The Subtle Race

Tomorrow! Tomorrow!

I'm humming an obnoxious show tune in my head, complete with the Doris Day-like shout-singing of all good Little Orphans Annie. My computer arrives tomorrow, sometime before 12 PM, as in noon, which I'm embarassed to say has been a source of confusion for me ever since I was eight years old. I see the PM and I automatically think "night," an incorrect detour in the well-worn streets of my neural pathways that years of peer mocking has failed to correct. Thankfully, though, I caught this blunder before The Day My Mac Arrives, so now I'll have only 6 hours to fill whilst waiting for it rather than 12. I plan to enlist Pledge and caffeine to help in making the time fly.

It's hard to find anything else blogworthy today. This morning marked my second forray to the base gym, a place which received Arnold Schwarzeneggar's emphatically garbled Teutonic blessing when it opened. The place is nice-- all green glass and stainless steel archways, an intimidating effect immediately negated by the military's overbearing motherly signage: "If you have MUD on your feet or person, please REMOVE it before entering." Because I just mopped. Little warnings about heat exhaustion and slippery floors abound, as well as reminders to clean "bodily fluids" off all machinery after use. Why "bodily fluids" and not "sweat"? Or is this not stictly a gym...?

There's a nice lap pool outside, but I've avoided it thusfar because I'm still unclear on lane etiquette. Back in Florida, Pants and I swam laps for about two weeks in preparation for his "let's put on all your gear and see if you drown!" test. We always showed up at about the same time, so we started recognizing our fellow swimmers. One was a tiny Asian woman with a murderous breaststroke. This happens to be the only stroke I'm really any good at, so I used to subtly race her.

This subtle race thing-- I have a problem with it. I do it way more than is healthy, and I don't know if it's because I didn't get all the competitive sports burned out of me at a young enough age or what, but I seem to be unable to enjoy physical activity, except maybe running, for its own sake without inventing some elaborate internal fiction about who this other person is and why I've got to BEAT THEM. "Cold War Olympic Challenge" is a favorite scenario, as are "Alien Abduction Biometrics test" and the Ender's Game-inspired "High Ranker Fitness Test." Basically, nothing is too cheesy. And it never matters who the person is-- little old men, Marines, children-- doesn't matter. In fact, my success rate is quite poor, maybe 50/50 if I'm being generous, but all that does is fuel the fictional rivalry for next time. I've given grudging, narrow-eyed nods of respect to people who stare back at me in nervous puzzlement.

Back to the Asian breaststroker: she beat me night after night. 10 laps, 15 laps, 30. She kept handing me my ass and it was getting to me. One night I decided I would beat her, or at least match her, if it killed me. The pool was very crowded and people were doubling, and even tripling up in the lanes-- lots of different professions were having their "let's see if you drown" test in the next few days and people were cramming (which makes no sense for swimming, but whatever).

In retrospect, I realize I probably should have gotten out of the pool and let people who actually had something on the line have full use of the lane, but my fictive rivalry was such that I believed I did have something on the line. We started out matched in pace for the first 10 laps, but then both got company in our lanes and had to slow down. She had two freestylers (whom she still outpaced), but I got two doughy boys from Kentucky who were unfamiliar with any stroke beyond dog paddling, and who were also determined to hold a conversation as they paddled in single file. It was maddening. I've never felt like such a competitive jerk while also feeling I'd be entirely justified in dunking both of them repeatedly.

Needless to say, she completely obliviously handed me my ass once again, but the annoyance verging on rage I felt at the two doughboys made me leary of getting into a shared lane ever again. What if my lane-mate is someone with an imaginary axe to grind with a fellow swimmer? What if I'm driving the wedge of her delusion deeper with every leisurely frog kick, and the view of my moon-white tuchus is front of her makes her want to drown me?

Is it the mark of the truly insane that they imagine everyone else shares their peculiar hang-ups, or is the ability to at least partially imagine others' viewpoints, however incorrectly, still a saving grace, some proof that one is aware that a whole world exists outside of one's own mind? I don't know. Obviously I've spent my fair share of time exercising by myself in the last few years, but until I have indisputable proof-- I mean proof-- that it's making me spongy in the sanity department, I'll keep racing.

Rock throwing punk

I was finishing up my run this morning (which means I was at the point where I felt like hell, was sweating buckets, and had to keep playing the Rocky theme in my head to even keep moving), when I rounded the corner on a bunch of kids waiting for the school bus, about 10 of them. I've seen these kids before. Our town has this dress code for elementary kids where they have to wear khaki pants and green polo shirts with their school logos on them, and thus appear way more harmless and collegiate than they really are.

So there they all are, looking like a Pink Floyd video, waiting in the dark for their bus. The few other times I've seen them, there's always this one pariah kid, a little weird looking, maybe a little too soft in his manners or features, a little weird in his habits, maybe a little too smart for his own good. I don't know. He's always sitting on a curb as far away from the rest of the kids as he can possibly get. Some days I see a car parked there on the street with its headlights on, and I think it may be this kid and his mom, like she's giving him a safe place to wait, but at the same time probably making the others kids that much more pissed off at him.

As I came around the corner today, there was no car and several of the kids were throwing handfuls of gravel and little rocks at this other kid. I had my dog with me, the iPod was blasting, my lungs were exploding, and I had a block to go before I was home and could stop timing myself, but seeing this, I had to slow down. I fixed my most heinous stink eye and the main rock thrower and get this: he didn't stop. He picked up another handful of rocks and pelted this kid right in front of me. I stopped running, yanked out my earphones and amplified the stink eye, walking right towards him and he threw another handful at the kid, some of which hit me in the shin as the other kid ducked and ran.

At this point, any adult would be justified in yelling at this little shit, perhaps addressing him accurately as, "Hey, you little shit," but I was exhausted, breathless, and stunned, and trying to think how to address the kid without profanity and coming up with nothing, and then, THEN I think I hear this, muttered under his breath: "What are you looking at, bitch?" This is possibly the one instance in my life where a hard core dose of happy-feeling endorphins has not served me well, because in that moment I made the decision to let this go because I could already see the bus rounding the corner and I knew that for now at least, the rock throwing had to stop. I gave him an extra dose of glare and memorized his face, but said nothing.

As soon as I picked up running again I regretted it. I should have given that fat little fuck the yell-down hell-ride of his life. I should have humiliated him in front of his peers. I should, at the very least, have gotten his full name and found out which house he came out of. But I did none of that and instead stood in the shower raging and scrubbing and coming up with vicious things to say to a 10-year-old that he would remember for the rest of his life. I even considered making the bus stop a regular installation on my morning routes to head off any more rock throwing and maybe even give my anti-people dog another chance to be scary.

Back when we lived in the last town, my husband gave a kid a yell-down hell-ride for throwing a handful of gravel at our brand new car as he drove down our back alley. He slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse, and leapt out of the car in his uniform and yelled at the kid, who was trying to mount his bike and escape, to freeze. He then yelled at the kid until he admitted that yes, he'd thrown rocks at the car on purpose, and no his parents wouldn't appreciate that. Then he made the kid ride his bicycle back to his house, and my husband followed him and then told the kid to go inside and get his mom. When she came out, he told the kid, "Either you be a man and tell her why we're here, or I will." The kid fessed up, the mom was embarrassed and apologized and made her kid apologize, and my husband said it was all right, but that if he were a parent, he would want to know if his kid was throwing rocks at people's cars.

Now, I have no idea if the mom then went inside and told her kid, "I'm not mad-- but that's what you get for messing with one of those asshole military guys," and then blew the whole thing off, but I do know that my husband felt a hell of a lot better, and that every time we saw that kid thereafter, he was headed at a full run in the other direction.

Me on the other hand, I'm now thinking about all the times I was bullied, and all the times I did the bullying (mostly to my little brother, which counts double since we'll know each other for the rest of our lives), and I've just got this sick feeling in my stomach for not doing anything. Was it really the exhaustion and disbelief, the hope that surely I'd misheard or misinterpreted the scene I'd stumbled on? Or was is that old kid fear speaking in me, saying that the best way to stay safe was to keep quiet? Either way, I still feel angry and ashamed.

Science and Shamanism

This morning I watched two crop dusters strafe the highway as they wove yawning figure eights around telephone wires and dusted the fields on either side of me. If I'd had a young, impressionable kid in the car with me, I would have told her that that's where fog comes from-- giant hoppers of chemicals in planes-- and on clear days, it means that the pilots are hung over.

I'm continually floored by how busy farmers are. My impression of farming as a whole was mostly formed by annual treks across West Texas, where cotton and corn seemed to sprout up in rows as orderly as corduroy with no visible trace of a human for miles around. I figured you planted and waited and prayed. If God was home, you got a good crop; if you got his machine, you were financially ruined.

Now that I drive by the same 60 miles of fields every day, I see how much you can do to nudge fate along, and how much of that takes place in the fragile hours of the early morning. Men in white pick-ups (the white pick-up has an unofficial offialness to it-- my grandfather once commented that there was no limit to where you could go in a white pick-up) bump along the margins of fields with all kinds of measuring instruments, prying up random plants, taking jars of soil, sifting powders along the rows like modern day shamans.

I have my own early morning rituals, and one of the best, most soul-clearing things in the world is an early morning run. The high school track is made from shavings of recycled tires and makes up for its boring elliptical shape by being mercifully even and easy on my knees. Across one field is the brand new Lowe's, and when the wind is right, you can hear the same sullen, sleepy-voiced girl making announcements over the loudspeaker.

My brother was always the athlete in the family, and for years I was focussed on other things, things that kept me mostly indoors and mostly inside my own head. In fact, if our bodies developed proportionally to our interests, I would probably just be a giant head that scuttled around on giant hands. I figured that being an athlete was something you were born into-- either you are or you aren't, and I wasn't, but I was OK with that. Lately though, I've been trying to reconnect with my body and learn how it works and if, maybe, it could be capable of something mildly athletic.

Part of this motivation comes from the fact that my metabolism is changing, and lying on my stomach reading a book doesn't seem to burn as many calories as it used to. But another part of it is the belated discovery of how delicious it feels to thoroughly exhaust my muscles and marinate my brain in a slurry of endorphins. It's incredible. It's like natural crack.

Unfortunately, there's also a whole world's worth of obvious things that I don't understand about exercise, having never engaged in it competitively or regularly or with any kind of guidance. For instance, why does the exact same workout feel like delicious crack one day and painful, boring horror the next? Regarding my retardedness with food, there's a whole mountain of questions-- how much of what kinds of things can I eat that will give me enough energy to run?

There's also an element of shamanism that goes into athleticism. What do you say in your head while you run? How do you manage your fatigue, and the despair and elation of either not hitting the mark or hitting it? How do you develop patience with your limitations yet still keep pushing yourself?

I'm beginning to realize that there's a lot that goes in to taking care of a body when you want it to perform, and I've decided to use a white pick-up approach to learning about it. I'll ask the dumb questions, I'll experiment and measure results, and hopefully, through some combination of science and shamanism, I'll get it right.