Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Escape From Alcatraz ... In Reverse


There are many unfair things regarding the government shutdown, and I don't want to downplay the seriousness of the matter. I believe everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and I'm not interested in a debate on the issue. Instead, I choose to make light of my own inconvenience.

The selfish point of this post ranks low on the importance scale regarding the shutdown, but I would like to go on record stating another very valid reason this circus needs to come to an end. We need air traffic controllers to stay on the job so a group of us can travel to San Francisco for my best friend's 40th birthday celebration. It's been planned for quite some time, and it's frustrating to know that we will not get to tour Alcatraz due to the recent closure. Hawk Hill, with its famous view of the Golden Gate Bridge ... closed. Muir Woods with its breathtaking redwoods ... closed. WHY DON'T THEY JUST SHUT DOWN SAN FRANCISCO and ignore all of my carefully planned photo ops and Nicolas Cage/Sean Connery reenactments?!?!

It's difficult to see any kind of maturity or etiquette displayed in the playground sandbox we call Washington. So the big picture? Senators standing around on the Senate floor for 21 hours just to prove a point, even taking time to read Green Eggs and Ham to a child watching from home. It's a house divided, people standing on one side or the other with their arms crossed. "We're not budging." "Well, we're not budging either." <tongues stuck out at each other in true Miley Cyrus fashion>

Come on, people. This is ridiculous. The rest of us need to earn a living, we need civil services to continue, and quality health care needs to be affordable. Grow the hell up and put your heads together to arrive at some fair compromises, and stop acting like five-year-old children screaming about a stolen shovel.

My suggestion? Lock up all the rock-kicking sandbox crybabies in Alcatraz until they come to an agreement. That's a tour I'd pay for. I'm all about principle, after all, and I would gladly sacrifice a little bit of dignity by taunting the animals behind the bars just to prove that acting like an adolescent when you're supposed to be an adult is annoying as hell.

In closing, I have the simple goal of celebrating a birthday while refraining from getting us all arrested or lost somewhere in Nova Scotia on the opposite side of the continent searching for Mike "Gandolf" Ganderson, 

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Battle of the Sexes, Overtraining, and One Direction Debates


I will preface this opinion, based on years of observation, by saying to the men who work hard to stay healthy that I am not dismissing your efforts. I get it. You spend the time in the gym working hard, you eat healthy, et cetera. But let's face it. Men in this category are so calm, cool, and collected about aging, taking it in stride year by year. They are afforded this perk because society allows them to age so exquisitely. The glimpse of gray interspersed in their five o'clock shadow really just accentuates their strong jawlines. The gathering of gray at their temples gives an appearance of maturity and experience.

And then you have my kind. Women who battle like MMA fighters raging against their opponents: time, gravity, and free radicals, just to name a few. Even though sweating our faces off at the gym for an hour and a half five days a week makes us feel healthy, strong, and youthful, all it takes is a flash of gray hair that poses a threat to our sanity scale. Those sprigs of gray have the ability to send us running through the house like mad women, finding a comfy place on the bathroom counter for a closeup in the mirror to further investigate. The following day we will promptly make an appointment at the hair salon. Facials, cleansers, moisturizers, eye creams, anti-aging creams, it all becomes a regimen. It's really a lot of work.

It's always this state of mind that tricks me into overtraining. I recently had an extra hour to burn and thought it was a great idea to add a short 700-meter swim to my regular cardio routine. Brilliant, right? It might have been if I was 25 and in prime triathlete shape, which is certainly not the case. The next day the strain in my rhomboid drastically reduced the range of motion in my neck, and that's how I ended up on the floor, flat on my back, alternating ice and heat while debating with my 14-year-old-One-Direction-loving daughter about the pros and cons of sitting through a showing of "This is Us." She immediately seized the opportunity at the first sign of my weakness and a free afternoon where my mobility was restricted. Being a successful negotiator at heart, she actually scares me with her swift-acting strategies. The kid will probably grow up to be a tenacious, badass dealmaker in the business world. Watch for her on the cover of Forbes.

The point of my story? Age really is just a number, but it never hurts to find a good hair stylist and start a savings account for your skin care regime. Laugh lines are a sign of happiness. They're incredibly beautiful. Embrace them. Avoid overtraining at all costs. The result is pain and exhaustion, and you risk the chance of your stellar parental negotiating skills temporarily becoming inferior to that of your apprentice, and you will find yourself sitting through two hours of One Direction telling you what makes you beautiful ... in 3D.

<sigh> Okay. So I have to be honest here. The truth is this:  hanging out with my awesome teenager is always quite fun, the One Direction guys are adorable, I got a couple days off from working out, ate chocolate, hung out, laughed hard ...