Spinning School Dropout

Posted on January 6, 2016 by iasshole

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Still trying to decide on an actual banner. Indecisive!!

I am having a festival of exercise right now. I have time, programs are running HELLA specials, and I have about two months to get fitter before I get dumped out in a job site. I am told repeatedly that being a slow loris can really increase your odds of getting laid off. I have time and a wee bit of cash to throw at this, so why not get as fit as possible in the next eight weeks?

I decided to try spinning class on Monday. SPINNING. What? I haven’t been on a bike in about 15 years, no joke. I was like EHHH I can pedal in place for an hour.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

“For those of you who are new…,” the instructor said, “Your butts will stop hurting after you come a few times.”

(That’s what she said)

I could not get comfortable right off the bat. Sit high? Ow. Sit forward? Ow. Stand up? TIRING! Spin class is not for little bitches. If you’re doing an activity that is supposed to be sitting down and you cannot, you’re gonna have a bad time.

To my credit (yeah right) I made it forty minutes. Then I was like, “Is this fun?” NO. Some exercise is not fun, and sometimes you’ll have a bad day no matter what. I’ve had terrible runs where I just give up. “This is now an adult walk. All runners please get out of the pool.” There are worse things than walking.

The most important question I asked myself was, “Will I feel a sense of accomplishment when the hour is up, and will I want to return to this?” NO. Deal breaker!

I did TRX yesterday, which is a cross between the circus and push ups. Uhhh…more fun than I just made that sound. It ticked my boxes for “fun” and “I will do this again.” I’m in a brief January series just to get started and the personal trainer is really nice. I found new muscles yesterday. Seriously, I wonder what these muscles are that are hurting??!!

One more thing–I’m also back in my old yoga series, this time with Pete. He went alone last month, and now we’re in together. When worlds collide! I always did so many things on my own for years because I had this weird anti-social territoriality somehow…like a dog that thinks its dinner is going to be taken away. Or a person who grew up compartmentalizing everything. Yoga was my city mistress and then I would come home and not talk about it. Sigh.

“How was yoga?”

“FINE.” *glares* *acts weird*

Pete came home and talked about yoga every day he went. He talks about things he does like a normal person, annoying me for years, which is completely unreasonable. I think I had this view of relationships that a person should strive to engage the other person and talk about only interesting or essential things, and be quiet otherwise, whereas he is very transparent and needs to brain dump and chatter. Two definitions of how a relationship works.

I spend a lot of time going “Mmmhmm” at home (but actually listening) because all the chatter flows my way. My children are finally reaching an age where they go, “Oh, how was your day?” It’s really nice. Sometimes I don’t have a lot to say, but sometimes a thing happened.

One time a few years ago I tried an experiment. “What if we don’t talk about work for a month? And see if we talk about other things?”

“Not at all?” he said, alarmed.

“Well, we should tell each other if we get fired or something.”

He ALMOST DIED. Of exploding. I felt bad and gave up, I think before the month was over. I was very happy, because tech world is boring, and we were pretty much in the same field. Now I feel much more patient about it, in part because I can follow and remember everything really well (no brain fog) and I feel helpful because I can remind him of past instances like “That sounds like when X did Y a few months ago” and he’s like “Ohhh yeah.” My head used to kind of swim like it always did when he’d tell me long stories about coding triumphs or a heinous meeting. It was hard to keep an oar in.

Point of all of this being, when my brain changed some I think I got more patient with what he needs from me, which is to be a repository of his day and be heard. That’s definitely something I can give.

I was raised to be seen and not heard, and preferably not seen, either. This is my chatter box. In 2001 I didn’t think anyone would read it, but I figured if someone told me to stop that babbling or to go to my room, it wouldn’t matter. And it hasn’t.

In Other News

1. Franny spent a week at her dad’s over New Year’s and has returned sick again, unfortunately. She is really messed up this time–super depressed, achy, congested, bloated. Her scalp was a flaky, itchy mess from shampoo that we’re allergic to. They use fabric softener and fragranced soaps there. I feel so bad for her. She seemed kind of okay at dinner and then burst into great sobbing tears and went to bed shortly after. She’s usually so chipper when she’s not glutened and corned. She’s having lung tightness like I do when I get corned and that coupled with a cold she picked up from her other sisters that is making her a little croupy (they are always ill), she is frustrated.

The night her dad dropped her off (Sunday) she was a little out of her mind and seemed drunk or stoned. She was rambling on and unable to finish her sentences or complete a thought, and was laughing at nothing, and running into walls.

“People were really nice for New Year’s and they brought me dishes I could eat.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Do they keep wheat-free kitchens?”

“No….”

“You seem glutened, honey,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and sighed.

I took over the dishes for her last night, but I had done so much exercise yesterday I could barely lift my arms, and then Pete tagged in.

I am trying to patch her up a little. I remind her to take magnesium, a bath, vitamins, eat some dark chocolate, vent. She knows what’s happening, and knows she doesn’t have an external event or situation depressing her, but it doesn’t make the depression less real. I had it about a month ago when I ate some bad nuts. I thought they were just coated with salt but in hindsight they were really too “dusty” looking. I crawled into bed and slept eleven hours. What was the point of getting up or dressed? I would never become an electrician. Would I even ever shower again? Eventually, I did.

She is lucky in that she’s going to a high school where if she needs to take a breather and step out in the halls and cry a little or just get some fresh air, she can. The penalty is that you miss part of your lesson, rather than getting slapped with detention. Her school is a “last chance” for some kids who have flunked out of regular public schools, or have had bullying problems, etc. She’s a good kid who does all her homework, but the flexibility there makes it the right place for her medical issues.

She spent years coming back from her dad’s house and being a teary wreck, and I thought a lot of it was the high amounts of sugar she would eat there. Now it’s even more extreme since she goes from being well to sick, instead of low-level sick/irritated to worse.

In summary, this is what the last four days have been like.

2. I liked this short story today from a long time internet acquaintance. Reminds me of when Franny was small. When Strudel was small, I was fielding questions about police justice and morality, how many ways there are to die, and what I thought she should study in college that would apply to becoming a supervillain. Now she’s just looking forward to swim lessons. WHEW. I come from dark genetics.

3. I have one more thing to say about yoga. I started yoga about ten years ago because I hurt myself in a kickboxing class, after an attempt to get really fit for the first time in my life. It turns out there was a reason I never did that before. I was just too fragile and prone to strains, joint pain, pulled muscles, and constant throbbing back pain. On Monday, for the first time ever in these past ten years, I did yoga without ANY pain. It was crazy. I kept expecting my wrists to go dead, my back to tweak, my hips to pop. Nothing. Before it was the lowest bar of what I could manage to do for exercise, and I felt like I had to “do something.” Now it’s fun and enjoyable. I GET IT. I GET YOGA NOW.

Did you ever hear the one about…?

Posted on September 24, 2014 by iasshole

Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time on internet forums and in irc and whatnot, and whenever people used to mention meeting me in real life I’d say, “Just look for the pink hair…and the goiter.”

HA HA hilarious. Do I even need to finish this Morrissettian-ironical weblog? I guess I should. Bam: I have a goiter. It’s just a baby one, though. Maybe more than one. In addition to a bunch of bloodwork I probably should have had months ago (but I was out of my mind on steroids [see also: Coats–leather–fringe–douchey] and having trouble walking, so I might have missed a few things) I am also having a neck xray. Hooray!

Also I impressed the endo with what percentage of my body is covered in horrific scars. I never get tired of “Stump/Horrify that MD.” Hy fyves all around.

Labs on Friday. Xray when they can get me in. This feels like progress.

So. Let’s talk about something else for a minute. Close the door.

A thing I have done every fall for the past three years or so is go to the film noir festival at the art museum. Two of my formerly favorite things: film noir and having an excuse to go out. I am pretty flat at the moment since I am so part time, so tickets are out. Also it is touch and go whether or not I can even sit in the theatre on any given night for two hours at a stretch right now.

Also I am again with the hating almost everyone. Last time I was in a theatre (Xmastime) I shamed myself by telling this obnoxious lady who asked my whole party to MOVE SEATS when we had gotten there early and there were plenty of other seats in the theatre (true) to GO FUCK HERSELF. I think I may have even asked her if she was born this annoying or entitled or if she had to work at it. I can’t quite remember. A sign I should probably not be out in company, polite or not. I seem to have lost my filter worse than usual.

Postscript, she came down the aisle and sat by me anyway because someone else moved. When the imbalanced collide….

MY POINT. I am having my own film festival at home following their calendar. Well, I cannot find Shakedown ANYWHERE, but I asked a subject matter expert for a substitute. Sorry, art museum, I want to put money in your coffers, but this is for the best. It’s not you, it’s me.

To make my pathetic self feel better, I decided to cook along as well. The first fillum is Maltese Falcon. I decided to look up the release date (January 1941) and I decided to google around for popular food in 1941, what the hell, and what did I see? BOOM: Gourmet‘s first issue. I got on the horn with the librarian I like to harass downtown and she told me they have Gourmet back to ’44.

The plan is to pull a menu from Gourmet each month and year that corresponds to the release month year and the film of the week. Since the library doesn’t have the first issue, I have kind of reconstructed it online. Apparently the “dinner of the month” was an eleven-course French holiday meal. CHRIST, NO. I am going to cherry pick three dishes from it.

It’s fascinating how Victorian the recipes still seem from ’41. I’ll get into that more on Fridays, which will be the day after the dinner and screening. Other than the early Maltese Falcon, the films range from the peak of noir, the late 40s through the 50s and the last one is from 1987 (sun-dried tomatoes that night, for sure).

Okay, team, I am halfway through a 22 of perry and listening to Ice Cube, so this seems like a good point to break. Let me pour one out for my new little friend, Gary.

“I have to get up at five o’clock in the morning and SPARKLE, Neely, SPARKLE!”

Posted on April 5, 2014 by iasshole

I wanted to show you my bathroom today, since it was supposed to be finished, but the plumbing inspection failed on Thursday. My least favorite plumber, aka Jackass Plumber, forgot to install a mixing valve on top of the hot water heater. Or perhaps he was not aware he needed to. It’s unclear.

The same inspector who approved the rough plumbing returned.

“Oh I see you went for the FANCY toilet,” he editorialized. There are way too many men in my house lately.

“Mmm hmm,” I said.

“Looks like this shower isn’t done.”

“It’s an open shower.”

“No door?” he asked.

“No door.”

He ran it.

“I guess the water’s staying in…”

And then a tick next to the word “failed.”

We get to try again next week. Also my vanity legs should be here by then. I bought vanity legs via my cabinet company. The legs–really more an idea of legs–were a very small black-and-white picture in the catalog that promised to be good metal companions to go with my retconned faux-nostalgic midcentury vanity that looks like something James Bond could have thrown up into, had vanities like this existed in the 1950’s. They did not. I’m enjoying this trend of thinking about what a credenza looks like and putting plumbing in.

But this isn’t Sears and Roebuck times. It is really bullshit to show me small black and white pictures at all. Sure enough, they arrived, and they are hideous. I didn’t really know what I was getting, which is not a defense. I asked for a picture or an internet link or a sample, but it didn’t really come to pass. First they sent two separate sets of black plastic legs, which was not what I ordered at all–so there was that delay.

Then what I did order showed up.

For size comparison, it cavorts among sauv blanc, water, and someone’s jank ass phone what needs a new case like whoa.

They were also kind of scratched or at least unevenly painted, and didn’t work at all with the actual vanity.

“Sooo the legs finally came,” I said, proffering them to my contractor. “Yay.” I was making bargains with myself at this point, just wanting to finish. I can do something else with the legs at some point, I told myself. He pulled one out.

“Do you like these legs?” he asked me, giving me a hard look.

“Well. Um. Maybe I can paint them, though?” He waited. “No. I don’t like them. And they’re kind of scratched up. I’ll go find some legs I actually like and have them sent immediately.” He nodded.

So I ordered legs from a site that does…midcentury legs. I figure they have ONE JOB, and they can do it well. RIGHT? Knock on knock-off legs.

It turns out the legs that we waited so long for and that I hated don’t even fit properly. So it was all moot.

We were hoping to start demoing the other half of the basement today, but it really needs to wait until the inspectors are done. One project at a time, please. So I have been futzing around the house today doing little odds and ends like painting a pillar on my porch that was getting very weather-ravaged, and test driving the DJ Roomba I bought with my tax refund. (R.I.P. Neato.)

Also I have been thinking about my kitchen today. There’s a couple of issues with it. It’s on the north side of the house, and gets a wee bit of sunlight in morning. It’s a candidate around here for a couple of those tubular skylights.

So this is what it looks like around 2 p.m. on an average April day. Dimmer than this picture makes it seem.

I decided to play up the primary colors feel between the yellow tile with the burgundy sizzle stripe and the teal-ish cabinets by adding a lot of primary red. The peace lily and the chevron bag is my sister’s for the little housewarming visit I made to her today. I had a squee. Among other things, I made her bacon peanut brittle and pickled eggs. I moved into that exact neighborhood when I was exactly her age, except her life is way less fucked up than mine was at 26. Yeh.

Also it’s L-shaped. Not much to be done about that. I like that it’s a one- or two-person kitchen and it’s pretty easy to convince people to beat it during parties so I can do my thing and get out.

Here it is with the lights on:

DEATH TO BOOB LIGHTS.

So here’s the tentative plan, but not for a while. Get ready for 50’s house heresy: I am taking out the countertops. I just cannot with the tiles any longer. Crud gets stuck in them constantly, liquid pools, and they always look dirty. I am thinking about doing wood but am not sure. I am keeping all the yellow backsplash, though. The cabinets are getting a new color scheme, and we have to redo the floors. The dishwasher leaked in January and it fucked up some of the underlayment. I feel lumps when I walk now. And the vinyl is going, of course. I am leaving the OG lights alone and the configuration, basically. It’s a nice cubey kitchen that is very 50’s sensible–no need to rip out the cabinets or anything. And it’s almost impossible to reconfigure an l-shaped kitchen so I am calling it good.

So now the question is how to work with yellow with a burgundy sizzle. I am thinking about doing something Frenchy Provencally after stumbling on a bathroom that is just like my kitchen, really (thank you, comments section).

Grey? Blue? Both? Cannot decide.

I am in the germinating phase now, since it’s far off.

This week was my last week of working part time. I’ve tapered down on Prednisone again today and it was a zap on my brain again. I dropped a bottle of rice vinegar on the back porch today–it was like it just left my hand somehow and shattered. I think I may actually sleep well tonight instead of my heart hammering at 2 a.m though. I’ve been sleeping 2-4 hours a night for several nights in a row and then I have a massive crash and sleep 12-14 hours and have a “good” day.

“How are you doing?” my contractor asked. It was before the plumbing inspector came, and we both thought we would pass with flying colors, and I would not see him again until maybe I asked him back to put in a gas insert in the basement fireplace.

“I’m okay,” I said. “The steroids are worse than the disease at this point.”

“Ah, I hear that,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with steroids for the last 25 years or so. I’m on my third heart.”

“Wow,” I said.

“And I’m a cancer survivor.”

“Holy cats, I’m glad you’re here.” We always say dumb things in the face of surprising information like this, right? Maybe just me, though.

“Me, too.” He said he owed it all to qigong and energy practice. I was not going to argue with that. I pretty much owe everything to obsessive attention to masturbation and the idea that tea tree oil can cure anything, including late-stage capitalism and jungle rot.

However. Cooking doesn’t require much thought at this point, which is pretty comforting. I can kind of just feel my way around. How many thousands of times have I sweated an onion? It sounds stupid but it really is so grounding to me. I had a little moment when I wasn’t able to walk or stand much where I was asking myself why I ever cooked, as we were hauling giant piles of frozen Trader Joe’s loot into the house that cost less than food that required marketing, planning, and chopping.

But now I’ve been doing a lot of cooking after work. On Thursday I made an asparagus and gruyere tart and then made Moroccan lamb shanks because why not? I’ve been cooking for so many years now that I think it’s keeping me from coming unhinged a little. Here is a normal thing. I was so anxious on Thursday afternoon I felt like I was going to have a panic attack, could not answer the phone, so I just focused on cooking. I had an alarm guy coming over and I felt like I was going to throw up, and made myself take an Atavan. It kind of freaks me out how I went from fish oil and an occasional Tylenol eight weeks ago to Valley of the Dolls so quickly. I hate this. I know it’s temporary, but I feel so trapped inside pointless, needless side-effectsy anxiety. I just kept rolling puff pastry dough and chopping garlic while he chit chatted at me about losing a cat from a hotel room during a cross country move.

I decided to see if I could bang together a Moroccan dish that tasted like Moroccan food with what I had in the cupboard and from memory. It was okay, really. I’d write it down, but I didn’t take a picture, so that would be kind of boring. It turned out. But here’s the tart:

Alien wiener tart.

I have been junking/thrift scoring plant stands for the house and bathroom. I liked my new snake plants but I thought they needed some levels to be finished. Behold my whirlwind life.