Sunday, May 31, 2015

Ditching the Double Standard

I am sick and tired of the double standard.      

My friend MS’s daughter wore, as she put it, the “dreaded yoga pants,” to high school, and for violating the dress code, she received in-school suspension. The same week, the school planned “water play” day for the students, and the girls were instructed to not wear white t-shirts. MS was pretty upset about the suspension, but more so that the same week, the school in essence sponsored a wet t-shirt contest for the high school students and then gave it a name that half the student body uses as a keyword for porn searches. Why is it not okay to wear long black fitted pants one day, but the next day students are encouraged to soak and squirt each other, making their clothing not only sopping wet but also clingy and revealing?
The whole dress code issue is out of hand lately, with top students being stripped of their honors for wearing spaghetti strap dresses to award ceremonies and plus sized students banned from proms because even in a long sleeved gown, cleavage is showing. School dress codes and fashion trends have never seen eye to eye, but the burden of this issue is always on the female students.  Wouldn’t it be great if school administrators could stop being the fashion police and get back to the business of educating?

I am a fan of uniforms for this very reason. Between the ridiculously overpriced preppy clothes that are so popular in the south, the attempting to dress for the temperature, also a Southern issue, and the constant uncertainty of what is or isn’t permissible, uniforms would pretty much solve all of those problems. I don’t understand why more parents don’t see it as a pretty easy solution.
That isn’t the only double standard that has me all riled up right now.

While young girls face all that pressure to look or dress a certain way, they have no end to the burden of maintaining an unrealistic and usually unattainable physical appearance. Women face an enormous amount of pressure to preserve their youthful look but men are allowed to age gracefully. I can name a handful of men that are still considered sexy despite their advanced age, wrinkled faces, and graying hair. I can only think of one woman with gray hair, Jamie Lee Curtis, and all she is fit to do is sell yogurt that helps you shit.

Men have somehow managed to turn bald heads into something so desirable that even men with hair want to shave their heads. I will never understand why anyone with a perfectly good head of hair would prefer to shear it off in the name of fashion, but it appears to be a trend that is here to stay.  Just a reminder, men, enjoy it while you have it. Chances are good that one day you won’t have it to cut off.
What’s your opinion of the hipster beard? I have to admit, I find them fascinating, but at the same time, how fucking unfair is that? I have been shaving my legs and armpits for over thirty years now, and for at least the last decade and a half, I have felt like I had to reduce the amount of hair in the basement because even pubic hair has been subjected to social pressure. Meanwhile, men have even less to do to maintain any sense of good hygiene. They can let both their face and crotch hair grow out to caveman proportions, and everybody is super cool with it.

The epitome of the double standard is something called dad bod. Dad bod is what a guy looks like when he drinks all the beer and eats all the bacon cheeseburgers he wants, leaving him with a borderline barrel gut and noodly thin arms from not lifting anything heavier than he can fit in his mouth. You know, like your dad. It isn’t a repulsive form, it’s just a normal body, maybe a little pudgy in the middle, maybe a little touch of gynomastia, not enough to make people cringe, but enough to say, hey, I don’t need to look like I do Cross Fit. I am comfortable in my body.
Name me one woman you know who is comfortable in her body, ever.

Men have reached a point where they have totally given up. They can be bald, hairy, flabby, gray, wrinkled, whatever, and they somehow make it not just acceptable but hip.  Women, on the other hand, are having Brazilian waxes and labial rejuvenation surgery because even their pussies can’t look old.
Why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that baby vaginas are in and have been for a while? Anyone else creeped out about that?

I would say it’s time to embrace the mom bod, but I too have been conditioned to think that mom bods are better not seen by the naked eye. I don’t want to gawk at another woman’s lumpy cellulite and stretch marks and wrinkles and sagging breasts any more than I want to look at my own. Blech. Droopy knee skin. Bat wing upper arms. Turkey necks. So many ways to self loathe. Are women going to be able to start growing out their upper lips and those three wiry chin hairs? If men can be lumbersexuals with questionable hygiene and dad bods, can we trend #lunchladylook?
In an ideal world, we would stop judging others and ourselves by our outer layer. We would go back to considering intellect, compassion, ingenuity, hard work, creativity, friendship, humor, empathy, and caring as the things that are important, the things that matter.  Kim Kardashian’s or Nicki Minaj’s butt wouldn’t be more important than ending world hunger or saving the whales. Girls at school would be more concerned with being top of the class and less concerned with who has the straightest, blondest hair. 

We have our priorities all fucking wrong, which is why a girl is excluded from learning because she wore the wrong pants to school. It’s also why a woman who grew another human inside her body feels like she needs to surgically remove her loose skin before she can wear a bikini, or why a post-menopausal woman feels she needs to continue having a moist vagina to compete with her husband’s Cialis prescription. We forgot how to value what makes a woman amazing at every age, and it has very little to do with how she looks.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

What's My Motivation?


Sometimes going to the gym is torture. It is all you can do to make it through your workout, and you barely feel better for having gone. Other times, it is perfection. I don’t know what makes a perfect day for you, but for me, it’s the total experience. It isn’t just the work out or the motivation or achieving the optimal level of endorphins. It is more about getting your fitness on while being totally entertained, exercising with so many good distractions that the time flies by, that you don’t even realize you were working out.
Last Saturday was that day.

I went to spin class at an earlier time than I usually do, and I had an instructor that honestly is not my favorite. He has been teaching the early Saturday class for over ten years, and other than an occasional change in music, he hasn’t really mixed up that workout in over a decade. He speaks in a monotone voice for fifty-nine and a half of the sixty minutes of class, and only a handful of his words are clear enough to be understood. The rest of them are garbled like an airline pilot’s.

He likes to sprinkle his commentary with motivational things like “this is you” and “this is what you can do.” After hearing him say that for ten years, it’s more depressing than inspiring. I imagine him saying it in the form of a question, “this is you?” or “this is all you can do?” The rest of the time, I pretend he is making comments about our altitude or how long the flight will be or when it is safe to take off our seatbelts and move about the cabin freely. He takes a break in the narration every so often to exhale loudly into his microphone.
He also uses his words to paint a little picture to distract us from the fact that we are in a smelly dark dirty spin room. Normally his imagery revolves around climbing a mountain on a last leg of an intense bike race, where we try to fool the riders in the front to think we have lost our mojo until we barrel past them with a burst of energy no one expected from us.

Saturday, he took it old school. We were steam engines. We were shoveling coal, chugging along the tracks, and releasing hot clouds of sooty smoke into the air, until suddenly, we transformed back into racing, sprinting hard core cyclists. I was so confused. Am I the little train that could or Lance Armstrong? How relevant is a steam engine to today’s workout? Is it too soon to use train imagery following the latest Amtrak tragedy? I recall at one point thinking, wait a minute, I’m winning a bike race? What happened to my coal shoveling?
It was awesome.

During the cool down, he recapped whatever the fuck he talked about for the whole class, with our levels three, four, and five, our switchbacks, our hammering, our patting ourselves on the back, all while mopping the sweat from his face and his laminated workout cheat sheet he parks on his handlebars.
As fascinating and distracting as his teaching style is, it doesn’t even compare to some of the spin class regulars. There was the German man who sits near the door, the one who looks remarkably like Robin Williams.  I love when he is there. He wears a mock turtleneck shirt in that spandex wicking material which accentuates his aging man breasts and brings a gym bag that is more like an old-fashioned salesman sample case, square and bulky. He unloads three large water bottles and balances them on the water cage of his bike, because he takes his hydration very seriously for an hour class. Then he puts on a head covering made from the same material as his shirt, which I believe it is referred to as a “do-rag.” Halfway through class, he takes off his long sleeved mock turtleneck fitness shirt to reveal another mock turtleneck shirt made out of the same material, only with short sleeves. I never see that part coming.

About forty minutes into class, German Robin Williams takes off his do rag and swabs his balding skull with a hand towel provided by the gym. Then he holds the do rag in his fist and squeezes all of his sweat into one of those complimentary hand towels before putting it back on his head. It is a whole process, and he does it every time.
It was also awesome.

Who showed up next but the weird woman who loves exercising. She doesn’t just love to exercise, she LOVES to exercise. She came in halfway through spin class, hair long and flowing, big smile on her face. She saddled up on her bike, and after a brief warm up, which I think for her might be foreplay, she was ripe and ready to go. She began to make those whoop sounds. She closed her eyes and felt the music. She bounced on her bike. Chances are better than not that she was experiencing multiple orgasms. Some people might think she is extremely enthusiastic. They are wrong.
It isn’t just awesome, it is also an uncomfortable sight to see, and you don’t even need internet access or verification that you aren’t a minor.

After spinning with the airline pilot, the German sweater, and the spinner who gets off in public places, I cooled down by walking a few laps on the track. In the work out area was a man doing the most awkward squats ever. He squeezed his eyes and knees shut and sat back like he was going to fall in a toilet. I have no doubt he was at the very least holding in a fart, but based on his facial expression, he might have been holding in more or failed to do so. His form was terrible either way.

Next I walked past the man who wasn’t just balancing on an inflatable fitness ball, he was actually humping it. I have never seen anyone else violate one of those balls like that, but it seemed to be working for him.
Awesomeness.

As I completed my last lap, the creepy old guy who wears long camo pants, Birkenstocks, sunglasses, and a really unfortunate wig came in to “work out.” Usually his work out consists of walking around the gym, scouting out any prospects. Sometimes he parks himself on the abductor machine so he can scan the entire square footage while demonstrating his inner thigh flexibility. He apparently doesn’t let his seventy plus years stop him from using the gym as his own personal Tinder because he can’t use apps on his jitterbug phone.
In a word, awesome.

A perfect gym day like that may only come once in a lifetime, but the chance that it might happen again is what gets me there every day.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Never Gonna Give You Up

My cat may have Stockholm syndrome.

To the casual observer, he might seem well adjusted and happy living with my family. But the more I really think about it, the more I believe he is trying to survive a life of captivity, one from which he may never be free.

Granted, life is a precious gift for my dear Moshe. He was a foundling on the doorstep at the vet’s office, delivered to them in a small shoe box, holes punched in the sides, duct taped to trap him inside.  He came to live with us soon after his abandonment, and while he was understandably skittish at first, he never really outgrew that constant level of fear.  You can see that fear in his eyes, constantly bulging and darting around, like he may flee at any moment. Plus, he has some serious trust issues.

 
Moshe is now seven. He has been confined inside my house for seven years. He leaves only for check-ups at the vet’s office, which means he is even more frightened to leave the house than he is being trapped inside. Better the devil you know, I suppose.  

Sometimes we just manage his health without actually taking him for an exam, like when he threw up repeatedly last week in an effort to purge a hairball or disagreeable insect he ingested.  That episode involved me yelling at him, tossing him out of my bedroom, and eventually rubbing a thick and smelly paste on his arm, one that he was forced to remove by licking it off. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, if he could swallow pills.
Most of the time, he is free to roam the interior of the house as he wishes. Usually, he takes advantage of that freedom to hide. He likes to hide under beds, in closets, and when he was younger and thinner, inside the furniture through a secret tunnel in the lining under the couch.  In fact, when he was a kitten and began perfecting his disappearing act, we thwarted his efforts by having the first knuckle of each toe removed. If that isn’t torture, I don’t know what is.

I am now convinced all that hiding is in an effort to get a moment’s respite from us, his captors. Usually when he hides, he sleeps. He is probably exhausted from trying to anticipate when the next random torture session will occur. He has to be ever vigilant, constantly seeking out new and more secretive hiding places.
No matter how well he hides, we can find him, and when we do, we don’t leave him alone. We pick him up. We carry him around. He force him to sit on our laps, sometimes holding him still until he gives up the fight and purrs softly and deceptively, waiting for us to loosen our grip on him so he can dash off to safety.

Our endless assaults on him happen at all hours of the day. He has no peace. Sometimes we make him play patty cake. Sometimes we hold him draped across our arms like a baby. All the while, we shove our phones in his face and snap pictures of him against his will. It is not unlike what happened in Abu Ghraib, only without the car batteries. He even has a series of humiliating outfits he must endure, a shark fin, a Halloween dinosaur head piece, a sailor’s collar, even a fake neck tie. The torment never ceases.
He is unable to read or write, so he is limited in his ability to articulate what his internment means to him. Mostly, he chews off the handles of the shopping bags. It is his form of civil disobedience. He is also partial to certain types of shoelaces. And pissing on the floor, just outside of the litter box, so that it looks like an accident. Take that, my jailers, he must think to himself. He also likes to rub his face on every available surface, marking them with a cat’s version of invisible ink. I was here, it says. My life matters.

I want to be perfectly clear: I love this cat, my Moshe. I am his number one fan.  In turn, he has either developed his own version of love for me, or he is the best damn cat actor since Morris.  We have a certain understanding. I know that whenever I feel the need for feline company, I can force him to cooperate with my snuggles. He knows that despite being fed the same bland food pellets day in and out, he can count on me providing them. He knows if he behaves, he might even get a special kind of pellet in the mornings as well as the regular ones that he has to eat out of a bowl on the floor, a bowl he shares with another abducted victim who has been trapped in the house for even longer, eleven years.

It seems that in addition to maybe loving me, he definitely loves his food.  There is never a time that the crinkling of a foil lined package fails to rouse him from the most secluded spot.  He can detect the opening of the deli meat drawer from the deepest sleep. In short, Moshe eats his feelings.
I can’t tell if I should feel badly for my victim. He is one in a series of such captives I have had over the course of my life, and chances are pretty good he won’t be the last. I doubt I’m the first abductor who feels the love I have outweighs the life of misery and fear I’ve caused.  I don’t know if this “relationship” is healthy for either one of us, but I do know that I just can’t quit him. All I have to do is look into his wide, vacant eyes, and I am a captive of his little soul, if he has one.