Ten Thousand Hours

Take This Job and Shove It, or: O Captain, My Captain

I have to hand it to my work.  They always think of new ways to try and make me a healthier person.  They always seem to think of ways to make me fatter, too, like sitting me at a desk for eight hours and having flavorful delights perpetually littering the office.

But anyway, now what we have going on at work is this walking challenge where we get together in teams of seven and wear pedometers and try, presumably, to walk more than every other team.  The challenge is made up, apparently, of teams from companies around the world.  Well when the email came out, I thought it sounded like a good idea—but I didn’t want to be the one to organize a team (mainly because I hate responsibility).  So when someone else offered to start a team, I joined up.  But then the team started growing and growing, and soon i thought that we had too many people, and so i decided that I would split off and take some of the extras and form our own team. 

Stupid.  Now people have this misapprehension that I will be the type of captain who will do lame things like think of clever team names and organize clever team pictures.  Well, I’m not.  (I made the casual joke that the two teams should be called the Sharks and the Jets, and guess what?  Our team ended up as the Sharks and the other team named itself the Pedominators.  An auspicious start.)  Creativity and dedication are not the skills that I bring to the table.  I am evidently such a bad captain that other teams’ walkers are complaining about me.  In fact, they’re complaining about me more than anyone on my team is complaining about me, which goes to show that if I can do nothing else as a captain, at least I know who to *not* have on my team.

We had to think of a team name, and organize a team photo (that’s supposed to be creative and fun) and come up with team profiles and individual profiles and set goals.  You’ll notice how much of the work associated with this event has nothing to do with exercise or walking.  And, frustratingly for me, it has nothing to do with me selling more of the things I have to sell to make money.  Sadly for me, these overly verbal colleagues of mine have nothing better to do than critique my captaincy.  They even got my own team riled up, and when it started to smell like mutiny, I decided to send out an email rallying the troops and asking them to send goals to me for the walking challenge.  I got one response, which is a strike rate of less than 17%, and the goal that this walker was bravely willing to commit to was to “try to walk more than just from the car to the office” on a daily basis.  He had the presence of mind to set the team goal to include walking enough to make up for his lack of walking.

If it sounds like I’m bitter about all of this, there’s a reason for that, and that reason is that I am bitter about this.  I’m already ready to pull the rip cord on this little event and it doesn’t even start for another two days.  But the plus side is that those two more days give me plenty of time to not do any of the myriad tasks assigned to team captains. 

unconditional love

You can’t know—I mean, know—how much a mother loves her kids until you’re married to one.  I used to think I knew how much my mom loved us and I’ve always known that she loves us as much as anyone can love, but it doesn’t really register until you go through parenthood yourself.  I always hate it when people tell me this, that I can’t know something, but I really believe that you can’t know how parents love their kids until you become a parent.

What women go through to bring children into this world, it’s just unreal.  From the very beginning, their bodies start to change and react against them.  My wife was nauseated for about twelve consecutive weeks with our second baby.  Weeks.   When I’m nauseated for fifteen minutes I want to lay up in bed and die.  Vomiting in the middle of the night.  Weight gain.  Hormones.  Shrinking bladder.  Clothes not fitting.

But the reality of the situation is that that’s not even the worst of it.  The worst of it is that from the moment that they know they are pregnant, they have to worry for the rest of their lives about that little pack of cells that is growing inside them.  My wife would tell me on some days that she didn’t feel the baby kicking enough.  It’s easy for me to tell her not to worry, but how do you count the kicks you feel inside of you?  Only a mother knows.

Motherhood can be summed up in many ways, but the lack of sleep is probably the most telling.  My wife wakes up in the middle of the night multiple times to feed and take care of our daughter.  I sleep.  She gets up, feeds the baby, changes her diaper, and gets her back to bed.  If our daughter is fussy or can’t sleep, she stays with her.  Partly because I have to go to work the next morning, but mainly because my wife is an extraordinary person and mother and she worries about our baby constantly.  And if the baby *doesn’t* wake up every three hours, my wife wakes up anyway in a terror thinking that something is wrong.  I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night to the gentle sound of my wife patting our daughter after a feeding—a constant, soft rhythm that comforts our girl.  I wake up sometimes in the morning to see that they’ve fallen asleep together, my wife frozen in an awkward position just so that the baby can be comfortable and safe.

When we spend time away from our kids, my wife doesn’t even enjoy it for how much she misses the kids.  She will be begging for a break, for some quiet relaxation, and then five minutes in she will start missing them and wanting to see them.  That, as well as being covered in tears, snot, vomit, pee, and poop at regular intervals, is motherhood.

When my brothers or I performed or competed in any way, my mom would be an anxiety-ridden bag of nerves.  She suffers for us when we suffer.  She calls us to remind us about someone’s birthday or holiday.  She revels in our victories and agonizes in our defeats.

I think back to some of the times I’ve put my mom through hell and back and feel pangs of regret.  But then, on the other hand, how could I have possibly known how much she cared?  As a child, your mother is (should be, in fairness) a constant, a fact of life.  She’s there giving all of herself for you so routinely that you can’t possibly do anything *but* take it for granted.  And it’s better that way.  Life wouldn’t make any sense any other way.

I’ve said many times that being a parent is the hardest thing I will ever do in my life.  I can’t even fathom how much harder it would be without having grown up with my mom raising me, or without my wife raising our kids.  I don’t want to know.

Here’s to moms.  If you are a parent, I probably don’t need to tell you this.  If you aren’t a parent, I’m sorry to tell you this but you can’t possibly know how your mom has lived and breathed for you for every moment of your life and then some.

To the mother of my beautiful kids, and to my mom, I love you, and thank you.

Happy mothers’ day.

Fitness

Today was the third session with my therapist, and I spent a good deal of time talking with him about improving my overall welfare.  The initiatives I’ve come up with range from granular (to force-feed three servings of fresh veggies every day) to vast (to exercise regularly) in scope.

Just in time for the arrival in today’s mail of the Bowflex catalog.  The catalog tells me that I will be able to Reveal My Summer Body by using this machine and promises that I can expect a physical transformation in just six weeks, guaranteed.  I am wholly confident in this claim, but I’m equally confident that it won’t be the same sort of transformation that the snappy-lookin homeboy on the cover of the brochure went through.  My sort of transformation will probably involve a prescription narcotic pain reliever and six weeks of physical therapy, which is another place where I find myself scheming to avoid the prescribed regimen.

It doesn’t really matter anyway, this idea of the Bowflex, because my wife has prohibited me from buying it.  She seems to have been really scarred by the lesson of the $1500 treadmill that I bought (along with a second satellite receiver so that I’d have something to watch while I exercised).  In fairness, I did get plenty of exercise from that treadmill—it’s just that 80% of the exercising came from trying to move that thing out of the house to sell it, because it is heavier than a black hole.

Fortunately for my wife, my therapist thinks it’s a little too early for me to start with such a big step.  He thinks that I should begin my journey of self-improvement with something that is more reachable from my list of goals, like flossing once a day without fail.  And so I will floss tonight, and tomorrow, and every night thereafter, because flossing helps prevent gum disease (which is linked to heart disease) and also because that’s one minute out of my day that I think I can pretty much sacrifice if it means that I don’t have to strap myself onto a Bowflex.

Typical

Me: Hi, can I speak with (owner)?

Receptionist: He’s not in right now.  He won’t be in until early next week.

M: Okay, can I leave a message?

R: Sure, but he won’t get it until early next week.

M: Right—that’s understandable.  Can I leave a message for him then?

R: Sure.

M: Do I leave it with you or on a voicemail?

R: I can take it.

M: Okay, my number is [xxx-xxx-xxxx] extension [xxxxxx].

R: You’ve got to be kidding with that extension.

M: I know, it’s a mile long.

R: Well that’s just ridiculous.  That would make me not to do business with you.

M: The six digit extension would make you not want to do business with me?

R: For sure.

M: You’re a very finicky person.

R: Oh come on, you can’t tell me I’m the first person who has told you that.

M: I actually can tell you that you’re the first person who has ever told me that they wouldn’t do business with us just because we have six digit extensions.

R: It just makes it look like you all don’t have your stuff together.

M: Well the problem with that is that we have 14,000 employees so we kind of need long extensions.

R: That *is* a problem.  Maybe they should just give you cell phones.

M: Yeah.  Well thanks….

R: Okay, I will give him the message.

M: For some reason, I don’t feel totally confident about that.

R: No, I will give it to him.  And don’t tell him I said that about the extensions.  He would KILL me.

I have abs!

We’re doing this weight loss thing at work.  You have to collect a certain number of points over a certain number of weeks, and you get points only once a week.  If you weigh yourself, that’s one point.  If you maintain or lose weight, that’s another point.  The goal is to encourage healthy, sustained weight loss, but all this promotes in my life is starving myself all morning and afternoon so that I have about a thousand calories left in the evening, at which point I consume two thousand calories of chocolate and other random shit around the house.

Last week I lost two pounds on this foolproof plan, but this week I gained back about a pound and a half.  So that seems to be working.  Which is good, because weight loss as a full on adult is very difficult.  I think this stems from the fact that I’m terrified to exercise because every time I do now, I pull something or other and have to lay around like an invalid for weeks on end.  I’ve been battling a sciatic nerve issue since Christmas and only now is that going away.  Perfect timing for my latest injury to take center stage, which is a pulled rectus abdominus (my left topmost one).  I know what you all are thinking right now, and I didn’t realize I had abs either!  But I have at least one, and now it’s pulled.

More disconcerting than that is that this muscle is a key component of two critical life activities of mine, which are laughing and sucking in my big fat gut.  The effectiveness of this muscle, and the others with which it works, is why I seem like a jolly guy who weighs 245 pounds, when in fact I really am a perpetually agitated guy who weighs 250 pounds.  (It could also be that I seem jolly exactly because the muscle doesn’t do its job.)  So now, any time I laugh, or any time I want to look slender, a mild but inexorable pain gnaws at my midsection, and instead of my typical affable demeanor, I just come across as a morose butterball.

Anyway, I think I should probably take it easy on the exercise for the next few weeks.  Just so I can properly heal.

swoon

I haven’t written many posts lately, but most of you will know that I have a really good reason.  there has been a huge shift in my personal priorities recently, ever since I started reading the hunger games.  gripping!

oh katniss!  katniss, you noble creature! you valiant sufferer!  The hunger games trilogy blindsided me and robbed me of hours and at least fifteen dollars, if you don’t count the lost productivity in life and at home.  But what a story!  And (spoiler about book 2*) and also (spoiler about book 3**) and it’s just so amazing and I can’t wait to see the movie except that movies are always terrible when compared to the books but not this one because omg.

Oh that and my newborn daughter is now six weeks old.  Six weeks!  She is the most lovable little thing but I have to be honest with you, things aren’t what they once were in the sleep department.  And you would think that having a second child means that you worry twice as much but in reality you worry four times as much.  There’s the normal worry you have that maybe her ears aren’t perfectly symmetrical (she got that from me) but the additional worry that one might get the other sick and there’s the horrible realization that my kids actually are learning from me every single day.  By learning from me, I mean that I can already see some of my flaws manifesting themselves on my son.  For example, when he enters a room, no one can get anything done because he’s so charming and charismatic.

Kidding.  That’s not a flaw.  The real flaw that I’m thinking of is sometimes things make him so furious that he can’t contain himself.  That’s just one example.  I also can see a flaw he got from my mom, which is that if I race him and he loses, he bursts into tears and can’t deal.  Which, if my athleticism is any indication, he better get over real quick.

Anyway, I had intended to write more frequently than this but things happen, and priorities change, so don’t expect much writing in the near future because I have a stack of Nicholas Sparks books here that I’m about to start into.***

—-

*OMG a *second* hunger games?!

**OMG again Katniss is the Mockingjay!?!!?

***I would never read that drivel.  You should be ashamed of yourself.

Pho [insert obvious joke here]

So early in my time living in *the* OC, I went to a ramen place for lunch.  For a person from Phoenix, even this is noteworthy.  In Phoenix, a “ramen place” is whichever aisle of the grocery store that Maruchan is sold in.  In south OC, though, ramen places are temples of umami succulence replete with dumpster-sized bowls of noodles.  And these noodles are not kinked up styrofoam clumps—no, these noodles are as long and as straight as Rapunzel’s flaxen locks.

[NB: I love top ramen]

Ramen here in Orange County comes with meats and vegetables tossed in and you can even get it in miso instead of just broth.  There’s usually half a hard-boiled egg in it and it is so filling and delicious that it’s close to unbelievable.  So basking in a post-feeding stupor, I told my manager about my virgin Ramen lunch that day, and he told me about Pho.

Pho is a Vietnamese rice noodle dish.  It does not rhyme with “show.”  It does rhyme with “huh?” and “duh.”  Consequently, there are a million different clever jokes you could make that start with “Pho” but since everyone makes them, including me, they are not actually clever at all.  Anyway, pho is a bowl of rice noodles and broth that takes the restaurant like 90 seconds to bring to your table after you’ve ordered it.  Then you fill up the bowl with fresh jalapenos and hoisin sauce and sriracha and mint leaves and bean sprouts and lime.  I like my pho with oxtail but the bold among you can choose pretty much any body part you want, from common to completely horrifying.

The issue with eating pho or ramen here is that the noodles are a mile long and often 250 degrees, too.  Out here I’m sure they teach noodle etiquette in third grade but I am from Arizona and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.  Do I pre-cut the noodles in the bowl and eat them with a spoon?  Since the dish is typically served with a shallow, flat bottomed spoon and chopsticks, this seems unlikely to be the appropriate way to eat it.

I look to others for guidance.  Most of the clientele in these places is Asian, and pretty much all of the Asians take a big bite of the noodles and then just keep reeling the noodles into their mouth until they’re gone.  I find this troubling.  I worry that I might do this and instantly be called out as a poser (like in Inglourious Basterds, when the one guy gets killed or whatever because he holds up the wrong three fingers for the number three).  Also, when you’re slurping up the noodles, sometimes they swing around and splash little drops of broth all over you and everything else.  The other day, I saw a dot of dried pho broth on my iPhone screen, and I hadn’t eaten pho for like three days.  I have a recurring fear that I will come back from lunch with broth splattered all over me. It would be humiliating.

I went the other night with some friends for Pho Friday (so named thereafter by the dude we were with. genius) and he would take noodles and painstakingly corral them in the spoon and then take a perfectly tidy bite.  Every once in a while, the noodles would fall off and then he’d just round them up again and calmly place them back in the spoon.  This is totally not what I’m about.  I would have a conniption the first time they fell off the spoon and an aneurysm the second time they fell off.  It worked for him though, paralleling the points that he would make as he talked—he would finish a sentence just as he was done crafting his bite of pho.  And then he’d eat it.  Next sentence.

No sir, even though I am confident it is detestable and the least refined (whitest) way to do it, and despite the fact that I am probably judged harshly by everyone else in the restaurant, I still take a bite of noodles and just bite off whatever doesn’t make it in my mouth.  The perk of this technique is its expediency, and as an added bonus, the noodles become progressively smaller in the bowl with each passing bite.  Another example of how taking the easy way out has its rewards.

it’s official. i have a daughter.

Car Search

This weekend, along with the last couple days of my two weeks of paternity leave, was spent hunting for cars.  Of course, criterion number one was that the car had to fit our car seat because only a complete idiot would *ever* buy a car that his kids could not fit in.

Of course, there are plenty of other criteria.  My wife liked the Hyundai Tucson, but I steadfastly refuse to buy a car named after that turdhole that the University of Arizona calls home.  I liked the Acura TSX, but my wife thought it was too expensive and too small.  My wife liked the Volvo S60 because it reminds her of Boston.  But it was too small.  The Kia Optima was high on my list because I love that commercial where the sock puppet gets a “MOM” tattoo sewn into his arm, but it was too expensive for the fact that it’s a Kia—classic commercial notwithstanding.

My wife wanted navigation and heated seats.  I wanted a car that would instantly boost me up a rung or three on the social ladder.  I liked the Audi A4, but my wife vetoed it because it is too expensive.  I test drove a Hyundai Sonata but it ended up being really expensive as a lease as well because apparently they project that in three years the car will be next to worthless so if I want to lease it I have to pay more for it.  If that makes any sense.

I rated the VW Passat at two and a half stars because it is so comprehensively boring, but my wife gave it three and three quarter stars because it has nav and heated seats, and because of its size.  They offered us a great deal, and my wife only agreed to marry me if I would let her win every argument, so we leased the Passat.  It even comes with an iPod cable but with bluetooth you can just turn your phone on and it will play your iPod music or pandora just like magic.  It’s amazing. And the back seat is big enough to conjure up a third child.

As if a weekend of car shopping torture wasn’t enough, this week I have so far had to suffer the twin indignities of returning to a life where I actually have to work for a living, and also being urinated on by my 18-day-old daughter.  My wife has many talents but high on the list is her ability to change a diaper at the exact moment when the infant needs to empty his or her bladder.  Well as she was carrying Amélie over to the bathtub, the baby started to pee.  Fortunately at this tender age the molecular composition of her urine is essentially the same as holy water, and I was the lucky recipient of this day’s baptism.  I’m sure it’s foreshadowing.