The Writing Spider’s Guide to Gym Etiquette Wednesday, Oct 28 2009

I had seasonal flu a few weeks ago. Not the pigfluenza, just flu flu. I didn’t work out for two weeks. So this week I went to the gym for the first time since my hacking cough finally evaporated. Normally, I hit the YMCA first thing in the a.m. but Monday mornings are a bitch so I stopped in after work. There were eleventy skillion people in there and there was only one elliptical left so I snagged it. Quickly I realized WHY it was open – the asshat on the next machine was on the phone having a very loud conversation about all manner of inappropriate content. So I burned a few extra calories thinking of what I would say in my resulting blog post. For your consideration,  I submit my rules for the gym. And life, too. Applicable anywhere.

1. You are not THAT important. I know you’re a doctor – you said so about fifteen times – but a 45-minute conversation with your college buddy does not need to happen whilst you sweat your way through your workout. If I had been your wife – who was on the machine on the other side of you – I’d have given you an earful.

2. Topics that should not be discussed in public hearing range include your salary ($185,000 – you said it twice), anything that would suggest that you are, in fact, encouraging your college buddy to have an affair with a woman he dated at one point (and whose last name neither of you could remember), and the amount you pay your hired help. (SEE: #4)

3. Gym etiquette dictates that you use a machine no longer than 30 minutes. This is doubly true when there are no other machines left. This is quadruply true when you and your wife are on the only two machines of their kind in the whole gym which are never available because people keep taking their half-hour turns on them. Per your conversation about how long you’d been at the gym and on the machines, you had been on that machine FOR AN HOUR. GET OFF THE FRICKYFRACKING MACHINE.

4. Realize that you look like a giant schmuck if you boast of your $185,000 salary then spend 15 minutes with your wife trying to figure out how you’re going to pay a babysitter less than you quoted her. I understand as your wife pointed out, $15 is “for God’s sake, that’s more than the maids make at our office” but backing the babysitter into taking $10 instead of your originally quoted $12-$15 per hour is just cheap. And mean.

5. Your children’s names are ridiculous. I don’t know if you know this, but you are not, in fact, Lord and Lady of an English manor. I realize you can’t do much about this now that the kids are three and five, but why didn’t you just call them ‘Pretentious’ and ‘Snooty’?

6. I know the maids normally perform the menial tasks of cleaning your environment while you work out like a fiend but here at the good old YMCA, we do things ourselves. Please look into proper machine-cleaning procedure in the future. I suggest you and your wife take a class together.

7. Thank you both for not realizing that I know one of you. I might have known the other one but I’m not sure. When I figured it out, I spent the rest of the time you were there staring at a tv monitor in the opposite direction. I think the girl on the next machine thought I was being creepy. I was frankly horrified at what I overheard and having to pretend it was a pleasant surprise to see you would’ve been more than I can handle. So I suppose your narcissism came in handy for me there.

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Where the Wild Things Are: Movie Review Sunday, Oct 18 2009

Husband and I went to see Where The Wild Things Are last night. Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last year, you must know that this movie exists. I’m not a special fan of director Spike Jonez’ films. I liked Being John Malkovich but I didn’t see the film just because of him. I’m familiar with Wild Things co-writer David Eggers’. I’ve read some of Eggers’ work and I find it disconnecting; my reluctance to read or recommend his work is probably why I’ve never been published in McSweeney’s. However his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius seems to have informed the movie greatly. In Heartbreaking Work, Eggers describes raising his younger brother after the death of their parents. Talk about wild things…two males alone in a house.  The themes of growing up and the loneliness that accompanies it color both the book and Where the Wild Things Are.

I’ll say off the bat the movie isn’t for kids. Well, maybe it’s just not for all kids. If you’re looking for a strict interpretation of the book, you won’t find it here.  I did notice, however, that of many children between the ages of about four and eleven, only a few were fidgety or not paying attention. One woman took a trio of misbehavers out of the theater about halfway through. The rest seemed at least engaged in the film. I don’t have kids, but I think if your kid is particularly thinky or mature, he or she may get more out of the movie than just the activity of the costumed characters. On the other hand, one of the beauties of the film are the costumed wild things. I’m so glad to see a movement away from total reliance on CGI. The wild things’ faces were apparently animated but the bodies are so wonderfully real. It’s a wonderful film just to see.

It’s not a very “happy” movie. Max is a wild little kid – one of the reasons Husband cited for not caring for the movie is that he didn’t like Max. It’s true – Max is a brat. But I think that’s a hard age for kids who aren’t little kids anymore but not teenagers. (I hate the word ‘tween’.) I read once that middle school is actually more emotionally out of control than the teenaged years – your hormones are beginning to assert themselves and whatnot. I believe it. And I think Max represents that stage of life very well, that messy period of learning to control yourself emotionally and physically.

I, and my generation, grew up on Sendak’s books, and I think this is a movie for us, for people who have a special attachment to that book and maybe sort of remember what it meant to really believe you could sail away into a world of your own but still come back to your own little bed at the end of the adventure.

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BFFs…sorta Saturday, Oct 17 2009

I’ve been home from work all this week, sick with the flu. Maybe it was the pigfluenza, I don’t know. There’s just no point in going to the doctor unless you get worse, which I didn’t. I stayed home and nearly drove myself batty alone, but the real thing I’m thinking about now is friendships. I watched Bride Wars, a film starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway.

In BW, the main characters are lifelong friends who plan their weddings in June at the Plaza and end up with their big days scheduled on the same day. Nothing for it but to fight. Hilarity ensues. They make up in the end after destroying their respective weddings, and both marry and live happily ever after. The voiceover, by Candace Bergen, who also plays the sought-after wedding coordinator, says: “Sometimes in life there really are bonds formed that can never be broken. Sometimes you really can find that one person who will stand by you no matter what. Maybe you’ll find it in a spouse and celebrate it with your dream wedding, but there’s also the chance that the one person you can count on for a lifetime, the one person who knows you sometimes better than you know yourself is the same person who’s been standing beside you all along.”

My problem with this movie was not in the complete unrealism of it all (Seriously, Emma could not afford that wedding on her salary, I don’t care if she’d been saving for ten years. Sorry, I’m not buying  that. And come on, WHEN is the proposal scene in a movie going to include the engagement ring NOT QUITE fitting so the ring has to be SIZED?)

It’s not a problem I have, per se. But the depiction of friendship that got me thinking, as it came on the heels of a quick conversation with R, a friend of mine, about weddings being alienating. Women’s friendships are supposed to be eternal, loyal, and nearly unchanging, according to books and movies, I think. And I also think that’s not really accurate. The notion presented in the film, that a woman can find a lifelong relationship in a husband, is nothing new. We all know that story and I’m sure it’s been the death of many a happy marriage in the vain pursuit of it.  The idea of finding lifelong relationships with other women, as friends, is new. To me it is, anyway. I’m still hashing out how I feel about this and I suspect this piece will be a garbled mess by the end but stick with me, I have a point.

There are things nobody tells you about when you’re a kid. There are things that don’t quite get explained to satisfaction. Friendship is one of those things. (I think the other thing is that nobody tells you what a letdown your early- to mid-twenties are either, but that’s a story for another post.) The romantic idea that female friendship, like romantic love, should stand the tests of time are immortalized in books like Anne of Green Gables, or more recently, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. But do they? In real life, do female frienships stick around that long? Or are these some kind of fantasy ideal that are the exception rather than the rule?

There was a point after college that I realized that it was starting to get harder to make friends. I’m an introvert by nature (Yes. This is very true. You have no idea.) and I struggled for years with just making friends. I know, how hard can it be? When I finally got the hang of it, all the places where it was easy to make friends dried up. In school, you have ready-made reasons to hang out with people. You have class together, you live in the same dorm, you ride the bus together. It’s much more difficult to make adult friendships, I think. People are busy with families and such.

Also, people keep moving away. (Yes, I’m looking at you, people who left Louisville and/or Kentucky to take your awesomeness elsewhere and leave us bereft of coolness. You know who you are.) In the workplace, people mostly have their own friends outside work. Mostly.

By the time you’re in your mid-twenties if you haven’t found your lifelong BFF chances are…you won’t. Right? I don’t know! Nobody told me any of this!

And if you HAVE found your BFF, did somebody give you the guide to getting along into adulthood with friends you’ve known since you had a perm and listened to New Kids on the Block? You think you’re going to have the same friendship for fifty years and the truth is you’re not.

This is not a bad thing. I’m very glad I’m not the same person I was in high school, or college, or even in my early twenties. Maybe the key is to find friends with whom you can grow with, instead of apart from. Just like a spouse or partner.

In my aforementioned conversation with R, she mentioned letting a friendship go. If I look at my current friendships, I see waves where maybe we weren’t at our best (SEE: My early twenties and half of college. Hot mess.). In the great journey of our lives, people sometimes stop for a while at Asshat or Bitchface before they roll into Sublime or Fun-to-be-with. If you’re lucky, you’re not both laid over at Jerkhole at the same time. Maybe you lean away from each other for a while, only to happily discover she’s moved on to Hilarious or Confident. Maybe she stays too long in Whinerville and you go to  Content without her. The trick is knowing when to check in again and when to bid bon voyage.

If I had kids, I would tell them about this friendship thing. Maybe not until college because in grade school, people are pretty crazy and you just don’t understand how you could NOT be best friends with this person for THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. I would tell my kid that her friendships are going to move and change and that’s a good thing, even though sometimes it’s a sad thing because you liked being around them or you had a good time together and it’s hard to let friends go, consciously.

And in rereading this, I agree, it’s kind of a mess, but you know this is an informal blog so that’s all I got.

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Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right… Saturday, Oct 10 2009

I’m not a bad neighbor. I park where I’m supposed to park. My yard looks nice. I don’t have raucous parties.* I believe I must have racked up some raucous-neighbor karma in a past life. Perhaps I emptied my chamberpot too oft upon some poor sir’s head. Maybe I let my cows wander off my idyllic pastoral farm and consume the entirety of my neighbor’s bumper crop of alfalfa. Mayhap I parked my buggy on the wrong dusty patch.

This is why I am surrounded now.

Normally you’d find me whining about Thug Life, but frankly, and somewhat disappointingly, they’ve been pretty quiet all summer. Move over Thug Life, there’s a new sheriff in town.

Sorority Row** moved in last winter and we didn’t see much of them for months except for the results of their inept parking. Our end of the parking lot is quite narrow. We all have assigned spaces, two per condo unit. SR’s and their friends managed to park in the space between the parked cars – the space allotted for things like pulling your car out or in so you can PARK or GO SOMEWHERE. For the night our parking lot looked like the back fields of a Phish concert.

I’ve met the main Sister. She approached me on my way to get the mail early in the summer. She owns the condo and was absolutely appalled that nobody maintains her yard for her. And she couldn’t believe there was so much junk in the gutters. I mentioned that the grass was cut by the association…and that since we live surrounded by water maples with their biological whirligigs, we’re pretty much at the mercy of the winds, guttorially speaking. She sniffed and adjusted her enormous Gucci sunglasses with equally enormous Frito*** French mani nails. She’s an interior decorator and can’t be bothered to understand the complicated mechanisms by which people PLANT and MAINTAIN plants. I did offer to give her some cuttings of my flowers and things.

Aside from a few personal interactions with her, my opinion of her and her cadre stems from the following: overheard conversations from her patio which is about fifteen unobstructed feet from my bedroom balcony, her and her friends’ parking habits or lack thereof, the smells of cigarette smoke (homemade and…otherwise), and assorted other overheard/overseen activities that may not mean anything by themselves but strung together form the sort of person I have decided, at the age of 33, that I just cannot suffer.

I’m hard pressed to put this into words. They’re the sort of people who start acting like douchebags if you ask them to please not park in your parking spot. They are the sort of people who feel a specific vapid kind of entitlement that I don’t understand. They face the world with a lazy disdain, believing everything should be easy and about them. I tried to feel better about her when she told me her wee extra-barky dog was a rescue but that fizzled the first time she and her friends sat on the patio smoking all night and carrying on a loud conversation about not wanting to take care of one of their boyfriend’s kid because, “I mean, shit, it’s not MY kid.”

To sum up: Sorority Row is by no means as universally obnoxious as Thug Life has been. I’ve probably misjudged her and her friends seven ways to Sunday. But last night, as they came on the patio at 12:15, mere minutes after I’d finally fallen asleep after the last round of Smoke, Drink, Holler, and as I slammed the balcony sliding door shut with perhaps a little more force than was absolutely necessary, I did feel completely justified in my hasty generalizations of her character and nature.

*I do have raucous parties but I keep them inside. Also, my idea of ‘raucous’ includes rousing games of Catchphrase and everybody going home at 11 pm.

** I know somebody is going to freak out because they feel I’m somehow stereotyping sorority girls or unfairly describing one household’s dirty laundry as a summation of all households including Greek-affiliated girls. I assure you, I have many dear friends of the Greek ilk. My college had some ridiculously high number of students in fraternities or sororities – like 75% or something, despite it being a school of 900. If you’re one of my friends, you probably understand what I mean when I say, “The neighbors are THOSE kind of sorority girl…”

*** Do other people call them that? When women get those fake nails that are quite long and square and look like Fritos corn chips? Or is that just me…?

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Nancy Droop and the Case of Things That Go BOOM in the Night Friday, Oct 2 2009

A week or so ago, around 3:30 am, I felt Husband get out of bed. Through half-open eyes, I saw him turn on a dim light and pull on pants, then go downstairs. When he returned, I mumbled, “Wassamatter?”

“Nothing,” he said, “go back to sleep.” So I did.

Turns out, he had heard something, a loud POW from the first floor, so he’d gone to investigate. Fearing a break in, he’d checked all the doors and windows. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he’d returned to bed.

In a few hours, Husband couldn’t sleep so he made his way downstairs to the kitchen to put water on for coffee. He discovered the counter was wet – wet like someone had dumped a whole glass of water on the counter. Searching for the source, and finding nothing, he picked up a roll of paper towels and found the roll  had soaked up a lot of water and was a sodden mess. It was about then that the stench hit him.

It was also about then that he wondered, “WTF?”

Given these clues, Sleuthsome Readers, what do you think happened? Burst pipe? Careless housekeeping? An evil stinky-water fairy?

You’d be wrong. It was (dramatic pause) a watermelon.

We get a share in a CSA (community-supported agriculture) every week and that week had included a sugar baby watermelon. They are about the size of a bowling ball, deep green, and, true to its name, sweet and delicious. Reconstructing events from the scene of the crime, it seems the watermelon had rotted from the inside out then just exploded, jumping up from the counter then leaking its wreaking organic innards all over. The result was a caved-in watermelon and disgusting rotten smell.

We only had it a few days but it was so hard I didn’t think it was very ripe yet. It sat on the counter in a relatively cool spot for a few days, but unbeknownst to us it was brewing a plot to blow up.

If only I had known – I would’ve put it on Thug Life’s back porch.

I did tell the farmers who actually grew the offending melon. They were dumbfounded but laughed with me when I suggested that we had discovered new biological weapons of mass destruction. “Perhaps we could rain rotten watermelons from our bombers,” I joked. The farmer told me that watermelons are hardest to tell if they’re ripe in the field. They gave me two watermelons for my troubles and I said, “If this one explodes, I’m gonna take it personal.”

Now, I’m the Exploding Watermelon Girl when I pick up my share. This week, we did get another watermelon and as I signed in one of them said, “We have another bomb for you this week.” Because it’s hilarious. Did you know watermelons can burst? I mean, EXPLODE? I didn’t hear the boom but I know that if it was loud enough to wake Husband it must’ve been loud because that man wouldn’t hear a dump truck drive driving through a nitroglycerin plant.

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