Background Noise

yoga as a contact sport

I’ve started working out again. I’m doing it slowly so I don’t end up feeling like my entire body is a bruised piece of fruit the next day. I usually take it too far when I get back into exercising after some time off.  I use too much weight, I do too many reps and then the next day I can’t walk or lift stuff or BREATHE without feeling every single muscle in my body screaming in protest.

I work in a gym, so it’s easy to work out. I usually do a few reps of a new exercise when I’m teaching it to someone for the first time because it’s easier to show than to tell. But instead of backing off after I show, I’ve started continuing on with the whole exercise right along with them, under the guise that we’re doing it together. Like gym buddies.

This has been working out great except for the days when I really want to do triceps and all I have are knee patients. Or I want to do quads and all day long I have shoulder appointments. So when it’s slow I do a few sets of tricep presses or hamstring curls, and since all the exercise is spread out through the day, I do more than I probably would if I went to the gym for a couple of hours.

But there’s the problem of working only part-time. I should be exercising more than three days a week, so I went into Tivo and searched around for an exercise show I can record and do every day.  I found Yoga Zone and it’s perfect because it is on every day at 6am. I can record it in the morning and then do it in the day whenever it’s convenient.  I never thought to consider that with a toddler in the house bouncing off the walls all day, no time is convenient for yoga.

I stupidly thought that Joey and I could do yoga together. But since the yoga instructors do not dress in colorful blue or red monster costumes to exercise, Joey is not interested in anything they’re saying or doing on the screen. He’s far more interested in what Mama’s doing on the floor all upside down and twisted like a pretzel, and he’d much rather use this time for fun things like banging books into my face while I’m trying to balance and control my breathing in downward dog, or throwing his cup at my knees while I’m trying to feel a connection with the earth during my sun salutations.

I tried to ignore his abuse and it was working until he pulled out his secret weapon. He took a big swig off his sippy cup, twirled himself around a few times and then walked over to me and SPIT UP MILK on my hand while I was in the middle of a slow pushup. The kid hasn’t spit up in almost a year so I know it was intentional.

It’s hard to ignore curdled milk as it drips through your fingers and onto the carpet so I put my yoga on hold until Eli came home. And once he was home I gave him very specific instructions: Keep this child away from me for ten minutes so I can finish doing yoga. I don’t know what Eli heard me say, but it only took three minutes before I saw him whispering into Joey’s ear and then Joey toddled over to me, got UNDER MY BODY while I was doing a front backbend pose called camel or cat or some other ridiculous animal, and started pulling my shirt up and sticking his fingers in my bellybutton. He made me lose my balance and fall down, and then he looked over at Eli with a big smile and clapped his hands while Eli shouted praise, “Good boy! You found mama’s button!”

I gave Eli my best I will murder you in your sleep later if you don’t make this stop death stare until he gathered Joey up and took him into the kitchen. Where he discovered that in all the excitement Joey had pooped his diaper. Since the wipes were in the living room, he brought Joey back in there and changed his diaper not even three feet away from where I was sitting in meditation pose with my eyes closed, legs crossed and my hands out to the sides resting on my knees trying to be at peace with the universe. It was a futile attempt because how can a person find their fucking center when it smells like you’re meditating in a bowel?

I know I should just pick up a copy of Sweatin’ to the Oldies and be done with it, because if there’s anything that will hold Joey’s attention on the screen it’s that tubby bitch Richard Simmons and his tribe of human physical agony.

a masochist like me

I knew it would happen eventually, but I was hoping this time it would be different. Now that I’ve had a couple months of peace, and my family has a schedule that’s working for everyone, I’m starting to feel restless again. I wish I could just live in the peace, and be content with the decisions I’ve made that have stabilized daily life around here, and I am to an extent. But there’s a small, aggravating part of me that gets a little bored with tranquility.

I don’t want to be a person who can only function under stress. That’s what got me into trouble in the first place. I keep reminding myself that any jerk can function in the midst of chaos, but it’s learning how to be still and calm and enjoy the quiet moments without constantly trying to figure out ways to make things unbearably difficult that are the sign of a person who has their shit together.

This morning I was cleaning out my wallet when I found a few of my old business cards tucked into the inside flap. And I started thinking about how proud of those cards I used to be and how much work it took me to get them. I spent years in school and then years paying my dues and then I dropped it all like it was just a silly hobby. There are days when I feel disappointed in myself. When I wake up and I feel like a big failure at keeping it together and moving forward with my life when everything was changing and mostly I feel ashamed sometimes at how poorly I made the transition to motherhood. I hate to admit that having a baby fucked me up, because it doesn’t feel fair to the small person who is in the world because I made it so, whose joyful innocence knocks me down every day, and owns my heart like no other person in this world ever has.

But not all days are full of self loathing and shame. Some days, when I get home from work well before dinner and Joey is fresh from his afternoon nap, we sit on the couch and read books together. He snuggles into my lap and rests his head against my chest while I read to him and when I glance down and see his sock feet resting against my leg and his chubby hands holding onto mine while I hold the book, I can’t believe I almost let someone else have these moments. Almost PAID someone a lot of money to have them. And it’s in moments like that when I get a little perspective back about what I’m trying to do.

Being content shouldn’t be so hard, but it is for a masochist like me. I just have to remind myself to remember the bad when thinking about the good, and try to stop torturing myself with regret. And I’m working on it. But I still couldn't bring myself to throw away all the business cards. I had to keep one.

ketchup and tears

I haven’t been up to the loft in a couple of weeks and I’d forgotten what a mess my desk is.

I’ve been using my laptop downstairs because it’s too much of a hassle to travel up two flights of stairs to get to my real computer. Also, downstairs is near the TV.

I don’t watch a lot of television, but I’ve been watching movies like it’s my career. It has become my routine after Joey goes to bed to brew a big cup of sleepytime tea and settle in on the couch for a movie before bed. And either I suck at picking movies or I’ve become jaded and unable to appreciate anything that doesn’t totally blow me away because I’ve hated all the movies I’ve seen lately. I didn’t like North Country. I didn’t like A History of Violence. Proof sucked. Jarhead wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. I hated Flight Plan. Red Eye was AWFUL. Dark Water was mostly stupid. The Fog, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and Half Light were not scary at all. In Her Shoes and Must Love Dogs were disappointing chick flicks. And on it goes, sucky movie after sucky movie. Except for November. That one was interesting and I liked it.

So I’m taking a break from movies for a while and I’m going to try reading with my tea instead.

It’s the first day of spring and it’s feeling more like winter than most of the winter did. The air is so cold and dry that my eyes are constantly itching and tearing and I’m having a hell of a time trying to keep myself from looking deranged when I head out in the morning. When it’s dry out my hair gets staticky and sticks out all over my head like I took a morning roller coaster ride instead of a shower. This combined with my red, watery eyes, and I look like a disheveled spazz who licked the toaster for breakfast.

Someone suggested eye drops, the kind that are supposed to be like natural tears, and it got me to thinking that maybe there’s a connection between my recent lack of real natural tears and my eye problems. I’ve cried only once since October. And if you’re not a big crybaby this may not seem strange to you, but all of my life I’ve been an avid weeper. I usually cry out of frustration and anger, and always once a month everything would just catch up to me and I’d have a nice big hormone-fueled cry. My shrink told me this is a coping mechanism, and a healthy way to deal with stress. But since I’ve started taking medicine that controls my moods and makes me less of an unstable psycho, the tears have stopped. I was beginning to think I might never cry again. But my theory was tested the day I got the news that my mom was in the ICU and she was having a lot of trouble and it was looking like she might not make it out of the hospital. I sat on my couch and thought about the reality of the situation, and what it would mean, and how even though we have a difficult relationship that tortures both of us every day, I’m not ready for her to be gone. Before I knew it my throat closed up and my eyes were wet. But only for a minute because once I realized what was happening it scared me so much I turned on the stereo and started cleaning.

Anyway, since nothing particularly sad is going on these days, I bought some natural tears for my eyes, and while I was at it I tried a trick I read about in Glamour where you run a sheet of fabric softener over your hair to control static. But none of it really helped. What I need is some fucking moisture in the air. The kind of moisture that happens naturally when the ground starts to thaw, the grass begins to grow and the vegetation starts to breathe and make the air feel less like a cold sucking space vacuum and more like a substance that can sustain life.

I could never live in Arizona.

And when I’m not thinking about how my skin is going to just give up one of these days, crack and fall off like a hard candy shell, exposing my soft chocolate center, I’m trying to figure out how to keep my cool as my child becomes more independent and fiercely stubborn by the day. The child who used to be content to eat with his fingers now demands his own fork so that he can torture and stab at his food with the tool in one hand while continuing to eat with the other.  He has also learned the joy of dipping through sauces like honey mustard and ketchup and goes beyond just dipping his chicken pieces and fish sticks like a normal person would, and instead dips everything on his plate, and when the food is gone, he eats the rest of the dip straight.

The dipping sauce has become the glue he uses to make extravagant sculptures of foods that should never be combined and I have to sit at the dinner table trying not to gag while the person sitting next to me drags his fruit through a pile of ketchup, like a sauce made from tomatoes is the perfect accompaniment for peaches. The most unusual and disgusting dip I’ve seen so far was the triple dip last night that consisted of a slice of apple coated in ketchup with a sprinkling of scrambled eggs all over the outside. I thought Joey was doing it as an experimental food sculpture, a colorful display of textures and shapes, and I never imagined he would eat it but that’s just what he did, and then he smiled because it was so delicious in his mouth.

But I can’t really complain because ketchup gets him to eat healthy things that he would otherwise never let near his mouth. Like green beans. And eggs. And rice. It’s like having a container of magic eating sauce in the fridge, but every time I reach for the bottle I know I’m doing wrong. As I squirt a pool of ketchup or honey mustard out on a plate I remember a commercial from when I was young about how you shouldn’t drown your food. There were all these cartoon vegetables being rescued from pools of sauce and dressings, and one very disturbing image of a radish in a salad screaming for help as a stream of salad dressing poured out over his body, threatening to drown him in the bowl.

But I have to remember that was the 70s and they didn’t know shit all about the healthy antioxidant effects of tomatoes back then.

mystery shopping revealed

I've had to remove a couple of things from this weblog since I started it. The first one was an essay I wrote about mystery shopping, because someone offered to give me money to publish it in a newsletter. And the second was an entry where I wrote some pretty personal things about an ex and then gave him the address to this site. I have some rules about this page, and one of them is that I will never use this space to communicate with anyone in my real life. If I have something to say to you, you will not read it here, you will hear it from my lips. (Another rule is I am a money whore and if someone wants to pay me to rip down an essay here or there, I am up in my control panel deleting shit faster than you can say Paypal.)

Anyway, the entry about my ex is gone forever, but the one about mystery shopping is mine again to do with as I please. So I'm putting it back (with the expletives added back in) just in case I can help another desperate person looking for a fast way to make some cash.
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A couple weeks after quitting my job I was starting to feel useless and began struggling to come up with something to do with my time.  It’s not that I have a problem finding things to do, I’m just not getting paid for the things I choose to do like going to the park and the grocery store, doing errands, coming up with exciting new games to play with the baby each day and hanging out watching Tivo.  These are a few of my favorite things and none of them pay.

My skills don’t easily translate to an at-home job. They really don’t translate to a flexible job of any kind at all, since I need to be in a lab to do the work I’m good at.

So I hopped online and went to this work-at-home-mom website to try and find a new career.  I’m not into any of that TupperwareCandlesAvon Party shit so I skipped past all that and that’s when I found Mystery Shopping.  A whole big list of Mystery Shopping companies who pay you to shop at stores and write reports tattling on the people who work there.  Long ago I worked in retail and I’ve been ratted out myself by many a Mystery Shopper, so I figured I knew pretty much what to expect from the gig.  I immediately signed up with five companies, took the little tests they make you take to show that you are indeed literate and can follow directions, read the contracts and then, high on the idea of what a great cash flow opportunity this could be, I accepted a bunch of work.

It wasn’t until I got into the details that I realized what a fucking scam this shit is.  My first assignment was to go to a pet store with a list of SIXTY items and, without arousing the suspicion of the store workers, hunt down each item and record its price.  Then I was to go home and enter it all into the computer by midnight the same day and submit it for approval.  And do you know how much they were going to pay me as a reward for performing this task?  SEVEN DOLLARS. 

Yeah, I blew it off.  Which wasn’t as easy as I thought seeing as how I received several angry phone calls and emails and finally they kicked me out of their shopper database for being unreliable.  Yeah, fuck your seven dollars.  I could find seven dollars in change on the ground at the park if I put a little effort into it.

The next job (with a different company) was to evaluate a daycare center.  I was to call during business hours and have a detailed phone conversation for fifteen minutes, asking questions according to a checklist.  I was then to visit the daycare unannounced and do a tour, again asking questions according to the checklist and remembering very specific details like everyone’s name or description of appearance, how many children present, and a million other little things about the general state of the facility.  I would then come home and write up a detailed report about my findings, elaborating on the eighty-question checklist all using perfect grammar and punctuation.  There was a clause in there somewhere reminding me to hang on to my notes for several months because sometimes companies don’t like their report and try to challenge your findings.  And do you know how much this little task paid?  Twelve dollars.  TWELVE DOLLARS ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  It wasn’t even close to my house, and besides what the fuck am I going to do with twelve dollars?  It’s like a half day of work, which ends up being like three dollars an hour.  Eat me. 

I’m still getting requests to do jobs.  Apparently there’s a big fast food chicken emergency happening right now and I’ve been receiving frantic emails all morning for someone, ANYONE, to go to KFC and buy a snacker sandwich to see if the cashier will try to sell a drink to go with it. The location is like twenty miles from my house and the report is three pages long and life is too short, man.  Oh yeah, and it pays…ten dollars.  Plus the cost of the food.   Never mind that I would rather drink Windex than put anything from KFC in my body (this of course does not count when I am pregnant.  I had a KFC emergency during my pregnancy that was harsh and I ate twelve dollars of greasy chicken and it was so good I wanted to rub the bones all over my body after I was done and drink the leftover gravy—pregnancy is not a pretty time in a girl’s life), those snacker sandwiches look disgusting.

So that’s the story about how mystery shopping will not be my new career path.  I haven’t blocked the emails yet because I’m still waiting for that dream shop assignment to come through.  Something like being reimbursed for testing and evaluating every coffee drink at a Dunkin Donuts.  Until then I’m working on some other stuff but one thing is for sure, I’m not your cheap labor.

saturday night fever

I’ve been slowly cleaning my house out this winter, getting rid of all the excess clutter. Normally when I do this, I hang on to stuff that I don’t want anymore because it’s too good to throw away. This is why I have two extra computer monitors, a spare television, and so much random baby shit like a beautiful vibrating papasan chair and a brand new crib tent that doesn’t fit the crib all collecting dust in the basement. But back in November I decided that I would have a yard sale in the spring and the promise of the sale is making me much choosier about what gets to stay in my home.

The sale needs to happen soon because we’re running out of basement. This morning I thought about opening an ebay store to get rid of everything, but that would be a lot of work, and might cut into my naps. Anyway, I’ve never had a huge yard sale before, so if you have and you’ve got some tips or tricks to share that may help me succeed at selling every damn thing in my basement, send them my way.

Moving on.

I don’t really have anything pressing to talk about. Eli and I have been going out more lately, and I can’t stress the importance of a reliable babysitter when you have young children. Joey goes to bed every night by 7pm, so Eli and I aren’t out together often in the evening. But lately we’ve been having our sitter come over on Saturday nights so we can go out and drink beer and socialize and live for a while like normal adults. And something happens to me when we drive away from the house in the dark, headed for a pub or a restaurant or even just over to a friend’s house for a party that I think is probably natural euphoria but feels like a damn good drug high.

Last Saturday night we hadn’t even traveled a mile from our house when we saw a fantastic wreck happen at an intersection involving many teenagers and their parents’ cars. It was mayhem, complete with screaming and crying and the road covered in broken glass. Once we got past that, we drove by a small car of more teenagers that had pulled over so one of them could puke on the side of the road. I almost forgot that the world is different on Saturday night. There’s so much happening out there while I’m sitting in my living room watching movies or playing strip uno with Eli at the kitchen table before calling it a night at 9.

When I know I’m going out on Saturday night, I make a pot of coffee in the afternoon so that I don’t get sleepy too early in the evening. My body is used to going to bed very early these days, but when we go out I like to stay out at least until midnight so it’s worth it and will sustain me for a couple of weeks before I get the itch again. I’m probably sounding a little negative about the necessary slow down that happens to a person’s social life when they have a baby. And I’m not. I wouldn’t trade the experience of being a mom and raising a child for anything in the world, but there has to be balance. It can’t be all Sesame Street and trips to the park. Sometimes mama needs to get her groove on. 

mean girls

I was trying to decide whether I should clean my house or write in my journal today, and I picked my journal even though I should probably tend to my house. We had a fruit festival at lunch and there are strawberry stains in the carpet that probably won’t come out.  I should care more, but the carpet is such a raggedy piece of shit in here that I’ve been treating it like a drop cloth. I let Joey play with his play doh on the carpet and he gets to spill milk anywhere he wants and the cats take the liberty of puking up their stomach bile in the middle of the night wherever they please.  We’re putting in hardwood floors soon so it really doesn’t matter at this point.

Now that Joey is older, we’ve been trying to come up with fun things to do with him on Sundays. One weekend we went to The Butterfly Place, which is a big indoor park with hundreds of beautiful butterflies flying around. That was fun, but a little underwhelming because you’re not allowed to touch the butterflies or encourage them to land on you. Since I like tactile activities, I spent the whole time resisting the urge to touch and running around chasing Joey and reminding him also not to touch while sweating my ass off in the tropical butterfly climate. And then there was the whining and crying each time I had to pull the kid out of a plant. He was trying to touch the flowers, but a toddler’s delicate touch is more like a strip and destroy mission, and he was ruining the butterflies’ food. Ruining the flowers was also a no-no, right up there on all the signs about touching the fragile butterflies.

Every time I tried to take a picture of a butterfly, it would fly away at the last second and I ended up with a camera full of plant pictures and no butterflies anywhere. Well, except for the one above. How did I not notice that fucking hand?

At one point another mother with a child around Joey’s age looked down at Joey digging in a pile of dirt and said, “Hey buddy, you’re the envy of all the other babies.” She said this because he was not strapped into a stroller. I know I probably should have spared myself the grief of chasing the child around the park, but the kid’s in a stroller everywhere interesting we go: post office, drugstore, bank and all the other random errand places I drag him to every day. He shouldn’t have to observe life from the confines of his five point harness everywhere we go.

Hey look what happens when I turn my attention away from the child for seven minutes to type on my computer!

A whole box of splenda packets on the floor.

This weekend we decided to go to a children’s indoor play place. They have a pretend grocery store, a dinosaur park, a sand room, an arts and crafts area, a big indoor climbing structure with an enormous slide and various other little themed rooms full of toys and activities. We didn’t even have time to pay at the register and Joey was off. And I hope it’s just a normal thing for his age and not some future predictor of ADHD, but the kid couldn’t make up his mind about where he wanted to be. One minute he’s got a dinosaur in his hand and then the next he’s slamming a plastic chicken from the grocery store into the traintracks in the train room. Eli and I spent the whole time returning toys to their specific areas. Plastic peaches don’t belong in the Jurassic room, just like books aren’t supposed to go in the sandbox.

The best part was watching Joey interact with the other children. Most of the kids were a little older than Joey and a little harder, more streetwise. He had every toy he tried to hold taken away from him at one point, and from what I could tell, the children doing the snatching of toys were all from the same greedy family. The same scenario happened over and over with two little girls. Joey is holding a block. Mean girl grabs it away from him and sneers. Mean girl’s dad walks over and scolds mean girl, taking toy out of her hands and giving it back to Joey. Mean girl SCREAMS her head off, and then runs to her mother, whining and sobbing and being a jerk. Joey looks on in amazement.

This happened with a block, a hot wheel car, a wooden saw and a Viking helmet. And I felt bad for the little girls who were whining because it was so obvious that they were tired and needed a nap. I wanted to tell the dad to take his kids the fuck home and quit torturing them, but who am I to say anything about someone else’s parenting. I just lingered close by while Joey played to make sure any homicidal tendencies toward him were kept at bay. And it was good for him to know that there are mean kids that will take his toys sometimes and he should suck it up and deal.

Anyway, since I’m the one who likes to crawl around on the floor with Joey, I got to take him on the slide. And once I got acclimated to the humidity and overpowering stench of feet up inside the climbing structure, I had a good time. The slide was stupid fast, and the first time we went down, Joey and I ended up flying off the bottom and skidding into the floor like we were crash landing off a rocket. I got a mat burn on my ankle. The next time I was ready for it and I was able to slow us down near the end and exit the slide at the bottom like a lady.

And on the last trip down the slide, a small boy of about five approached us at the bottom with a dinosaur puppet which I thought he was showing to Joey until he pressed it into my face while working the teeth in a chewing motion with his hand until his dad walked up and dragged him away. I still don’t know what the fuck that was about but it gave Eli a good laugh, especially because I couldn’t push the kid away since I was holding Joey and could only sit there helplessly while a dinosaur puppet invaded my face.

By the time we left we were all sweaty and tired. So we came home and took a nap. And I will never again underestimate the energy it takes to keep up with a toddler. Man, this kid kicks my ass. I’m thinking about having him do yoga with me in the mornings to put some good use to the endless amount of energy he seems to have.

I guess I understand now why some moms do Ritalin.