Category: First-World Problems

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

What Did the Angel Moroni Say About This Situation?

You may not know this about me, but I love dogs. I know! We all have our secrets.

Last weekend I had my two babies, plus Barley, their best friend who is sorta transgender AND Katie the Beagle Dog, who weighs about 15 pounds and has Cleopatra eyeliner. Barley had to go home, but for this weekend, I still have Katie the Beagle Dog AND Moby, a skinny, neurotic Shepherd mess who belongs to a former student of mine. He’s so sweet and crazy! I yub him!

My student and her mom and brother dropped Moby off this afternoon, and for about fifteen minutes, it was a cacophonous tumble of canine greetings. When the family left, I was pretty sure I could still make it to the gym by 5:00, so I quickly peeled off my work clothes. I had my workout pants and socks on when I heard a knock at the door. I figured Moby’s family had forgotten to give me his leash or something.

Now there are women in this world who can go braless. Alas, I am not one of them. It’s really unpleasant for all involved parties. But I thought, I’ll just sorta hide behind the door, and threw on the first thing I could get my hands on: a holey, old, too-tight, no-longer-totally-opaque T-shirt. I turned the locks and peeked around the door to find two Mormon missionaries smiling at me from the stoop.

I said, “I’m just running out to the gym,” but then one of them proffered a card, which I had to reach around the door to take. That was the moment Redford decided he needed a better look at his new friends so he bashed the door open with his body. I stood there in all my braless, partially see-through glory.

Those poor boys. I wonder if they reconsidered the whole “mission from God” thing at that point.

The Hatred

You remember when I did 1,500 push-ups in June? Well, having that goal, writing it on the wall, committing to a partner was really helpful.

I wanted to work on a new challenge in July: pull-ups. Coach Phil (who will be moving over to CrossFit RTP in October—yay for him! wah for me!) convinced me that, as sexy as 1,500-whatevers-in-a-month sounds, it’s just not the best way to get results. He recommended volume training: specifically, up to five reps on the minute for twenty minutes, twice a week, alternating pull-ups and chin-ups.

I harassed a bunch of other people into doing “Pull-Up Club” with me and even started a Facebook page so we could track our progress together. And for the most part, it’s been really good.

Now I can’t do unassisted pull-ups, which means I have to tie gigantoid rubber bands to the pull-up bar and put one foot inside to support some (read: a lot) of my weight. When I started at CrossFit last year, I was using the black band, the hugest, thickest one. It’s so thick that I couldn’t even get into it myself. I’d have to have one of the coaches pull it down so I could shove my foot in the loop. The other day, my sister-wife and I tried the black band just for shits and giggles, and—no joke—I felt like I was in one of those Johnny Jump-ups you put babies in. I worried I might shoot through the roof.

So good, yeah, I’ve worked my way down the bands for the past year, and during this month went from green and skinny purple, to green, to blue and skinny purple, to (today) blue. I’m not even close to doing an unassisted pull-up, but I’ve made progress, and I’m going to continue with the volume training until I do. I guess.

All this to say, you know, I’m proud of myself for the work I’ve done, and I know shit doesn’t change overnight and the food craziness is what’s in the way, but I saw a photo of myself from the gym this morning, and it made me want to jump off a bridge. The other day, one of my friends mentioned my upper body—just a throw-away remark, but clearly contrasting it with my lower body—and I laughed, which is what I do, because it’s comical, really. There’s something very carnival fun house about the area from my waist to my knees.

But I just hate it. I hate my body.

And I know I should STFU because, unlike Aaron, I have one that works.

And I know this is when people tell me don’t say that, don’t think that, you’re beautiful, look what you’ve accomplished.

But I’m telling you, don’t do it. Don’t tell me that. There’s nothing you can say that will make me not hate my body today.

Athos, Porthos, and Aramis Can Suck It

Yesterday, I ate my annual Three Musketeers bar and then wondered on Facebook how many years it would take me to remember that THEY’RE GROSS.

Because if I’m working on one skill in my old age, it’s turning down bad-for-you food if it’s not frickin delicious. If I’m going to put crap into my system, I try to make sure it’s sublime.

But yesterday, I had to go to yet another meeting, and I felt like I deserved a treat for going, so I went to the vending machine. The pickins were slim. I don’t know if Three Musketeers was my best choice, but when you’re trying to avoid gluten, options are limited.

Anyway, my status update led to an academic discussion of Three Musketeers’ worth when juxtaposed against other works in the chocolate bar canon. And a scientific discourse on the peanut butter-to-chocolate ratio in mini Reese’s cups vs. that of the full-sized variety.

Enlightening stuff.

So, my question is: which sweet treat do you pass up even when it’s offered to you free of charge, and which, despite its required money- and calorie-expenditure, will you snarf anyway because it’s totally worth it?

I'll let you know right now that, lately, this stuff has been haunting my dreams.

Scrat Roars

My gym is different from your gym. Not to say that my gym is better.

Except that it’s better.

Ha ha. OK, fine. I’ll add one tiny prepositional phrase: it’s better for me.

I never thought I would look forward to going to a gym, but I do. I actually look forward to going to my gym. I’ve documented how much I love CrossFit here, here, here, and here. But there are myriad other reasons. For one thing, I love that they tell me what to do and I don’t have to think about it. I dig the fact that there are no mirrors—it’s never about how you look; it’s about what you can do. And I get all giddy about seeing the friends I’ve made there.

In some ways, though, my gym is just a gym. Dudes call each other pussies. “Sweet Cherry Pie” is on heavy rotation. There’s dropping of barbells and grunting.

And, I have to admit, I have surrendered to the siren call of dropping a bar with a bunch of bumper plates on it. First of all, often it’s absolutely necessary—you’re lifting an amount of weight that would be dangerous to lower to the ground. But more importantly, when you’ve just hit a new clean & jerk PR and you drop that heavy-ass barbell, it makes the most satisfying sound when it hits the floor. My friend Steve once wrote to a bunch of us about his emergency medicine internship. He told grisly tales of gunshot wounds to the head and shit, but the image that has stuck with me all these years later was of him and his cohorts standing in line in the cafeteria when a chorus of beepers sang out from their belts. All those white coats dropped their trays in unison and bolted for the ER.

Come on. That is some badass shit.

Dropping a heavy bar two feet in front of me is about the closest I’m ever gonna come to being that much of a BMF.

I always drew the line at grunting though. I mean, I make little runty-pig noises when I do push-ups and stuff, and when I’m trying to crack up my friend Erin, I’ll make this belabored “Eeeeeeeee!” sound

that she likens to the squirrel in Ice Age.

But never during lifts. No this-is-Sparta crap at the top of a front squat.

Well…

See, the WOD today involved a bunch of front squats, wall ball shots (pitching a medicine ball 9′ up a wall with a full squat at the bottom), and kettlebell swings.

One could argue that I sometimes go too light on WOD weights. It’s not that I’m afraid I’ll be last. I’m always last. I’m used to that. It’s that I’m afraid I’ll be so far last that people’s children will be at home sobbing from hunger pangs. Or worse, I’ll have a DNF. I’ve hated a lot of WODs; I’ve cursed a blue streak; I even kinda puked in my mouth once. But I’ve never logged a Did Not Finish.

So sue me, I go a little light on the weight, just to be sure.

Tonight, I was supposed to front squat 75% of my bodyweight. Ha! That’s, like, 130 pounds. My one-rep max is 115. I went for just under 75% of that: 83 pounds.

It was hard. It was so hard. The workout was a 21-15-9, which meant that you did 21 of each movement, followed by 15, then 9. I was breaking up the first round of front squats into 4 to 5 reps at a time. When I came up on about the twelfth rep, my lungs and throat emitted this great “Uhh!”…and I realized why people grunt.

It feels good.

It makes the lift easier too.

But mostly it makes you feel like a mythical beast.

I probably sounded like the squirrel from Ice Age, but I felt like a dragon. Rarrrr!

I love my gym.

What Happens en el D.F.

Last night, I went to the ever-entertaining Monti StorySlam. Between studying for the Praxis and my new job, I hadn’t gotten it together to prepare a story, so I just spent the evening eating takos and tots from the Kokyu food truck—em… eff, that stuff is good—and

listening.

Boy, is it a different experience. Whenever I do put my name in the hat, my limbs go numb, and all the other stories reverberate with the din of a turbine supercharger inside my head. Instead, last night was pleasant for me, sitting there listening to stories without wondering if and when my name would be called and trying to discern whether the other stories were better than mine.

When the theme for the event (Law and Order) was announced last week, I couldn’t for the life of me think of a good story. I’ve been pulled over one time in my life—because I had a headlight out—and that was nearly 20 years ago. There was also that night in high school when my best friend and I were told by a cop that we couldn’t park on that dead-end side road, and we breathed huge gasping sighs of relief after he left because he must not’ve smelled what we were cookin’. As it were.

But as I sat there last night, I realized, really, even though I’ve never been a super-straight arrow, I haven’t had any brushes with the law.

Except—Oh, yeah. I forgot about Mexico City.

Wanna hear that story?

OCD, Easy as 1-2-3

Whilst celebrating the birthday of my sister-wife* today, I met a friend of hers, who I immediately connected to. Remember how I talked about sparks? It was like that. Now don’t get too excited—her friend was gay, but I’m just saying, you know when somebody you meet is a kindred spirit.

Anyway, so, not sure how the topic came up, but I was sharing with the table at Vin Rouge that, when I was a kid, I had some variety of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or something. Maybe a sensory input problem, I didn’t know.

The way it manifested itself was, say my right leg itched. Well, if I scratched it, I had to scratch my left leg in the same place or else I felt unbalanced. If I bumped into a wall with my left elbow, I would turn around and bump my right elbow into it too.

Turns out, Kristen’s friend—the one I want in my posse—is a psychiatrist, so I was all, “Hey, what the hell was wrong with me?”

He explained that, when we’re little, we believe in magic, we believe things that are broken can be made whole again, etc. But as we develop and understand the bounds of reality, the transition can be jarring. The “balancing” actions I took were a way of holding onto the old scenario. If I stretched one arm out, stretching the other would make it as if neither happened.

This was my meager understanding of what he said. It’s totally possible that my paraphrasing is completely wrong.

But it’s interesting to think about, right?

You want to know the best part? One day, when I was probably eleven or twelve, I was like, “Amy, that is some fucked-up shit. You need to cut it out.” I had always known it was weird; I had always felt like I had to hide it. So that day, I just talked myself out of my mental illness.

Sure wish I could do that with the rest of my emotional special needs.

*To clarify, my sister-wife, Kristen, and I are (in our fantasy) both married to Paul, who is (in real life) married to Jeff.

A Few Guidelines for the Fellas, and a Question

If the contents of your first email to me are:

I would to see you tonight?? (sic)

and you include a picture of your Hummer on your profile, then we are not a good match.

If we’ve exchanged two emails each over OKCupid, and you find and friend me on Facebook, then I will be creeped out.

If your profile states:

honestly….trying to find a total stranger in the area willing to help me with a quirky, simple, and safe favor….its odd…but i am serious….

and you have no picture posted, and you email me to say:

can you chat? favor to ask ya… then I will respond, “If it’s sexual, no thank you.”

(He didn’t get back to me after that one. Guess he didn’t need me to pick up his birthday clown from the airport.)

If your online dating handle is Fast_backhand, and your profile pictures are of you playing tennis, and in my email response to you, I say:

So…do you play tennis? (Ha ha. I make a leetle joke there.)

then don’t reply, “I do play tennis, yes.”

**********

I went on a date with a 25-year-old on Friday night. He was cuter than his picture and perfectly nice, but I kind of got the feeling I would eat him alive.

Also, etiquette question, since I’m trying this let-the-dude-pay thing: I’m also a firm believer in letting the guy do a little chasing, so I’ve always let him contact me first if he wants a second date. But when a guy treats, I feel like I need to email and thank him for buying me dinner. Thoughts?


Who Says?

I hate it when listeners call in to the Diane Rehm Show. It makes me so uncomfortable. If I want to hear some bumbling, disjointed, half-baked ideas about politics, I’ll just listen to my own thoughts, thank you.

A few days ago, a caller was, amongst many uhs, explaining his point-of-view on…what? I don’t even remember—I was in a jittery sweat, just wishing it were over…when it occurred to me I could change stations. I could listen to something other than NPR. Usually, the only time my dial is not set to WUNC is during pledge drives. (During those torturous ten-day periods, I make my pledge and then burn through all my saved-up podcasts of…NPR programs.)

But this time…it was not a fundraiser…AND I COULD STILL CHANGE THE CHANNEL.

Scary.

I pressed the scan button on my radio and ended up on one of those happy, poppy stations, which was playing a bubble gum tune with lots of na-na-nas and the lyric, “Who says?” over and over again. I think the singer’s thing was, who says you’re not perfect just the way you are? Something about not being a beauty queen but beautiful anyway. In your own way. Whatever.

I just kept hearing, “Who says?”

And these were the questions that came into my head: Who says you can’t get an MFA in creative writing? Who says you can’t, for the first time in your life, incur educational debt? Who says you can’t quit teaching altogether?

Yikes.

See, ’cause my friend Cat has been nudging me to apply for a low-residency MFA program. She did, and she got in, and she’s going to do it. And I want to do it too. But I’m terrified. I’ve never taken out an education loan, never even entertained doing so for a degree that has a good chance of paying me back bupkis. Never thought about quitting teaching to do what I actually want to do, which is write.

Here there be dragons.

But who says?