Why I Still Look Good in a Speedo
Okay, so it’s probably not the speedo that first jumps into your head, but it’s made by Speedo – in the swimming world, it’s known as a drag suit . . . just ask Phelps.
Today marked my (not-so) triumphant return to the pool for a . . . (wait for it) . . . workout!
[I'll give those that have known me long enough a little pause for the gasps to subside . . . that oughtta do it.]
There was no glory in it other than the fact that I came, I swam, I did not swallow any water.
Now the reality that I even thought of getting off my duff to do anything that remotely looks like exercise is probably a shock to those closest to me. But I think they’ll understand because what man is going to admit to his friends that he’s thinking of going shopping for a piece of loin cloth that looks a little too much like a thong when it’s on the retail rack? NOT this guy. Nonetheless, I thought it would be mildly amusing to take a look back at the pros and cons of this morning’s little swim. To do that, we’ll have to go back almost to the inception of my brilliant idea to get back in the pool.
STEP 1. Shopping
Pro: I get to go speedo shopping!
Con: I get to go speedo shopping.
A lot has changed since I last perused the speedo aisle of the local sporting good store. And when I say a lot has changed, I am not talking about the product. I no longer fit into that size 28 from college. If I had attempted to squeeze into that old size, I would have put the very word “elastic” to the test. Seriously, it would have been scientific, with guys in white lab coats and everything.
STEP 2. Suiting up.
Pro: All the memories flooding back
Con: Glimpsing my mirror image
Sure the memories come flooding back, and the trip down nostalgia lane is always fun, but that walk past any reflective surface is sobering at best, bitingly painful at worst. My experience was somewhere in the middle.
STEP 3. Walking the (plank) pool deck
Con: Did you see that guy in the mirror?
Pro: Gawking old ladies in the neighboring water aerobics class.
That’s right! And that’s why I still look good in a speedo . . . you know, kinda. Really, it’s primarily that demographic that has any interest in glancing at the likes of one like me. For them, I am the vision of the man in their life “bringing the sexy back.” (And if you’re reading this honey, I know you’re having a good laugh). So, really, there was no irony in the title of this post, it just applies to a very particular minority.
STEP 4. The Swim.
Pro: The beginning felt fantastic
Con: Four laps later
Con # 2: Four laps after that
It was good to know that I could still put one arm in front of the other. It felt like I remembered how to do it, only this time it was a lot slower. And harder. It was pretty quickly into the swim that I realized I really had my work cut out for me, but when all was said and done, I felt good. Other pros to mention about the swim: I didn’t have a coach pushing me to my limit, I decided the pace of the workout, I didn’t have to share the lane with anyone, and I could start and stop whenever I wanted.
STEP 5. Warm down.
Pro: The steam room
Con: Soreness
I never had a steam room when I was a competitive swimmer. That thing is awesome! I also wanted to hit the hot tub afterward, but at that point in time the water aerobics class was over and the gawkers had relocated. So, I had to skip that one (major ‘con!’). Thereafter, I hit the showers and the realization started to settle in when my muscles collectively said, “hey, idiot! You’re 30 now and you haven’t done anything like this in over six years. What were you thinking?” They’re forming a union as I type this post and I can tell you, they are not happy. It could get ugly.
STEP 6. Post-Workout Post Mortem
Pro: Endorphins
Con: Realizing I’m going to have to do this a lot if I want to see any results and possibly fit back into that 28. Okay, I’ll settle for “results.”
So, the question is “Will I be able to keep this up?” I hope so. Otherwise it becomes the equivalent of the first of many Eagles farewell tours. And that’s just sad.
Like this:
Purse Prejudice
Recently I have found myself back in the midst of the college environment, sitting in class as I once did when I was a student. The reason? It’s part of an effort to bridge what is taught in a high school English class and a basic college level reading and writing course, something that is in the midst of articulation between my employer and the community college where I am currently observing. Fun stuff, I know.
I have been noting my observations, but there is one issue that stands out to me. It doesn’t so much ‘stand out’ as itch like a splinter that has been under my skin for three days and, no matter how much I attempt to ignore it, I. Have. To. Scratch. It is a particular type of student. And when I say ‘particular’, I mean I have narrowed down this type of individual with cell splitting, microscopic accuracy. I am irked by the following demographic: women who carry large purses and forget to silence their phones. Yes, these individuals, to me, are what high schoolers would deem ‘the worst.’
Now many of you know I teach high school. I have to deal with cellphones in my class often. I tend to handle phone situations differently than most. Many of my colleagues exhibit a Jekyll and Hide type approach to handling a cellular irritation. While in the midst of a lecture if they hear a ringtone or sense a vibration, the half smile they were wearing when rambling about the beauty of romantic poetry quickly shifts into a grimace of unmitigated gall. Lecture forgotten, they will go on a five minute tirade where few English words are recognizable, though a few get through: respect, job, fired, hell, etc. Me? I’m far more relaxed. I, the enlightened and compassionate one, won’t burst at the seams or into flames when a phone goes off. I’ll just ask the student to please silence it and give others the opportunity to do the same. I’ll even let text messaging go if it’s infrequent and doesn’t distract the student from her work. Though this approach is typically frowned upon by most schools’ administrations, in large part, I don’t have problems.
But that woman with the over-sized purse who forgets to turn her phone off, she will set my belly ablaze with hell fire.
If you have taken a college course within the last four years, you know who I am talking about. You probably have been sitting in a class where the professor is lecturing about the superiority of the active versus the passive voice with intense animation. You get the impression that he dreams about a student he’s caught using the passive voice chained to the floor of a dark, empty room, he with a bat, no one watching, and no consequences. His passion on the subject is beginning to show itself in beaded globules of perspiration on his forehead. And then it happens. Somewhere on the other side of the room, a ringtone softly begins to play.
This is okay because you hear other people’s cellphones go off throughout the day anyway. You know you can tolerate 5 to 10 seconds of that Lady Gaga song you’ve been hearing on the radio because soon it will be off. But that time has elapsed, no one has moved, and the hit single plays on. The professor continues his fiery lecture, oblivious, his mind in that dark and lonely room with that weak writer and a bloodied bat. Now you NEED to know where that noise is coming from. Your eyes shift, subtly at first, but then your head jerks in several directions and a growing look of hate etching across your forehead. Others are doing the same, except for one woman. Sitting there. Aloof. Suddenly, an epiphany, she wears an expression that reads, “Is that me?” How could she not know?
She bends down to begin her hasty excavation in that satchel in a futile attempt to find the handheld device. As the contents of her purse shift around, the phone’s ring grows sometimes louder, sometimes quieter. Louder, then quieter. Louder. Quieter. Eventually she realizes what she should have known from the start, she needs to put that lumpish thing on her desk and shove her head inside it or that phone will never shut up! So, she hoists this piece of luggage on her desk top and burrows in, up to her elbows in purse. While she’s doing this, you’re beginning to think that you could solve a rubrics cube in less time. And then . . . Eureka! She’s found it!
When she pulls out the phone, resting her arms on top of her purse, she begins to stare at it. Notice I did NOT say she ‘turns off the ringer.’ She hasn’t yet. She’s looking at the phone . . . and it’s still ringing. I have come up with three possible reasons why she doesn’t immediately turn it off. One, she doesn’t know how to use it, which means she owns a device that she doesn’t fully understand. But that can’t be it because she figured out how to get that thing to go Gaga, and it wasn’t born that way. Then perhaps it’s reason number two: She spent so long digging it up that she has completely forgotten where she is and what she was doing. After all of that physical effort it doesn’t occur to her to think, “You know, I am in a classroom and I just distracted everyone in here, and this lecture should really be paid attention to by me because I don’t know what the passive voice is and I don’t want the professor to kill me and hide my body in the woods.” If this isn’t the reason, then it’s number three: she just doesn’t care. Perhaps that’s why she tossed her obnoxiously loud phone in to the purse she stole from Mary Poppins in the first place.
Eventually, she turns it off, but only when the ringtone was within two to three seconds of terminating on it’s own anyway. And depending on which of the three reasons she didn’t turn it off after getting it out of her bag, she may or may not send a text message or two. Then she pulls out a rather large snack and an absurdly over-sized bottle of water – her purse is already on her desk after all – then hurls that bag back down to the floor with a loud smack. And, if you’re lucky, she’s considerate enough to either turn her ringer off or at least not put the phone back into the purse, but there is no guarantee. One thing is nearly certain though: she will probably run this whole scenario again during the following lecture.
At this point, the professor pulls out a handkerchief and dabs at his forehead, the best of his energy spent driving home that point about the verbs, but you missed it.
Of course, I have observed many other useful examples of human interaction and collegiate wisdom, like how to download the latest Lady Gaga single. Maybe I’ll glean even more wisdom next week and figure out how to get that song out of my head.
New Blog
I started a new blog. It’s about how I am getting laid off . . . again. Drop by to see what kinds of thoughts run through my brain as I face the underbelly of our nation’s (especially California’s) economic situation.
This is the California Teacher Association’s response to what’s going on in Wisconsin.
How do you react to this?
Out for a Walk
I just did something that I haven’t done in a long time: I took my son for a walk. It was fantastic! I felt like I got away from it all for a few fleeting moments. How refreshing!
I have to admit, the TV is on too much at home. Most of the time we don’t pay attention to it, it’s just noise. Or we are only attentive to bits and pieces of whatever program is on, but it’s on nonetheless. Before my walk, I didn’t realize how much it segmented my time. I’ve started thinking in one hour to half hour segments. This is true for me at work as well. I think in one hour segments there, not because it’s convenient, but because I’m a high school English teacher and our periods are about one hour in length. Then the drive home is about 30 minutes, and so I can slip right into the segments of regularly scheduled programming when I get home (especially if I can arrive at the top or the bottom of the hour).
But the walk I just went on didn’t fit into the category of regularly scheduled programming, so I just forgot about it. It was a load off my mind.
Not only was their a release from the pressure of these artificial time chunks, but there was no noise. No media noise, that is. So, on my walk, when I wasn’t talking to my son, I was thinking about things I usually wasn’t free to think about. Also, I was able to enjoy the weather (here in Southern California we’re between rains, so the air is crisp, the sky is blue and speckled with clouds, and the vegetation has a freshness to it). It was beautiful. For approximately 25 minutes, I was on vacation.
Now, this has me thinking: what if I took regular TV vacations? Hmmm.
Persona Non Grata
The other day I made my first posting mistake; at least I hope it was my first. On facebook I posted an insensitive remark about a “project” a colleague was working on. I didn’t think it was insensitive when I posted it, but when another person commented on the post in defense of the one under scrutiny, I had to think twice. Actually, more than twice. In truth, it pretty much dominated my thoughts for the next few days.
I ended up deleting the provocative post and hoped that it would end there. A few days later, at work, someone completely unrelated to my facebook page asked me about it. It had gotten “offline”.
Great. If I ever had any doubts that what I say online has any real impact in the world, this was a perfect example. I’m still waiting for the “your post changed my life” moment, but I don’t think that will happen any time soon. But now I’m digressing.
Without getting specific, here’s what happened: I bore witness to the final result of a project person A had been working very hard on, I homed in on one element of the project I didn’t like, I posted it on facebook, and Person B (who works closely with person A) saw the post. From there it spread and now I am “persona non grata.”
The truth is, considering the whole scope of the project that person A was working on, it was well done. I actually hold the final product in pretty high regard. But would you have thought that if you were my friend on facebook? Nope. You probably would have thought that I believed I was “above it” and that “I know better.” Taking a step back, the post just made me sound like a jerk.
Here’s the funny thing, I don’t think I’m a jerk. I don’t believe that most of the people who know me think that I am one either. But why did I say something so “jerkish” if that’s not who I am? This is what racked my brain (and heart) for the better part of a week. I have come to a two part conclusion: one, underneath it all, I really am a jerk and, two, I did it for a cheap laugh. The comment itself wasn’t inherently rude, but the mixture of rhetoric and juxtaposition of subjects made it that way. To put it plainly, I fooled myself into thinking that it was okay to post this comment.
But it wasn’t okay. I hurt people and I hurt my relationships with others and all because I had hoped to get a chuckle out of a few. That’s pretty pathetic when I get honest with myself.
In this mess I created, my hat goes off to two individuals: Person B, who rushed to defend Person A, and the one who came to ask me about the comment face to face, offline. If it weren’t for people like the two of you, the world would be in really bad shape because those like me might go on thinking that it is okay to get a cheap laugh at the expense of our friends and co-workers, yet all the while sinking deeper and deeper into a corrupt, and rather lonely, social quagmire.
For those reading this, think about what you post. Learn from me that it’s not about “what you meant” it’s about “how it came across.” The latter should concern us far more than the former.
Censoring Twain?
If you’ve been covering the Mark Twain beat (and who hasn’t, he’s only been dead for 100 years!), then you would know that he had quite a good year in 2010 with the release of part one of his autobiography. And, though it isn’t his autobiography, it looks like he’s set to release another one this year: a revised edition of his classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
But for a man who wanted the truth to come out about himself, an accurate representation of things as they were, he can’t be too happy about the latest edition of his masterpiece. Here is the headline I found at National Public Radio’s website:
New Edition Of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Will Eliminate Offensive Words
Blank
Here is an excerpt of the short article:
Saying they want to publish a version that won’t be banned from some schools because of its language, two scholars are editing Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to eliminate uses of the “N” word and replace it with “slave,”Publishers Weekly writes.
The edition, from NewSouth Books, will also shorten an offensive reference to Native Americans.
As PW says, “for decades, [Huckleberry Finn] has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word.”
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I thought the whole point of Twain’s writing was to challenge his readers to think on their own. Didn’t he want us to face certain realities, I mean really face them, let us get all tied up in knots, and then toil inwardly to sort them all out?
I think the other part of this story that I am finding hard to come to terms with is that it seems vaguely Orwellian. I’m pretty sure the Big Brother isn’t behind this seemingly small and insignificant edit, but what are the larger ramifications? Maybe not Orwellian. Perhaps it’s Bradburian? Yes, the government doesn’t impose upon us, we the people impose the censorship upon ourselves. It certainly seems that these scholars think this book is a loaded gun and they are setting out to replace the real rounds with blanks.
What do we need protection from here? Can we really not handle the truth?
It seems that a few choice words are not the real issue here, at least not the way I’m seeing it. It seems, rather, that this is a symptom of something larger, but of what? What’s really going on?
