Category: First-World Problems

This would be the category in which I bitch about my ridiculously privileged life.

I Pretend That I’m Not Competitive

That is, I pretend that I’m not competitive when I can’t compete, which is, like, all the time at CrossFit. But I am, in my head, competitive. Sometimes.

Last week, we were supposed to find our new one-rep max for dead-lifts. No way I’m as strong as a couple of my girlfriends, but I hit 248 that day, and I was really proud of myself, first because it was a 35-lb. personal record, and second because my form was really good up through 243. Two forty-eight was ugly, but it still counts.

Usually for all matters CrossFit, I comment on the CrossFit Durham site or Facebook page, but that night, I posted on my own wall:

I feel like even my non-CrossFit friends should know that I dead-lifted 248 pounds tonight.

Status was Liked. Props were conveyed. Yay, me.

But one comment made me go into full-on Ivan Drago mode. It was from my cousin, who said:

Nice work! I did 200 lbs a couple months ago. Not sure what I am at now since I couldn’t go today.

This particular cousin is six months younger than me. We rarely, if ever, see each other these days because she lives on the other side of the country, but we grew up as summertime besties at Grandma‘s house.

And I was always ferociously jealous of her.

She was beautiful and vibrant. Flawless skin. Body that could stop traffic. She laughed at everything, all the time, including herself (something I’ve had to work very hard to learn). Her family went on cruises. Her clothes were just about the coolest, not that I could borrow any of them because I was always half again as large as she was. She grew up, got married, had two ridiculously cute children, and is now a total MILF who goes on Mexican vacations with her hot husband. Both of them do CrossFit out on the west coast.

Now, back up a second: a month ago, the Universe offered me a particularly jarring lesson about being jealous of people. A 40-year-old acquaintance who still got carded when buying beer and her husband who, in a friend’s words, was so handsome you could hardly look at him, well, he committed suicide, and now she gets to raise two kids, one of them with special needs, on her own.

So intellectually I realize that You Just Don’t Know About People, ergo You Shouldn’t Be Jealous, but when my cousin posted that comment, I just thought, “No. You get everything else. You don’t get this one.”

And I immediately started planning my next trip to the gym and my workout regimen because I was not—was not—going to let her dead-lift more than me.

The problem is that there’s no such thing as healthy competition in my disordered brain, and it went, in about six seconds, from “work on dead-lifts” to “eat paleo and lift every day and lose 50 pounds” to “shove Peanut M&Ms in face at kitchen counter”.

A little later, I realized that this competition (a) was decades-old, (b) lived entirely in the real estate of my crazy-ass brain, nowhere else, and (c) made me feel bad.

This is the part of the story where I tell you that this realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Changed my life’s paradigm. Set me free.

Would that it were. Nope. I’m still petty and shallow and jaundiced.

A Cotton Swab Parable

It was the morning of the Watauga High School band’s trip to Carowinds, I want to say sophomore year. I showered as usual and headed to my parents’ bathroom to scout out a q-tip to dry my ears. And when I say “dry my ears”, you know it went a little farther than that.

It always started out as just drying my ears, and one of my mom’s sayings, along with “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”, was “Don’t put anything in your ear that’s smaller than your elbow”, but as I’ve mentioned, I have my dad’s ear wax genes, and I could never help but dig in there a little bit and pull out a satisfyingly disgusting wax-coated swab of cotton.

Maybe I was a little aurally fixated because I’d had a shit-ton of ear problems as a kid. Frequent, angry ear infections. Throbbing pain that I remember vividly thirty years later. Seriously, I recall looking up at my mom, who I know now must’ve been dying to see her five-year-old in such agony, and thinking, “How are you letting this happen?” Anyway, I had to have tubes put in my ears. Twice! To this day, when doctors look in my ears for the first time, they go, “Whoa!… Um, so you’ve got some scar tissue in there, huh?”

This particular morning in high school, after I’m certain I spent a half-hour picking out the perfect outfit to impress Robbie, probably involving matching shirt and scrunchy socks, I got really into the “ear drying”, and I just went a little too deep into my right ear canal. A little tap on something inside, and I found myself eye-level with the bolts that kept the toilet anchored to the floor. Totally horizontal, like that, in an instant. My ear felt a little tender but didn’t hurt. It was just weird, was all, that I could’ve been so undeniably standing in one moment, and in the next on the fucking ground.

I began to pick myself up, but even weirder, when I raised my head more than three inches, it was—no joke—like someone was holding me down. I could not make myself vertical.

Of course, I was not thinking that I may have done some major damage to myself. I was freaking out that I might miss the charter bus, and Robbie would never see that the coral and aqua in my earrings was exactly the same as the coral and aqua in my shirt, and uuugggghhhhh, why me?

But eventually, over the course of about 20 minutes, I raised myself up a few inches at a time until I was able to stand and stagger out of the bathroom. I went on the trip, and it’s unclear whether Robbie appreciated my fashion choices—he played cat and mouse with me for, oh, about three more years.

I have no recollection of where my family was during this incident. Maybe my parents had already left for work, but my brother must’ve been in the house because he was the captain of our ’83 Subaru GL (I was quartermaster, and by that I mean I managed the Led Zeppelin cassettes). Was I too embarrassed to call out for him? No idea.

Anyway, clearly the moral of this story is, do not match your accessories perfectly. It looks like you’re trying too hard on the band trip.

The Net

A month back I went to see Louis C.K.—one of the funniest people alive—at DPAC with my friend Jonathan. Jonathan mentioned Louie’s appearance on a podcast called WTF with Marc Maron, and I’ve been downloading that program ever since. I haven’t yet heard the Louie episode because it’s in the Premium Content section and costs TWO WHOLE DOLLARS, but the most recent episode I listened to was Maron’s interview with Aubrey Plaza. She’s an actor/comedian currently on Parks and Rec, who also appeared in Judd Apatow’s movie Funny People, neither of which I’ve seen. Before the podcast, I had no idea who Aubrey Plaza was; in fact, I think I loaded hers on my iPod accidentally when trying to transfer a Mike Birbiglia episode.

Anyway, her story was sort of interesting, not riveting, but I was walking the dogs, and it was the only thing on my Shuffle I hadn’t listened to yet so I kept it running. At one point, Maron asked her who she’d like to work with in the future, and she admitted she had admired Rosie O’Donnell since middle school, had read her autobiography Rosie multiple times. She said she followed a lot of Rosie’s career advice from the book. For example, Rosie wrote, Never have a net. So Plaza had never gotten a “real job”, always counting on making her living through her art.

And that hit me in the gut. I realized I not only have a net, I’m in my net. I’m highly qualified in my net. I’m National Board-certified in my net. I’ve been lying in my net for going on ten years. Long enough to have indentations in a criss-cross pattern on my back.

Not Actually Old

My 92-year-old great uncle just lost his license. Nothing had happened; there was no incident, thank god—it was just Time. Actually, it was Time a long time ago. Long about 2003, I rode shotgun on his grocery store run, and all I remember is feeling my heart beating in my neck and hanging onto the oh-shit handle so hard I gave myself calluses. Since then his cognitive abilities have deteriorated. Two days after he buried his dead cat in the back yard, he said, “Now where has that cat Oliver gotten to?” Moreover, he can’t hear or see a whole lot.

So my mom, who takes care of my uncle, consulted with his doctor and his lawyer, and they said, yep, get him evaluated. (By the way, did you know it costs over $300 to get an elderly person screened for driving? You’d think that society might want to bear that burden, seeing as not doing it could get somebody killed, but nope. Out of pocket.)

Of course the evaluation said to get him off the road.

Now he’s miserable and blaming my mom, which is totally unfair because she’s done nothing but cook him dinner, help him keep up the house and gardens, and play two games of cribbage with him every night for the last decade. Plus, she’s devastated for him too. She told me that, after she got the news, she cried straight through her voice lesson. And that’s normally the happiest hour of her week.

I get it, though—he’s pissed and scared. Pissed because even though his daily rounds included only the post office, the dump, and Stop & Shop, it was his routine. His life. And scared because when the DMV revokes your license, well, that’s sort of the beginning of the end, innit? What’s the timeframe between losing the right to drive and having to have somebody wipe your ass for you? Probably not that long.

Ugh. Old age, man. I have to remember that even though I’m feeling old, I’m not. I can drive to Kroger, and I remember putting Boonie in the ground, and I can wipe my own ass. Thank god for that.

 

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.

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.

 

The Nighttime

Interesting things happen when it’s nighttime. To wit: my friends and I threw a prom of sorts on Saturday night. It was nominally a birthday party for me (36) and Anna (three-oh!) but, as I said in the invitation, mostly an excuse for us to get dressed up in fancy clothes and sway to the musical stylings of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Of course, we also told people they could wear pajama pants if they wanted to.

In the planning phase, we tried to come up with a suitable venue. We weren’t sure how many people would show up. I didn’t trust my mansion to hold the crowd so we asked the owner of CrossFit Durham if we could have it there and, being the coolest ever, he said yes.

Do you remember going to your elementary school at night, like when your mom had a PTA meeting or something? Remember how weird it seemed? The light was different, no lines of second-graders waiting to put their germy cheeks against the water fountain spigot. You’d pick up a pencil, and it just wouldn’t seem like the same implement as it did between 8:00 and 2:30. That’s a little how it was being at CFD without the overheads on, without the grunting.

Four of us had spent an hour hanging up glittery stars and white Christmas lights on the pull-up bars. Anna had had the presence of mind to bring floor lamps, so we could turn off the fluorescents, thank god. Lindsay made an awesome polaroid frame (see pic below). And that was it! We were ready for prom.

Now only 20 people came—I don’t know if folks were scared off by the prom theme or what—but those of us who were there had a ridiculously fun time. The equipment we use for WODs? Suddenly it all became props in our prom farce.

That’s not how you hold a sledgehammer; I just wanted to make sure my corsage was visible.
(Something jokey jokey joke. Pull-up bar while wearing a push-up bra. Nope. I don’t have it.)

That big open space we use to do burpees? Well, that was the dancefloor.

I lasted 57 minutes in the heels before I took them off. That’s 37 minutes longer than I promised.

Anyway, IT WAS SO FUN.

All because it was nighttime in the gym.

Of course, last night, I woke up because my foot was all sting-y. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom to look at the sore spot. The underside of my ring toe was cut, right where the toe meets the foot. I washed it, slathered it in Neosporin, stuck a band-aid on it, and crawled back in bed.

But just as the elementary school library looks like a labyrinth after 7:00pm, ideas take different shape in the nighttime. I started spinning tales in my head. See, my friend M had a blister about this time last year, and maybe it was the State Fair and maybe it was the gym, but somehow that tiny foot wound sent her to the hospital with a staph infection. In the nighttime, with me in my bed, it seemed not only plausible that that would happen to me but an absolute done deal.

But nighttime doesn’t stop there. In the few months after her hospital stay, M’s house got robbed, and she got breast cancer. (Talk about all-time worst years, right?) So there I am last night, in the fetal position, certain that I’m going to lose everything I own and need a double mastectomy. Stupid nighttime.

This morning, after my coffee, I soaked my foot in salty water and applied more antiseptic cream, and I sit here pretty sure that I won’t be coming home to a pillaged house after my chemo treatment in a few months.

But I’m still worried I’m headed for the ER in a day or two.

Daytime. Bah!

VIHR

Sometimes I get really dedicated to Very Important Hair Removal. Now there’s one thing I’ll never do, unless maybe I start a porn career. (My doctor friend: “It’s mucosa! Would you ever shave your tongue?!” Exactly.) But I do wax my eyebrows, trim the ol’ nostril cilia, and use a

medieval torture device

on my leg and armpit hair.

And then there’s the mustache. The mustache that my friends swear they can’t see, and I usually don’t either, until I’m sitting in my car with the late afternoon sunlight pouring in, and I flip down my visor mirror, and GOOD GOD, I LOOK LIKE GERALDO RIVERA.

And I can’t help myself, I head for the wax. This is a bad move, a stupid move, because it always ends the same way. Whether I wax it myself, or I have it waxed by a professional, no matter what kind of wax I use, or if I pluck it with tweezers, or if I steam my pores open first, or even get it threaded at the mall, I always spend the next five to seven days with tiny whiteheads on my upper lip.

What’s worse? A mustache that can only be viewed on sunny days between 4:00 and 6:00pm in my vehicle or a week’s worth of lip acne?

The mustache, right?

(Everybody pretend you don’t see my lip acne for the next week, K?)

T to the A to the S-T-E-Y*

My friend Bea has been trying to dress more like a girl. I really want to do this too. Before you get all “what is gender anyway?”, I’ll clarify and say that every person has the right to dress however he or she feels most comfortable/beautiful/happy/etc. without regard to social constructs.

…AND I know that I feel best about myself when, on the spectrum, I fall about halfway between gender-neutral and “Toddlers and Tiaras”. I like jeans and flip-flops and hoodies, but I also enjoy pink and sparklies and skirts that twirl up when you turn.

There are challenges to dressing like a girl though:

I rarely wear dresses and skirts for reasons I’ve already discussed. (But I feel pretty in them so I’ll grudgingly frock out for special occasions.)

Also, I’ve never met a pair of heels that I could wear comfortably for more than ten minutes. (That doesn’t stop me from trying every two years or so. I buy a pair, wobble around one event, and then donate them to Goodwill.)

However, I thought I could try injecting more girliness into my daily outfits. You know, put on tinted chapstick. Sometimes wear my fancy silver watch instead of my Timex Expedition. Or find some ballet flats to sub for my Tevas.

I had a $5 off birthday coupon for DSW, so I scooted over there today, thinking, they have a couple thousand pairs of shoes—I’ll have loads of options. Not so. Nothing proves the adage “Different strokes for different folks” like the array in a shoe store. This is me walking through DSW:

  • No.
  • No.
  • Nope.
  • Ew.
  • What even?
  • Those look like shoe-shaped poop.
  • Those shoes are sluts.

And so on.

I tried on a few ballet flats, but as I mentioned in the comments of the post I linked to above, the problem with putting tiny shoes on my already-small feet is that they contrast with my substantial ass, and just in terms of physics, it seems incomprehensible that I could even balance. (Relax: This is one of the times when I’m laughing at myself.)

But eventually, after I’d snaked through ALL the aisles, I tried on a pair that didn’t make me contemplate why I don’t fall over all the time:

And they're Fergalicious.

I mean, that’s the brand.

Thirty bucks, minus the coupon!

Pretty sure I look like a girl!

*I’ll grant that when you’re a hitmaker like Will.i.am, you probably have a lot of Yes Men around you, but seriously? Nobody wanted to tell him he was spelling ‘tasty’ wrong?