Run for Your Life

Last summer, my older daughter E began training for the high school cross country team.  It didn’t really involve me much, so I didn’t mind. I didn’t have to drive her often, and since the season had not officially commenced, I didn’t have to sit through races or relays or meets or whatever it's called when cross country teams compete against each other.  She carpooled most mornings with a generous mom in the neighborhood who liked to get her morning run in while the team ran their designated course or did their conditioning, which mostly involved lots of crunches and planks on old beach towels in the parking lot. The park did feature a sexual deviant who hung out in his car and watched until some vigilant parents alerted the authorities, but he never really interacted with any of the kids. All in all, it was a good season, and E enjoyed it enough to go for another year.

This summer, E hasn’t really gotten into the team spirit. We spent much of the summer traveling, which put a real damper on the training and conditioning. She packed her running shoes for our trip to London and Paris, but she really didn’t have time to use them. Running in another country isn’t the kind of thing you do as a novice runner or a novice traveler, and she was both. Her running shoes sat unused for the whole trip.

We went to the beach soon after, and again, she wasn’t much in the mood for training. The beach has all that humidity, even in the wee hours of dawn, and you have to be a pretty devoted runner to get up before sunrise to get moving before the temperature surpasses the humidity level.  Add to that her fifteen years, her general ennui, her love of sleeping in, and yeah, ain’t nobody got time for that. We did have plenty of time for croissants and pastries overseas and hush puppies and ice cream at the beach. E is a trooper though, and she came home and cold turkeyed most of that at the same time she started running at least three mornings a week.

Seriously, the struggle is real.

Her cross country season doesn’t start until the school year begins, but the coach encourages the team to condition all summer long. Since we’ve been back in town, E has been getting up and out of the house before seven to meet her fellow team members at the park across from the high school. The good news is the park is as sketchy as ever.

How sketchy? Well, let’s see. Last summer, as I mentioned, there was the constant presence of the pedophile in the parking lot. During the school year, the team would meet there and run after school, where they were joined in the park by the pot heads who would get high and harass them. The coach would encourage the burnouts to leave, but he never called the police. Honestly, what was he going to do, call it in every afternoon? At some point, he needed to do the business of coaching. It’s the kind of park where you expect to see broken glass and cigarette butts in the sand box and used condoms on the asphalt. It’s a real community park, open to everyone.

This summer has upped the ante. Last weekend, a gunshot victim was found in the park. I can’t say for sure if he was murdered there or just dumped, but regardless, a lifeless body was found with some exit wounds and no breathing. This is not the kind of thing a mom wants to hear.

I waited for some communique from the coach, an email or text or something to address this little piece of  bad news, something to reassure us parents that our children would be safe, that he took their welfare seriously, that their well-being mattered to him as much as their pace.

I am still waiting for that, by the way. I didn’t contact him myself because, let’s get real, I have a fifteen year old daughter who can barely function from all the mortifying humiliation I cause her. She begged me not to say anything, pointing out that the dead body had already been collected by the coroner and, therefore, the park had returned to the status quo. So I did nothing, waiting instead for E to let me know all was well.

I played twenty questions with her that first morning practice after the alleged murder. No, there was no yellow caution tape in the park. Yes, there was a clean-up crew pressure-washing the area of discovery.  No, there was no white chalk outline. Yes, there were still some mystery stains. No, the coach wasn’t there. Yes, the team captains were instructed to warn the kids about running alone. 

E also let me know there was a new sexual predator hanging around the parking lot, although she wasn’t sure if he was interested in the cross country high school team or the little league baseball team. She also reported that someone dug a hole in the back of the park and filled it up with dirty diapers, the stench of which almost made her puke.

For all you parents who have kids on other teams, take a moment to appreciate what you have. The kids who show up in the heat to play football on the practice field. The girls hitting the volleyball court hard. The basketball games in countless gyms. Those kids all do their sportsing in a designated sporting area, the school gym, the fields near it, the swimming pool. Not so the cross country runners, who like the big mammals of the ocean, need space and miles to do what they do best. These are as close to free range children as there are anymore, and for good reason.

I have to tell you, we live in a nice area of town. I shouldn’t have to worry about homicide, sexual assault, or illegal diaper dumping when I send her off to practice her team sport. I don’t want to discourage my child from participating, so I try to disguise my fears with some advice. You don’t have to be the fastest runner on your team, I tell her, just faster than the kid next to you.

A Jolly Good First Day

Have you ever taken a red eye flight? It seems like a good idea, traveling during your sleeping hours, very efficient really, unless you want to function the next day when you arrive at your destination. Shitty sleep upright in a tiny seat in a tube traveling through the air really isn’t the best way to get rest. But who cares, because you are going on a trip, or something like that.

We flew the red eye to London, which in addition to being a seven hour flight, is also five time zones ahead of us. I don’t much care for flying, which meant that in addition to a seven hour flight and a five time zone adjustment, I also was floating on a nice cloud of Xanax washed down with a bottle of cheap red wine. If you asked me what happened between our landing after eleven in the morning and dinner that night, I would have some significant difficulty piecing it all together. Let’s just see how much I can remember.

Here’s something that’s a little different: European time is a twenty-four hour clock. While we count to twelve and then repeat, those clever Europeans go from one to twenty-four. And yes, midnight is actually 00:00. For vacationing Americans, it adds a level of math to an otherwise fun vacation. I wonder if they have numbers on their watches with faces or if they went military digital.

If telling time wasn’t enough of a challenge, then why not throw in the whole money thing. We are fond of our dollars and cents here at home. In England, it’s pounds and pence, and the queen is on all of it. And coins, Lord, the coins. We never could figure out how much anything was worth, and my husband has a doctorate. Luckily, most everyone takes credit cards (with microchips, so plan accordingly) but there are times when cash was a necessity, and those times made us all feel like ignorant kindergarteners. I wanted a worksheet to color in or a play register or something just to practice.

We spent a crazy amount of time at the airport, just trying to orient ourselves.  We stood for what felt like an hour in the customs line and then stood in another line to exchange money at what had to be a pretty shitty rate. After that, we stopped at what looked like an independent coffee house, only to find out that it was a chain, before we lamented how much better the chains are anywhere but home.

My husband got in line to buy tube tickets and ask out how to get to Kensington while the girls and I protected our pile of luggage from potential pickpockets and thieves. All that took another hour before we figured out what the hell we were doing. Seriously, we spent almost as much time at the airport as we did flying there across the ocean.

We emerged from the tube station with our rolling suitcases in tow, orienting ourselves not only to the direction of our hotel but also the driving. You don’t look to the left before crossing, you look to the right. If you can’t remember, just look down, as it is written on every crosswalk. Is that just for non-British visitors, or do even the Londoners have trouble remembering which way to look before crossing the road?

While walking to our hotel, we passed the most amazing assortment of high end cars along the way. Bentleys, Maseratis, Lamborghinis, Ferrari, Aston Martins. I might see one of those every now and again at home, but this was literally every car on the street. BMWs and Mercedes in London are like Hondas and Toyotas at home, practical and affordable. Is everyone in London this rich, or is it a Kensington thing? The parallel parking spaces lined both sides of the street and even had handicapped spaces, labeled clearly on the road as “disabled.” Those Brits don’t need some cute little blue wheelchair symbol; the word disabled is bloody fine for them.

After checking in and dragging our luggage upstairs, we freshened up and headed to the Museum of Natural History. Every step reminded me we weren’t in the US anymore. The sidewalks were old. The buildings were old, each older than the one next to it. Even the signature red phone booths were old. When was the last time you saw a pay phone in America? I didn’t step inside to see if they actually had functioning phones because I didn’t want also want to find out if the booth smelled like urine.

The Museum of Natural History was not like the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian is like it, really like every museum we went to in London and Paris, only with a much smaller collection. These buildings and their contents reek of history. They are positively infested with it.

We and a few other lollygaggers were forced from the museum promptly at 17:50. You do the math, and then stop trying to make sense of it. We staggered out to the street, trying to decide what to do next. The museums were closed, we weren’t hungry, and we didn’t know where to go, so we started walking over the uneven stones of the sidewalk. We had a few moments of feeling unsafe, but that was more due to our American paranoia than any actual threat. We walked and walked, and then we looked up at nirvana, only it’s called Harrods.

Have you ever been to Harrods? It’s a department store that dates back to the 1800’s and a must-see for anyone who likes shopping and eating and people watching and creating generalizations about other ethnic groups. I only say that because the only people there besides other American tourists were Saudi Arabian shoppers, and the Saudis were ready to throw down some serious poundage. We minced from department to department, trying to not touch anything worth more than our plane tickets or stumble and God forbid break something that would cost our daughters a year in college, while all around us, wealthy, swarthy Arabic men and their insanely gorgeous and overly covered ladies who walked several steps behind them were catered to in the watch and shoe and other designer sections. Both my feet and my overactive imagination just wanted to sit down and take it all in.

We took a detour to the Diana and Dodi Memorial on the lower level. I wanted to get a picture, but the pilgrimage line was too long for me to snap a quick one. Instead, I stood behind more Saudi shoppers and tried to explain to my teenage daughters who Diana and Dodi were and why they are remembered in a department store with a cheesy statue and glamour shots. It took just enough time before it was my time to capture the moment.

My children wanted to stop by the toy department, ogling over toys they would have wanted if they were younger or those like the ones they had, only with cooler, British names. We all were a little sad that we had no reason to buy anything, no more tank engines or woodland creature families dressed in gingham.

We consoled ourselves in the great food hall. We were too late for the true Harrods ice cream experience, but we improved our moods by walking past the displays of fruits and vegetables, pungent cheeses and smoky charcuterie, seafood and sushi and meat pies and oh, the pastries and breads. It was overwhelming, really, and we hadn’t had dinner, and in our heads it was either mid-afternoon or a day later. We were trying to make a decision about what to eat, which as a family is not our strong suit, when the bakers began condensing their display before closing time. We decided to get not quite but close to one of each, over twenty pounds’ worth of flaky pastry creations.

We limped back to our hotel room and ate them all standing over our bed, flakes raining down on the covers. Our first day of London was everything travel should be, confusing and delightful and informative and overwhelming and amusing and just, just amazing.

Up, Up, and Away

Remember when air travel used to be pleasant? Yeah, me neither.

My sisters and I flew quite a bit when we were kids because our parents were divorced and didn’t live within driving distance of each other. We were three bored and poorly supervised girls on a plane, and no amount of free playing cards and wing pins would keep us quiet. When the magic ink pen word search and connect-the-dot books lost their thrill, we would occupy ourselves with making sculptures out of our untouched microwaved “chicken” and “potatoes” or sticking sanitary napkins in the sick bags. It would kill an hour and a half, and then we would be either with our father or back at home, none worse for the wear.

Air travel today isn’t the Norman Rockwell painting that it was for us back in the 70’s and 80’s. Now, you have to get to the airport two hours early. You have to fret over your suitcase’s weight more than your own. You have to hope the over used and under serviced self-check-in kiosks function. You have to partially disrobe based on the whims of your jaded TSA agent. Sometimes it’s your shoes, sometimes your jacket, sometimes your belt, none of it consistent. You are subjected to the caste system implications of by-zone seating, after you have already experienced watching the wealthier and more frequent travelers taking advantage of the fast-pass system of security clearance.

If you are lucky enough to board and have room to stow your carry-on in the overhead bin and not under the seat in front of you, you then sit and wait. Is today the day the plane leaves on time? Is your flight lucky enough to not have mechanical difficulties?  Is there a storm brewing in the opposite corner of the country that somehow is causing delays in your faraway and poorly connected part of the continent? Did you flight crew show up? Are they rested and sober?

If all the stars are aligned and the gods are smiling on you, you might just take off on time, which is also not really a fair description of departure and arrivals. In case you never noticed, airlines pad their flight time to avoid costly fines due to too many delays. So your flight that looks like it’s two hours really only takes an hour and a half. Sometimes you arrive twenty minutes early, or so you think. Win-win, right?

We used to pay for the convenience of air travel, and it was a comfortable and pleasant experience. Now, it isn’t any of those.

When my family and I travelled to London and Paris, we got the best and worst of both worlds. We tried to save a buck or two on flying to London and back home from Paris, which meant we had two stops in each direction. It saved us almost a thousand dollars on airfare, but you get what you pay for, amiright?

We left our home town and flew to Washington, D.C., and luckily, it was uneventful. We checked in and passed security in plenty of time to sit and wait for our zone to board last. I popped half a Xanax and don’t really remember much of that flight.  After a quick connection and another half a Xanax for me, we landed in Ottawa, Canada. We were in another country. You might say it doesn’t count, but my passport stamp disagrees with you.

Immediately, we knew we weren’t in the U. S. The border agents were polite, and the rest of the airport staff was extremely friendly. Seriously, those airport Canadians could give us Southerners a run for our money.  In fact, one lady we spoke to at the information desk asked us where we were from, and when we told her South Carolina, she told us she always wanted to visit our state.

“Really?!?” we said in unison.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s warm there.”

We charged our electronic devices and tried to find dinner somewhere other than a Tim Horton’s, which seemed to me a Canadian Arby’s and thus still not anything I wanted to eat.  After waiting for a thunderstorm to pass (who knew they had lightning in Canada?), we boarded our first international flight to London.

I expected the plane to be bigger.  I also didn’t expect the sleeping pods of first class to be so amazing, but they sure looked like they were as we walked past them to get to our economy seats. We did have video screens in the back of the head rests, and each of us had a complimentary pillow and blanket waiting in our seats, so it wasn’t too shabby. We all settled in and waited for take-off, which I am pleased to report was uneventful.

Immediately, we were served a full dinner at almost eleven at night. My fifteen year old daughter was next to me and also high on Xanax, as she seems to have inherited my fear of flying. When the flight attendant stopped at our row, he offered us food trays and then a choice of red or white wine. My daughter didn’t know what to say, and started mumbling about how she was fifteen and didn’t know what she was supposed to do and didn’t think she was old enough to drink, you know, playing it cool, but he interrupted her again. “Red. Or. White.” It wasn’t so much a question as an order.

“White,” she meekly responded.

And thus my daughter was served her first alcohol, which is a fabulous way to wash down that Xanax she took, as she sat next to the Parent of the Year, also high, with a bottle of red wine on my tray.

I don’t really remember much after that. At some point, they collected the trays and dimmed the lights. At some later point, they turned up the lights and forced a moist package of banana bread on each of us. And then, there we were, Heathrow airport in London.  The return flight from Paris? Well, that, my friends, is a story for another day.

My point is, if you have to fly, fly first class or overseas or both. If not, take a Xanax. Don’t be scared to wash it down with a little bottle of wine. If a fifteen year old can do it, so can you.

What I Did for My Summer Vacation

I travelled.

This wasn’t my usual trip to Atlanta to see my sisters or five hour drive to the beach or even the more rare flight to Orlando to see the Mouse.

My family and I, much like the Griswolds, took a European vacation. We spent four nights in London and five, with an unplanned sixth night, in Paris. We flew from our town to Washington to Ottawa to London. According to our passports, Ottawa counts as having been in Canada, which means we had our first practice run on going through customs and changing flights in another country. In between London and Paris, we took the Eurostar through the Chunnel. We had an extra night in Paris, well, a hotel near the airport, which in itself was an additional adventure. Then we came home and our lives are forever changed.

You know a vacation is good when you take days not just to recover, but to process. To think about all the things you did and saw and ate. To consider how life is different but the same. To be glad to have the things you missed but to lament the things you don’t have that you experienced.  

My main regret is that I forgot to pack a notebook or journal. I know I am going to forget something, some thought or opinion or observation that thanks to my forty five year old brain will be lost in there forever.  As I continue to reflect on my trip, I have been increasingly unsure how to write about it. Do I write a chronological detail of every day, of every museum and meal, hoping that by retracing my steps mentally, I will recall all the thoughts and feelings I had at the time? Do I concentrate on anecdotes, telling a snippet of here and there, in no particular order other than how I remember them? Do I ponder the ways in which the little bit of life abroad I experienced compares and contrasts to my own typical days here in the Southern United States? So many options, so many possibilities, so many ways to tell my two week story that may have possibly changed my life and the lives of my children.

I am asking you to weigh in. I don’t tell my stories in a vacuum. I share them with you, when you stop by for a little visit. The truth is I have a lot to tell, and in my head, it’s all fucking fantastic and interesting. At the end of the day, however, isn’t this the modern version of having you all over for dinner and then forcing you to sit through the slide show of my vacation? I already did that on Facebook, by the way. I attempted a daily post or two of the things that captured my attention, sharing small observations along the way. It’s not the same thing as painting those pictures with words.

So, if you care to comment, tell me what you would find more interesting. Do you mind sitting through the “we did this Monday and we saw that Wednesday?” Or would you prefer a more all over the place approach, like what makes our toilets so different or who knew that was what yogurt could taste like? Granted, you are going to get a whole lot of B with your A, so keep that in mind.

And please stick around, because I am pretty sure in the story telling, I will have something for everyone, even if all of it is really for me.

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.

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.

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.