There was an old lady...

Today's weather is amazing. It is sunny, it is just the right amount of breezy, it's not so hot that I can't wear jeans and a tank top, it's pretty fantastic. Know what I'm doing? I'm sitting inside with a blanket on my shoulders and an ice pack on my lower back. I spent the morning getting to a point of reduced pain and enough mobility to allow me to take my dog for a walk. Being like this makes me feel old and vulnerable. It also makes me miss my chiropractor in Virginia.

Naturally, I joined a gym today. Nothing makes a person who has trouble working through the mechanics of using the restroom and getting out bed feel better than throwing away their money. And for free I get a fitness assessment where a tiny spandex-clad blond named Ashley measures and weighs me and talks about my fitness goals. I don't understand why gym people do this. If I don't ask you for your recommendations, why do you insist on providing them? And why through the portal of a person I'm most likely to have a visceral reaction against? Does my chubby black ass want to have a conversation with Ashley about my fitness goals? No, I want to sit on Ashley. That's what I want to do. Sit on her while eating something outside the meal plan she is likely to recommend. I don't want to talk to Ashley about what I do eat or what I should eat. I just want to fucking go to the gym. Christ almighty, it makes me want to eat a sleeve of girl scout cookies. In front of them.

So my plans for the day are kind of shot. I want to sit in the park with my dog and read a book but sitting is an issue and getting up is an even bigger one. I had my lunch and some Motrin so I may put on some sweats and go to my new gym, which is literally 2 steps from my front door. Seriously. Two steps and my hand is on their doorknob. Before they can discourage me with their talk of "clean eating" and supplement recommendations, I can at least exercise on my own terms. I have a feeling my conversation with Ashley will provide plenty of blog fodder so I look forward to it for that reason alone. I'm paying the money here so I don't have to put up with stuff I don't like. I don't have weight loss goals, size goals, clothing goals (other than staying in the ones I have). I just want to be stronger. I want the gym to support my lifestyle, not become my lifestyle. I want stronger abs not because I want to display them to the world (which is tacky to me) but because it will help stabilize my back. I want a stronger back because I don't want to have to get low to pick up dog poop and I don't want a trip to the bathroom to be so involved and potentially catastrophic. I want stronger thighs and calves to support my genetically bad knees and clearly malicious ankles.

In pictures from college and my 20's when I was in the gym 5-6 days a week, I looked great but I didn't appreciate that body at all. That body was bangin for real and I didn't do it justice and was never satisfied with it. Knowing that about myself, it's important for me to approach fitness pragmatically. Will there be less of me to love as I work to get strong to support my weak areas? Absolutely. But if I approach with goals focused on dress sizes, smaller this or bigger that, I will be unhappy no matter what I do and I will get frustrated and quit. So wish me luck with Ashley or better, wish her luck because I'm going to make it clear that I'm not interested in having the kind of discussion with her that she has with everyone else. I'm not going to talk about what I eat for breakfast, how I take my coffee. I'm not going to purchase her supplements or approach working out like I'm a professional athlete obsessed about "performance" and "recovery" and other nonsense. I'm a 35 year old woman who wants to feel good and wants her body to run like a dependable car. I don't need to pour all my energy and time into being able to smoke anyone at stop lights. I just need it to take me where I want to go without breaking down.

Just for laughs-Mitch Hedberg

Mitch Hedberg "Just For Laughs" - watch more funny videos

I'm out

I'd like to think I'm a long suffering person, a steady co-worker and friend, the kind of person who is in it for the long haul. But you know what? I'm not sure I'm that person. Today might have been the day. The day I mentally packed up and quietly left this job. I've tossed and turned, wondered if I would have a career, what I should do, how competitive I would be with everyone with their advanced degrees, and then settled down, collected my paycheck and lived to grouse and grumble another day. But in today's theater of absurdity and insult, I felt something give way and now I'm exploring options. I've already shot off my first e-mail inquiring about jobs. It feels good but one thing troubles me. I'm concerned I might be running away. Because I think that might be what I do. Not running away afraid, turning away and rejecting. I did that with my first job. I knew within a year I wouldn't be there for 20 but I kicked in for 3 more years just to be sure, looking for a way I could contribute in a way that interested me. I had all sorts of complaints and concerns along the way but when I wasn't accepted for a program I should have been picked up for, that was it. Peace out, kiss my ass. When I interviewed for the job I have now, they asked me how I would feel if I wasn't selected and I told them I would be fine because if they had any doubt about whether it was going to be a good fit, I hoped they wouldn't hire me. And here I am almost 7 years later and I think today might have been the day that I stopped wondering whether I would stay and started planning how I would go. I'd like to think I'm courageously pulling up root to make my way to where I belong but I might just be jumping at the empty promise of greener pastures.

Trading the crazy trophy

Do you ever feel like you are trading the crazy trophy with your girlfriends? Like each of you gets a turn to completely break down, make sweeping negative generalizations about themselves, the world, men, and the other gets to be rational and calm?

Vignettes

Ringtones and old people

For comedic purposes, old people will be everyone over 50. When I'm sitting in a meeting and an adult white male cleanly in the yearly colonoscopy category has "Apologize" by Timbaland as his ringtone, I laugh, I cringe, I philosophize on the universal nature of music. But mostly I laugh. It just cracks me up. What you want to hear in the car and what you want to have ringing during a meeting are usually different. Not as funny as an old white guy with hip hop ringtones but probably just as potentially embarrassing was a David Guetta/Akon's "Sexy Bitch" as the ringtone a peer had which, of course went off during a meeting. Club music during the staff meeting with lyrics? Yeah! Let's do this thing!

Ava's unfortunate event

Because it makes me feel better about my overall stability, I'm going to blame a new medication I started taking last week for the strange and slightly worrisome affect and thoughts that crowded my brain for a few days. I had next to no interest in seeing how the story ended and thought it might be a good time to end it on my own. Not in a tearful terribly emotional way, just kind of matter-of-fact. Like one considers discarding a worn out pair of underwear-it's just time. I'm no stranger to introspection and depression but this was different in a way that had me feeling quite outside myself and curious about how much further I could continue without being tempted to just do it. I felt my parents would be disappointed but didn't even consider my friends-it was really weird. I talked to my wake-up buddy Sunday morning and she was horrified and requested I stop taking the new stuff immediately. There's some kind of warning about suicide risk or something on the medication but I really didn't take it seriously, after all, it's allergy medication. I really can't imagine taking my own life so a part of me wants to experiment, somehow do a double-blind study to see if it really did have me thinking crazy or if I'm more suggestible than I'd like to admit.

Ava and the meaning of life

I'd like to be able to have a shitty day at work without carrying it home with me and using it as a reason to retreat into a place where I'm only stockpiling my dread for the next day instead of blowing off some steam, exercising or accomplishing something real in my life outside of work. I get paid pretty well to be unhappy sometimes. A smart version of me would have more fun with it.

Ava doesn't get it when you talk around having a crush on her

A friend I've mentioned before who makes me feel like the most optimistic, well-adjusted person in any room we share came over the other night. I'm not sure, but I think he likes me. And he might have been trying to tell me but I really have a blind spot for stuff like that. Until after. Then I wonder how in the world could I miss all the signs. If he made me close my eyes and then rubbed my cheek with a scarf he bought me, does that mean he likes me? If he joked about how my hips were killing him too when I complained about my hip actually hurting, does that mean he likes me? When he blurted out that I would be a wonderful mother (seriously were not talking about anything remotely related to kids), did that mean he likes me? When he talked about not being able to figure out what to do about a girl he knew here, was that me? Well friend, I don't know. But I do know if a guy likes me, he has to actually make a move or I am not going to know what is going on.

Advice on giving advice

Maybe called yesterday. He and the girlfriend are having the big moving in discussion. He's a bit freaked out about losing the sanctuary of his home to her to the point he wants to designate a room just for him. That's not terribly unusual and some might even say it's healthy. The issue is after considering all 4 bedrooms, two stories, rambling basement, and deck, he chose the master bedroom. He wanted her to move into her own bedroom. I know. W.T.F.

After a couple of hours of talking this through, I advised him to propose they both move into one of the other bedrooms and make it 'their' space. The master suite would still be his retreat (on this point he would not budge) but he would not sleep there so it would cease to be a bedroom in the inflammatory sense it had become when he didn't want her moving in it. He liked the idea so we'll have to see what she thinks. I'm sure anyone reading this is thinking, if you aren't ready to share the bedroom, should you even be living together but this is Maybe we're talking about. He thrives on being unconventional and does wonder why this girl wants to date him sometimes. I wonder too. That would be a deal breaker for me. We might end up in separate bedrooms when we're 90 but to start there-just not something I think I'd be into. So what do you think? What advice would you have given?

The Surly Barista

I've been waking up early for about 3 months now and seem to have less time than I ever did. The first few weeks were a revelation and I imagined what wonderful things would fill these found hours, how much more together my life would be, how much more space I was creating for creating, writing, exercise, grooming. I don't know what homey adage is most appropriate now; the one about leading horses to water or any of the ones about people never really changing. Either way, today I'm seeking contentment in my current space since it is the only one I can actually do anything about.

In other news, I'm starting to consider not continuing my education in psychology. Right now I consider myself strange in mostly quirky ways with relatable flaws. Every single person I've met with a PhD is really strange and gloriously flawed. I met a forensic psychologist last Friday night. Really smart, closing in on 40, married and kept wanting his friend to have us all over to his friend's place to smoke. Wife (who wasn't there) is also a psychologist who works for Department of Justice and not a big fan of the pot smoking on account of the zero-tolerance policy of her employer. We kept telling him that neither of us (I was with a girlfriend) had any interest in smoking anything at all. Had a burn on his neck from his bong. Naturally, we hit it off. And we really did. I've often joked about my uncanny ability to find the least available man in any room but it's true, I really can and do find these men. The other guy in the group was someone I talked to for hours a year and a half ago. We ended up sitting down with them because he recognized me from our chat the day before Thanksgiving, 2008. He also has a girlfriend that he's been with so long, they would common-law married in most other states. We played pool with them, talked about our families, relationships, the psychologist's belief that he might be mildly autistic...it was quite a night. But the moral of the story is Ava should not get an advanced degree in psychology and Ava seriously needs to figure out how to spend her Friday nights with single men.

And the same day I realized I got a scheduled raise, my big boss waxed eloquent about how great I was doing but (isn't there always a fucking but) I really needed to do more of this work or that work. Kind of made me think, yea, whatever asshole. Looks like they'll keep paying me no matter what so kiss my ass. He's one of those guys who likes to see 'pace' even if you are treading water and I refuse to waste my time appearing responsive. I told him I understood what needed to be done and like everything else I've accomplished to date, eventually my efforts will yield results. He asked me what folks in Washington might think when looking at our metrics about individual officers and I told him folks in Washington don't have that kind of time and the volume of information coming across the desk on any given day doesn't lend itself to wondering what Ava is up to. What I wished I had mentioned was at the end of the day, no one cares about anything but results. They don't care if I went to 50 meetings or 5. I worked really hard at it so I do hope he read the 'kiss my ass' subtext loud and clear. I need more than anything for him to leave me the fuck alone. He had the gall to try to mooch credit for one of my projects. Something he hasn't done anything to support or guide. Some people...

New Strange Phenomenon(s)

Young Indian men are sweating yours truly on this stupid dating site. They initiate conversations, instant message me...I seriously don't get it. And they are 24-25 years old. What the hell?