I very rarely eat fast food. Questionable animal parts in a grease soaked bag is not my idea of tasty. I have an occasional breakfast from a cheap eats establishment before an early morning flight, or pick up a burger and frosty for my daughter after she badgers me for three weeks and I can use it to bribe her into doing a chore without complaining, but those events are few and far between. I can count on my hands the number of times I have ordered food through a little speaker and was able to pay for a meal for three with a twenty dollar bill.
I didn’t always have an aversion to fast food. As a matter of fact, as a child I thought “flay-o” was a kind of fish after getting filet-o-fish sandwiches with my Dad repeatedly. I grew up in the time when sitting down for a meal at a brightly colored plastic table with attached chairs was family fun, not a visitation at an upstate penitentiary. The e coli infested ball pits were not yet a thing. When I was a teenager I became vegetarian and then vegan. I quit fast food when most kids were just really getting started. I have always gone a little against the grain.
Diseases in every color!
My husband was a serious fast food junkie when we met. He awoke in the morning smelling like french fries the same way frat boys awake on Sunday mornings smelling of beer and bad judgement. Neither one of us cooked well and he was not a big salad fan so he was left with few options. We eventually put on our big kid pants and learned how to cook the year I planted a garden and had a kitchen full of baskets overflowing with vegetables. When you are faced with not being able to get out of your house without chasing tomatoes rolling across your kitchen floor, you figure out a way to put them to use. My better half soon went from his old peanut oil scent in the morning to asparagus pee in the evening. I’m not sure I did him any favors.
We were pretty adamant about not poisoning our child with pink slime. We avoided chain restaurants in general and treated anything with a drive through like a brothel, someplace no child should enter. I will admit we were a little over the top, but our fears were realized when my parents started feeding our five year old meals that come with a little plastic toy destined to become landfill within a week. We had opened the door a week prior by making a run for the border. It happens.
Friday night was the rare exception to our general avoidance of food that comes in a bag. I had quite a few errands to run and being that it was Friday in the middle of lent, our options for a quick meal were limited. I gave my family a few choices and they told me to drive through the golden arches. That is the last time I am listening to those fools.
Pick a lane…
Since it has been at least a decade since I have had to place an order through a speaker, I knew what we were getting before I approached the entrance. It was a good thing too. I was so confused by the presence of two drive through lanes that I almost turned around and left. I took the far lane which proved to be a wise choice after I watched a car pull through the inner lane and pull up to the window without placing an order. While turning the corner she took the curb with her back wheel. I ordered my three “flay-os” and fries by yelling my order into the little speaker a foot away from my window. I must not have yelled loudly enough because the cashier replied “what?” several times before asking “is that all?” It was like having a conversation with a cranky old man with his hearing aid turned down.
After completing my order I pulled up to the first window with my money ready. A teenage girl reached her hand out and took my money without a word. She then handed me a receipt and my $.08 change with a dripping wet hand and closed the window in silence. At first I thought maybe it was the restaurant’s policy to not be chatty with the customers. That was until I pulled up behind the car that had taken the curb a few minutes earlier. She had been sitting at the window talking to one of the workers for the entirety of my ordering process. The worker stuck his head out the window repeatedly looking back at me while they continued their conversation. My fast food was starting to take the time of a seven course tasting menu with the chef. The woman in the car started to pull away at least three times and stopped abruptly to say one last thing. When she finally pulled away I drove up to the window to find two bags sitting inside and nobody to deliver them out the window. The man who had been there was walking to the door on the other side of the restaurant where his lady friend had pulled around and parked. Another teenage girl finally ran up to the window and handed me my bags saying “have a nice night” with a smile. Finally – the service with a smile I was expecting based on all of the commercials I see on the Disney channel.
If the car didn’t need a new air freshener before, it does now!
As I drove home I reached into the bag to eat half of everyone’s french fries. This is the price they pay me for picking up the food. I learned this from my husband. He calls it a delivery tax. It mostly applies to Starbucks and sweets, but my understanding is I can apply it to anything. After eating a handful of fries I dug around for a napkin only to find none. Now I understood why the cashier’s hand was dripping wet. This fast food hell-hole was apparently napkin-free. I guess they have to cover the cost of their ultra friendly labor force somehow. I continued munching on fries for my entire drive home all while wondering how it’s possible that the people who just gave me such sub-par service are the same ones demanding a raise. I can’t complain though. It is true everywhere, you get what you pay for.
My child is stalking a guy on my meditation app. At the end of the meditation a screen appears with a congratulations and a list of people who were using the app at the same time. When the meditation ends, my daughter immediately picks up the phone to look at all of the pictures of the people who were meditating with us. Every night there is someone named Chris who uses a picture that she likes in the list. And every night she tries to click the button to send a “thanks for meditating with me” message. She literally scrolls through pages of little pictures until she finds Chris every single night. I have tried to explain to her that we don’t know Chris and if we continue sending messages on a nightly basis that poor Chris might become frightened and think that we are obsessed with him. Her response was that she IS obsessed with him. Clearly.
She has no information about Chris other than he has a picture of what she thinks is an alien with trees growing out of his head and that he lives about thirty miles from us. Chris could actually be a woman. Or Chris could be a psycho serial killer, although I doubt it. I mean you don’t really hear much about serial killers spending a lot of time getting zen. Either way, we know nothing about Chris, yet my daughter is obsessed with finding this person nightly after our meditation ends. She is even getting antsy during the meditation if it lasts too long, which is kind of defeating the purpose of meditating. She starts bouncing around grabbing at my phone when the timer gets down to under two minutes.
I’m not like a regular mom. I’m a cool mom…
In her six year old mind, she and Chris are friends because they meditated together. I can’t really blame her though. We call her classmates “friends” and her gymnastics teammates “friends” and even the other children who she sees a few times a week at the child care center at the gym “friends”. Clearly if they are her friends, then so is Chris. At least she knows his name, which is more than I can say for half of her “friends” at the gym.
I wonder what Chris thinks about the weirdo who keeps thanking him for meditating together. Who is this No, Seriously person? What can Chris ascertain from my profile? Well, we can begin with my tagline which is “square peg in a round hole world” which could be interpreted as “I’m a rebel”. My photo only adds to the mystique – you know, no face and the super cool old school NYC concert venue shirt. Looking through my activity he could hopefully gather that I am a parent based on the nightly meditations from the kids – sleep section. So obviously I am a super cool mom who is defying the laws of aging. Then again, from the photo and activity combo he may think I am an immature teenager who really likes rainbow angels. The joke is on Chris. I am a really immature middle aged woman going through what appears to be the longest mid-life crisis in history! Poor Chris is in for an even bigger shocker – it’s not a angsty teenager or middle aged soccer mom doing the stalking; it’s a six year old little fireball with a penchant for unusual cartoon characters. Sorry Chris.
I have a love/hate relationship with the gym. It’s not for the obvious reasons though. Most people don’t like the actual work that is done at the gym but they love the results. I love working out, I just hate that it has to be with other people. The gym I go to is pretty crowded right now with all the people who decided that they were going to get in shape in 2018. They are the same people who made this vow at 12:01 on the first day of 2017. And just like last year, they will be gone by the end of February. But for now, they are mucking up the works. I have encountered more broken machines at the gym in the last three weeks than I did in the prior nine months. I was a little perplexed as to how this could happen so quickly with the ellipticals until I watched a teenage girl hop on the machine next to me and pump away as fast as she could for about two minutes until the machine started clicking and her knees started to buckle. I looked at her at one point just to make sure she wasn’t having a seizure. It turns out she couldn’t figure out how to turn on the machine to track her progress. She jumped off in a huff and walked away without wiping down her machine. Apparently she didn’t see the twelve signs posted all over the gym asking her to clean up after herself.
My husband returned from his workout last week and shared with me that a guy was humming the Ghostbusters theme really loudly and singing along to the parts he knew. I wish I had been there to hear that, but realized it was best I wasn’t there since I have a hard time not expressing my amusement and may have fallen off a machine laughing. Unfortunately a few nights later we both witnessed a guy who was both grunting and huffing simultaneously as he walked along on his treadmill at a whopping two miles per hour. A woman then started huffing away right behind us. At one point it sounded as if a porno was playing in surround sound. I couldn’t keep it together and had to head to the sauna.
The dry sauna is usually one of my favorite things to partake in at the gym. However, when the gym is crowded like it has been, the sauna gets a lot of extra traffic. The only good thing about this is that the conversations I get to overhear usually involve more bros and more idiocy. Unfortunately the added idiocy also comes with added pounds and added sweat. I try to sit in my corner and soak in all of the bizarre bro talk – mostly about their piles of money and how much they drank last night – without getting soaked by the sweat dripping off of them as they pace back and forth and stretch on the floor. There is also usually the one guy who has to prove he is extra tough by doing push ups in the middle of the cedar box full of people. I can’t even count the number of times I have walked out to the sauna after spending ten minutes fighting with my bathing suit in the locker room only to find wall to wall bros and no free seating. That is when I turn right back around and leave.
When the boobs come out these boobs get out!
Inevitably when I head back into the locker room there is only one other woman in the area, but she feels the need to take up every available inch of counter and bench space within 100 feet of her. Her 15″ x 15″ bag is like a clown car with 80 pounds of make up, hair product and clothing spilling out all over every available surface. In the past week I have watched a woman spread three towels over the benches in between the lockers and dump her beauty products all over the place claiming her space; a 6 year old lying down playing with her mom’s phone on one bench as said mom dropped wet towels and bathing suits dangerously close to my electronic devices sitting at the corner of the other bench while she spread her belongings all over the room; and two elderly women sitting topless, one on each of the two benches in the area while speaking Chinese very animatedly. The last scene had me throwing my coat on over my bikini and fleeing before getting knocked out by a boob as the women’s arms flailed while they chatted. It was then that I remembered why I rarely used the locker room.
Someone needs to write a pamphlet about gym etiquette, although I don’t know who would read it. People seem to be unable to read the various signs around the gym asking that they wipe down their machines after use, to not use cameras in the locker rooms and most disturbingly necessary to not spit in the drinking fountain. If the seven word signs are too difficult, a pamphlet on etiquette would be like reading War and Peace for the bros.
Are you talking to me?
One of the peculiar things that happens to my husband that never happens to me is that as he is getting on a machine a person walks over to tell him they are using that machine. They are sitting on a machine close to the one that he is attempting to sit down on or doing squats five feet away. They say things like “I am in the middle of a rep” or “I am getting back on that machine.” This has never happened to me. Although, to be fair I don’t make eye contact with people at the gym very often and my headphones are blaring Hatebreed so people could be yelling all kinds of things at me and I would have no idea. My husband is a nice guy and it’s written all over his face which is why people walk all over him if he lets them. Me, not so much. My expression usually says “get out of my way” even when I am not in a hurry. I mentioned to him several responses he could give to people who try to hold machines they are not using like it is their own personal gym. My responses included giving them a definition of “using” or pointing out that they were not in fact currently on the machine which means it is free to use by anyone. Since he is opposed to getting punched and/or harassed he declined my advice.
I think the entertainment I received last night made all of the overcrowding and close calls with accidental motorboating in the locker room worth it. I was in attendance at a one woman show. I was diligently pushing into my sixth mile on the elliptical when I heard a woman start singing in what can only be described as a pseudo operatic voice. I looked up at the television to see Beyonce jiggling away but the singing wasn’t matching up to the mouth movements on the screen. My familiarity with Beyonce is limited, as I only know a few songs (one of which was done better by Jonah Matranga), so I didn’t know what song was playing or who I was hearing.
I looked around and quickly found the source of the noise. A very small middle aged woman was on an elliptical machine a row behind me singing away with her eyes closed. I could hear the song she was listening to so she obviously was playing her music through her phone speaker for the whole gym to hear. This did not surprise me in the least, as I have heard people doing this at least weekly. The thing that surprised me was that she was wearing headphones. Either she did not have them properly plugged in or she had both the headphones and speaker enabled simultaneously. Whatever the issue was, this crazy lady was singing at the top of her lungs completely off key as she shared her “music” with half the gym. As I was looking back at her I noticed that several other people were laughing along with me. The best part about this is our little entertainer had no idea she had an audience giving her their full attention since she had her eyes closed. She was literally singing like nobody could hear. I turned around and went back to my workout but at one point the singing stopped abruptly. She must have opened her eyes or been otherwise tipped off to the fact that people were watching her.
I was amused by this woman because it is something I could relate to. Sometimes I get wrapped up in what I am listening to so much that I find myself running on the elliptical, lifting double the weight I am used to at double the pace or drumming on my legs. There are usually pretty awful videos on the televisions except on saturdays when every now and then a really good video airs. A few years ago I almost fell off my machine when Sleigh Bells came on right in front of where I was working out. I had to pick up my phone and text my husband and friends to tell them of this fabulous news. They were not all that excited and it ended up being a fluke because I never saw the video again. Someone probably saw me almost take a header and flagged it as a health risk to gym members! So to the singing little lady from the other night, keep it up. Joy is contagious, even when it is completely out of key.
Attention Target shoppers – there’s a creepy guy near the children’s swimwear…
My husband and I have had fun filming. So much fun that we filmed an intro video. We wanted to incorporate all of the things that I do on a regular basis, so of course we had to film me shopping at Target. It is my second home after all. Seriously, when I got in my car after leaving the gym on Saturday, my GPS told me how long it would take to get to Target rather than my house! Filming at Target was kind of fun. My husband was a bit like a nature documentarian, following this big cat in her natural habitat. The only bummer was that he made me put back everything I had put in the cart. Apparently they were just props! What’s up with that? I don’t think I have ever walked out of Target without my arms weighed down with bags. I don’t work out my arms at the gym, these guns are strictly from lugging around shopping bags. (more…)
I think the most complicated relationships are between women. I say this because I am a woman and I can’t even figure out how I think half the time, let alone what most normal women think. I also don’t have a lot of women in my life that I am close with, I have always gravitated toward the dudes. Even as a little girl I watched the game with the men instead of hanging around the food with the women at family gatherings. I think the easiest explanation for this is that I think in very black and white terms and I lead with my head rather than my heart which is common for males. (more…)
![Sleigh Bells](http://<a href="https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/album/reign-of-terror/490170428?mt=1&app=music&itscg=30200&itsct=afftoolset_1" style="display:inline-block;overflow:hidden;background:url(https://linkmaker.itunes.apple.com/assets/shared/badges/en-us/music-lrg.svg) no-repeat;width:157px;height:45px;background-size:contain;"></a>){kind=link}
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