My night as a speed dater part 2, or, The green guy
Posted: August 4, 2013 Filed under: Anxieties, Body, Dating, Love, Writing | Tags: danielle, phoenix comicon, ryan, sci fi speed dating, speed dating Leave a commentYou may remember I once tried speed dating. That experience is how I developed an deep-seated hatred of all people named Danielle. Particularly men, for some reason. I went to that event mostly because I thought it would be so horrible that I would get a great story out of it, but also because I had paid a nonrefundable $19 registration fee.
And I got exactly what I wanted out of the experience: a night so uniformly unredeemable that I could tell the story for years. (And believe me, I will.) So no need to ever do that again, right? I mean, what could happen that would be so utterly disastrous and bereft of all human hope and kindness as to ever convince me that speed dating would be worth trying again?
Phoenix ComiCon 2013, that’s what. Poorly organized, anxiously run, and disastrously overcrowded. I found the staff to be either rude, uninformed, or both, plus meek mild me just wandering increasingly desperately by myself for 30 minutes trying to find the registration booth to get my damn badge got yelled at by the overzealous security no less than four times. Then when I finally did find registration, it was just downstairs, literally beneath my feet, but the escalators had broken and instead of letting me just use them as, you know, stairs, and I know because I asked, I had to fight my way back through the crowd, cross the street, fight my way through a whole other building, walk down the stairs there, and cross back across the street through the basement, only to wait ten minutes to get my presenter’s badge even though there was only one person in line ahead of me. Then I couldn’t get into a single panel I wanted to because they were all full. Every one of my attempts at networking in the vendor’s hall failed utterly because apparently you have to know somebody to be somebody. Plus my sandals gave me blisters on both pinkie toes and as soon as I figure out how that’s their fault, I’ll bitch about that, too.
So. After hours of this, that’s me unhappy and cranky and aggressively disappointed. But I had driven clear up to Phoenix and paid an unholy $12 for parking, so I was hellbound and determined to salvage something from the day.
Which shows you just how deranged I had become that I picked speed dating as my salvation.
As I was wandering the convention, being consistently rejected from every single panel I had even slightly more than zero interest in attending because remember the massive overcrowding, I walked past a big sign in one programming hall that said “Sci Fi Speed Dating” with a guy at the signup table and would have kept on walking, but I happened to overhear the organizer tell a guy that they were completely full up on guys for the next session. This wasn’t any kind of surprising, but out of curiosity I circled back by the table and peeked at the male/female signups. For the men they had a solid 25 plus a waiting list. For the women they had: seven.
So finally: here’s my opportunity to feel wanted and welcome, right? Because if nothing else, goddammit, I can peddle my female-ness. But it’s still a weird thing to sign up for. I mean, what’s it like? Would I be the oldest there? The youngest? The ugliest? The hottest? Would I get any matches? Would I get all of them? And is it ironically gauche that I’ve come wearing an unassuming pink silk halter top and burgundy miniskirt rather than dressed as, say, Poison Ivy?
I hovered pointedly, wondering my way through each of these questions, not knowing whether I should stay or go. Because speed dating…at a ComiCon…this is for sad lonely losers, right?
Which is me?
Right?
I hovered too long, though, and the organizer sitting at the desk caught my eye. “Are you signing up?” he said bluntly. Nicely, too, but let’s face facts here: he needs wimmin to make this work.
“I don’t know,” I said. Not because I’m a jerk, but because I was actually emotionally conflicted. “What’s the deal?” I knew already, but I was trying to buy time I didn’t have a plausible excuse not to go yet.
“There’s a host, Ryan,” he said, with the kind of flat optimism that only comes of working convention booths. “The guys rotate around the girls. Ryan tells jokes. It’s a lot of fun. Are you signing up?”
“Uh,” I said. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say hell no. But secretly I just wanted to do something so I would feel better about attending a ComiCon by myself and somehow still not being hip-deep in nerds, and that made me feel weird and ashamed and guilty. Like I owed something to the nerds for being kind of a b about it all.
“It’s a lot of fun,” he repeated, this time a bit more sternly, as though he knew my internal conflict was. This guy, I did learn his name later, but I’m really sorry, dude: I forgot. He seemed nice, though. “Ryan used to be a standup comedian and he’s really funny. Everyone has a lot of fun.”
“Well,” I said, involuntarily imagining all my worst nightmares coming true. I mean, I always say how much I love nerds and that they make the best boyfriends. And I mean it. But isn’t there some saying about carefully wishing for what you think you want?
“It’s a lot of fun,” he said again, looking at the other people around the table, obviously done with my indecision, and very clearly fresh out of sales pitch. “Everyone has a good time and it’s a lot of fun. Do you have any questions?”
“Is it a lot of fun?” I asked. That time I actually was just being a jerk. He just waited patiently for me to stop snickering at how hilarious I am.
But seriously folks. “Well,” I hemmed with a legitimate concern I had. Then I hawed a little. “Is it a problem that I’m not in costume?” He looked me up and down appraisingly. “Actually, it’s probably better that you’re not.”
Was that a compliment? I genuinely couldn’t tell.
So yes, I signed up. Ryan (dressed as a Jedi, complete with an Ultra Saber) and his friend lined the women up first, counted them off, then brought them into the large room where there were multiple rows of chairs paired up to face one another. The women all sat facing the front of the room. The guys, he explained, would come in and take a seat, we’d do an brief introduction to the event, then we’d have three minutes to chat with each beau before they rotated across and down the rows, volleyball-style, until they got through all the girls.
Next they passed around a box of pink badges for us to wear, each with a number on them. The numbers were a safety feature: we were forbidden to give our names and were to only refer to ourselves as numbers. One girl fussed extensively and ostentatiously because she couldn’t find number 69. Then there was a brief but loud and high-pitched squabble over who deserved to get number 42.
Fucking nerds.
After Ryan told me testily to stop rooting around for number six and keep the box moving along, we were also given note cards and pens. Because the other purpose of the badges was that we were to write down on the note card the numbers of the guys we wanted to talk to later. The guys being given blue badges, also with numbers.
But props to Ryan: he runs a good event and seems to be a genuinely nice guy, even though he’s a Republican. He gave all the ladies a stern talking to about safety, which I wasn’t expecting but was really reassured by, since get any random thirty single guys in a room and chances are reasonable at least one will have an imprecise understanding of appropriate personal boundaries.
And then he insisted that all cameras and recording devices be turned off because of what he was about to say next. And he was goddamn serious, too. Number 17 wouldn’t stop texting, so he cut her across the face.
What he had to say was this: if there’s a guy who’s a creeper, there’s a signal we can give that he (meaning Ryan) will be watching for. I won’t give the signal here, since he was very stern about not telling other people what it is. But I thought that having one at all showed an incredible thoughtfulness and respect for the safety of his events and the people in them, and my respect for Ryan shot up 300%, even though he’s a Republican. If we needed to, we were to give this signal and just bear through the next 180 seconds, then Ryan would pull the guy aside for a private talk, and depending on how the talk went, either put the chastened would-be suitor back into the rotation or bounce him altogether.
Ryan’s a big dude, by the way. Massive. I do believe he could bounce damn near anybody, except possibly an actual Jedi. Although I’d give him even odds on a couple of younglings.
But he also gave us girls a talking to, which I was really impressed by. Ryan said explicitly and in so many words that sometimes nerds are afraid to talk to women like they’re people. Possibly because of inexperience or insecurity, but probably because they learned about gender relations primarily from reading Dragonlance novels. Meaning that: most nerds are harmless and we as females should take care not to be professionally offended. Examples:
Ryan really seemed to make an impression on the room with all this, too, since when he asked if there were any questions, a girl wearing a navy blue spandex catsuit and matching high-heeled boots asked if anyone had two band-aids.
So after she got settled, they let the guys in.
But they didn’t let them sit down at first. He made them all line up against one wall while he explained about the chair rotation and the numbered badges and the not asking about whether she likes it in the ass.
And when he asked again if anyone had any questions, one girl piped up with, “Can you make guys wearing masks take them off?” Ryan, charmingly, had very obviously gotten this question before, because he answered immediately with: “No. It’s the individual’s choice. If he feels more comfortable with it on, he can leave it on. And if you don’t like it, don’t write down his number.”
That is not a question most matchmakers need to have a ready answer to, I’m guessing.
When Ryan finally released all the guys to find a seat, there was a flurry and a brief round of the most embarrassing game of musical chairs ever played as every last one of the men tried simultaneously to sit in front of the girl dressed as an extremely convincing Na’vi. Ryan had to wade in with a large stick and forcibly remind the guys that they’d all be rotating around to every girl so just take a goddamn seat already.
This was the moment when I realized I had been lied to by the sign-up guy. Because yes. Yes, it was indeed a problem that I didn’t come in costume. Because I was the only one. I looked around the room for the first time and realized that the skinny girls were all dressed in costumes either skimpy, tight, or both, and the fat girls all had on corsets that aggressively displayed their ginormous cleavages. Me, I just had on some clothes. I have never felt so dumpy wearing a miniskirt.
And, just like in middle school when I always got picked last for kickball, mine was the last seat left open. Every single one of these guys thought another chair was preferable to mine. But everyone has to sit somewhere, and up from the back, where he had probably been trying to bribe another guy to switch seats with him, came my first three-minute suitor.
And it was then I learned why the one girl had asked about masks. Because my guy was wearing one. Except it wasn’t just a mask. It was a full-body lycra/spandex body suit. Colored bright green. Covering his entire body. And remember that his entire body includes his hands. And feet. And face.
That’s right: I was expected to make compelling small talk with a guy dressed as a green screen.
So, is blanking out your personality a thing? Because I will freely admit I don’t get it. I don’t know if it’s a tragically misguided attempt to cope with crippling social anxiety, or a reference to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or an ironic commentary on the state of modern fantasy/adventure film-making, or a poorly sublimated Power Rangers fetish, or what.
But it seems to be something people are into. The Morphsuits website openly promises that girls go crazy for guys in these things. Their “actual customer reviews” include such sociologically horrifying quotes as:
and
Sweet baby Jesus.
SecondSkin offers, in addition to their regular lineup of products, both Santa skins and rental skins. Their website promises that “the skin tight feeling of SecondSkin gives you an instant second identity that brings excitement.”
NO.
So it’s clearly a thing. But I just as clearly don’t get it, and I don’t get the green guy now and I didn’t get him then.
Which is I guess too bad, since he actually seemed nice enough. He was outgoing and charming and funny, which made me even more put out since he was unwilling to show me his face. I was angry at him for putting me in such an awkward position and for either putting his comfort above my own or for blatantly shifting the power dynamic between us, and I was absolutely socially forlorn because I had no way to reflect my experiences in his face or to connect with him in any meaningful way. There was no place to rest my gaze; it was like my eyes kept sliding off the green lycra/spandex blend and plummeting into the swirling void of meaningless small talk surrounding us.
It was nerve-wracking, way more so than just talking to a plain old stranger. If I’d had a cigarette, I would have smoked it to calm my nerves. I mean, first I would have started smoking, and then I would have left the room and exited the building and gone 200 feet past the doorway to the established smoking area, and then I would have switched to e-cigarettes because that’s what the kids are into now, and then I would have had a pleasantly artificially flavored false cigarette to calm my nerves.
It did not get better after that.
The next hour or so went by three excruciating minutes at a time as I bore unwilling witness to an unholy parade of male nerd stereotypes. It was all an anxious blur of awkward introductions; I could barely remember any of the gentlemen even while I was talking to them. My face hurt after, so I must have been smiling a lot. Maybe it’s a function of growing up in a media culture, but my memory tells me the time passed in montage form, with each of the guys appearing on-screen just long enough to display a telling detail about how very poorly matched they were for me indeed, and all backed with “My Girl.”
There was, for example:
and, of course,
And the worst part was that, three girls down, the green guy took off his mask after all and then waved at me cockily. Really, green guy? I’m not good enough to show your face to, but the girl with the cat ears and admittedly incredible ta-tas is? Hell with you, buddy.
After about 17 years (including bathroom breaks), all the guys are finished rotating through, what you do is look at your note card to see which numbers you wrote down (mine was blank) and then you went over to the table where there were pieces of paper laid out. Each paper had a number on it. The idea was that each of us were to go to every number we liked and on that paper write our first name, badge number, and phone number. Then we each got the piece of paper with our number on it back, and, if there was anybody cute on our list, we could could call or text them with a request to go make sweet monkey love.
Na’vi girl’s had every single number on it.
I got: three.
So.
Yeah.
So I’m…done. I mean, if I can’t laid at ComiCon, I’m just done, right? On the other hand, was there a single individual in there worth my attention? The answer is an obvious no.
But it’s not really just that straightforward, is it? Is it really possible that of a sample size of one room of men, was there really not anyone worthwhile? Am I just picky as shit or what?
I don’t think so. I mean, I am, but I don’t think that’s the problem. Because of course this wasn’t a true sample. Because remember how many guys they had mobbing the event? I think there’s some nerd psychology at work here, and I think it is working not in my favor.
Remember again how the commonality these guys seemed to have was a general un-self-awareness. My theory is because the nerds with a healthy self-image—meaning those who understand the world enough to understand how to interact with people and how they themselves are likely to be perceived—so in other words, the ones most likely to be good dating prospects—are the ones least likely to sign up for speed dating. Because I think the nerd psychology goes like this: “Wow, there are a lot of guys here. They probably all have something really interesting to offer. There’s going to be a lot of competition for the best girls. I’m not sure how I could make myself stand out, and I don’t really like competition anyway. It’s definitely better if I don’t go.”
And thus, with that logic normally impeccable in the real world but tragically misguided for ComiCon, they take themselves right out the running. Thanks for being normal, guys. I wish you could have been a little less normal for me that day, though.
So I’ve tried speed dating twice. I can confidently say that the type of guy appealing to me is not going to be a speed dater. Which means I can now and forever give up on this sham of a farce. Which is nice, because that means I can stop wasting time trying to make it work. I can go on to do other things far more likely to make me attractive to men, such as making out with straight drunk girls at bars, or getting a back tattoo, or learning to smoke cigarettes with my vagina.
Or maybe I’ll just call up Ryan. He’s single. And he seems nice.
Even though he’s a Republican.
Drowning naked with weirdos
Posted: July 16, 2013 Filed under: Anxieties, Body, Outdoors, Self | Tags: guinness, mira vista, naked, naturist, nude, nudity Leave a commentOk, it’s been a while since I posted. This is entirely my own fault. I have plenty of good stories and lots of time to write. I just haven’t been.
But. I figured that, ethically speaking, I had to write this one up as soon as possible. Because people often ask me if there is any scary thing that I’ve failed to do, or have not been able to do. Although to be fair, this is a little bit of an exaggeration. It’s not actually true that people “often” ask me this. It’s more accurate to say “people frequently resort to asking this and other increasingly desperate questions when it becomes clear to them that once I’ve gotten started on this topic, I have no intention of letting it go any time in the current decade.”
But let me try this again: people sometimes ask me if there is any scary thing I’ve failed to, or have not been able to do. I’ve always been able to answer, rather smugly, that no, I’ve always accomplished everything I set out to do, even if I sometimes needed a lot of help to do it. (The answer is true; I opt in to the smugness.) But as of this posting, true is no longer the case. And right now I’m hiding out in my living room with the shades drawn, hopped up on fat and sugar and beer and lorazepam because I can’t stop tweaking out about what I just attempted to do.
And this is one I thought I had in the bag, too, which is what makes it so strange to me how strongly I’m reacting to it. It’s one of the easier things (I thought) that I’ve attempted: being naked.
Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not a Never Nude or anything. I love being naked. I’ve never liked the way clothes feel against my skin and, when I moved into a new place recently, I chose to not get a roommate specifically because I pay good money for rent and I shouldn’t have to have to wear pants if I don’t want to, goddammit.
In fact, I got nearly naked in public recently as a YoF project and (eventually) loved it. I’ll write that one up soon, but the point I’m taking my own sweet time getting to get to is: that successful experience plus my generally positive feelings about no-clothes-having was what made me think this very terrible idea was somehow actually a good one. I’m not too proud to admit I was wrong. What I am too proud to admit is that I’m really disappointed in myself because there is no good reason this should have turned into the big honkin’ deal it almost immediately became.
What happened is this. I saw a story in the paper calling for people to come help attempt to break the world record for simultaneous skinny dipping. The event was, not surprisingly, being held at a nudist resort and—even less surprisingly, probably—the attempt at the record would be happening inside a swimming pool. Most normal people would see that story and say to themselves: “Huh.” And then move on to reading whatever comic has replaced Calvin & Hobbes, because I haven’t held a newspaper since 2003.
However, my brain is slightly different. I saw a call for world-record–breaking skinny dipping held naked with strangers in an overcrowded drowning pool at a place where people pay handsomely for the opportunity to be aggressively naked. And I thought: “I’d get my name in Guinness for taking off my clothes. Also I still can’t swim. And I’m a single woman, attending alone, and am so painfully socially awkward that many people believe to this day that I have Asperger’s. LET’S DO THIS.”
Be glad you don’t live in my brain.
The place I’d be going was called Mira Vista Resort, a premier luxury resort I’ve lived in Tucson for 147 years now and never heard of, but whose website promises, apparently without irony, that visitors will “enjoy nature’s beauty.”
Because I’m just going to say what we’re all thinking here: while I do sincerely wish for each and every person to be happy and comfortable in his or her own body, it does not therefore follow that I sincerely wish to look at each and every happy and comfortable person inside his or her own body. The day before I went I told a friend of mine what I planned to get up to, and he predicted the event would be “unsightly.” The kindest way I know how to put it is that the age of this group skewed considerably past the “best before” date.
The world record attempt was at 1:00, so I pulled in to Mira Vista just a bit before. Because how hard is it to get naked, right? It’s not like there’s paperwork involved.
Oh, wait. There is paperwork involved. Because the world of nudity is a cruel and heartless place.
In fairness, it does make good security sense to have some control over the naked comings and naked goings of your naked guests at your naked premier luxury resort. Still, when you pull your car up to the front gate and they buzz you in from the office without seeing you or asking who you are or wondering if you’re a guest or really identifying you in any way whatsoever, you can’t help but feel the so-called security is really just more to make naked people feel better about being naked. Or possibly to provide someone naked employment. Or really, probably most realistically, a feeble defense against the inevitable naked lawsuits. Which actually probably would not be naked, unless the United States criminal justice system has gotten considerably more accommodating of naked of late.
And when you arrive at the resort, the gauntlet does begin at the parking lot, if you’re wondering. I did not know that at first. I went into this experience completely blind (and yes, I do in fact wish I meant that literally) and so had to figure out the clothing-optional etiquette on the fly. And if you know me, you know that not knowing how to be polite in a given situation is (ironically) a sure-fire guaranteed way to make me really, really cranky. So bear in mind I was already working at a cranky disadvantage throughout this story.
So I go through the gate and pull into a parking space. And just across the way, somehow to my surprise, apparently because I am incredibly stubborn about facing reality, is a guy standing in his open driver’s side door, wearing absolutely nothing but sandals and a straw hat. He appeared to be retrieving some personal belongings from the passenger’s seat. And here is what went through my mind at that time:
“Holy SHIT that dude is totally fucking naked.”
Car naked seems to be the norm. There were a lot of other folks just getting out of their cars, and every last carcinoma-lovin’ one of them was stripping down in the parking lot.
I considered it. I mean, if that’s what people do…but really. No. No fucking way. The practical result of doing that would be that I am walking around on unfamiliar grounds surrounded by strangers and far from my vehicle with these items on my person:
THAT’S IT.
So I figured I’d go up to the pool and naked there, where the Guinness activity was actually happening. Where it, you know, makes sense. After all, it’s clothing optional, not clothing prohibited. And it’s not like someone would be mean to me for being new and inexperienced.
And I’m glad that I thought for a while that was actually true, since it means I still retain some hope in the basic goodness of humanity. What actually happened was this: I walked over to the pool. It was easy to find: it was the spot from which pool water was pouring down the sidewalk like the blood of the infidels and which was roiling like a massive Caucasian snake pit, provided the snakes were all flabby and lethargic and unevenly tanned. I was kind of nervous about going in, so I took an initial pass by and then doubled back to try again.
I’m nervous a lot in social situations. Most of the time, actually. And so I’ve developed some strategies to hopefully make me fit in a bit better and give me a chance to calm down and get the hang of whatever new situation I’m in. One of these strategies is pretty simple: I ask for help.
In most cases, this works wonderfully. Because people are, generally speaking, good and kind, and plus it’s flattering to have a girl come up to you (yes, I do tend to ask guys, because I’m a sexist and also it works) and plead for your manly studliness to protect her from not knowing where the coat room is. In this particular case, though, and possibly for the first time in my life, I just did not feel good about asking a naked man for help getting me naked. So I asked the woman who happened to be walking past me what I thought would be a softball icebreaker question that would help us be bestest friends: Hey, I forgot my towel, I am not a hoopy frood, are there any around?
In my imagination, the conversation went like this:
Me: Excuse me, I just realized I forgot my towel. Is there a place here I could borrow one?
Her: Oh, sure, come with me and I’ll show you. Are you new here? My name’s Karen and I love meeting new friends. I like cantaloupe, and my favorite captain is Picard.
Me: That’s lovely.
Here’s how it actually went:
Me: Excuse me, I just realized I forgot my towel. Is there a place here I could borrow one?
Her: (walks right past me) Five dollars.
Me: (to her back) Oh. I didn’t bring any cash. Thank you anyway.
Her: (stops; turns to glare suspiciously) Do you have a parking pass?
Me: I’m sorry?
Her: If you don’t have a parking pass you’ll be asked to leave.
Me: No, I just saw this event in the paper and I thought—
Her: (getting very close to my face) Did you sign in? You can’t be here unless you signed in at the office.
Me: Oh, I didn’t realize. Where’s the office?
Her: (sighs heavily and walks away without looking back) Follow me. I work there.
Me: That’s lovely.
I followed Mrs. Cunterson (her actual name; I read it off her name tag) to the front desk where she asked me brusquely if I had signed in for the skinny dip (no, you clam; you should be able to figure that out from context) and first asked for my ID, which I handed over, then gave me some paperwork to fill out. It was pretty standard stuff: name, DOB, address, phone. Apparently you have to have either a full membership or a guest membership to be on the grounds at all. Which I can completely understand; what I don’t get is why she was so angry about it. I mean, this was at heart a publicity stunt to drum up new membership, right? That’s a great idea. I mean, it worked on me. Or it might have worked, if she, the front office receptionist charged with greeting and settling potential new members, hadn’t been openly hostile to new members, or more specifically: me.
She gave me back my ID, which I put in my purse, then looked at the paperwork I had filled out and given back to her.
“You have to put down a phone number,” she said. I had left the phone blank because a) I don’t want people calling me and b) they don’t need it.
“Oh, I don’t give that out,” I said pleasantly. I’ve never had any individual or organization not accept this answer graciously.
Mrs. Cunterson sighed with same restrained tension and grinding depth of feeling as if I had asked if it were permissible to carry anthrax on the grounds. “We have to have it. It’s for your safety,” she tried.
“But you’re not asking for an emergency contact. Isn’t that the phone number you would need for my safety?”
She glared at me. “I have to put something and we’re not done here until I do.”
I smiled. “I can make something up if you like.”
“FINE,” she said sweetly.
So I gave her my real phone number, which is (520) 555-1234. Then she pulled out a blank parking pass and said, “I need your driver’s license.” I didn’t say anything, but it’s true I did pull it out a bit snippily, and probably set it down on the counter with slightly more force than entirely necessary. I mean, come on. I register new customers all the time on my job and I’m smart enough to only have to ask for ID once.
She then told me I’d have to go back to my car immediately and put my parking pass on the dash or I’d be asked to leave. I really felt like she was exaggerating somewhat. First of all, how would they even find me? It’s not like I’m naked except for my Prius-themed ball cap. But I asked politely if I could wait until the event was over so I didn’t miss it. That being of course the whole ever-lovin’ reason I came to your stupid shitty cootieville resort in the first place.
Bitch ROLLED HER EYES AT ME. “Just be sure you don’t forget,” she said snidely. “You’ll be asked to leave if you don’t.”
I GET IT THANKS. You have a huge problem here with naked skinny pretty girls trying to get in to your resort and you’re really bitter about it and it makes you angry to take their money.
Because of course the next step being money. It cost $10 to get a guest pass for the day. I thought this was pretty unreasonably high, considering I wouldn’t actually be using any of their amenities. Such as a towel, for example. But I was entirely wrong: that is a price I was informed I should be grateful for, because normally it’s $30 for a day pass. She asked me if it was cash or credit, and I’m proud to say I physically restrained myself from pointing out that not having cash was literally the first thing she learned about me.
Finally we were all finished signing me in, and she bafflingly offered me this as a farewell: “Normally we give tours first. That’s the first thing you do. But you can go join the skinny dip first this time. Come back after you’re done and I’ll give you your tour.”
Which is good she mentioned it, since I was pretty worried I wouldn’t get to spend any more time with her.
So I’m all legit and shit now. I walk back over to the pool. The pool which is filled with about 200 naked 50+ dudes and approximately three couples. I am the only single female visible. The pool has a gate, for some reason, even though I’m almost positive this is an 18+ organization.
And this is where it got hard. That is NOT what she said. I know I opened the pool gate, but I only remember my hand being numb. I remember the water rushing down the sidewalk several inches deep and soaking my sandals. And I remember thinking, “This is the worst idea I’ve ever had.” And everything after that is kind of a sick blur.
Because my brain just…froze. It simply stopped working properly. I was stuck in time in a deeply unpleasant and panicky way. Part of it was realizing I was about to get naked with fully 200 strangers, nearly all of whom could have been my father or grandfather. But it was also the realization that there was a camera. On a ladder. And they were taking photos.
My problem is this: I really struggle with people noticing me. I don’t even like people looking at me, and especially I don’t care for getting my photo taken, because actively considering my picture and my externality causes a weird LSD-like reaction in my brain where suddenly all I can think about is the permanency of this image persisting throughout eternity and how my external self is held hostage by the consumption of the other, whereas my inner, softer self is rendered permanently unknowable and unseeable by the simple fact of the human condition, even to those who love me and care for me.
Issues, right? And I was also completely thrown by the camera because how I pictured (hah) this day playing out: a Guinness representative would show up at the appointed time, verify communal nudity, count heads in the pool, then we’d all huzzah and be on our merry way, and probably someone would try to buy me a drink. It never, ever, ever occurred to me that of course taking a picture and submitting it to Guinness is by far the superior way to make a record happen. Photoshop notwithstanding, of course. I never even dreamed that an attempt at the record would be made by putting a camera on top of a ladder, then some fat hairy naked dude wearing only swim fins would clip clop his way to the top of the ladder, set the timer, then flop flop flop flop all the way back down and plunge into the pool just before the photo was taken.
I must have gone in to the pool area, because I found myself putting my scant personal belongings down on a table back behind the photographer. I watched everyone bob in the pool, and I watched the photographer dude go up and down the ladder about ten times. I felt excruciatingly conspicuous in my, you know, jeans and t-shirt. I have never wanted so desperately to leave a place as I wanted to leave that place. But like I said, my brain froze and I couldn’t think of a good way to leave.
Which tells you what a bad state I was in. Because I could have just turned around and left at any time through the same gate I came in. I just didn’t have the mental capacity to accomplish that task. And frankly it’s probably better I wasn’t driving right at that moment anyway.
So I just stand there staring at the naked pool like a clothing-optionaled idiot until the photos stop. Once the photographer got what he came for (lmao), people started vomiting out of the pool like maggots from a prisoner-of-war’s flesh wound. Is that dark? Sorry. It was a low point for me.
And my coping mechanism was: watch people walk by while standing there awkwardly. Because at this point I’m facing two entirely unprecedented problems. One is: where is my line of sight? Do I maintain rigid eye contact and pretend like I can’t see anything? Or is it cool to do a casual up-and-down because it’s just all right there anyway? And the more I think about it the more I just don’t know.
Conversation starter option one: “So, do you come here never mind.”
Conversation starter option two: “Hey, you’ve got a Prince Albert there. How do you like it?”
Both of these are horrible.
Problem number two is this: when do I actually get naked? I didn’t do it in the parking lot. I didn’t strip down for my tour. And now I can’t find a good time to do it. I feel very much not right disrobing in the pool area. And there’s obviously not going to be a changing area. I missed my naked window and now it’s socially impossible for me to optionally clothe.
I might have just stood there until the sun went down if a nice young man hadn’t come by and said hi. (I told you guys are more likely to help girls.) He introduced himself and made a joke about fuck knows what because I couldn’t hear anything over the clenching of my jaw. But I made a joke about how I missed the photo and he sympathized, or at least I assume he did based on context. He offered to show me back into the office. I agreed, but only because I had no motherfucking idea what I would have done if I’d turned him down.
We went back in and he showed me a couple of things he thought I might be interested in. For example, the restaurant. With vinyl booth seating. I did not see any towels in evidence, meaning no one was sitting on one, but I can only pray those people were all breaking the very strict hygiene rules in place in a RESTAURANT. There was also the gift shop, where you could buy (no kidding) Mira Vista Premier Luxury Nudist Resort polo shirts, ball caps, and men’s shorts. This is just killing me to report.
My new friend stopped in front of the man standing by the skinny dip sign-in book. This new man’s mouth movements and hand gestures led me to conclude we were being introduced and he was very happy to meet me. I shook his hand and agreed I was happy to meet him as well. He was dressed, if you’re curious, and in a Mira Vista Premier Luxury Nudist Resort polo shirt, ball cap, and men’s shorts. He was 50ish (I’m sensing a theme here), soft-looking, and nebbishy.
“Hi, I’m the manager,” he said. “My name is Jenn doesn’t remember due to the extremely high amounts of anxiety at the time, but it was a very nice name anyway so we’ll just say Steve.”
“Hi, possibly Steve,” I said. “I guess I missed the main event ha ha.”
“Yes, they’re pretty punctual,” he replied. I’m not sure who he meant, since the photographer was obviously a club member and not an official Guinness representative.
“I did sign in on the skinny dip list when I got here, but I didn’t do it,” I said, gesturing to the clipboard he was cradling rather protectively. “If you’re trying to get an accurate count.”
Steve’s face fell like I had just asked to step on his favorite puppy. “I’ll take care of it,” he mumbled, taking his pen and scratching me out with more vigor and force than I would have guessed his pasty arm had in it.
“k,” I said.
“So I take it this is your first time here?” asked Steve. “You should stay and enjoy the day. It’s a really nice place and the people are great. We’re AANR-certified, and sexual shenanigans, we don’t tolerate any of that.”
Wow. Okay. So AANR, in case you aren’t already aware, is the American Association of Nude Recreation, whose tag line describes them as “the credible voice of reason for nude recreation since 1931.” I really don’t even want to know the history behind that. But AANR is also on Facebook looking involuntarily as well as slightly interracially excited about being nude, so be sure to check that out.
But this, what he said, is exactly the part that really bugs me about this whole thing. I mean, is this an American thing? So you like to be naked. So…be naked. Do we have to have a club for it? Maybe I’m being close-minded, but there’s something about it that just rubs me the wrong way. No pun intended, if that was in fact a pun there, which I can’t tell if there was. Just…ok, their FAQ page, for example:
What are the characteristics of an AANR club?
Club activities often include sports and events much like any resort. You’ll enjoy swimming, walking, tennis, hiking, volleyball, cycling, themed parties, special meal events, and the opportunity to meet a wide variety of people, diverse in age, profession, and culture.
NO.
I enjoy sunning in my yard and skinny dipping, but why should I join AANR?
Joining AANR expands the opportunities for you to enjoy nude recreation. You can pack less and relax more at nearly 270 clubs and resorts throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and beyond. Hike nude on nature trails. Go RVing with your family and leave most of your luggage behind. Go on a nude cruise. Take part in a volleyball tournament.
NO.
How will I feel if I’m not in the greatest physical shape?
You’ll feel right at home. Nudist clubs are a reflection of society at large, with people of all shapes and sizes.
NOOOOOOOOO
Do men get visibly excited?
Not often. Nudist clubs are far less sexually charged than places where bikinis, thongs, or other provocative clothing, are worn. On the rare occasion where this occurs, simply don a towel, turn over, or take a quick dip in the pool.
NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.
(Also, did you notice the weird shift in subject from Q to A? I find that to be ever so slightly creepy.)
I just can’t quite get behind (ha) formalizing the need to be naked. Obviously there’s something I’m not getting here. And the thing about the sexual shenanigans…honestly, I would feel more comfortable if there WERE shenanigans. I don’t care if the whole property is a flimsy excuse for a huge weird 24/7 sex party; at least then I could understand why every people are wearing no clothes. What I can’t understand is why you would get undressed and want to just…go eat some buffalo wings.
“Um, yeah,” I said to Steve the clothed manager. “I don’t think I’ll be staying. I don’t know anybody here.”
“Nobody knows anyone here!” crowed Steve happily, which seemed to me to be entirely the wrong reaction. “You’ll be in great company!” He reached out to a 60ish, aggressively tanned couple walking past. Yes, they were tanned everywhere.
“Hey, we’re trying to convince her to join,” said Steve, tipping his hand ever so slightly. “Tell her what you think of the place.”
“Oh, it’s great!” screamed the woman at me from two feet away. I’m not exaggerating. She was your standard-issue sassy Latina. “Every Friday we have karaoke!! And sometimes we have theme parties!!! And everyone goes in the pool. EVERYONE. If you don’t, we throw you in!!!!”
“You’re totally making this worse,” I didn’t say, out of respect for her culture.
“Oh,” is what I said out loud. Steve got my attention again and said, “It’s really a supportive atmosphere here. None of us are supermodels. Present company excluded of course ha ha. But it’s a chance for people to feel good about their bodies.”
So…it’s a low self-esteem club? Call me crazy, but I’d rather build my self-esteem through, you know, doing stuff and accomplishing things. I’ve been blessed with skinny genes, but I still have body issues like anyone else. I do not see a nudist club as an appropriate solution to those issues.
[Author’s note: this attitude may come back to bite me when I write about the time I got nekkid for art, but I’m willing to take that chance.]
And I just want to address the supermodel quip. Yes, he was trying to be complimentary. And yes, it’s true I am extremely poor at taking compliments. But is that not the creepiest-as-fuck bullshit you’ve ever heard? I mean, what does that even mean? I’m thin, but I do not look like a supermodel. And so everyone who does not look like me gets a chance to feel good about themselves, but I don’t?
Or I’m expected to be 100% confident about my body because…because why? Because other people there are what, jealous of me? Pleased by my conformation to societal beauty standards? Regretful of the last 15 years they’ve spent eating fast food and never exercising? I DON’T GET IT.
Plus a comment like that just makes me feel like I’m suddenly the entertainment. And it seems to totally destroy to camaraderie and community he’s trying to build. “Those of us who aren’t supermodels are here to have fun, aaaannnnnnd you can go screw.”
And what if I am secure in my body? Does that mean this club has nothing to offer me?
I didn’t verbalize any of this at the time, because I was too busy concentrating on not hyperventilating. What I did say was true, although only a portion of the truth:
“I just feel like, as a single woman attending alone, I may encounter problems.”
“Hm. Well.” He thought for a moment, then nodded solemnly. “You’re right about that.”
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, STEVE?!?
I told Steve I was just going to go ahead and hit the road, thanks, and he seemed somehow surprised, as though he were having a completely different conversation than I was. “Okay,” he nodded again. “Okay. But you should come back. Bring a friend.”
I normally try to to be polite, even to jerks, which Steve is technically not, but I do get very blunt when I’m under stress, which is the only reason I can think of that I replied how I did, which was: “There is not a single friend I would bring here.”
But by which I swear all I meant was, how in the hell could I bring a friend? What friend? A friend I get naked with routinely? That is called a boyfriend, and if I wanted to see him naked all I would have to do is ask. Or a friend friend? Tell me honestly: do any of you have ANY friends you would just feel like hanging around naked with? How would I even broach the topic?
Me: Hey, Sherryl, want to hang out this weekend?
Sherryl: Sure, sounds fun. What do you want to do? Go hiking? Play a game? Watch a movie?
Me: Go sit in a restaurant naked with strangers.
Sherryl: That’s lovely.
I bid my farewell to Steve and thanked him for a lovely evening, probably. I honestly have no memory of what I might have said to him. But I do remember that as I walked back out to my car, all the disappointment and confusion and self-consciousness I was feeling welled up into a big nasty spiky ball in my head and burst out of my face as tears. I drove home that way, crying and rage-hiccuping the way a four-year-old might upon being informed that he cannot in fact be a robot when he grows up. And back at the house I indulged in so much self-medication in an attempt to cope with these feelings that I fell asleep and was late to my night shift at work.
So. Mission fail. I admit it. Naked in public was just slightly beyond my personal capabilities.
Moral of the story: It caught me by surprise. I didn’t like it nearly as much as I thought I would. And it was certainly a lot harder than I expected it to be.
That’s what she said.
Postscript: The Guinness rules for skinny dipping specifically state that all persons must be entirely unclothed. And at least half of these motherfuckers were wearing hats or, god help me, visors. Which means that even if I had gone through with it, it almost certainly would not have counted anyway. So I think in the end I did the right thing, although for the wrong reasons. Such is life.
Choking cats and the Jägermeister hat
Posted: April 25, 2013 Filed under: Animals, Anxieties, Health | Tags: CPR, humane society, Jägermeister 2 CommentsThere are times—not many, but times—when I am extremely pleased with my past self. This is one of those times. I’ve been putting off writing up what it was like to attend a pet CPR class mainly because it was so weird I didn’t have any idea what to do with it. But more than that, given how much I harp on truth and memory in writing, and given that I did this class all the way back last August, I was afraid of writing up a bunch of half-remembered BS and then feeling ashamed of myself because I’d be the only who knew I let myself down. Like, I knew there was a guy in the class wearing an abominable hat, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was on it that made it so abominable. I figured for the purposes of the story I could just make something up equally hilarious, but then I’d have to qualify that I made it up and then the whole thing lacks pizzazz and really I may as well just go back to eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and watching South Park.
BUT! As I was resentfully rifling through of my many comically oversized stacks of paper for anything that could help me write this, I finally found the manual they gave us for the class. AND! Inside the back cover was a full page of notes that I took, obviously anticipating this future moment of crisis. And in reading the notes, not only are the memories flooding back, but I’m choking laughing as I reconstruct what my mental state must have been while writing said notes. Because although I am one calm cool collected cookie on the outside, evidence on the page strongly suggested that on the inside I am a roiling torment of tortured emotion. I promise I’ll give some examples in a bit.
And I even took notes about the horrible hat. Just in case you failed to read the title of this post, it was in fact a Jägermeister hat. Worn with pride. If that gives you an idea of what I was in for.
For those of you who don’t know, last spring I took a CPR class for county employees, of which I am one. I mean, the class was only for county employees; the CPR could be used on anyone, even employees on layoff status, administrative suspension, currently separated from the county, or who had failed to file their COBRA paperwork within the requisite 90 days after separation or being transferred to layoff status, pending filing of a Request to Perform Life-Saving Procedure form, signed by the appointing authority, pursuant to BOS policy D 2.22.
This is the class where I was liberally insulted by someone named Fern from the Parks and Recreation department and the instructor made three and half hours worth of jokes about how He’s Totally Not Gay, Seriously. My life would be so much easier if I were making it all up. I took that class because I thought it was scary to not know what to do in an emergency. Because the not-funny truth is you just don’t know when you’ll need to help save a life.
And I would consider the class a success. Because although it’s true my first several attempts at saving my man dummy’s life resulted in his grisly demise, ultimately I was able to successfully resuscitate him, and I took a lot of pride in being able to do so. And I’m not ashamed to say that he and I bonded over the experience. And so when I discovered that there also exist CPR classes for pets, and since dying pets are also scary, let’s saddle up, dogie.
Really, though, if I’m being honest, I mostly wanted to take the class because I was really excited about practicing little animal CPR on little animal CPR dummies. Because after becoming so intimate with my CPR man dummy, I’m only realizing just now how terrible that sentence sounded. What I’m trying to say is that, after such a personal experience with nope not going to work either. So after my man dummy and I shared a deep okay I’m giving up now.
I was impressed with the dummy. Let’s just leave it at that.
So what do dog and cat dummies look like? Are there different-sized dogs? Are there puppy and kitten ones, like they have ones for human babies? And how far into the exotic pet demographic does the dummy industry extend? I was determined to find out.
But the fates were against me with this class. I was supposed to take it in the spring, but it was cancelled at the last minute and rescheduled for months later. Then I wound up with a social engagement that same day and I had to do some fancy footwork to fit everything in on the same day. THEN they sent a confirmation letter saying I should show up 5–10 minutes early, and there’s a better chance of Saint Peter personally descending from heaven to offer George W. Bush a blowjob than of me ever being early to something.
The class was held in the Humane Society’s multipurpose room, where they do large adoption events and which also doubles as a vaccination center three days a week, opening up sometimes onto the front lawn for obedience training classes and public events. To handle all this, the room is built as basically a huge garage, with cement floors, no insulation, and actual windowed garage doors making up two of the four walls. The high, strictly functional ceilings make it an acoustic nightmare, and just imagine when it’s full of muthafuckin barking dogs. There’s no a/c because the place is a sieve and what’s the point.
Which means that, say, if a student for the CPR class arrived 5–10 minutes late and the only seat left was the one right next to the one garage door that didn’t quite go all the way down to the floor, and it was August in Tucson so it’s 105° and a billion percent humidity all being pushed around by hurricane-level winds, and that late student sits in her crummy metal folding chair and just gets hot moist air forced up the entire right side of her body for hours because like the two fans they have blowing are going to do anything, that student might wind up very damp and cranky by the end of the whole event, particularly if she were attending semi-formal event immediately following.
Slipping into that last seat also put me right next to: the Jägermeister hat. As I sat down, somewhat breathless and inattentive and just happy to have found the place at all because I had gotten lost three times on the way, I turned to my tobacco-stained neighbor with the long stringy gray-streaked hair to give a little apology nod for my rude lateness, or late rudeness, and both unfortunately and inadvertently compounded my rude lateness or late rudeness by audibly choking when I caught sight of the terrible hat he was wearing, which in turn set off a convulsive saliva-induced coughing fit when I tried to pretend I hadn’t just done that. It’s not my fault: it’s not every day you’re confronted by an ill-fitting black ball cap with a bastardized symbol of St. Hubert emblazoned upon it in traffic-cone orange embroidery thread and the word “Jägermeister” set in German Dildonic underneath.
And look, people, not only was he wearing his Jägermeister hat indoors, but he was also wearing a matching Jägermeister t-shirt, obviously under the impression that these garments, worn together, produced an ensemble. Perched jauntily on the brim of his Jägermeister hat were his Circle K neon sunglasses, probably worn to indicate to nearby females his abnormally high levels of suave sophisticatedness. I think it worked, because I was literally unable to stop staring at this black hole of manliness.
Seated immediately to his left was a woman who was clearly with him. You’ve met her: a 40ish woman who wears turquoise reading glasses and scrunchies that match her stretch pants and considers a man with a two-piece Jägermeister suit to be a highly desirable mate. So desirable, in fact, that when she caught me staring, she pointedly started holding hands with her billionaire playboy philanthropist and sort of snuggled her right elbow up into his inner left thigh. He smiled at me, both sympathetic and knowing, as though he understood how badly I wanted him at that moment and though we both bitterly regretted the knowledge that I would never have him, he still wanted to reassure me that my feelings of lust were passionately returned.
To distract myself from this roller coaster of heartbreak, I turned my attention to, you know, the actual class. I started listening to the instructor right in time to hear about how some of us may have taken a human CPR class with a human dummy and yes, there are cat and dog CPR dummies as well,
OH HELL YES
but unfortunately the Humane Society of Southern Arizona does not have the funds for these, so instead we’re going to be using stuffed animals from Target with 1″ lengths of PVC pipe sewed into where their mouths are.
WAIT
WAT
And the forensic evidence suggests I was so cranky about this news that it I make it my very first note.
Y u no dummies, Humane Society?
So. Disappoint.
Even more disappoint was my creeping realization that this class’s real purpose is to help animal lovers come to terms with the knowledge that, if your pet needs CPR, your pet is probably going to die. I’m not trying to be a jerk here; they pretty much came right out and said it.
The instructor began by outlining the available range of life-saving measures for pets, of which of course CPR being the main reason we all came. She started that discussion by gathering consensus from her audience, which by my estimation of the 17 women sharing one haircut, consisted of 75% lesbian couples.
“So, we all love our pets, right?” said the instructor, Inge, a 30ish blonde woman with a spritely ponytail.
“YES!” chorused the class happily.
“And we want to do what’s best for them, right?”
“YES!” the crowd shot back, louder and more enthusiastically.
“And our pets are a part of our family, right?”
“YES!! OH YES!!” At this point, people were sitting forward in their folding chairs. Mrs. Jägermeister Hat started adding her own fervent commentary of “that’s rights” and the particularly creepy “my babies.” Two of the lesbian couples started swaying back and forth, eyes closed and hands raised to the sky.
“So we want to learn everything we can to protect them and keep them safe!”
“YES WE DO!! OH! OH!!!” A tiny ancient woman wearing eagle feather earrings in the front row stood up, shaking her clasped hands at the ceiling and crying while one man fell from his chair into the aisle, convulsing and speaking in tongues. Jägermeister Hat clasped his woman’s elbow tightly with his inner thigh.
“And the best thing we can do for our pets is prevent them from becoming ill in the first place,” shouted Inge joyfully, ponytail bobbing, arms upstretched in a vee to indicate we should agree.
“…yes!!” agreed the crowd, although now with an undercurrent of confusion and a definite note of tension.
“Because there aren’t ambulances for pets, only for people. You can’t call 911 to save your pet. They won’t come help you. And if you’re at home by yourself, that means you can’t do CPR on your pet and drive her to the emergency vet at the same time. And CPR only has about a 10% success rate. You’ll learn how to do that today, but the best medicine is prevention. That’s the best thing you can take home to your pets to keep them well.”
She smiled expectantly as the whole class visibly deflated. Obviously I wasn’t the only one who had arrived that day with a head stuffed full of fantasies of hauling my cat by his scruff out of an antifreeze-filled swimming pool infested by sharks made of chocolate and chicken bones, and forcibly filling his lungs with air three breaths at a time, shouting “LIVE DAMN YOU LIVE” while I compress his fuzzy little rib cage until he finally sits up, shaken but alive, and the crowd of bystanders starts applauding and then nominates me for something.
But we had come to learn pet CPR, so we’d better get to it. Remember, though, no dummies to demonstrate on. What they did have to demonstrate on were a toy stuffed cat and two stuffed dogs (a small and a large). Each of them had a pink tongue stitched on and lolling out comically (or not really, considering that this was supposed to simulate a near-death emergency) and that short piece of PVC pipe also stitched in to give us something to blow on. To prevent cooties, each student also got a short piece of sanitized PVC to put over our own mouths when we blow. I felt pretty dumb doing it, too, because there’s no seal on the pipe and no air bladder inside the dummies to practice inflating, so basically we just took turns blowing really hard on stuffed animal faces.
God damn, but sometimes it really pisses me off living in a world where schools and free clinics and libraries and animal shelters have to eternally scrape for pennies while stock market jerkoffs complain because the $100 bills they stuff up their dickholes to masturbate with are giving them paper cuts.
The way you give CPR to a dog is mostly what you might expect. Dogs should be on their right side, which I did not know. Apparently the way a dog’s body is configured, you get better results from chest compression that way. And from there it’s very similar as for a person:
Once you get a cat, they will follow a similar CPR procedure, except it doesn’t seem to matter which side they’re on, because either way they’ll throw up insect parts on your carpet. Also with cats (and small dogs) you don’t use the full–body weight, straight-arm chest compression that you do for large dogs because that’s a great way to end up with cat (or small dog) crepes. Instead you place the heels of your hands firmly together as though you were going to terrify an infant with an imitation of a crocodile, then gently slide your palms onto the animal’s chest and use just the strength of your fingers to compress the chest until the cat begins to slowly but reliably shred the skin off your hands.
We also had to practice muzzling a dog, since of course frightened animals are likely to bite. And it’s not just wrapping a leash around the dog’s mouth, like you might think; it has to be done in a certain particular way so you don’t injure the animal. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and I had to get remedial help because I kept accidentally hanging my stuffed dog dummy. There’s a certain trick to wrapping the muzzle, where the rabbit goes around the tree and through the hole and then recalibrates the dilithium crystals, because eventually Inge gave up trying to teach me and said, “just wrap the leash around his mouth. You’ll be fine.”
Cats of course can’t be muzzled when they’re frightened or injured. Them you wrap up in a towel like a little kitty burrito, with two huge eyes and a tiny adorable nose sticking out the top and two tiny fuzzy paws emerging from the front, trying to claw your liver out. Actually, I learned kitty burrito from my vet a long time ago, and have since used it on any number of cats who are due to either be unwillingly medicated or have their nasty scoochy butts forcibly cleaned. It works well, and really I think that’s the preferred terminology, since at the Humane Society they called it the “kitty taco,” which just strikes me as somehow inappropriate.
Things got more confusing when they showed us a video about pet emergency care. And I mean a video. It’s not like I’m saying “books on tape” here when really I mean “audiobook.” And just in case you weren’t sure it was a tape, the narrator helpfully mentioned “the information on this tape” about 1500 times. We also learned from the tape that if you have a cellular phone, you may use it to phone your veterinarian for help.
But that’s not actually the confusing part. The confusing part was how in the video they said said you should use the Heimlich (except it’s not called that anymore, on the request of the family) (I’m completely serious) on a choking animal. Inge told us that instead we should use the tongs we have in our pet first aid kit at home to extract the foreign object. Because I totally have both of those things.
After CPR, we talked about other emergency situations that your pet may require immediate medical intervention for: traumatic injury, poisoning, predators, joining the Tea Party, etc. And in each of the situations, the short answer is [SPOILER ALERT] prevention is the best treatment, but after you’ve prevented everything you can, drive your pet to your veterinarian’s office. Because again: no kitty ambulances. Although that would be adorable. Sad, but adorable. Really, really adorable. But sad. And adorable.
The prevention advice they gave is pretty sound. Essentially, to keep your pet safe, you should:
So I feel pretty solid about that. We also covered in depth a particular specific traumatic injury that is apparently pretty common among animals because animals are horrible people: evisceration.
Our student manual has this to say on evisceration:
Do not put the intestines or organs back inside the animal. Cover with a clean, moist towel or other cloth. Keep organs as clean as possible and do not allow animals to self-traumatize.
And for the benefit of everyone who did not grasp the true horror of this euphemistic phrasing, as I did not, Inge helpfully explained this point further, saying, and this is an actual quote I want to stress here, “Evisceration is when the organs come out. A dog that’s eviscerated will eat his own internal organs. And that’s a problem.”
This was a fact previously unknown to me. Well, specifically the second fact. The first fact I knew already. And the third I could have surmised if I had any idea any creature would ever do something like this. But the second was definitely news. And, I’d like to point out, not taking any sides here, pretty powerful evidence in the debate over whether dogs are smarter than cats.
But not only am I horrified now, again, writing this, I was obviously at least twice as horrified when I learned this fact. Because not only did I scrawl down the quote down in full, but I reiterated the fact immediately underneath the quote, again, this time frantically underlined, as though the act of writing it could possibly help me understand this phenomenon.
THAT SHIT TOTALLY DID NOT HAPPEN IN “WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS”
Me being me, I raised my hand unsteadily and asked why dear god why would a dog do such a thing. Inge, nonplussed, just said, “Instinct.” I nodded in agreement. I’m not really sure why I asked. I was in such shock that she could have said anything and I would have nodded in agreement. “They do it to replenish their ketamine levels after injury.” Oh, of course. “Dogs can actually regenerate internal organs if they have necessary nutritional building blocks.” I see, naturally. “It’s actually really delicious and also they’ll be reborn as one of the Lassies if they do.” Certainly, certainly.
Christ.
So after that class, I am definitely anti-evisceration. And I am also anti–animal abuse, which the Humane Society sees a lot of, and tales of which we were regaled with, said tales being totally and utterly unsalvageable for humorous purposes. At least by me. Maybe George Carlin could have made something out of it, but he’s a professional. Plus they urged us to vaccinate, which I already have, and also to spay and neuter our pets.
And about that: I know we all love adoption stories and happy endings, and the Humane Society does amazing work that I have tremendous respect for. But when a dog or a cat goes into a shelter, they only have about a 40% chance of coming out alive. Most are euthanized because there just aren’t enough homes. That’s about 4 million adoptable, loving pets every year who die because nobody wants them. So please: spay or neuter. And if you have feral cats in your neighborhood, trap them and get them spayed or neutered—the shelter will help you pay for it—because the reality of life on the streets is nasty, brutish, and short. Plus the number of kittens brought into the shelter every spring absolutely overwhelms the shelters. Really, the kindest and most loving thing you can do to show how much you care about animals is spaying and neutering.
But back to the class: I just looked at my notes again and remembered that I also learned from Inge that “smush-faced dogs are more likely to have an eye pop out.” So all in all this class was extremely educational.
And then the class was just…done. The winds outside had picked up as the evening monsoon moved in. It was only 5:00 but already getting dark from the storm clouds. The fans couldn’t do anything against the humidity that was starting to curl the edges of our certificates of completion. I still have mine if you want to see it. We all started to file out. I let the lesbian couples go in front of me, nodding politely to Mr. and Mrs. Jägermeister Hat as I did. He winked at me, smiling broadly. She gripped his arm firmly just in case I’d forgotten he was taken. I hadn’t forgotten, but I can’t blame her for checking. Although I might suggest she just get him spayed or neutered instead.
So I’m glad I took the class, although I don’t know if I can say I am any more prepared for an actual emergency. Case in point: about two weeks ago my cat was out in the yard, unsupervised, and ate a bee and just absolutely hauled ass inside, frothing at the mouth from the sting and (literally) running in circles. My response was first to pry her mouth open to try and get the stinger out (fail), then to go to Google to find out what the symptoms of an allergic reaction are (frothing at the mouth and running in circles either definitely are or certainly are not symptoms, depending on who you believe, so double fail), then to use those same sites to figure out how to dose a cat with Benedryl and going to my medicine cabinet to stare forlornly at the spot where the bottle of Benedryl used to be (omg such fail). In the end I just waited a half an hour to see if she’d have a reaction (she didn’t) and gave her a low-dose aspirin for the pain. I also got a clean, moist towel or other cloth ready to wrap her in like a little kitty taco, but fortunately it didn’t come to that.
But hey: if your stuffed animals ever go into cardiac arrest, I have totally got your back. I’ll just need put on my emergency Jägermeister hat first.
Past-jacking
Posted: April 14, 2013 Filed under: Blogging, Self, Writing | Tags: André Aciman, robb stark, rupert murdoch, semele, zeus 4 CommentsPeople sometimes ask me why I write autobiographical essays instead of, say, novels or short stories. Usually they ask me this because we’re at a social event and I’m standing in between them and the spinach dip, and I’ve refused to move until they affect a pre-determined amount of interest in my so-called career.
And what I say to my devoted fans when they ask me this is the truth: it’s easier. Writing fiction is hard. And usually it turns out bad. At least for me. It’s true that 90% of everything is bad, but I think fiction pushes more like 96% terrible. That last 6% is entirely me. Sorry about that.
Because check it out: here’s what it’s like when I write fiction.
Fantasy: Creating a world of mystery and magic of the sort that lighted my imagination as a child and fired my love of reading in the kiln of embarrassingly rendered Scottish accents means crafting:
And oh, hey, look: I just spent 18 months writing spreadsheets.
Science fiction: A genre rich with the opportunity to sacrifice both scientific accuracy, character development, and interesting plot lines in order to make basic observations in 400 pages or more.
Dystopia and/or cyberpunk: This is a great career plan if you are a 14-year-old girl.
Realistic or literary fiction: This means either a) a book about my vagina, or b) a Bildungsroman, because I have learned this term and I absolutely refuse to say “coming of age” instead. I paid good money for my English degree and I’m going to use it, goddammit. My point being: I couldn’t write either of those books and still live with myself.
Mysteries: Oh, hey, it’s a book about how some dude I don’t know got murdered before the plot started and everyone cares for some reason. I’ll confess to the murder myself if it means we can all get out of here by lunch.
Romance: I tried it. I wrote scenes so smutty even I was embarrassed to read them.
Inspirational: Huh. Have you met me?
Westerns: No.
So we’re back to nonfiction. Good nonfiction generally requiring some amount of expertise in the subject you’re writing on, of course. So unless the market for books about reading other books and petting my cat opens up dramatically, we’re pretty much looking at experiential-ish essays.
Which, technically, makes me a memoirist. That makes me uneasy. Because honestly, nothing’s easier to fake than a good story, and nothing gets attention like a good story. But I’m not in this to get attention. (Obviously, based on how well I promote this blog.) I write because I think the stories I write are interesting, but also because I think the truth is important, and when I can’t find it, I write until I can. So naturally the recent article in the New York Times called “How Memoirists Mold the Truth” caught my eye. I haven’t read André Aciman, but he’s apparently like a famous memoirist and junk.
But…oddly, Aciman is openly hostile to the medium he works in:
[M]emoirists, unable to erase the ugliest moments of their past or unwilling to make new ones up, can shift them around. They don’t distort the truth, they nudge it. Everyone has reasons for altering the past. We may want to embellish or gloss over the past, or we may want to repress it, or to shift it just enough so as to be able to live with it.
And I mean, he has a point. It’s true that probably people who write stories about their lives aren’t doing it because they’re chock-full of self-confidence and lazy summer days. But I’m deeply disturbed at the assumption that the reason for writing down the past is to change it. Is that why other people write? To make up stories about themselves? And if so, why did I bother with an English degree again?
He goes on:
Writing the past is never a neutral act…Writing alters, reshuffles, intrudes on everything. As small a thing as a shifty adverb, or an adjective with attitude, or just a trivial little comma is enough to reconfigure the past…And maybe this is why we write. We want a second chance, we want the other version of our life, the one that thrills us, the one that happened to the people we really are, not to those we just happened to be once.
And I don’t think this is him just getting all Heisenberg uncertainty on my ass. This is just ugly. But not ugly in a true kind of a way—ugly in a baffling kind of a way. Because it seems to me this is a fundamental misunderstanding not only of how the past works, but also how we exist in the present.
Because to say something like this:
Writing not only plays fast and loose with the past; it hijacks the past. Which may be why we put the past to paper. We want it hijacked.
you would have to also believe that writing down the past not just changes it, but damages it, and deliberately so. But here’s the funny thing: memories are unstable. The very act of remembering actually changes the memory itself. Just as observation changes the present, remembering changes the past. That’s why, for example, mandatory reporters are trained to not ask questions of a minor reporting abuse: because the more times the story is told, the more vulnerable the truth is to succumbing to influence, suggestion, fear, and intimidation. This makes it harder to put shithead child abusers in jail, because shithead lawyers will pick apart any inconsistencies in the kid’s story, assuming of course the case ever even gets that far.
So writing is actually the only way to try and crystallize and retain the truth. The real truth. And here I realize we start getting into questions of objective vs. subjective truth, and whether objective truth exists at all, or whether the only truth exists in what we experience, and blah blah fucking snore only shithead philosophers care about that.
There are all kinds of reasons memories have to be handled carefully. A primary reason—and, I’m guessing, a primary reason why people write memoirs—is trauma. Traumatic memories are not created in the brain the same way that normal memories are. Traumatic memories conform very poorly to narrative and are often fragmented, meaning those events tend to be stored in the brain as emotion without time. Plus a common coping mechanism for people under severe stress is dissociation, which makes it even harder to connect your own experiences with the events happening around you.
So, say, a woman getting beaten up by her husband might recall the night only in pieces, especially at first, which, to take the scenic route here, which you really should expect from me by now, means that the shithead husband who is hitting her is also likely going to be the shithead husband who starts picking at her memories to try and get her to deny what actually happened. Which is easy, because she’s traumatized, so she’s having trouble remembering if he called her a stupid waste of a cunt before or after he shoved her up against the wall, and then he uses her hesitation that as “proof” that she’s exaggerating, or making it up, or being too sensitive.
I’m not being entirely fair to the subjectivist’s argument here, but I also don’t really care. My point is that yeah, I believe in objective truth. Six artists could draw the same bowl of fruit, and none of the drawings would look the same. That doesn’t change the fruit. But we do also face the real problem that we only exist in our bodies and in time, and so we can only experience those parts of objectivity that we can. However, we can also use our smart thought brains to piece together what the truth looks like from other perspectives. And that’s the joy of writing: capturing the truth as clearly and as beautifully as your words are able.
I think he also whiffs pretty badly here:
Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons…provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction. It’s their revenge against facts that won’t go away.
Well…I mean, duh. Of course we’re looking to justify the past. We’re justifying using our time to tell the story. There has to be a reason to recall something if we want to recall it. If I tell you a twenty-minute story about my twenty-minute commute this morning, and by the end all that’s happened is I arrived safely at work…you’re probably going to punch me in the face, and I would deserve it.
But humans crave narrative. We need it to live. It’s how our brains process experience. There isn’t anything wrong with admitting that. And I would venture to say that most people use the conventions of fiction instead of history because history conventions are: boring.
But to be slightly less flip, there’s something else he’s ignoring: being too close to the story means you just can’t analyze it in a way that somebody else could. It’s why every writer needs an editor (and I can think of one writer in particular that especially true for). You can’t see your experience from someone else’s perspective. That means if I’m writing about my own experience, I probably won’t be capable of analyzing it from a historical perspective. I won’t be able to speculate on the influence of the Google+ vs. Facebook struggle for dominance in the social media sphere has on my ability to relate emotionally to my peers. I just can’t. Someone else a bit more removed would have to do it for me.
(Although frankly, I sincerely hope that no future historian does that to me, either, primarily because that would be dumb.)
Which of course brings us back around to the objective vs. subjective debate. History is objective; memoirs are subjective.
Right? Except any amateur Richard III historian can show you objective histories of that man that prove he’s either a good, loyal, and noble man who made the best of a bad situation but got the short end of history anyway (think Robb Stark) or black-hearted, scheming, lying, manipulative, evil incarnate who uses rumor and innuendo to claw his way to power (think Rupert Murdoch).
So I think that the best we can do is also the simplest: just tell the truth. To be good writers, we have to look as boldly as we can on the truth and just hope it doesn’t burn us to cinders like Semele when she looked on her husband Zeus.
Because if we don’t, if we make excuses and shaky metaphors for writing and allow ourselves any slack at all, this is the kind of bullshit you wind up with. Here Aciman is talking about publishing two versions of a true story: one where he was walking with his brother, and one where he was walking alone. The “reality” of these two “truths” apparently confuses him.
Today I remember the walk I took alone, but only because I spent more time writing it. Ask me which of the two is truer, I’d say, “Probably the walk with my brother.” Ask me again and I might admit making the whole thing up. Ask me yet again, and I won’t remember.
Here we enter the spectral realm of quantum mnemonics. There is no past; there are just versions of the past. Proving one version true settles absolutely nothing, because proving another is equally possible. If I were to rewrite the scene one more time, this new version would overwrite the previous ones and, in time, become just another version among many.
Again, gentle reader, I cry you to call “bullshit” upon his head.
Because I mean really. Fuck this guy. The truth is the truth, and if you don’t have the courage to commit to it, even knowing it might destroy you, go write fiction and play around with your shitty unreliable narrators. There’s plenty of room in fiction for hacks.
This is a true story: When I was in college, my best friend, Ted, had a car and I didn’t. One day he took me to the grocery store so I could do some shopping. He was a theatre major and I was English major because we both cared deeply about the truth of stories and what narrative means to the human experience. We disagreed on almost everything. I said that stories pull reality from the universe so we can look at it and figure it out. He said we use stories to create that reality and make it more beautiful, the implication being because no one’s going to do it for us.
As we were standing there in that Safeway parking lot, he suddenly turned to me and said what he obviously thought sealed the argument: “We create our own reality, and we’re the hero of our own stories.” There was a long, dramatic pause. I told him he was nuts. I thought he had been brainwashed by the death-of-the-author po-mo crap that we were being taught at the time.
And partly I do think that’s true. But I think what he said was a lot more profound than I gave him credit for. The truth is objective, but we experience it subjectively. That means that we’ve been given an enormous responsibility: we really are the heroes of our own stories. Or, more accurately, we are the protagonists.
And whenever we—we as people, but especially we as writers—fudge the truth, or gloss it, or just outright change what happened because of fear or cowardice or anger, we have become the villain. We become our own enemy. It’s easy to do. We’ve all done it. It can be as easy as breaking a promise to someone who loves you because it’s no longer convenient to keep that promise. You tell yourself it didn’t really mean much to her anyway, or that she had to have known it was coming, or that she probably broke promises, too, so it’s ok to do what you’re doing now. But you know you’ve failed to be brave. Failing doesn’t make you a villain, but pretending you never failed at all certainly does.
Because being brave enough to pursue the truth isn’t just a narrative convention. It’s everything. Whatever is godlike in us strives for that truth and loves it. We really are the heroes of our own stories. And every true hero is tested and sorely tried. That’s why it’s so hard to do what’s right, and why so many fail.
As for me, I may fail, too, but I will try. Because I don’t see any other choice.
And because, let’s face it: the story is so much more fun that way.
Balls
Posted: February 26, 2013 Filed under: Animals, Caving, Family, Food, Love, Outdoors, Year of Fear | Tags: balls, calves, chicken, criadillas, tuna Leave a commentThere’s a problem with having friends. Maybe not just one, but there’s one big one. Specifically that problem, and I’m sure this has happened to you, comes when you’re all out at a restaurant for someone’s going-away party, and the waiter announces they have testicles on the menu tonight, meaning, you have to presume, to eat and they’re not just teabagging their own menus for funsies, and when he says that everyone turns to look at you because your friends have all come to expect you to be the one to do things that are insane, and they know perfectly well that by your own rules for yourself you are bound to both order and eat these stupid things, and your so-called friends take immense delight in your pain and suffering. Whereas if you were by yourself you could get away with playing the stupid gringo in front of the waiter and pretend you don’t know what “criadillas” means and go on perfectly content with your testicle-eating-free life.
But instead, after we all heard the waiter describe the specials of the day, the cry went forth across the land: “Jenn’s eating balls!”
Thanks, guys.
But just as my self-imposed rules are my damnation, they also carry within them the seeds of salvation. The rules for me taking any recommendations for doing a scary thing, remember, are these:
- It can’t be something stupid (as in would endanger my life, health, or livelihood)
- I have to be able to afford it
- You have to do it, too
While eating balls is undoubtedly a great way to get to get your co-workers to gossip about you, it’s not actually dangerous in any way. And it was $10, and I could afford $10, mostly since I had just gotten paid. But. BUT!! Rule 3: I don’t have to do it if nobody else does. I instantly invoked this clause, although through an unfortunate coincidence I said this right before something really really interesting happened. I didn’t see what it was, but it must have been amazing, because everyone immediately turned away to look at it, and they quit talking about what I might be eating for dinner altogether, or really, talking at all.
I figured the Great Ball Fiasco of ought-12 was over and we could now put the whole ugly incident behind us, never to be spoken of again. And so it was until I accidentally outsmarted myself. Another friend came to sit next to me and asked what I was ordering. “I was going to get the criadillas,” I said in a lofty and superior tone, smugly confident now that I had escaped certain doom, “but it’s too much food for me.” “Oh,” he said, apparently unconcerned about the blatant and self-serving lie I had just told, and also I completely forgot until just this minute that he speaks fluent Spanish, “if you order them, I’ll help you out. And I’ll buy you a drink to make it even.”
Well, fuck me. I think he set me up.
So I order the damn things, grudging and hostile, as though the waiter had just called me a cunt, then brooded while I waited for them to arrive, cranky and irritable. But that was just the appetizer. I still needed to pick an entree. I decided to order the duck, since I was in such a foul mood.
(…get it?)
(holy God I crack myself up)
(no, really, I bet you didn’t even see that one coming. BLAM.)
(but I actually did order the duck)
In an evening of amazing coincidences, whatever interesting thing had captured people’s attention disappeared right when my appetizer showed up. It’s fortunate it worked out that way, I suppose. And only when they set the plate in front of me did I begin to understand the depth of the trouble I had just gotten myself into. They were NOT fucking around with these balls:
You are what you eat.
“What’s the problem?” I can hear you saying, because I forgot to take my medication today. “It’s six little balls, three pair, and someone else is going to eat half, and besides, for you, eating three pair of balls is just called Friday night!”
“Ha ha, good one,” I reply. “You really got me. I wish I’d thought of that.”
The problem is that this photo, while highlighting the artistic application of paprika, the glossy sheen of the cocktail sauce, and the frankly half-hearted “bed” of romaine, does not provide a good sense of size. This is my own fault, for not including a scale bar in the photograph. I blame public education. But the fact is, the plate was ridiculously big, and the “delicacies” a match. To attempt to convey what I was really looking at, I’m going to add a scale bar to the photo so you can begin to understand what I was staring down:
Rings included for scale.
So you can see this was a bit more than I was anticipating. And it’s all the harder when you’ve become a spectator sport. But I had no choice, right? Now or never and all that. And eating them is said to confer bravery and machismo upon the diner, so how could I say no?
Except that I’m just not buying the “confers bravery” bit. I mean, maybe I could if, say, the balls were hunted in the wild across the plains of Spain (that fall mainly in the rain). But you know these poor calves are just loaded up into the slaughterhouse and have a bolt put through their head and hook in their ass to bleed them out after. What, exactly, is macho about that? Plus I have a theory that people attach stories to things they’re uncomfortable about, like forcibly taking testicles from young bulls, breading them, deep-frying them, and eating them while pretending they’re tasty. After all, it’s not like we tell ourselves that we’re having the passion of the chicken breast conferred upon us, or are being imbued with the rage of the tuna.
Nope. It’s just the testicles we tell ourselves stories about. Which means we know it’s wrong but do it anyway.
Or, possibly more accurately, know it’s disgusting but do it anyway.
I looked at everyone looking at me. I looked at my plate. I looked back at everyone. I considered that, having now ordered these things and not being able to take that back, the least I could do is not let it go to waste and eat three calves worth of balls. In, like, tribute or something.
They didn’t really look good. I mean, I know we were at a fancy restaurant, but they still looked bad. They looked deep-fried and greasy and unnaturally flat. I had to picture someone pounding these things, dipping them first in egg wash then in batter, then frying them. I kind of wanted to gag, but I knew I had to go through with it.
Still not fully able to commit to what I was doing, I opted for the Zeno’s paradox method of eating these things and immediately cut one in half with my fork. Quiet swept across the diners like a breeze across the prairie. I let it dangle on my fork for a minute, eyeing it with the same utter contempt and baffled confusion with which Republicans eye poor people. I smelled it. It smelled like fried. I took a molecule’s worth of a nibble off the side. Results were inconclusive.
I made a big show of cooling this thing off, because that oil gets pretty hot and it’s not ready to eat yet, right? I put it down, still speared on my fork, on the side of my plate, since woo was that molecule too hot to handle. Then I dipped my spoon in the cocktail sauce and touched it to my tongue, because even though I, as a rule, prefer food so spicy it allows me to see through space-time, I needed to make sure the flavor profile was to my liking.
But eventually even professional-grade procrastinators like myself eventually run out of excuses. And I would have to think that cold fried balls are WAY worse than hot fried balls. So pretty much at a certain point you just have to eat the half-ball already.
So I did.
It was…food-like. Very chewy. The coating seemed like it was supposed to be crunchy, a real ambitious go-getter type, but was just kind of limp and depressed instead. Mouth feel was…spongy? Neutral? Look, the very best possible spin I can put on this was that I felt like a macho asshole eating them.
But I had no choice, right?
Because I really kind of didn’t. Testicle-related reservations aside, I had to eat them. No, really. I mentioned at the beginning that this was a going-away party. Our friend got a better job in another state and she took it. And good for her, honestly. I might do the same thing, but I’m pretty much only marginally qualified for the job I have now. It’s always too bad to say goodbye to a friend, but this one was a hard thing. This was one of the people who figured pretty prominently in helping me through the Year of Fear (part one). This is the same person who simply walked me into Mordor and thought up the Public Service Justice League with me. She was there to bear witness to what I now simply call “the cave incident.” And I think it’s entirely reasonable to say that without the practice run, I may never have gone caving at all, and never done the one of the things that scared me the most. So there’s that.
I’ve never fooled myself that I’ve been successful at so many of these crazy things I’ve tried over the past year because of my friends. I think that’s a good thing, overall. We’re each of us bigger and better when we’re with people we love. But I’ve never wanted to let people into my life because I’ve always been afraid that they wouldn’t stay. That they’d always eventually find better, more interesting, and more exciting things to do than to hang out with me. I’m afraid of being left behind, and left alone.
So yeah. There’s a problem with friends. And that’s sometimes they leave, and you know they’re not coming back, and you know it won’t ever be the same when they go.
But what would I have done differently? Only spent more time if I could have. We each of us create what we fear, and I’m no different. I know that living in fear of being alone is only going to curve my paths of fate back around to being…alone. The more I dread the change that the future will inevitably bring, because it will, the less likely I will be to reach out, to take chances, and to love without fear or pain. And if I stop trying, I really will be alone. Because I don’t know if you can even reach yourself anymore when you give up on that.
Basically, what it boils down to is this: is all the fun we had worth the heartache of waving another friend goodbye, and knowing she won’t be even close to the last? And I can honestly answer yes. But all that’s hard to articulate, or at least hard for me to articulate. So I wanted to do something as a farewell, as a thank you, as a tribute. Something to pay back for all the fun we had. Something to show her how much it all meant to me.
So I ate the balls. Because I had to. Because she was worth it.
She’s dead, gym.
Posted: February 20, 2013 Filed under: Anxieties, Body, Dating, Health, Love | Tags: exercise, gangnam style, gym, hamming distance, mahna mahna, ymca Leave a commentI have an extremely mixed relationship with exercise. Actually, “mixed” is being pretty optimistic. I think my problems started back in elementary school PE class, where the unfortunate decision was made to have our gym classes taught by gym teachers. Maybe things are different now, but I’m not convinced any of my gym teachers had a scrap of pedagogical qualifications between them. To this day I’m convinced that every one of those classes were taught by Soviet sleeper agents given intensive linguistic and cultural training and sent to infiltrate American elementary schools (and probably cafeterias as well, now that I think about it) to make American children hate physical exercise and develop insatiable cravings for things like tater tots, “chicken” nuggets, and little triangles of grease-sogged pizza with precisely one slice of allegedly pepperoni on them, thereby sowing the seeds of generational sloth and obesity, causing Americans get fatter and dumber with every passing year, eventually bringing the country crashing to its dimpled, cartilage-free knees in a self-inflicted bloodless coup, with our new Soviet overlords riding in to ultimate power on a wave of saturated fat and refined sugar. You have to admit, they’re doing a pretty good job so far.
Because if that’s not true, how do you explain the scooters? The little butt-sized platforms with teeny rickety wheels on all four corners, riding two inches above the floor. These were SO MUCH FUN and all the kids loved it when the scooters came out, except the alignment on them was so terrible that every time you pushed off with your feet at top speed to roll across the gym, they bumped, your hands slipped, and the hard plastic wheels ran over all of your fingers simultaneously. Fun in gym = physical pain. It’s classic Pavlovian conditioning, people.
Or pickleball? Remember pickleball? The unholy bastard offspring of tennis, badminton, and ping pong? It’s like a sport, except so slow and with such low self-esteem that it doesn’t require its players to exhibit either physical coordination or mental acuity. “You’re being too critical,” I hear you thinking, because I have a magic brain, “and claiming pickleball as evidence of Soviet infiltration is clearly a paranoid overreaction.” Really? You think so? I submit to you as Exhibit A: the USA Pickleball Association. Adults play this game, invented in 1965, in tournaments, on a national level. Their “This is Pickleball” page claims that a dog named Pickles invented this game, and who am I to argue with an animated gif. This page goes on to explain the universal appeal and unbridled fun of playing pickleball, or at least I assume it does, because the page is coded such that the demonstration videos cover up the universally appealing and unbridlingly compelling text explaining everything. If this isn’t the work of the Soviets, it’s at least clearly the North Koreans.
Or how about the Flying Dutchman? Not the ghost ship doomed to sail the seas for all eternity, but the exercise I participated under threat of flunking? This is an exercise so appalling that Google, obviously in on the conspiracy, has flushed all references to down the memory hole. Be afraid, people. This exercise, or mind control technique, as it is more rightly called, involved one person lying on his back on the ground, legs up at a 90° angle, hands reaching up. The second person rests their hips on the first person’s feet so the two people are face to face (only three feet apart), and then they hold hands. This brainwashing technique was developed to make children believe that they could trust their classmates, only to be held personally responsible by the teacher when the other person fucked up. Whoever invented gaslighting children in that way is a monster.
Today the Flying Dutchman persists, like a rot under the gums, only now it goes by a different name: static balance exercises. The Soviets don’t want me to blast this story wide open, but the truth compels me to speak. If I wind up dead of a particularly embarrassing “suicide” involving poppers and goats, you’ll know it was no accident.
Not convinced PE is a Soviet plot? What about the Presidential Fitness Challenge, where the standards for youth physical fitness were set so embarrassingly low that even I could pass, literally without breaking a sweat? Listen to me: this conspiracy has infiltrated the highest levels of our government.
I mean, if I were a gym teacher, charged with laying the foundations of health and wellness for a new generation, drawing on, for inspiration, the Platonic ideal of the gymnasia, I myself might attempt to teach:
Instead, what my teachers taught me is:
My point with all this being: it probably will not be a huge surprise to you to hear I’ve never joined a gym.
But I’ve been feeling lately like it was time. Not because I’m in terrible shape—I’m actually doing pretty well, physically speaking, especially by general American standards. Plus I accidentally lost 15 pounds after I left my ex just because I wasn’t stress eating and binge drinking as a coping mechanism anymore, so weight’s not the issue. Ironically, I wanted to go to a gym because I was starting to take pride in my body for the first time. I had been doing lots of new and exciting things, like hiking and backpacking, or running a 5K, or having marathon life-alteringly good sex, basically pushing my body as hard and as far as it could go, and every time I did, I felt better and sexier and prouder, and wanted nothing more than to try again to see how much I could do this time.
But a lifetime of Soviet indoctrination is not so easy to overcome. And although I kept poking listlessly at the special fitness deals my work had made with various gyms around town, because they’re self-insured now and their sharply increased interest in my physical health is purely coincidental, I clearly was making no move to actually, you know, do anything. But fortunately for me, merely considering a gym membership has many health benefits that will no doubt eventually be recognized by some medical professional somewhere, provided you offer him or her a bucket of American money as a recognition tool.
Do you believe in coincidences? Because I kind of don’t. At all. So when a friend offered me a handful of guest passes to the Y, purely out the blue, I figured that meant something. Of course, what that meant to me and what that mean to her were pretty much entirely in separate galaxies, meaningfully speaking.
What it meant to me: the universe was giving me a nudge in the direction of overcoming fear and shame, and lovingly providing a practical solution for fulfilling the deep longing I so clearly had to love my body and take joy in my physical self.
What it meant to her: There was a cute single instructor there she wanted to fix me up with.
So I took the passes. I was apprehensive, but the Y offers a wide variety of free classes, so how bad could it be, right? And that’s how the very first thing I did when I went to a gym for the first time in my life was accidentally attend a kickboxing class in Spanish.
It wasn’t my fault, I swear.
I printed out the class schedule from their website and showed up for Jake’s Boot Camp class right on time. I did the whole sign in thing where they were, I think, unnecessarily suspicious of me. I mean, was it really necessary to use a counterfeit detector pen on my passes? But when I asked the way to Boot Camp, the receptionist startled visibly and told me there wasn’t any. Turns out they had just changed the schedule, but not posted it yet. Thanks, guys. So I asked what classes were happening at that time so I didn’t waste a trip. Kickboxing was about to start, taught by Oralia. Well, ok, sure. I’ll go.
I’ve had some people ask me why I didn’t get suspicious at this point about what language the class would be in. And the answer is: because I am not a racist, that’s why. I’ve lived in Tucson long enough that an instructor named “Oralia” doesn’t raise any alarms with me. What I failed to take into consideration, however, was that I was now on the south side of Tucson, which tends to be more racially homogeneous, if you take my meaning. My meaning being: that’s why they were looking at you weird, white girl.
So unsuspecting me goes in and gets stared down by the all-female manteca class, who circled up in a vaguely hostile manner. I took an empty spot toward the back of the room, and one of them peeled herself off from the pack and told me I would have to move to another, equally empty spot, like four feet to my left. I did, because wtf?
Simmering racial tension aside, the class was actually fine. It was just a cardio class, so all I had to do was do what Oralia was doing. And it’s not like the language was so advanced that I couldn’t follow what was happening (“¡Quatro! ¡Tres! ¡Dos! ¡Uno! ¡Y quatro más!” So even though I wasn’t entirely convinced I wasn’t about to be shanked for occupying the wrong empty space, I would still call it a positive experience, in that I sweated voluntarily for the first time since that day I ate a chiltepin.
So that was good, but I did not achieve the goal of meeting Jake. So I went back later in the week and tried his kickboxing class. Based on my experience with Oralia, I was led to believe that kickboxing at the Y was a cardio class. Furthermore, I was led to believe this based on the actual class description:
A challenging action packed cardiovascular class that combines the energy and music of an aerobics class with martial arts techniques
= sweat and kick until you reach your target heart rate. Imagine my surprise when all the other students showed up with hand wraps, all ready to punch and kick and punch the living shit out of a floor bag. The whole class was about learning actual kickboxing techniques, so we all lined up against one wall, then demonstrated our extremely shaky command of actual kickboxing techniques one by one across the gym and back again. This style of teaching is pretty much maximally designed to active my social anxiety; said anxiety being quintupled when Jake had to continually (and manually) correct my form in front of the class.
And it totally wasn’t his fault, but having the first time my potential date ever touched me be to underscore my public humiliation pretty much killed any chance he had of ever touching me in any more entertaining way. Sigh.
So I was already crabby when they pulled out a man-sized upright dummy and had all of us line up to practice punching it in the face. I was basically ok with it until Jake helpfully shouted: “Come on, ladies! Hit him hard! Hit him in the face! Pretend it’s your ex-boyfriend you’re getting revenge on!”
Everybody laughed. Except me. And it wasn’t funny at all.
So I gave up on that Y and tried the one next to my work. They had a class called “Muscles and More,” which I found to be a pretty exciting name, and is described thusly:
Take your workout to the next level using only exercise bands and body weight. Develop lean muscle, build a strong core and improve endurance. All levels welcome!
I can handle that, right? Even considering that my “next level” was technically only “ambulatory,” it still sounded just my style. And I had a huge amount of fun speculating on what the “more” in the name might refer to. Kittens? White slavery? Self-esteem? The possibilities were limitless.
EXCEPT when I got there they had JUST CHANGED THE SCHEDULE and so I wound up going not to Muscles and More, but instead to Awesome Abs, which was now in that time slot. Awesome Abs did not sound like as much fun:
Want a powerful core? This class will take you through a series of exciting exercises that will keep your core in check. Develop your abs, low back, and oblique’s in a quick 30 minute class!
Although it’s true I would have hated the class anyway due to the greengrocers’ apostrophe, the only thing exciting about this class was finding out how many different ways there are to almost throw up. I spent the next three days dreading my own sneezes.
So: strike three. Or maybe two and a half. But fourth time’s a charm (or three and a half’s). I went back later that week to try out Muscles and More again for the first time.
(Is the “more” a North Korean hit squad? A ham sandwich? A T-Rex?)
But hey, fuck you, says the Y. Muscles and More was cancelled that day due to staff intransigence. Seeing me standing alone and forlorn in a dark and empty workout room, the helpful roaming staff member starts pitching the TRX class instead, which at the same time in a different room. I had never heard of TRX and told him so. He said “it’s a state-of-the-art system for maximizing your muscles developed by a Navy SEAL.” I assumed the modifying phrase was simply misplaced here and didn’t ask the obvious question. He led me to a small room, where, it appeared, people were hung by their wrists at regular intervals at a 45° angle from ropes off the walls, like some really badly written episode of Clone Wars, or a horrifying BDSM Harry Potter fanfic.
The idea of TRX, which was not at all explained to me by the not-yet-staff instructor they were trialing and observing that evening, is basically that you do pull-ups holding onto a strap strung through an O-ring on the wall, pulling your full body weight up and back (down and forth?) using just your hands to support yourself. For an hour. The story is that the Navy SEAL who invented it needed workout equipment that could travel light, pack up easily, and give you carpal tunnel in thirty minutes or less. I walked out when I felt the shooting pains in the backs of my hands.
So to recap:
Four classes, 3.5 failures. I could almost feel the Red Menace tightening his grip around my throat, except he had been to TRX the night before and could longer make a fist.
But I am nothing if not stupidly optimistic. So I took my last pass and made one final attempt at Muscles and More. (A xylophone? Freedom fries? A sherpa?) This time I went to a third Y, the one near my house. They took my picture before they let me in and claimed it was corporate policy. When I politely countered that two of the two other Ys I had been to did not seem to agree that it was corporate policy, the receptionist just stammered out, “Uh, they should.” My personal theory is that, having visited three different Ys in three weeks, they flagged my name as someone casing all the gyms across town as a probable member of the Free Weight Gang. But in any case, I went.
And here Muscles and More (A wheat penny? Linux? Full release?) was described differently:
Work your core body and major muscles with this strength and conditioning class. No cardio but you can pair it with Zumba which follows!
which struck me as pretty comical, imagining how that particular description came about. Working in the public library, I’ve learned that people will complain about anything. Because they want to feel that “someone” is listening to them, even if that someone is powerless to change anything about the situation or to make the person complaining actually receive the explanation they demanded. So here’s the conversation I’m imagining:
YMCA member: (irritable) Excuse me. Excuse me! Miss!
Pitiable staff member who happened to be scheduled at the front desk: (politely) Yes?
YMCA member: I have a complaint about the Muscles and More class.
PSMWHTBSATFD: I’m sorry to hear that. How can I help?
YMCA member: There was no cardio in that class. I came here for cardio. My doctor said I have to do cardio workouts or I WILL DIE. I will sue you if that happens.
PSMWHTBSATFD: Uh…well, it is a conditioning class. If you’d like to do cardio, you could go to any of our—
YMCA member: I WILL SUE AND DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
PSMWHTBSATFD: Certainly. I’ll make a note of the deficiency on the schedule.
But hey! It was my last chance as a guest to try Muscles and More (Hot Pockets? Herpes? Hamming distance?) and sure, let’s throw in some Zumba, too. Because why not.
It so happened this was the week before Christmas, and I was feeling pretty smart about trying the gym before January hit and the plague of 6-week gym members hit. Luckily it only takes me two weeks or less to become a snob about almost anything.
I got Muscles and More (Pita bread? Wheetabix? Swedish fish?) ten minutes early, and I was already way late. Apparently there is a short class right before it where they do crunches for twenty minutes; before this class is also the times when all the cranky Active Seniors camp on all the good equipment and leave you with the 6-pound weights.
But all that hard work of not actually making it to a single class finally paid off when I attend my very first MaM class and got the stuffing whooped out of me. Those old ladies are tough. I wheezed through “muscles,” but disappointingly never found out exactly what the “more” was. Maybe you only find out after you’ve been to a certain number of classes.
Shaky and pale, I decided to stay for the Zumba class, mostly because it was in the same room the next hour, and I wasn’t actually capable of moving yet. As the students filed in, the instructor bounded up to the front of the room. She was an adorable Hispanic woman who looked suspiciously like Oralia, and who was dressed up like an adorable sparkly sequined elf. With the hat and Converse and skirt by Victoria’s Secret and everything.
I’ll say for the record: Zumba is fine. It’s fun, even. It is less fine and fun when all the songs are Christmas (or Navidad) songs, and I loathe Christmas songs, and even more less fine and fun when the class is clearly over capacity and yet somehow you get stuck next to the most energetic skinny man in the world, racing back and forth across the room with a frighteningly hyperfocused manic energy because he apparently has crack cocaine for breakfast. Think Chris Traeger from Parks and Rec, only WAY more positive and excitable. Literally.
And then at the end Santa came out for a guest appearance. It’s obviously much, much harder to Zumba in a full Santa suit than an adorable elven outfit, although he also obviously had much better musical taste. He got thirty seconds into “Gangnam Style” before he had ho ho slow it down and mostly just wave merrily. By the time we got to “Mahna Mahna,” he had given up all pretense and was just pacing slowly back and forth at the front of the class. Perhaps not surprisingly, this made me feel a lot better.
So: my last pass was spent. So? I did it. Despite all the terror and setback, I discovered actually really liked going to the gym. So: I ponied up the $34 a month. I am now a member of YMCA. No, no. Please. Hold the applause.
Of course, joining was only the first hurdle. There’s also the stick-to-it part. But I’ve been going for a while now (and brother, I have stories). And I’m a little embarrassed to say it feels kinda good. I like pushing my body. I like being surprised by how much it can do. And I like that the hard work has decimated my alcohol and sugar cravings. To my everlasting shock, I now am one of those gym people. I have actually come to enjoy that time after a hard workout when you get that pained, exhausted, hunched-over and happy feeling in your muscles.
I want more.
Bowl me down
Posted: February 10, 2013 Filed under: Animals, Anxieties, Entertainment, Home, Sports | Tags: Big Lebowski, bowling, broken toe, swamp cooler, tater tots, zorbing Leave a commentBowling, a game wherein most of your time is spent wearing silly shoes and drinking cheap beer while you wait for your turn to hurl a greasy lime green ball toward some pins, probably doesn’t seem like a big deal to you or anything that could legitimately be called scary. This is because you are not socially retarded, as I myself am. Performance anxiety lurks in my very marrow, like a really rare and extremely skilled ninja, and every time I think I have it beat, it leaps out from my bones (being a marrow ninja, remember), up through my neck, and throttles me from the inside via a reverse throttling maneuver that only marrow ninjas understand. Meaning: any activity where the people take turns staring at one other’s performances and said performances are then automatically rated and frequently openly automatically mocked on an overhead screen for your entire peer group to see is not exactly my idea of an amazing time.
Add to this the fact that I’m pretty physically incompetent as well. I never did quite get the hang of convincing my limbs to move in concert. This becomes a serious problem when one of the goals of the game is to keep your ball in one lane at a time, that lane preferably being your own.
Just in case you think I’m exaggerating: the only time I’ve been bowling was in seventh grade when my friend had her birthday party at a bowling alley, and I said I didn’t know how to bowl and didn’t want to go because of that, but she insisted I go anyway, and to make me feel less awkward and self-conscious, stood behind me to coach me on each throw, and that’s why when I was following her instructions to “not be afraid to put some power in it,” except with my gangly adolescent body that refused to obey orders correctly I put the power in at the wrong time, the wrong time being the upswing on the way back and not the downswing going forward, and being already so nervous about doing it wrong that I was all sweaty in that special slippery way that only seventh graders can be, I lost my grip on the ball and launched ten pounds of terror straight back at her face with all the force my surprisingly wiry little arm could muster. My only saving grace that evening being that she was on the varsity softball team and therefore had quick enough reflexes to jump back just in time, and the parabola the ball described ended not with me being imprisoned for manslaughter but instead with the hot pink ball landing smack at her feet, leaving a pretty decent hole in the ground where it fell. That hole today is popularly known as Crater Lake.
Also going bowling is kind of a big deal because, while I am willing to expend time, energy, and my friends’ money to organize something soul-stirring and life-affirming, like, say, a caving expedition or backpacking trip, I am significantly less inclined to arrange an outing wherein the highlight is me falling down, plus tater tots.
Which means if I’m going to cross bowling off my list, I had to go with the only opportunity that presented itself of its own accord: a work league. My work does a monthly thing where they go on I think the first Friday or something, every, I don’t know, ten months out of twelve? Three seasons out of four? Months with lunar eclipses? Every third month unless the date is odd? I’m really not clear on what the bowling season is. All I know is that there is a lot of bowling and then it stops.
I kept postponing going, of course, because really the last thing I want to do is perform physically in front of people I have to work with, for god’s sake. Until all of a sudden it was the very last month. Somehow everyone knew it was the last month but me, and for some reason they all went out of their way to tell me that it was. I think it was a conspiracy. So with a heavy heart, I agreed to go, figuring if nothing else I could get a good story out of it.
What’s that saying about you might wish for things if you aren’t careful?
So I steeled myself for bowling that very evening. I figured I had enough time to run home, change clothes, and eat dinner, since the organizer told me it started at seven. The players all told me it started at seven. The flyer sent out to the entire staff said it started at seven. Based on these contextual clues, I chose to show up at seven.
Except that apparently in bowling etiquette, 7:00 is understood to mean 6:30 or possibly even last Tuesday, because by the time I arrived at 7:04, everyone was already in teams and tacky shoes, so all there was for me to do was stand around awkwardly and pretend as though it wasn’t exactly like high school when no one wanted me on their team then, either. So I basically just stood around affecting interest in the games and trying not to throw up out of anxiety until I thought I could finally leave without being rude. I did not count this as a success.
So I figured I had to try again, if for no other reason than to shut people up about how much I really would love bowling if I just gave it a chance. “Luckily” for me, for some reason I don’t understand, the 2011–12 fiscal bowling season was immediately followed with a summer session, or really whatever I don’t care, so the Last Game That I Had to Go To or Miss My Chance was just the first in a series as far as I could tell. And by this point I had built up so much anxiety around it that I absolutely wanted to go at the next opportunity and just be done with the whole mess.
This line of thinking led to what was if not my first mistake, certainly my greatest, which was going bowling with a broken toe. Breaking my toe wasn’t actually my fault. It was my shitty landlord’s. Instead of putting air conditioning in the duplex I lived in, they put in a swamp cooler. For those of you not familiar with swamp coolers, the concept is that it blows moisture into your home to cool it off inside when it’s 107° out with 0% humidity (again, you think I exaggerate. I do not.). Swamp coolers actually work pretty well most of the year, and your skin feels less itchy when it’s on, plus they cost like a nickel to run, so they’re pretty popular in Tucson. The only problem, of course, is that the massive amounts of humidity make all your books warp like they’re being involuntarily pulled into an alternate dimension, and all that “at least it’s a dry heat” BS goes right out the window you always have to keep cracked open so you don’t burn out the cooler’s motor, and also during the fairly significant monsoon season we get here, swamp coolers are 100% useless and you will spend the summer lying on your floor hating rain and all water everywhere.
Or, here’s how a friend of mine put it: “You’ll think you’re a genius for three months. Then you’ll want to kill yourself.”
And I know you’re asking yourself how this can be their fault if I knew it had a swamp cooler when I moved in, but trust me, if you knew the rest of what they did, you would totally be on my side on this one.
So yes, I did think I was a genius for three months. Then the monsoons came. And here’s a fun bit of trivia: winds in Tucson tend to blow east to west. And remember you have to leave your window open. Guess which direction my windows faced? Yup, east and west. And monsoons come up unpredictably now, thanks so much global climate change. So rain just basically blew in my house all the goddamn time. But even when it didn’t, I just had to walk around my house sticky and angry. Wearing clothes didn’t help, and not wearing clothes didn’t help. It’s impossible to get comfortable or sit on things or sleep well. The cats were all pretty much just one long bad hair day, and took to walking around sideways for some reason. When I took one of them to the vet, he (the vet) asked me if I had bathed him (the cat) that morning. I had to say no, it was just my house. I woke up enraged every single day, and one morning I opened my eyes and yelled at my house, “STOP!!! BEING!!! DAMP!!!”
So swamp cooler time is angry time, is what I’m trying to say. So I’m just filled with blind rage as I stomp around the house. And one night I tried to huff myself to bed, except I was so angry I lost what little directional competence I possess and walked my baby toe straight into my metal bedframe with full enraged force. And that is how I broke my toe. I’m frankly surprised I didn’t break the bedframe, I smacked it so hard.
Did I go to the doctor? No. I did not. Everyone knows there isn’t anything you can do for a broken baby toe other than feel sorry for yourself. You can’t even fix a broken big toe. I happen to know this from personal experience, because I once had to take my ex, who not only had some anger management issues but also liked making sure I knew I wasn’t in control of my own life, to urgent care because he was so angry he kicked a plasterboard wall, putting a hole in it and thereby breaking his left big toe. I don’t remember what he was mad about now, but I’m pretty sure it was something like “don’t tell me to quit calling you a stupid cunt, goddammit, because it’s only the truth and it’s not my fault you can’t handle the truth.”
(I was not supposed to be mad about the hole in the wall, either, because “it wasn’t made well” and “just caved right in.”)
But ok, I’m dutiful and take him to urgent care, but I have to help him hobble to the car and hobble to the waiting room and fill out all of his paperwork and wait with him for nine hours (thanks, broken American health care system) talk to the doctor about his aftercare because somehow I am responsible for the state of his toe, and help the same doctor convince him that he does not, in fact, need a cast even though he insisted he did, because no competent doctor will put a cast on a broken toe and no, the doctor is not trying to screw you over by giving you substandard care.
So yeah, I lost a weekend to that. But you can’t be too mad because these things happen, right?
Except then IT HAPPENED AGAIN THE VERY NEXT WEEKEND. He kicked the OTHER WALL with his OTHER FOOT and broke his OTHER BIG TOE and we did the whole stupid thing ALL OVER AGAIN on my THREE DAY WEEKEND. Only this time he picked a brick wall, which fortunately was in fact made well and did not in fact cave in, which is why he insisted that this time, surely, he would need a cast, and how he eventually convinced me to take him back. Again.
Healthy boundaries, kids. Have some.
So yeah, I didn’t go to the doctor because I knew the drill. Instead I hobbled around pathetically and pretended to be surprised when people noticed.
Basically, then, picture is this: I’m at bowling. I’m on what must be the unluckiest team in bowling history. And people are kindly trying to show me how to bowl (I asked them to please not stand behind me) but it’s pretty much impossible to get the 1-2-3 (left-right-left? red light–green light?) rhythm of the steps right when it’s more like left-hobble-left and there’s no way to time the swing correctly and basically I just am making a jackass out of myself.
Also my boss is there.
So…still doesn’t count, right? Fine, I’ll go a third time, but this is it: this experience will determine my position on bowling. Because by this point I’ll have given it every possible chance a reasonable person can.
I wait until monsoon passes and my free-floating rage ebbs. I wait until my toe heals. I wait until I’m feeling optimistic, upbeat, and chipper. I even wait until I’ve watched The Big Lewbowski for the first time.
I get there on time, meaning 48 hours early. I get some shoes. I get some tater tots. I get some impromptu lessons again, mostly from the same boss, but also a lot of enthusiastic coaching from everyone else who noticed my incompetence, meaning everyone else.
And on my first frame, I threw a strike. Yeah, no shit.
I felt pretty silly about all the anxiety and the hoopla I had thrown up against bowling. I mean, it’s just fun, right? And win or lose, your teammates will cheer you on because there’s nothing so dumb you can do that will make people not want to bowl with you.
My second frame I got a spare. And I was feeling pretty impressed with myself. I was feeling the ball and how it sat in my hand and how the weight swung and how my body moved. I was feeling much more confident, and started to throw the ball with serious heft and intention, and the ball was actually going where I wanted it to go.
So it therefore came as a complete surprise to me when, on the third frame, I somehow bobbled the downswing and, using my full physical intention and all of my personal strength, swung an 11-pound ball directly into the back of my knee. I didn’t ever go back and ask, but I’m pretty sure the hole I left in the floor when I collapsed is now being used by USGS for gravity coring in the earth’s mantle.
Yeah, it hurt, a lot, and the back of my leg swelled up and turned black. I didn’t go to a doctor for that either, since I already happen to know it’s not actually possible to die of embarrassment. But that giant bruise, which lasted for freakin’ weeks, was the final signpost on my road to bowling. I didn’t get a good look, but I think the sign said “Lane ends.”
So. There. I gave it a try, and I was more than fair. Bowling is stupid and I hate it and it hates me and that’s the way it will stay forever and everyone’s happy with things staying just like that. And don’t ask me to do it ever again because I won’t go, unless maybe I just watch and someone is buying me beer.
But I am still totally willing to try zorbing, if anyone knows a guy. That looks like fun.
