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  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

It’s about like I expected, this place. Run-down building, fluorescent lights, cheap plastic chairs, a carpet resplendent with mysterious stains. People refilling flimsy styrofoam cups from pump-driven cisterns of coffee.

As things get underway I strive for a position of relaxed, attentive listening, but my body language betrays me. My crossed legs and folded arms tell the room what everyone already probably knows: I’m in unfamiliar territory. I’m closed off like a clamshell, physically uncomfortable with the talk of God and power and the odd group response to certain phrases. It reminds me of church, or maybe like a less-raucous midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I’m surreptitiously eyeballing everyone in the room and my eyes feel hot and prick with self-pity as I decide I don’t belong here, not with these people. Not on this shitty chair, in this shitty place with the shitty overhead lighting.

One by one, people start talking. Hi, Bob! People tell things. Hi, Jessica! I’m doing something awkward and jittery with the strings of my sweatshirt, twisting them over and over around my fingers, like the hair-twirling habit I had as a kid.

Hi, Matt!

Jail, restraining orders, public urination, divorce. Rock bottoms, and the shovels people used to keep digging. Stories pour through the room and are held aloft by nods and murmurs.

90 days. 2 weeks. 20 years.

A woman haltingly describes how she was at a party, her first as a nondrinker. She says she couldn’t dance; she tried, but felt self-conscious. “I used to love dancing,” she says quietly.

Even in gain, there is loss. I know this.

At the end everyone stands and the two people on either side of me reach out to clasp my hands and everyone says something in unison, a prayerlike something, and this part I hate, oh god, I do not want to be standing there holding someone’s goddamned hand, and afterwards I rush to my car and wipe my palm on my jeans, no one said anything about holding hands.

All day long I can still hear those people’s stories. They’re moving around inside of me somehow. I’m a gusty house that is both too empty and too full, ghost voices echoing through the halls.

Anonymous room, anonymous faces. Where everyone has one thing, that shameful thing I don’t ever want to talk about, in common. Where nothing I could have possibly said would have been met with contempt.

I imagine talking to those people. Telling them anything I want. I imagine unspooling, breaking open. I think how if that happened, I couldn’t put myself back together again in quite the same way.

My hand itches at the memory of a stranger’s touch. I don’t know what it takes to reach out—across all the space I’ve surrounded myself with—and grab hold.

1) Brief, mostly non-satisfying update to the Mystery Smell: we had a furnace technician come in and he acknowledged there was in fact a Bad Odor and it was probably originating from the crawlspace. (Yay for someone besides me smelling it!) (But boo for lingering corpse/WTF-reek under the house.) He suggested having someone come out and sanitize the crawlspace, which I assume involves something like the part in E.T. where they wrapped the house in plastic and a bunch of creepy government guys in biohazard suits scurried around being all conspiratorial and cover-uppy.

2) After 3 months of consistently being the slowest/weakest motherfucker in my class, if not the entire gym, I’ve become slightly obsessed with improving my CrossFit performance. I don’t expect to be slinging around the heaviest weights yet, but I hate being the straggler who gaspingly finishes when everyone else has been done for five minutes. So here’s what I did: I stopped eating a big old dinner right before my workout. Duh, right? I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier, but it turns out that having my largest meal of the day an hour before attempting to rupture my own spleen wasn’t exactly helping me be light on my feet.

So I switched to a snack beforehand and a protein shake right afterwards, and while that isn’t necessarily ideal in terms of having a normal dinner when I want (my class is at 6:30, we eat as a family around 5-5:30) I’ve already noticed an improvement in speed and recovery.

Five years of being interested in health and fitness and I think the only thing I’ve truly learned is that the most critical element of success is to be grudgingly willing to do things you don’t really want to do.

Now if I could just resolve the Crunchy Knee Thing, which has plagued me for years. It isn’t painful (I asked a doctor about it once and he said something vague about extra cartilage under the kneecap, nothing to worry about until there’s something to worry about, ma’am), but it’s kind of gross/embarrassing to sound like an amplified bowl of Rice Krispies every time I do a squat. Do any of you have a Crunchy Knee? Is there, like, a supplement or some shit that helps?

3) JB is in Austin tonight for business and I decided that since he was enjoying BBQ and peaceful hotel solitude while I’m stuck here with children whose love for Parry Gripp continues unabated, I was going to get a damn manicure. Black tips, even, because that was the most impractical thing I could possibly think of.

The fact that I am so stupidly thrilled by the results reminds of the other night when JB turned and asked me earnestly if 10 PM was too late for a piece of gum. Welcome to your late thirties, self, where late night Trident and silly French manicures are AS WILD AS IT GETS.

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