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Another week in Baltimore! I straightened my hair for the occasion. When my mom saw me, the first thing she said was, "Why is your hair flat?"
My brother Bryan came in from New Zealand with his wife Nancy and 21-month old daughter Abby. Ultimately, they flew to Madison, WI for Christmas with Nancy's family, but they arranged to spend some time in Baltimore first. I hadn't seen them since May (their last trip to Baltimore), before Abby could talk. Now she calls me "Zora". And she has a Kiwi accent, which must have come from daycare, because both her parents are American. AND, unlike the rest of the family, Abby has curly hair, like mine. When she gets older, I can be her spiritual hair advisor (e.g. anti-frizz curl-defining hair products and anti-Bette hair straightening techniques that work).
When I got into town, we had another Thanksgiving meal, complete with mushroom stuffing, because the NZ contingent missed out on the calendarly correct one. Again, it was fabulous. Then, over leftovers the next day, we discussed things that intellectuals discuss, such as "gym nakedness protocol". My parents go to a gym, but not together; they have slightly different exercise regimens. My mom lines up at the front door and waits for it to open at 5:30am so that she can do 30 minutes of cardio, then some weights, then 30 minutes of cardio before work. My dad does a lot of hanging out, which is understandable, because it's the fanciest gym in the universe. You know, super clean, all the newest cardio machines complete with built-in DVD player and cable TV, no rust on the spin bikes (I actually went to a spin class. So that's how a spin bike is supposed to work! The ride was so creamy smooth, I didn't even realize I was at threshold the whole time. But the phrase "this is a Johnny G. technique" was actually uttered, which was a little scary.), several Internet stations, smoothie bar...blah blah blah. My favorite part of the gym is the women's steam room. It's all sparkling white, smells of eucalyptus, and few people use it. I mentioned this during our Day-After-Thanksgiving#2 meal, and Bryan asked, "Do you go in naked?" As I said "yes", I realized that I've never seen anyone else in there naked. But at my gym, most women use the sauna naked (we don't have a steam room). Plus, what's the point of a steam room, if half of your skin never gets the benefit? Apparently, most of the men go into theirs naked. Bryan's scared to go in. My dad wears shorts.
Intellectual/cultural pursuits continued the next evening, when I went downtown to see the Monument Piano Trio at An Die Musik with my parents. My mom lined up early (do you see a trend here?), so she snagged a couple of front row seats when the door opened. At intermission, mom dashed out to the lobby so that she could line up early at the bathrooms. I slowly made my way to the lobby, and she was still waiting, first in line, with a guy behind her, wondering aloud what could be taking so long. The guy behind her asked, "Are you sure there's someone in there?" So she tried the door again. Oops. It was empty the whole time. I guess she's just used to waiting....
One of the pieces they played was E.W. Korngold's opus #1, which he wrote in the early 1900s at the ripe old age of thirteen (!!). I think I still had a sticker collection at thirteen. I'd have felt better if the sheet music had been written with crayon, but I was close enough to see it, and it wasn't. Maybe it was transposed from crayon.
Well, I may not have written a concerto, but on the not unpleasant Christmas day flight back to Oakland, I did something that I'm sure anyone would agree is fairly comparable: I totally reprogrammed my HR monitor with all new workouts! It took 2 hours (I accidentally re-set it after the first hour, erasing all my work). I now have to burn at least 75% of my 9 hour/5800 calorie weekly goal to earn the flashing trophy every Monday. I know what you're thinking: Where can I get a watch that'll get me to work out for 9 hours a week, just so that my watch will flash a trophy for me every Monday?!?! Polar, baby. Polar. It's the wave of the future.
After 2 hours spent fiddling with my watch, I started my new book: Everything is Illuminated. I've been meaning to see the movie, and this guy that I might sortof have a crush on told me at a party that the book was even better. So far, so good. One passage in particular made me laugh out loud on the plane. Next on my reading list is some of David Foster Wallace's fiction. From the way Bryan describes his work, it seems like his writing style might be similar to that of Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). But Bryan says DFW has more soul. If his initials were DSW (as in, "Designer Shoe Warehouse"), you could say that his work had "sole". I kept forgetting his name, so I used that as a mnemonic device.
I didn't mention that in between Thanksgiving#2meal and Day-After-Thanksgiving#2 meal, I got a massage from Amy, my oldest friend in the universe. She's a massage therapist by trade, and she'd never actually given me a massage. At Thanksgiving, she offered to drive in from Virginia again on my next trip, specifically to give me a massage at her mom Rosalie's (Rosalie lives in Baltimore, also does massage, and has a table). How sweet is that?! Bonus: she brought my 3-year old cousin-nephew Carter (she'd wanted him to call me Aunt Laura, and I thought that sounded old, so I asked to be called Cousin Laura, so we compromised, and now the kid is thoroughly confused). We jumped on the bed together before my massage. It was tres fun. I also told him all about my pet polar bear, to entice him to visit me.
Does anyone know where I can get a pet polar bear?
I was told the other night that my blog posts can be somewhat incoherent*. Not in those exact words, but that was the basic gist.
*"lacking normal clarity or intelligibility in speech or thought" - Merriam-Webster Online
Well, I just came up with one word to describe the nature of my writing, when the original message was conveyed with several. Hah!
While we're not on the subject, I'd like to take this opportunity to say, once and for all, that it doesn't take an intellectual to be good at Scrabble. You don't have to know what the words mean, you just have to know how to spell them. And everyone knows that Scrabble is generally won or lost on 3-letter words and 2-letter words.
Ergo: asking the woman sitting in front of you at the movies what the end of "No Country for Old Men" meant, just because you noticed that she was playing Scrabble on her phone before the movie started, is not necessarily going to get you any closer to truth. It would have been different, had she been spotted reading a book entitled, say, Film and Allegory, or maybe What the End of "No Country for Old Men" Means. But who has time for books, when you're busy spelling out "ewe" on your phone?!
UPDATE: While we're not on another subject, Steve just sent me this photo that he took of me with my mom and dad over Thanksgiving. I had to cut my dad out of the photo because he was making a funny face. HAL!
I was trying to decide what to do tonight:
POO ride?
Spin.
POO ride?
Spin.
The expected overnight low: 34 degrees. I chose spin. Anyway, I just felt like going to spin tonight. Plus, I had been elected to pick up a DVD for my boss' birthday bash tomorrow (Flight of the Conchords, Season 1), which I could totally do on the way home from spin.
As I was getting ready to leave the locker room, Carly, the blind woman who spins, asked for help: one of her shoes had gone missing. Two of us emptied her bag (separately) and looked all over the locker room for it (I actually looked twice), and it wasn't there. I asked at the front desk, and it wasn't there. I borrowed the key from the front desk, went back up to the spin room, and it wasn't there. I looked in the lost and found, and it wasn't there. Meanwhile, it was getting later and later, and I was getting crankily hungry, and I had a DVD to buy. I had to leave. But I couldn't just leave her and her blind boyfriend to walk to the bus stop with inadequate foot protection! What if she stubbed her toe?! So I offered her a flip flop (not terribly protective, but better than nothing). She was not enthusiastic. I offered to drop them at the bus stop, and they agreed. Of course, as I led them to my car, I realized that my back seats were down for bike fitting purposes, so I fiddled with the back seat on the driver's side to create a seat for Boyfriend, who got in back. And when we got to the corner of San Pablo and Ashby, I was all, "what side of San Pablo Avenue" (really cranky now), and of course they didn't know how to explain it, but I figured it out. Then I was worried that a cop would show up (they'll ticket you in Berkeley for sitting at bus stops, and bus stop tickets are expensive). I could just see it: my two blind passengers hopping onto the bus as a cop pulls up behind me and rolls his eyes at the old "I was just trying to help a couple of blind people" excuse. Then I also realized that Boyfriend had to open the back door on the driver's side, in traffic, to get out. I'm all, "OK go now. Too late, don't go. OK, now. Too late..." It was ridiculous, so I got out of the car to help Boyfriend out. But I was like, "we have to hurry, I'm going to get a ticket." I must have sounded like a total bitch. So much for the good samaritan bit. After dropping them off, I made it to Borders, only to find out that they didn't have the DVD in stock (They never have anything in stock! Borders sucks!). So I grabbed a bite next door and moved on to Barnes and Noble down the street; there, I snagged the last copy in the store. Yay!
When I got home, I talked to Mel. She had just done the POO ride, after which she headed over to her boyfriend's place, and then managed to lock herself out of her boyfriend's apartment with her bike still inside. Her boyfriend's in China. Oops. She's going to try to key the lock before our Saturday ride. In an unrelated matter, I'm going to meet up with her in San Francisco for drinks tomorrow after work, but the person who'd originally set up the "girls' night out" thing won't be coming now: she and her husband were just out walking their dog when some other dog walker threw a ball, causing the other dog to (1) take off after it, (2) slide in some mud, and (3) accidentally take out this woman's husband! His knee is jacked and he's totally immobile, so she has to take care of him instead of coming out with us. Weird....
My current BFF has a job interview today. I wonder how it's going. I wonder if I should call him to remind him to turn his phone off. This idea could backfire, though, depending on the timing.
So if he gets the job, he'll be working in the East Bay. I work in the East Bay. And I live in the East Bay. How fun would that be?!?! But then the poor thing will be working as a real lawyer. So he'll be a bucket of stress, and he won't have time to hang out, because he'll be drafting some brief, or traveling for discovery/interrogatories, or doing whatever it is that those wacky lawyers do 120 hours/week. I don't know if I should want him to get that job. I bet my local Trader Joe's needs checkers though, because it just opened. The more I think about it, Trader Joe's just works better for me. I think he should work at Trader Joe's....
...it would behoove me to improve on my cornering skills. My HR monitor recorded an all-time (biking AND running) HR max on the POO ride tonight. I wasn't looking at my monitor at the time (poor vision/newbie bike handling abilities preclude such silliness), but I know exactly when it happened. I had just sprinted to catch the pack after slowing to round a corner, and just when I managed to grab the last person's wheel, I felt the strongest urge to hurl.
I'm also going to revisit the possibility of Lasik when I go to the optometrist next week. It would be so nice to be able to see stuff once in a while, when moving quickly, at night, 2 inches away from lots of other people who are also moving quickly, with only spandex between me and whatever. I've been told that I'm not a good Lasik candidate. Same for contacts. But maybe there have been developments? Hullo? My prescription glasses don't work well for cycling. Plus, glasses are such a pain. I broke a pair several few months ago, when I stepped on them (I didn't see them, because I didn't have my glasses on). None of the screws from the eyeglass repair kit would fit, so a co-worker patched them together for me with one of those tiny binder clips -- you know, the paper clips that resemble handbags for Barbie? I only wear this pair at home.
OK, I'm going to go sit on the nice warm floor (next to the couch) to watch TV for a spell before bed.
