Miscellanea
In which I eat crow, complain about my brown thumb, and bemoan the animal workout
The death of Scary Mommy this week has made me nostalgic for the old days of blogging. I had a “mommy blog”1 that I started back in 2007 and stopped writing in 2013. I called it The Madame Queen, after one of my mother’s nicknames for me in my youth.2 It was the heyday of blogging in my opinion and I made lots of online friends during that time, some of which I’m still online friends with to this day. I even flew to Iowa once to visit one of my blog friends.
I’ve spent some time over the past couple of days clicking through to different years and spot reading posts whose pictures or titles catch my eye. Today, I came across this one called The Book is Dead. Again. that I wrote in 2007, in which I rail against the advent of the Amazon Kindle and against e-readers in general. In it, I swear that I will never read a book on an electronic device.
Ha! Of the 18 books I’ve read this year, six have been on my Kindle. Now, last year I did set myself a goal to read everything in physical form and I’m pretty sure I did with one exception, but as I wrote in my year-end reading round up I think that lead to me reading fewer books last year because when I’m reading a book electronically, I always have it with me on my Kindle app on my phone and can read it whenever I have some time to kill. So, not only have I adopted the use of e-readers, I even use one on my phone.
I still believe this part though: “A book has weight. Heft. It has a smell. It has a specific typeface (which I guess could be duplicated, BUT). It has cover art. Just go read Faster Than Kudzu (specifically the 10/19 post) to see how important cover art is to a lot of people. For me, these are all a part of the experience of a "book." Of reading.”
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One of the things that I have finally come to admit about myself is that I have a brown thumb. I love plants, but I can’t seem to keep them alive. I can’t tell you the number of orchids I’ve killed and and whenever anyone gives one to me as a gift I immediately feel guilty because I know I will kill it eventually. My roses that are outside live in spite of me, not because of me.
So, it’s kind of a miracle that I’ve managed to keep alive the peace lily that I took home from my dad’s funeral. It has definitely had its struggles, but it has hung on. I admit that I feel a sense of responsibility to this plant because of its association with my father’s death. Like, if I let it die, if I kill it, I will have somehow killed a connection with my dad. It’s irrational, I know. It doesn’t help that my husband has started referring to it as “your dad’s plant,” as though my dad owned it at one time.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I were at Lowe’s and saw some peace lilies in the outside garden area and they looked great and we both looked at each other and went, “We could put it outside in the summer!” And we did, and y’all, it looks amazing. It will get a little droopy if it gets too much afternoon sun, but a little water and bringing it inside for a bit will perk it right back up.
Of course I’m knocking on wood as I type this. Wouldn’t want to jinx it!
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I recently renewed my vow to myself to get back in the gym three days a week. I’ve been going to the Monday and Friday weight lifting classes pretty religiously, but I’d stopped going to the Wednesday class, which is a combo of strength and cardio. I’m still having a hard time getting back into the Peloton groove and I need the cardio. The Wednesday class can be brutal — I usually leave dripping wet and beet red in the face — and I stopped going because one day we did something called an animal warmup that I think might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s all body weight movements that mimic an animal of some kind. There are lots of these kinds of workouts, but ours consists of bear crawling across the gym, which I estimate to be about 90 feet. When you get to the other side, you bear crawl backwards back to where you started, which is hard as fuck for some reason. Like, I thought I was going to die. Then you take turns going back and forth doing a spiderman crawl, then some kind of sideways plank movement where your hands cross but your feet don’t, and finally an inchworm walk.3
It was so terrible that the thought of having to do it again actually kept me from going on Wednesdays. But, I knew I needed to get back to Wednesdays, so I started going. Week one, fine, regular warmup. Week two, womp womp animal warmup. My gym friend, G, loves the animal warmup and when she requested I literally groaned aloud, “Noooooo!”
But I did it and it was just as terrible as it was the first time. In fact, when we were done, I jokingly said, “Alright, see you guys next week” and started walking to the locker room as though that were our workout and not just the warmup. My traps were on fire for the next several days and I think it was holding up my own body weight for all those reps back and forth across the gym.
I still hate it, in case that’s not clear, but something weird has happened. When I went to class on Wednesday, I was kind of hoping it would be the animal warmup because I want to not hate it as much. I want to prove that I can do it without wanting to die or complaining about it.4 I like the challenge of kicking my own ass sometimes. What the hell is wrong with me? LOL.
For the record, I find this term kind of annoying and the use of the word “mommy” infantilizing because often women who were categorized as “mommy bloggers” were writing about serious topics, but I’m going to use it here because a) it’s convenient and b) in an attempt to reclaim the word and term.
One of her other nicknames for me was Pussywillow and there was no way in hell I was naming a blog that. I’m reserving that name for my OnlyFans account. I kid, I kid!
I think this warmup was the first time I used the word fuck in class to denote how terrible something was. It was like an ice-breaker and I think everyone accepted me a little more after that.
I told the class that meme that’s going around: “My mom didn’t raise a quitter, but she did raise a complainer. I will do it, I will finish it, but I will complain about the whole time.”