FLOCK OF CHICKS

A vlog for you’ns! It’s been a while since I’ve posted a vlog because I kept thinking maybe I’d shower and put on make-up before I did one. But I so rarely get around to doing those things that it got procrastinated upon. I procrastinated it. Until tonight, when I decided to record one, despite the fact that I’m sweaty from the gym.

Anyway here it is:

 

They also have a gift called a Trio of Rabbits, and I’ll admit that I like to imagine them doing a few musical numbers with top hats and canes for the lucky recipients.

The Pause Button

We’re doing nonfiction book clubs right now in my two Honors classes, and the kids got to choose which one they’d be in. We talked about how people discuss books, and just in case, I gave them a graphic organizer to take notes on each day. As they’ve been doing their discussions, I’ve been circulating, listening in, and occasionally contributing. Some of the groups were doing fine but some weren’t so I decided to do a “fish bowl” activity where one group would hold their discussion and the rest of us would observe and later critique.

In my first class, the group in the fish bowl stunk up the joint. There was very little I could say that was positive, and I’m the Queen of Finding Positive Things to Say. I almost scrapped the idea for the other class, but I’m so glad I didn’t.

Oliver, Stefan, and Eric are reading Woodsong by Gary Paulsen, a memoir of his time racing sled dogs, and their discussion was deep and clarifying and respectful, and I was pretty much squealing with delight in my mind as it was. And then…

Stefan: It’s like Gary Paulsen has all these “pause” moments. Like somebody presses pause and everything goes by really slowly.

Eric: Yeah, he does. Things don’t happen to me that way. They go by really fast.

Oliver: Maybe those moments happen to him like that. Or maybe they happen to him like they happen to everybody else, but he presses pause and describes it that way because that’s what writers do. For us.

Sigh.

Yay.

Don’t Make Me Get a Sperm Donor

Just read a story called “Many Women Underestimate Fertility Clock’s Clang” on NPR. The gist: Because you’re 36 <bing>, you’re most likely going to be a spinster <bong>. You hit 40? Forget about it <clang-ang-ang-ang>.

So here it is: I want to have your babies. Why? Because you’re awesome. You’re smart. You have a job. You get along with your family. You drink in moderation. You’re not super-religious. You may not be an Adonis, but you exercise and try to eat healthily, and I find your unconventional visage just delightful to look at.

Most of all, I want to bear your progeny because I find you hilarious. I don’t know, something about the things you say, I just laugh and laugh, and I know that our synergy of humor is what’s going to get us through that night seven years from now when the littler kid can’t stop shitting the bed and the other, inexplicably, decides on that moment to contemplate the meaning of death. “What about Redford? Is he going to die?… Wait, what about ME? I don’t wanna die!”

Oh man. That night’s going to be so terrible. Thank god we can joke about it.

Why should you want to be my baby daddy?

Look at that rack.

In the spirit of full disclosure, it’s not quite that phenomenal without significant structural supports, but it’ll feed your spawn, and in the meantime, enjoy!

Also, I’m smart and fun. Ask my friends. Then again, if you ask anybody’s friends, they’re probably not going to say, “He’s kinda dull. And surly.” But seriously, I’m smart and fun.

So what’s my damage? Why am I 36 and never married? It might have something to do with fear. Not fear of commitment, necessarily, but fear of committing to a bad thing. Or, more, fear of committing to something that starts out good and turns bad and then just living with it because it’s easier than changing myself or my circumstances…

I guess that’s just fear of commitment, isn’t it? OK, well, I don’t have time for that crap anymore. I’ll make a pact if you will that we’ll make it good or we’ll make it done and speak fondly of each other after the fact.

(In addition, I’ll tell you, I have an ugly little habit of withdrawing when I’m stuck or scared or mad—totally unintentional, and I never even realize it’s happening until way after. But I’m working on it! And now you know about it, so when you see it, you can be like, “Hey, where you going?” And I’ll apologize and we can have make-up sex. NB: I reserve the right to pout for 2-6 hours before the make-up sex.)

Listen, I really don’t want to be a single parent. Like, not at all. But I’m just crazy enough to do it. I will fucking go to a sperm bank and read their bullshit profiles and choose some jizz that’s purportedly from Johnny Depp’s doppelgänger but probably really from a Danny DeVito look-alike, and the donor won’t even be funny like him, so I’ll have no It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia shtick to look forward to once the little bastard can talk.

Don’t make me do it.

[Ed. note: I was trying to write a new online dating profile, and this happened.]

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.

Dear Victorious Praise Fellowship

I appreciate your persistence. Actually, ‘appreciate’ implies that it’s worth something to me. Admire? No. Acknowledge. That’s it. I acknowledge your direct-mail dedication to getting me to your Gospel Explosions and whatnot. And I can see that the Muse was with the graphic designer of this latest postcard who cleverly exchanged the zero in ‘2011 Big Event’ for a disco ball.

But I have no interest in coming to your church. And when I say no interest, I mean like, the opposite of interest. I would rather do burpees for an hour than sit through a Sunday morning in your mega-sanctuary. Moreover, I don’t wish to donate toward your $6 million project to build a bowling alley, movie theatre, business center, gymnasium, and workout center. Even if I held your same religious beliefs, I’m not sure I could reconcile how the bowling alley would “win souls to Christ”.

In fact, in the event that I give my life over to Jesus, I can’t imagine that it would be in a church that has a Director of Marketing.

Save yourself the stamp.

Thanks,

Amy

Dear Redford, Part 7

Sometimes when we’ve been strolling around the neighborhood, you and Violet have started sniffing enthusiastically at the same spot. You’ve decided it’s mark-worthy before she’s finished checking it out, and you’ve peed on her head. OK. I get that. There must have been something that required your scent, on the double. But, dude, when I reached down to pick up Violet’s poop on our walk just now, and you marked my leg? That was uncalled-for. You know I’m yours already.

Love you anyway,

Amy

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.

Dear Redford, Part 6

In some ways, you’re the same little puppy you always were, and in others, you’ve changed so much.

The sameness:

  • You still love hoomin beings like whoa.
  • You frequently execute your signature move.
  • You remain hungry all the time, and you don’t hesitate to let me know.
  • You bark that big houndy bark.
  • I often have to shoo you off the picnic table.
  • That drinking problem has not resolved itself.
  • You still love CrossFit (though maybe a little less now that Coach Phil has moved on). The other day, I tied you to the 70-lb. kettlebell, a.k.a. the Yellow Submarine, a.k.a. Kristen’s Bitch, and you started dragging it around like, fun! sled-pulls!
That says 16 kg, but it's actually 32, a.k.a. 70.4 lbs.

(Alas, as of yesterday, you’re not allowed to go to the gym anymore. New policy: no dogs allowed. I haz a sad.)

  • I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this before, but you have the same snacking protocol you’ve always had. That is, you have one little requirement. When we were at Cuttyhunk this summer, Margo gave you and Violet each a beef-basted bone. Violet went to town on hers, while you jogged repeatedly to one end of the porch and back. Margo finally said, “Redford! Eat your bone!” and I had to explain that you need something soft to lie on in order to eat snacks. She scoffed… but draped a beach towel on the planks, and you plopped down on it and started gnawing away.

As for the changes, there are two main ones. First, you weigh 82 pounds now, little man, and second, well, you’ve gotten a bit squirrelly. You get aggressive on the leash when we walk by other dogs, and even a visit to the dog park a few weeks ago ended badly, with you scaring the shit out of a shepherdy-mutt-dog. She was nervous, hovering, getting up in your business, but you most definitely over-reacted. It made me sad because I remember the days when you never met a dog you didn’t want to make out with. During all this time spent trying to let Violet recuperate from her surgeries, we haven’t been as social, and I think you’ve forgotten how to be with other dogs. And that makes me feel guilty and angry and frustrated.

But the other thing that has stayed the same is I love you like always. Madly and forever.

You're my best boy.

Love,

Amy

Photos by Kate “The Ginger Menace” and ATD.