Three years ago, I did laughter yoga. It was real dumb, and I kind of loved it.
I was lamenting the need to go pants shoppingtwo years ago, but I have come a long way, you guys. I went jeans shopping on Wednesday with Kate and Michelle (blog post surely to come), and I bought jeans, and I BOUGHT SKINNY JEANS WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA?
You heard me.
To blog about dating or not to blog about dating: that was the question I was asking myself a year ago. Clearly the answer is uh durrrrrr, of course.
My sister-in-law is a gifted songwriter, and about ten years ago, she wrote a hilarious collar-tugger of a song called “Too Fat for Breakfast”, in which she (a normal-sized person) outlined some of the ways our society made her feel like a lumbering, jiggly mess (“Last-season Jennifer Aniston/You look like a lollipop”). Here’s my CrossFit-themed homage to that song.
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About half the time, I’m tremendously proud of my CrossFit accomplishments. And then something happens. It’s usually that I see photos of myself working out. In fact, in one of my Fat CrossFitter posts, I addressed my resemblance to a certain Martin Short character. And there are just no other words to capture what happens inside my chest when I look at these pictures except abject horror.
Recently, I had to ask for a Facebook courtesy-delete of a photo of me holding a medicine ball, taken at three-quarters view so my hips are wiiiiiiiide as Mother Ginger’s. Seriously, it looks as if, were I to pull out the bottom of my spandex, nobody would be surprised if some children ran out. In addition, I’m looking down, so my double-chin is in spectacular spectacle.
These photos make me want to close myself in my house and communicate with the outer world only via USPS.
But sometimes it’s not a photo. Sometimes it’s an exercise that’s standard to CrossFit that I’m incapable of doing, and I feel like a failure pile because I’ve been at it for two and half years now.
I’m not even talking muscle-ups or anything. People way stronger than I am can’t do muscle-ups. I’ll probably never do a muscle-up.
But I still can’t do a pull-up. And I’m still too fat for toes-to-bar.
Here’s that story.
A recent CrossFit WOD required as many reps as possible in 7 minutes of:
three 95-lb clean & jerk
three toes-to-bar
six 95-lb clean & jerk
six toes-to-bar
nine, etc.
At this point, (it seems amazing but) a 95-lb clean & jerk is not difficult for me. My max is 129. So the first three clean & jerks were nothing. Then I stepped up to the pull-up rig, grabbed the bar, summoned every ounce of strength, and kipped as hard as I could. And my toes totally hit the bar.
I was like, OK, I’ll do another. I took a giant swinging swing of a swing, and my toes once again made contact. Then I had to rest. I missed the next one and had to rest. I think I got the one after that. Or maybe there was another missed rep in there.
Back on the barbell. Easy six reps.
Back on the rig. Missed the first rep. Efffffffffffffffff.
I managed to get through the six, interspersed with another three or four missed reps (which are the fucking worst because you’ve done all the work, just to get within an inch or two and have the rep not count).
And time was up. 18 reps. For comparison, the relatively fit people got 50ish reps, and the super-athletes got more than 90.
I wasn’t even winded because I had to spend all that time resting for my next toes-to-bar attempt so I did nine anger-clean-and-jerks after the buzzer.
I know, I know, I’ve made progress. When I started CrossFit, I would dangle tenuously from the bar and, with a great heave, pull my knees up to about navel level. Now, I can do nine singles. If you give me a few minutes.
But I still look like Jiminy Glick when I’m doing them.
Aaaaaaand now I’ll be closing myself in my house and communicating with you people only via USPS. Send your addresses.
Ugh. Norovirus. Or food poisoning, or something. When I wasn’t exploding from both ends, I was curled up on my pull-out couch with the dogs, moaning. Moaning! I literally moaned for, like, 15-minute stretches. Then I would watch two episodes of How I Met Your Mother, and then I would turn it off so I could moan some more.
Picture me there behind Redford, moaning into his ear. He was very tolerant.
Seems to be gone now (knock wood). I’m vertical today, and I’ve eaten a banana and some Rice Chex.
In other news, my dad swung through town earlier this week. :)
Talking to my sister on the phone: “Amy picked me up in the middle of the melee at RDU. I was nervous because of the guy on the goddamn lawn mower going back and forth.” (It was a cop on a Segway.)
Amid bon mots, he said something about how I seem, here on the blog, “almost desperate for a relationship”. Isn’t that the worst word to hear about yourself? Desperate? Wasn’t that the ultimate high school take-down? “God, she’s so… desperate.”
But he’s right. I do seem, here on the blog, almost desperate for a relationship. I’d even take out the ‘almost’.
That’s for two reasons. First, both ends of the spectrum, the one that goes from “Victorious Is What Happened” to “Cyclone of Despair”, are compelling, but the middle? Not really, right? The “I Got a Solid Eight Hours So My Day Wasn’t Too Exhausting” and the “Grocery Store, PetSmart, and Home Depot in One Outing—High-five, Me” that make up most of my life, I mean, I’m pretty excited about them, but they make for vanilla reading. So, I’m going to write about the times when I’m either feeling a sense of hope or one of catastrophe. And granted, the latter happens more often and is usually funnier.
So that’s the main thing. You hear about my being desperate to be in a relationship because that’s what’s interesting.
The second thing is that I’m desperate to be in a relationship.
Not desperate. But yeah, kinda desperate. Two reasons, I like companionship, and I want kids. In the post I just linked to, I said I wasn’t an extrovert. But I am. I’m an extrovert. Being around people energizes extroverts (and saps the energy of introverts). I definitely get energy from being with people.
However, I’m shy. People say, “Isn’t that the same as introverted?” No. Shy means I’m scared of people I don’t know. Like, all of them.
I’m scared of people, but I need people—ain’t that the worst?
Anyhow, it’s got me thinking, that’s probably why pretty much all my dating in the last four years has been online. Because I don’t make eye contact with people I don’t know (because I’m scared of them) when I’m out in the real world, so it’s hard to connect. Maybe I should try that? Eye contact? With people I don’t know? My hands are sweating.
Two years ago, 70,000 people heard me tell a story.
A year ago, I was trying to control the controllables. Maybe making eye contact with strangers is controlling a controllable? Or maybe I try a different website. A friend recently sent me this one, which takes a sort of different approach to the whole online dating thing… I’m gonna go lie back down and moan some more.
We’ve gotten to the point in Amy’s Fantastic Fashion Voyage when you’ll be seeing some of the same items as before but in different combinations. As I mentioned, after our excursion to the outlets, we put all my purchases on Kate’s bed, she laid out ensembles, and I took pictures of them with my phone. I never would’ve put the following items together, but I have photographic evidence in my stream that it’s a legit outfit, so don’t fight with me.
Skirt and cardigan from Ann Taylor Loft, orange tie shirt from Banana Republic, motherfucking tights, and–look at that–short boots.
I liked this outfit OK. I mean, it’s a skirt, so I was uncomfortable as hell all day. Also, I feel like I look real hippy (wide-below-the-waist, not peace-love-drugs) in this skirt, but Kate said. Kate said.
Next up is an item you haven’t seen yet. Kate fell in love with this stripey blazer from Ann Taylor Loft, and she promised I could pair the polka-dotted cami with it (even though it looked real trippy to me), so I did.
But I also messed things up with an unfortunate choice of pantaloons.
Ann Taylor Loft blazer, Ann Taylor Loft cami… How about if I just tell you if things *aren’t* Ann Taylor Loft from now on? Short boots! Not ATL!
Also not ATL, trouser jeans from <hangs head> Coldwater Creek. Stop laughing! I swear they looked good when I bought them a year ago! They’ve just gotten all weird and squeezy in the wrong places from the laundry. I showed this photo to Kate, and she said, “Oh. They have side pockets?” I admitted as much. She said side pockets were a no-no.
So, Take 2: Same blazer, white tank, grey Gap slacks, schmutz on mirror.
What could those possibly be on your feet, Amy?
Kate gave this outfit the stamp of approval. Feeling like Matlock [let the record reflect that the Avid Bruxist has never seen Matlock], I said, “But, Kate, these pants that you made me buy have (dun dun DUN) side pockets! Ha!”
She said it didn’t matter because they weren’t jeans.
But… jeans are pants.
Aren’t they?
So confused.
That wasn’t the only time I tried to slip an item from my old wardrobe into the mix. This attempt was a little more successful, I think.
Same ol’ grey slacks, but with a silky shirt I got from Old Navy one million years ago.
I showed Kate and our friend Lindsay this picture and asked, “Would this outfit be a good candidate for a statement belt?” Kate said yes, a skinny belt right at the smallest part of the waist (so high!), and I could get one cheap at Target. When I asked what color, they both started shouting,
PURPLE.
YELLOW.
RED.
PINK.
ORANGE.
They basically named all the colors. I went to Target yesterday.
Now that I think about it… Oh, man, I hope they said turquoise. They said all the colors. They must’ve said turquoise, right? You guys said turquoise, right?
So far, a hit and a miss, but then I realized it was Skirt Week. I didn’t want to wear the navy one again (it’s so short!), and I didn’t want to wear the pencil skirt again (it’s so tight!), so I pulled out a skirt from the back of my closet.
That evening, Kate was lifting on one side of the gym, and I was lifting on the other. Between sets, I mouthed, “I wore a skirt today,” and pantomimed to illustrate.
She made all kinds of sexy gestures back at me.
At the end of the strength segment, I went and got my phone with the picture on it. Before I showed it to her, I said, “Listen, it was a skirt I’ve had for awhile.”
Kate cocked her head and frowned. “Yeah?”
“It was a hand-me-down from a friend…” She started to shake her head.
“…in maybe 2004?” I said. Kate coughed.
I said, “It’s paisley. Is that bad?”
And Kate took a lap around the gym to compose herself.
Now I was proud of myself, as usual, for just putting the damn thing on. (I also wore my TALL BOOTS, which [sadly] are super-uncomfortable because I’m a short person, so they kept jamming into the fat part of my inner-knee-thigh area. They also rubbed pills into my motherfucking tights.) Whether Kate had a problem with the skirt’s pattern was unclear, but she did say, “It’s too long for you. It doesn’t hit you in the right spot.”
Wah. I don’t get this “right spot” business. The paisley one hits me just about where the pencil skirt does, and Kate said the pencil skirt is “made of magic”. Harrumph.
She said if I want to keep the skirt, I need to get it hemmed. Nope. To Goodwill it goes.
Back to Kate-sanctioned articles of clothing:
The item you haven’t seen here is the Gap blouse. It’s a sleeveless, navy thing with cool lacy work at the top. I had to wear a strapless bra with it.
Those orange pants. I like them. I do. It’s just, my lower half kinda draws the eye all on its own just with its… volume, you know? It’s hard to come around to the idea of adding the sartorial equivalent of a neon sign.
Speaking of strapless bra, ready yourselves, steady yourselves, hold onto your nuts for the I’m-here-for-sex outfit: dark Gap jeans, Banana Republic top, pointy Nine West flats, and purple pleather jacket (not pictured, but you’ve seen it).
Anybody else disappointed?
I didn’t feel like I was there for sex. At best, I felt like I was there for a poorly-timed kiss next to my car after an awkward second date.
In actuality, I was there for an evening with my friends after which I went home alone to my dogs. As per uszh.
Still not writing much, but my brain is chewing on a new FAYSHUN post. I’m going to buy a strapless bra at Target tomorrow, and then I’ll be ready to be there for sex. Not at Target. Just wherever I end up going in that outfit.
Also, I’ve got a good story about teaching that I’m itching to write, but that one will have to be password-protected.
*****
Three years ago, I didn’t write anything worth reading. :(
But some people say this post from two years ago is the funniest thing I’ve ever written, so.
A year ago, I was explaining myself. I’m kinda tired of doing that. Maybe I’ll stop and just let people think what they’re going to think. And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.
Happy Retrobruxist Friday, y’all.
(How are YOU? I feel like this relationship is one-sided.)
I’m a bloggy failure mess. I am not the boss of this blog. I can’t seem to write shit, and blah blah this has happened before, but never for this long.
It’s scary, to be honest.
I’m in a not-so-great place, to be honest.
Even things that had been going well are not going well. Wednesday, at the gym, my buddy Chad came by to give me a fist bump after the workout. “You crushed that WOD, Amy Scott,” he said.
I responded that I less “crushed it”, and more just “laid a hand on it and half-heartedly pushed down”… And actually, now that I thought about it, I less “pressed on it”, and more just “gave it the finger from a distance”. And it was true. I did pretty much two reps at a time of everything. I was tired and grumpy, and my plantar fasciitis was raging. My right heel felt like somebody’s heavy came after it with a baseball bat and my calf like it was one pace away from charley horsing.
When I said I was grumpy, Chad said, “Well, it was a grumpy WOD.” It was. It was a grumpy fucking WOD (20-minute AMRAP—what the shit?), but sometimes those are the best because you come off them feeling like you’re the boss of it. This one… It was the boss of me.
Also, yesterday as I was walking the dogs, I was reminded of that scene in the movie Parenthood when Steve Martin’s character wonders whether they should have the kid Mary Steenburgen’s character is pregnant with, and she says something like, “I’m not even sure we should keep the two we’ve got.” ‘Nita‘s adorable and I love her, but she’s a psycho around things with wheels, which makes our walks a teensy bit stressful. So what does my brain do? My brain tells me I shouldn’t even have dogs. My brain is the boss of me. The terrible, terrible boss of me.
Then my brain thinks this—no kidding, no edits—it thinks:
Everything’s overwhelming, and nothing’s good.
How’s that for some hyperbole? But, seriously, in that moment, it felt true. For all the above reasons.
Plus, and I’ve mentioned this before, I’m seriously considering single motherhood. To the point that I’ve done some legitimate research on the topic.
And it’s cool and exciting and scary and all that, but mostly it highlights the fact that all this would be physically, emotionally, financially, and in all other ways easier with a mate, and I cannot fucking find a mate to save my fucking life.
And now it feels like I’m throwing myself a pity party, and I hate that.
I’m not being the boss of me. And I hate that.
There. I wrote something. It was terrible. I hate that.
Today I arm-wrestled the boys in my first period class. Only one of them beat me. (Yes, they’re 12 years old; what’s your point?) The one that beat me is hella strong—at least three inches taller than me and wide as a high school football player. We might actually have a 21 Jump Street situation on our hands.
Two years ago, I was trying to come to terms with the fact that the Universe didn’t want me to make any money. The Universe still doesn’t want me to make any money. I’m starting to think maybe this teaching thing is not where the big bucks are. Jobs where I’ll make more money and still have at least 10 weeks off per year, go! (Nota bene: U.S. Congress is out. [See: this blog.])
I rediscovered a year ago that I can’t have Girl Scout Cookies in my house. I also rediscovered that same exact thing two weeks ago. I imagine I’ll rediscover it every year until they put me in the goddamn ground.
When I was in Italy, my host sister washed her hair on Saturday evenings. That was it. Once a week. So did most of my friends. Everybody thought I was bananas for washing my hair every day.
And they were right. So much work. Washing, conditioning, drying. Drying’s the worst.
I’ve been semi-obsessed with going No Poo (grossest/most red-herringy name for a thing ever?—yes), or at least Less Poo, for over a decade. Aside from not having to dry it and avoiding rubbing chemicals directly into my scalp underneath which sits my brain just begging for cancer of itself, think how much money I’d save over the course of a lifetime if I didn’t buy shampoo or conditioner. Let’s be conservative and say five bucks a month, times twelve months, times (let me go ahead and give myself another) 50 years… that’s three grand! That’s a trip somewhere cool!
The internets say that, as a super-cheap option, you can wash your hair with baking soda and condition it with vinegar. (And if you do them at the same time, woohoo—science project!) I’ve used them. I thought rinsing with vinegar would make me smell like salad dressing all day, but no, it was fine. However, baking soda is a mite harsh on the old strands, especially when you dye the crap out of them like I do.
And it was cheap, but I still had to wash it. And dry it UGH MY LIFE IS SO HARD.
People say you can just “train” your hair not to need any shampoo whatsoever by—get this—not washing it.
[Don’t be greasy! Good hair. *treat* Who’s a good hair? Who’s the best hair?]
In 2003, to train it, I started washing my hair every other day instead of every day. Those “people” I mentioned, the supposed professional hair whisperers: liars. I wore head scarves on non-wash days for two years because that shit was like the Deepwater Horizons spill. A decade later, it still gets greasy on the second day. Now on non-wash days, I’ll apply dry shampoo like
a little of this
or maybe
a little summa this
but they’re probably both full of chemicals, and I doubt I’m saving any money. The Psssssst! is only six bucks but provides maybe four applications, and the Alterna lasts a while but put me out $22 at Sephora.
So anyway, one thing we know about me is that I like to take somebody else’s system and fuck it up (see: cooking posts). One time, I decided that since one could wash one’s hair with baking soda, one could probably use baking soda as a dry shampoo. I sprinkled some on my scalp, tossed it through, and voila! It totally worked. Absorbed the oils, and I was on my way.
Except it was raining that day. Maybe you’ve used baking soda as a kitchen or bathroom cleanser, and you know that all you have to do is add a little water and it becomes a viscous paste. Maybe you can conclude that I walked around that day with a white sludge covering my scalp all day. Maybe you understand that I’m an idiot.
I have good intentions. That counts for something, right?
I will admit, I am one of those people that says “Feb-roo-ary” and flinches an eensy bit when people say “Feb-you-ary”. I know that makes me an asshole because EVERYBODY says “Feb-you-ary”, just like everybody says “laying down” when they mean “lying down”.
[“Lay” requires a direct object. You can lay your keys down on the counter or lay your baby in a crib or even lay your body down, but when you head to the couch to take a nap, you’re actually going to lie down. Even more confusing, the past tense of “lie” is “lay”. (The past tense of “lay” is “laid”.) So you can say, “I lay down for a nap”, but that would mean you did it before right now. I KNOW. I’M AN ASSHOLE.]
I further know it’s only a matter of time before we reach the tipping point and the Grammar Mavens say, “Well, language evolves, and now ‘Feb-you-ary’ and ‘laying down’ are considered correct.” But that day has not yet come, so if you notice that I have a tiny facial tic this month, there you go.
You can blame my parents for the above (see my dad’s comment on this post from three years ago, which also explains why I use quotation marks the way I do).
Two years ago, I shared with you my magical pit-stank cure. Still using it. Still giving myself Alzheimer’s. But the ‘heimer’s hasn’t hit yet! Still sharp as a marble! Now where in the world did I lie my keys? I’m confused—I need to go lay down.
I “competed” in an Olympic weightlifting meeta year ago. I hit 79.2 lbs on the snatch and 107.8 on the clean & jerk. I’m proud to say that my clean & jerk is now 128 pounds, and I snatch 103. That’s right: I have a 103-lb snatch.
