? At this point, in case you were wondering, I’m terribly, terribly embarrassed. As many times as this has happened, and it’s a lot, I still feel like hiding under a pile of ab-mats.

Do you feel like you need to run with me? Do kettlebell swings with me? Count for me? That’s so sweet. You don’t. Do you feel the urge to do solidarity burpees until I call time? That might accomplish the opposite of what you were intending. On top of my shame, you’ve just piled jealousy (fantastic—look how much fitter she is than I am) and/or guilt (oh shit, dude’s gonna have to do over two hundred burpees).

And imagine you decide to swing a kettlebell with me, the coach chooses that moment to watch and give pointers, and a third party is just staring and cheering. Three people studying my slow ass. That’s a good combo to make me spiral into a Cyclone of Despair.

Here’s what you do. You sit or stand far away. Across the gym. You pretend to talk to someone else. Once, just once, you look over and yell, “You got it, [fat CrossFitter]!” which makes you feel supportive and me watched, but not too much.

3. PHOTOS

Those photos you took of me working out? Restrain yourself from uploading them to Facebook. I’ll write my name and shitty time on the board. I’ll fess up to a measly 2-pound PR in the comments on your website. But despite all evidence to the contrary, I like to maintain a fantasy that I’m a badass when I work out. Your public photos show me how delusional I am and the internet exactly how many chins I have.

4. COMMENTS

Comment on my push press PR. Chat me up about my good back squat form. But please don’t tell me I’m looking skinny. We both know that’s a lie, so it just makes things awkward.

That’s it. Follow these guidelines, and fat CrossFitters everywhere will think you’re a sensitive, supportive, all-around-awesome person.

[UPDATE: Before you comment, please read this.]

[UPDATE: Also, follow-up post.]

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This Is My Serious Face

Went to The Monti StorySLAM Tuesday night, as is often my wont, and put my name in the hat. The theme was Fear, and you know, there are a million types of fear, but the straight-up scariest thing that’s happened to me in a while was on August 7 of this year. So if I got drawn, I was going to tell that story.

Speaking of fear, you’d think since I hosted the goddamn thing last month my nerves wouldn’t get all jangled just thinking about telling one little story, but you’d be wrong. I sat there listening to the tambourine in my head, sweating sweaty sweats. More than eight people had filled in storyteller slips, so there was no way to know whether I’d be going up on stage anyway, which is worse than knowing. When there are eight names in the hat, you steel yourself in a different way: I will be going; I just don’t know when. This way, I was dealing with either nerves or nerves plus disappointment.

First and second stories were just OK. Third story, woman got up and told a riveting tale about her fear of cancer, its origins (mom’s lymphoma) and coagulation (boyfriend’s lymphoma). Boyfriend’s ended up metastasizing all up in his shit, grapefruit in the chest, tumors on the brain, so when she said a year ago he had a bone marrow transplant and today was in remission, I squealed. Squealed in my chair. And I turned to my friend and said, “She just won the night.”

The next story was awesome too though, a woman came out to her mother, who was perplexed and perturbed by this information, and then adopted a child from Africa. It was funny and poignant and well-constructed. She scored slightly lower than the previous storyteller.

Then there was intermission. Right before the show started up again, Jeff reached into the pitcher and plucked out a piece of paper. “It’s you,” he said. Another word about fear: I’ve always been funny at The Monti. The story I was prepared to tell was not funny. That made me twitchy. So I got to sit there for the next three minutes and concentrate on not being incontinent.

Sure enough, people laughed at a few moments in the beginning of the story, ones that I didn’t intend to be funny, but about forty seconds in, the audience seemed to get that this wasn’t my usual deal. I told the story, and my nervousness morphed into terror because every time I tell that story, I get fucking petrified all over again.

The judges tabulated, and I tied with the lesbian adoptive mom.

Often the scores creep up over the course of the evening, but despite a story about being left on-stage when the lead actor knocked himself out cold, another about a fear of clowns, and a slow-yet-engaging story about a traffic jam in Italy (it’s possible I didn’t hear that whole story, as I was in my chair having a five-minute crush on the storyteller), the placement remained, and I tied for second place. My best finish ever! Maybe I should put my serious face on all the time.

Peeve-iful

Know what I hate? When people try to combine words that don’t go together to promote something.

For example, nail salons called Nailsations. Or Raleigh’s Buzztival, which celebrates local NC honey. I can deal with Scent-sations for your fragrance business, or even Festifall, for your fête to all things autumn. Eat your egg-cellent eggs.

But Subway, right now, is promoting ANYtober, a month during which you can get any foot-long sandwich for $5. That’s some bullshit. Rocktober, yes. ANYtober? Seriously?

Anything with the suffix -tastic that doesn’t rhyme with fan: off limits. Move-tastic, Heel-tastic, Frog-tastic, you’re all out. The only exception is my friend’s weight-lifting shoes, which she had embroidered to say Snatchtastic. That’s hilarious.

Set Rat Thur in That Rockin Cheer

I’m reading aloud Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick to my students. The narrator, a 12-year-old boy named Max, bears a striking resemblance to his convict father (WHO TOTALLY KILLED MAX’S MOTHER IN FRONT OF HIM WHEN HE WAS LITTLE, BUT SHH, THAT’S FOR LATER). Another character comments that he’s the spitting image of his dad, so I was explaining to the kids where the expression “spitting image” came from: originally, people said “spirit and image”, but folks from coastal South Carolina don’t really pronounce their Rs. Voilà. Spittin’ image.

I like to think about the differences in southern dialects. In fact, I hate it when people say, “He has a southern accent.” What is that? Drive from Charleston to the opposite corner of the better Carolina, and you’d NEVER have gotten “spittin’ image”. For your enlightenment, in the Blue Ridge, the Rs are as hard as Sarah Palin’s, fortunately without the flat vowels (shudder), but, yes, Rs are very ARRRRy up yonderrrr.

Also, many monosyllabic words with short vowels get an extra syllable, so ran becomes rayun, pin is peeyun. Actually, both pin and pen are peeyun but if it’s the writing utensil, you say ink peeyun.

I’ll just keep going here. If it’s the first word in a sentence, the word it is pronounced with an H on the front, and since it fits the previous rule, it sounds like heeyut.

Regarding verbiage, you don’t push a button; you mash it, but it’s pronounced with almost a long a: maish. You also don’t turn the light off; you cut it off. And you better lift a fanger when somebody passes you on the road.

And if you ride bus 27 home from Cove Creek School, your bus driver will bang a spelling book against the metal ceiling and yell, Y’all better quieten down. Yep, quieten down, not quiet down. And for a long time, I thought quieten was a word. Years later we’d laugh at her redneck expression. But just now, since spellcheck didn’t pick it up, I looked it up and quieten is totally a word. Go on, Pat Shore, Driver of Bus 27 and Quietener of Children!

Now, one of these days, I’ll have to make a vlog of myself saying these things—ooh! and reenact my phone interview with a principal from Rocky Mount, and you could hear the difference a couple hundred miles make. I won’t right now because I haven’t showered, and I think you could probably smell me through the internet.

My point is: there’s no such thing as a southern accent. There are eleventy-five different southern dialects. (I had to stop watching True Blood because every character had a different southern accent, and only two of them were any good. Would it have been so hard for HBO to hire a dialect coach?)

Y’all wanna sheer (that’s share to you) what people say and how they pronounce thangs in yer neck o’ the woods?

Harden the Fuck Up

I can’t believe how good I feel. I was cracking UP with my fourth period class today, and sitting here now, I’m just delighting in the color of my kitchen walls. Which is gray. But it’s such a cool gray!

It kind of pisses me off. I mean, clearly the amino acids work for me. But (a) I don’t understand why because I no goot at syintz, so (b) there’s a niggling little neuron in my brain that keeps saying, “It’s just a placebo effect.”

Even if it is all in my head, I shouldn’t care because I feel better, but I really wish I could conduct a controlled, double-blind study on myself. Because, if it turned out that a placebo cured my depression, then I could stop spending money on the amino acids and just harden the fuck up.