So it was with a mixture of joy and trepidation that I read the following email from my dad, which arrived mid-August.

Good morning, everyone:

Well, about two years ago I made two resolutions re my then distant  60th birthday.  The first was to lose fifteen pounds or so and thus weigh in under {redacted for the sake of my dad’s modesty, if he has any left} on the big day.  I am happy to report that I was able to do that ({exact weight}, to be precise).  The second was to be in good enough shape to run through the 2.5 mile Arboretum Run on the Labor Day following my birthday (within thirty days thereof, and thus  sufficiently in the neighborhood to qualify as a birthday event) with my extended family and other loved ones. (This is especially important to me, as my knees are telling me in no uncertain terms that this is likely to be the last time I pin a number on my shirt and run around town.)

 I write with respect to that second resolution.The annual Glen Rock Labor Day Arboretum Run will be held on Monday, September 1, 2008.  The 2.5 Mile Run starts at 9:25 am, followed by a Junior Mile, for those children 8 and older, and a Fun Run for those 7 and younger.  I am “running” the 2.5 miler.  Everyone – all of you and all members of your families, young and old – is invited to join me.  Vicki and I  will be pleased to cover your application fee, with the single proviso that you must run with me and keep me company throughout the race.  I’ll warn you in advance ( this is particularly important advice for Conor, Molly and Seamus) that I’ll be shuffling along in the 12 minute per mile range, so if you’re accustomed to moving faster than that, you’ll have to adjust. (Younger folk who don’t think they can manage the 2.5 but who want to try the Junior Mile or the Fun Run will be our guests as well.)

After we all recover, it’s back to Ashton Place for burgers and dogs, and, since I’ll be mailing  our mortgage payoff package to Citi during the race ( a mailbox being located en route), we’ll have the classic American  mortgage burning ritual, together with cake for the summer birthday people.

I’ve been looking forward to this for years.  Thanks for being part of it. 

Peace,

Bob/LYF/Grandpa Bob/Uncle Bob

A couple of items of note– when he signs things “Peace” he means it in a Jesus-ey kind of way and not in the way that Usher or other various rappers use it. Also, he’s taken to calling himself Grandpa Bob in written communication even though the only person who calls him that can’t really talk yet, much less scroll through her inbox on her blackberry.

My conditions for participating in this race were that I’d only do it if Peej were there as well, and that if I made everyone matching Tshirts they were required to enthusiastically wear them. This took about 4 trips to Michaels for plain white shirts and iron on letters but it was the best mandate I’ve ever laid down, because it meant that as we approached the starting line the rest of the field got to marvel at the sight of a bunch of people ages 8 through 60 who all look more or less exactly the same even before you put them in matching shirts proclaiming that they were With Bob.

Dad’s shirt, naturally, just said Bob. Unlike the rest of us I didn’t put his name on the back of his shirt, which is the only thing I would change about the project in retrospect since one of Dad’s rules was that no one could beat him so we all spent most of the race looking at his back. For awhile I was considering not doing names but Stations Re: Bob but that would have gotten complicated in a hurry. I didn’t even feel like ironing “daughter” onto my shirt, much less “brother in law,” which is just a lot of letters. I also struggled mightily with the punctuation problem since iron on letter kits don’t come with apostrophes. I was just going to go without them but I wouldn’t have been able to ever look at those shirts again if they had said IM WITH BOB.

I’ve probably never been so proud of anything as I am of those shirts. These are the life skills that being in a sorority gives to you.

Patrick was in charge of taking pictures over the course of the run and I put myself in charge of video. This was a brilliant tactical move– PJ took over 190 pictures during the run, whereas I got half a mile into it and went “Wait, I remember now, I hate running” and circled back to the finish line. I ran the last straightaway of the run with my family and when I turned my number in to the official at the end I confessed to cheating, but he didn’t seem concerned. My name was still listed in the local newspaper. I think everyone should run every race like this. Why even bother doing the middle part?

Dad wasn’t kidding when he said he would be paying the house off in the middle of the race (he mailed the last mortgage check around 1.4 miles in) and then returning to the house he fully owned to light the relevant documentation on fire. Housing Crisis? What Housing Crisis? Everyone else in this country is defaulting on their mortgage whereas we are merely burning ours.

One of the things I hate about my video camera is hearing the sound of my own voice, which makes me want to claw out both my eardrums and vocal chords to keep myself and anyone else from having to listen to it. I think I sound frighteningly close to Daria Morgendorffer. The only time I don’t is just as Dad is about to start lighting things on fire in our backyard and I get nervous about not having an exit strategy (like, say, water or a fire extinguisher), and that is the only reason I’m posting this video– so I have proof that I don’t always sound like a 14 year old who is trying too hard to be ironic. I would suggest you keep the sound pretty low for this one, as it is a “tradition” in my family to sing off-key to the birthday song, which has nothing to do with the fact that not a one of us can “carry a tune.” I had no idea that my uncles were so skilled in lighting pieces of paper on fire, but as soon as the mortgage catches you hear two of them going “turn it upside down! Don’t let the flame go out, it’s bad luck!”

Dad sets the house on fire from Cristin on Vimeo.

Anyway.

Patrick, let it be said, destroyed this race. He ran the whole thing and afterwards looked like he could have done it again 4 times without breaking a sweat. He also did it in velcro sneakers from WalMart and kept me distracted from how much running sucks by shouting things like “Looks like we’re getting a dispatch from The Ministry Of Funny Running!” before skipping for an entire block, and he doesn’t exactly have a lifestyle conducive to athletic exertion. He was amazing.

Photo gallery here.Good place to go if you want to see me misspell things in the captions and make self-deprecating comments about how I quit the race after two blocks, or if you want to see pictures where I look like an 8 foot tall albino grasshopper. Seriously. My understanding about adolescence was that you outgrew it around age 18, but these say otherwise.

I did a little movie for my dad that is mostly a slideshow interspersed with the video clips where I don’t sound quite as annoying as usual (still pretty bad, though. I’ll never again make fun of how those Olympic gymnasts sound when cheering each other on). I’ve given about fifty billion caveats to everyone who’s watched it so far: I still haven’t learned how to use any transitions other than “wipe right” in Windows Movie Maker and you start getting vertigo from it after awhile; I am pretty sure a fairly advanced 3rd grader could have done a better job on this; I really thought that the music would cover up the audio on some of the more annoying clips but it didn’t, so you just have to deal with me yelling “Good Stretching, Guys!” to everyone before the race starts. (Though let it be said that the stretching clips are probably my favorite part of the whole thing– you can’t really hear what PJ says, but he’s telling me “You have to hold it for 15 seconds. Otherwise it doesn’t count” (that’s what she said) and then when you see Uncle Michael and Uncle Tom they’re both kind of flapping their arms around before Michael resorts to just practicing his golf swing, which must be genetic because my dad used to do it ALL THE DAMN TIME. He would come to visit me in high school when I was working at the bookstore and just stand in front of the counter and fake golf for a few minutes while I was all “DaaaaAAAD, STOOOooop.” After the stretching it goes to Uncle Ricky ordering us to either win the race or don’t come home, but before you hear him saying that you hear my Aunt Kathy go “Ever see that movie There Will Be Blood?” and I have no idea what she was talking about but it seems like the perfect reference for that exact moment in time when I was thinking about faking an aneurysm to get out of running). But I should stop narrating and just let this glorious piece of art do all of the talking because at the end of the day I will probably never in my life make something better than this and I’m upset that I didn’t save it for Christmas, because according to my stepmom it made my dad cry when he saw it for the first time and after last Christmas  when he cried looking at pictures of The Baby when the real baby was, herself, just two feet away I’ve been vowing to find a way to ellicit a similar response from him. Now turn the sound back up.

Take us home, Bruce:

See Bob Run from Cristin on Vimeo.

As another offering to the tiny gods of pain that live in my knees, I’m giving up walking to and from work until this gets better. This was a big mental struggle (almost as big as the one about taking drugs that won’t let me lay down, or the one when I filled out my new patient forms in front of The Boyfriend and asked him to be my emergency contact which OHMYGOD is such a huge step for us, particularly when it leads me to force him to answer questions about how long he’d leave my body on life support and how he would make sure that my organs were donated. I’m a fun date) as walking to work through Central Park is easily the best part of my day, even though I’m constantly getting lost (It’s a confusing place). There are lots of people playing with their extremely happy and cute dogs in the park circa 8:15 and it’s a fantastic way to start your day. Also, walking five miles a day makes it totally fine to eat an entire bag of Pepperidge Farm soft batch oatmeal raisin cookies in a day, as I did yesterday.

So my choices were to ditch the walk or to wear the knee strap during it. Hmm. Outfit that lends itself to a knee strap. Outfit that does not.

I limped off to Anna’s Orthopedist (Anna ran the marathon, so he must be good). First sign of weirdness: no magazines in the waiting room, only TVs showing Animal Planet. At 8:45 am on Tuesday, Animal Planet likes to run a show that I *think* was about how owners of a misbehaving rabbit used some kind of rabbit whisperer to discern that the unhappy rabbit needed a companion in order to stop escaping from his pen. Specifically, a female companion rabbit. To which I say: Duh. How many phrases do you know that end in “{verb} like rabbits?” Of course he won’t want to leave his pen once she’s around. After I solved that mystery, I spent 90 minutes getting Xrayed and then jumping up and down on alternating feet for various medical professionals while wearing a hospital gown. When the doctor himself gives me 45 seconds of face time, I’m so disturbed by his facial hair choices (has anyone EVER looked good in a soul patch? Other than Tony on 24?) that I almost miss the diagnosis, which is some kind of tendinitis commonly known as “Jumper’s Knee.” There is zero jumping going on in my everyday life but I guess that doesn’t matter. I also got the extremely advanced treatment recomendation of “don’t do anything that hurts,” chapter 2 in the medical book of Duh, right after “smoking might not be such a great idea.” This is a vague concern since the above-mentioned 5k is in a scant three weeks. My new plan is to not do anything between now and May 20th and see how that works out for me. I think my body will respond favorably to the rest by becoming more athletically capable, even though that didn’t work for the first 24 or so years of my life.

In addition to the Nothing That Hurts Plan, I also get to rock an extremely sexy knee strap thing whenever I do something that could Potentially Hurt. Dr. Soul Patch thinks that casually referring to the strap as “the donut” will endear me to it more easily and he is most certainly correct. Also, they come in fun colors so I can match them to whatever I’m wearing that day! Just like 5k Barbie! After Soul Patch was done with me, he sent me to his brace fitting team. Brace fitting guy sat me on a table and looked at my knee and then immediately remarked “It’s pretty swollen, huh?” I nodded automatically before I could digest the words and then went “Wait, what? This is what it always looks like,” which created a nice moment when Brace Guy realized that he had just told me I had fat knees. Kind of like how my dad will periodically see me barefoot and ask if I sprained an ankle. No, Dad. This is just what I look like. There’s a rogue Fat Joints gene somewhere in your or mom’s family that probably only hits the creative/ moody people.

Thrilled that (a) it wasn’t something unfixable and (b) I had taken the entire day off from work, I walked from my appointment up to meet Anna for lunch. Then I walked to my apartment. Then I sat down to watch Season 3 of Felicity and when I tried to stand up 20 minutes later my knee buckled and I fell down with an extremely graceful thud. You’d think that a man so confident in the “don’t do what hurts” school of medical advice would take it one step further to “and also, walking the five miles from this office back to your apartment might not be such a great idea.” But he didn’t. Way to give me credit where it is in no way due. Back to square one.

I am up for it (a good goal, a good distance), though I’m worried that policemen will be more in shape than me. Can we find a group of, like, office workers, or something less tough, to support? Some sort of comic-book related 5k? (Kidding. I will run for cops. Or from cops! Snap!)

And I am still laughing. Anyway, come on kids, it’ll be fun! I promise! Do some running, then we’ll all go to a bar.

The swim lanes at my pool are labeled by speed, which meant that, as I slapped my flip flops across the deck trying not to fall and crack my enormous head on the tile, fresh from my first experience of being totally naked in the locker room that I don’t want to replicate any time soon for the sake of anyone involved, I had to pick how fast I was having not been in a large body of water for over a decade. (I can’t be in direct sunlight for more than 6-10 minutes before my skin combusts into flames, ocean water where you can’t see the bottom freaks me out, and I don’t like getting my hair wet). So I picked “medium-slow,” because that describes me pretty well in most venues, and because there was no one else in it. By the end of my pool time I had been joined by an enormously hairy old man, and another old man who was swimming laps wearing a snorkel. I hoisted myself up the steps and out of the pool and almost fell over realizing that every single muscle in my body hated me for this, and that was after just breast stroking around when all of my attempts at freestyle made me forget to breathe. And so, today I’m phoning it in and just posting pictures I’ve been meaning to showcase, all of which are going to be little smidgeons of pictures because I’m doing something wrong in the uploading process and cannot be bothered to figure out what.

Like this one, for which a more clever blogger would be able to come up with a series of Goofus & Gallant-esque descriptions. Anna greets her friends with a welcoming smile! Cristin shoots daggers of rage from her eyes! Anna mixes classic pieces with a modern look! Cristin wears white after labor day!

Or this one, of my incredibly handsome brothers:

Or this one, of Nora and Emla playing with my pirate hook and tiny pirate finger puppet Camilla gave me:

Or this one, of the Mr Potato Head Pumpkin Pirate, also from Camilla (that’s my cube in the background. Jealous?):

Or this one, of one of the babies:

 *On the Hannah Montana page, I was pleased, and then a little scared to see that Disney is gearing up for High School Musical 2. I guess this was inevitable, and I’m a little surprised it took them this long. I guess first they wanted to push through that Disney original movie about jump rope teams that keeps clogging up the iTunes top 100 before they settled on a new HSM. Also, I’m pleased to say that, while watching the Bears game this weekend, I confirmed that I’ll be dragging Cathy and Nora to suburban new jersey to watch my mom’s high school put on their very own version of High School Musical (Maggie, you’re so in). Now we just have to decide if we’re going to dress up as the characters a la Rocky Horror, or have fake East High tshirts printed.

I don’t know how I got the idea for Outward Bound, other than a brief mention that the program got in the Babysitters Club super special where the girls are camp counselors and Stacy winds up getting her cabin lost in the woods. I didn’t know anyone else who had done a course and it certainly had never been suggested to my pasty ass by anyone in the athletic education field. I found an ad for Outward Bound in YM or Sassy or some other beacon of journalism (speaking of, I recently bought an issue of 17 and found myself wondering how creepy it would be if I just got a subscription. Totally creepy? Not at all creepy? How about after you factor in that our mailbox is frequently left wide open by the USPS so that everyone in my building can confirm that I already have too many magazine subscriptions (or, alternatively, steal my identity)? And then when you consider that I work in an industry targeted at the 16 and under crowd and it could be deemed market research? I’m torn) and sent away for information. I remember sitting my dad down in our living room (also known as the room I’m still technically not supposed to enter unsupervised, even though our last dog made a career out of shredding most of the couch, blissfully unaware of the fact that “that couch is one of the things in this house that cost more than my first new car!” ~dad) and telling him that I wanted to do it and saying that i would pay for half of it. (That worked out to a thousand dollars. Kind of a lot of money for a 16 year old, albeit a gainfully employed one. Looking back on it I’m a little disappointed in myself for not using this to milk my parents, who would have been thrilled to have me out in the wilderness and away from any bedroom doors to slam in their faces in exasperation. At minimum, I should have tried for the divorced kid discount (dad pays half/ mom pays half/ you pay none) but I didn’t). Some day I’ll have to ask my dad exactly what went through his head when his extremely bookish daughter said that she wanted to go live in the woods for awhile (actually, I don’t even need to ask him, as I’m sure it was some Thoreau quote) but he did an excellent job of being supportive and not laughing in my face. There’s a real chance that he doesn’t remember this encounter, as displayed when he recently recounted some of my Outward Bound exploits to The Boyfriend. A frightening recent trend– whenever my parents get around The Boyfriend they reach deep into their mental recesses to come up with some kind of random story intended to make me look admirable or awesome, like they’re trying to give him reasons to continute to date me. They should really just start paying him under the table, as these stories rarely hit the mark. Within an hour of meeting The Boyfriend for the first time, my dad interrupted a family-wide discussion of running careers to say “You know, Cristin did track. She was a thrower. She can put a softball through a barn wall.” to which The Boyfriend could think of little to reply other than “Uh. Great.” Or when we were doing the driving tour of Glen Rock my mom pointed at a store and said “Cristin got her makeup done there for Junior prom,” to which I added “Yeah, and I looked like a total whore,” to which my mom said “Yeah, you did!” Similarly, when my dad decided to tell tales of his little girl doing Outward Bound, he went directly to the stories of how they trained us to go to the bathroom in the woods. Which, for those of you who know the issues I have with the discussion of anything I have mentally classified as “bathroom talk” (the other day I accidentally used the word “booger” in front of The Boyfriend in reference to something that had, until just that moment, been residing in my nasal cavity instead of for Heidi’s douchey boyfriend on The Hills and was so horrified at myself that I almost broke up with him to save myself the embarrassment of being with someone who knows that, on occasion, my body produces a substance that necessitates me blowing my nose, which is disgusting), makes it easy to see how having my dad even vaguely hint at hole-digging techniques in the presence of The Man I Love was cause enough for me to douse myself in gasoline and beg someone to strike a match.

Anyway. So. When I was 16 I spent three weeks living in the woods. (This is no way means that I’d be able to survive in some kind of Hachet or Lost-like situation, unless I had a gas stove, a supply of trail mix, a shovel and a tarp). As soon as I signed up, I became obsessively committed to their preparation literature– I read everything they sent me every day while only hesitating slightly at the “4 pairs of underwear” listed on the supplies roster. Really? 4? I’m no math major, but isn’t that slightly less than the number of days I’ll be, you know, a woodland creature? (On our first day, our guides told us that after a few days, you simply turn your underwear inside out and it counts as an entirely fresh pair. I am totally astonished and how logical and rational that suggestion seemed at the time. I currently own enough pairs of underwear to get me through 2 months of not doing laundry, should the need arise). My dad and I also spent a lot of time laughing at the accompanying materials for parents, which stated over and over “outward bound does not ‘fix’ kids. This is not therapy,” which made me more than a little nervous that I was going to be stuck in a tent for many, many days with drug dealers who were packed off to Georgia by their parents and expected to return home all bright and wonderful and career-oriented and prone to saving kittens from trees. These warnings were almost as good as the details for the “solo mission” (where they pick a spot for you in the woods, leave you there alone with your water bottle and a small brick of cheese, and come back to pick you up two days later) and the “personal challenge” at the closing of the trip which wasn’t explained until we’d been out there for about a week, but turned out to be a 9 mile trail run. I never thought I’d be capable of doing any of this, and if someone put it in front of me today I would laugh at them and return my attention to the My Super Sweet Sixteen marathon. To say that it was a unique and amazing experience is putting it mildly. Which is why I am filled with rage when I turn on The Real World.

This season’s real world is full of people dropping racist and homophobic terminology left and right, and no less than 3 of them had blamed their behaviors on alcohol by the fourth episode. High on the list of people I want to shoot is Brooke, who blames her unprovoked outbursts on her “anxiety disorder” and frequently calls her mother screaming. During my favorite phone-a-mom moment from Brooke she was crying about how she wanted to leave Denver (prompted by confusion as to where a nearby nail salon was located) and she wailed “I cannot believe I’m paying $750 in rent for my apartment in california while I am stuck HERE.” to which her mom replied “But your rent is only $450.” to which Brooke spat “There are UTILITIES, TOO, MOM.” to which her mom replied “But I pay those for you.” This exchange didn’t advance the “plot” of the episode at all, convincing me that the producers really want you to hate Brooke. I am happy to comply.

 Brooke and her fellow housemates/ cavemen have begun training to be Outward Bound instructors. This is fun for me, because it gives me pleasant rapelling and rock climbing flashbacks and has resurfaced what I project to be 3 solid weeks of blog fodder (“so, here’s a story about the time that I hiked for 36 straight hours without food”) that will bore you all silly, but it’s also incredibly painful because I can already see Brooke’s interview for the last episode where she talks about how she accomplished a series of things she never thought she could do (set over a montage of her crying in a harness and helmet in various remote locations) and–best of all– was able to help kids FIND THEMSELVES on their outward bound treks. And I will remind myself that this is a girl who, on national television, thought it was okay to hike in her underwear and wipe herself in the middle of a campsite, and I’ll reassure myself that the ONLY thing we have in common is the outward bound bumper sticker I still have in my room. On my trip, someone on my team had an allergic reaction to a beehive we accidentally walked through and had to be medevaced to a local hospital. I’m hoping for a similar fate with a less happy outcome. Though I’ll settle for her falling into a lake.

2. A really really kick ass banana bread recipe. Anyone?

3. Um, some ideas for what I should talk about on this here website. Otherwise you’re all about to be treated to about 2,000 words on my first car, The Tainted Love. Open call! Show me what you got!

1. I wore flip flops yesterday, on the last day of November. It was 67 degrees in New York. Yes, it is going to be be 40 tomorrow, but this might be enough to get me through the winter. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing, Mr. Gore! (I’m kidding, it’s totally awful. Stop driving SUVs, the lot of you).

2. We have recently discovered that ABC’s newest bachelor is a Navy lieutenant! Like my brother! and went to Duke! like The Boyfriend! Seriously, something for everyone! This show is going to make the best drinking game ever! drink every time they make an “a few good (wo)men” joke! Drink every time he mentions college basketball! I might actually have to watch this one.

3. I just realized a few minutes ago that my lifelong obsession with the baby name Shea (not as a first name but, you know, in the middle somewhere) will be totally validated by the time I feel like it’s okay to have babies, because the Mets are building a new stadium that won’t be called Shea anymore in 2009 so by the time the baby is in 1st grade or whenever name-calling generally starts no one will make fun of it for being named after a baseball stadium. Because there won’t BE one anymore. But all the other little kids’ dads will think its cool. You have no idea what a relief this is to me.

4. Now that the 4th floor of my apartment building is populated entirely by William & Mary 03-04 grads, I really think we owe it to the apartment gods to do the floor-wide new years rockin eve party. If you could let me know if you’ll be available to rock and not, like, “sleeping in that night” or “out of the country” that’d be awesome. Even if it’s just the 4th floor inhabitants drinking bad champagne and playing Oregon Trail on my laptop it would still be pretty awesome, though. In fact, I kind of want to also pick up Amazon Trail and African Trail and have all of those games going at the same time. Do I know how to party or WHAT?

So, moving on.

I met with my “personal trainer” for my “fitness orientation” at “my” gym two nights ago. And he was kind enough to give me a pretty managable routine and to not laugh (much) when I almost fell over doing walking lunges. Seriously, though. Those things are hard. Then, because I am super cool, I made an Excel calendar of December so I would have someplace to log whatever I did because of the whole it takes 21 days to form a habit and positive reinforcement and blah whatever lies athletic people tell you. And I was trying to decide what kind of color coding system I’d use on the calendar when I found myself mentally adding in my animal shelter time and the Sundays when my hungover ass actually makes its way to church, probably because all three fall under the “I should really do that” umbrella that shrouds me in a pillar of laziness-induced guilt whenever I have a free hour block and elect to fill it with repeats of Rob & Big (best show on tv, if you’re not watching we’re not friends). Less so with the puppies and the working out, anyway, as I enjoy direct benefits of both of those, but when Jordan was recently explaining to me how the number one motivator for how guys conduct themselves in realtionships is Don’t Do Anything That Will Cause Me To Get Yelled At, I immediately thought “oh, kind of like how I go to church because I just want to avoid the guilt of not going.” Ladies and gentlemen, Vatican II! Anyhow. I was thinking of all of these things I want to make time for and I found myself mentally coding a points system. And then I found myself getting way too excited about it. And I know exactly who to blame for this.

My sorority had a carefully orchestrated points system so that you could remain in “good standing,” though it wasn’t terribly hard to accomplish since you didn’t get points for things like, I don’t know, getting As or doing volunteer work (in all fairness, you could get them for attending sorority study hall, where I would routinely spend my time throwing candy at people, or from doing greek philanthropy events, where everyone would spend their time yakking up Arbor Mist into bushes), but rather for stuff like getting ice cream or going to parties with boys. Despite that whole “you get out what you put in/ be as involved as you want to be” string of lies we told girls during Rush, if you didn’t make points for a couple of months in a row you got called into exec and people talked about your level of dedication and then you were on probation and it was bad (see, you thought we just bought our friends. This is true, but we also tortured them for not being worth the money. Heyo! Just kidding kids!). I always “made points” and then some, because I like ice cream and parties and loved my sorority. I never really got how people would come in under the points limit– do you not LIKE ice cream?– and, since it was reported on the honor system, I always assumed people would just lie about it the way I lied about the number of girl scout badges I had completed in 3rd grade just to beat out a particularly annoying troop member. (I stand by that decision, it was worth it to see her crumble). But we went to college at the “alma mater of a nation” where they had invented honor codes, so I guess lying to keep your friends falls under that. Weird.

And now I find myself seriously considering assigning point values to mileage and workouts and other “good” things I should be doing so that the month of December doesn’t get totally devoted to Oregon Trail or The Boyfriend’s recent quest to make egg nog ice cream (not that I would help in the Making Of but rather the subsequent Devouring portion of that adventure). Am I, like, two steps away from becoming a Nazi youth, or is this a good idea to get me into a routine? Also, does this make me look like a complete lunatic who needs her life to be rooted in quantitative approvals? Or just someone who’s, you know, organized and a fan of color coding (really, who isn’t?).

In my thus-far limited experience at “my” gym, I’ve noticed a few things– namely, there aren’t a ton of doors. They like corners more than they like doors. I don’t know if this is for ventilation reasons or what, but to get to the women’s locker room I round 3 different corners but never open an actual door. Then to get to the “cardio court” I round 4 more corners and do some stairs but, again, never open a door. This, along with an extremely subtle signage philosophy, does, of course, mean that my ratio of gym visits::times I accidentally walk into the men’s locker room is at 1:1 after two gym trips.

The whole reason I pulled the trigger/ bit the bullet/ took the plunge on this whole gym situation is Christmas-related. My father and stepmother are big, big, big nerds (big ones) and like to get all of their Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving (big nerds) so I had to come up with the Christmas present that they’re getting me by two weeks ago. And while they’ve gotten mildly lax in recent years and understand that all I really need/want is pictures of dead presidents, they get nervous that by just handing over cash they’re depriving me of the Christmas present-unwrapping experience and I’ll need years of therapy to overcome the pain. Kind of like how my mom recently asked me, completely straight-faced, if I thought I had a deprived childhood because she had never taken me to see the Rockettes at the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. I wanted to (JOKINGLY. JOKINGLY, MOM, I SWEAR EVERYTHING IS FINE) reply “no, but I think that whole coming from a broken home thing means I had a deprived childhood” but I didn’t because that would have been mean (AND ALSO TOTALLY UNTRUE, I PROMISE!). Anyway, all of my conversations with my dad about Christmas go like this “Just give me money.”  “We don’t want to do that, then you have nothing to unwrap! If you don’t have any ideas for big presents, we have a few ideas about what to get you”  “Can I know what your ideas are before I give you my own, or is it like Let’s Make a Deal where I can’t know what’s behind the door until I choose it?”

Lest you think I’m a whiny little ingrate, putting the fate of a large present in my parents’ hands (in any parents’ hands, I’m guessing) could be dicey. Two years ago, my dad got me a 28 cassette lecture on the history of the english language. Also, each year each of his children get the following:

1. An animal or group of animals donated to a third world village in our name by Heifer international. I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t miss this horribly should he decide to discontinue the practice. You can pick anything from a flock of geese to a water buffalo and donate it to a family that needs it as part of this ending world hunger project. We spend a lot of Christmas morning time shaking our small envelopes and trying to guess if the gift certificate inside says we gave a rabbit, or a flock of geese, or a pig. One year Patrick opened his to learn that he had donated honey bees and immediately got Mad As Hell. “BEES? I got BEES? That’s like the worst animal ever! Next year why don’t you just get me a rattle snake!”

2. Roth IRA donations, accompanied by a New Yorker cartoon that has something to do with retirement savings. This present carries the added bonus of you receiving a check made out to someone else, which is always fun, and the knowledge that at some point over the course of the year dad will email you, cite the amount of money you currently have in your Roth IRA, and ask that you use “the rule of 72” to discover how much money that will be on your 65th birthday. God bless us, every one!!

So you see, I was pretty happy to get him to agree to contribute to the Stop Being Lazy And Fat, Cristin fund, even though it means that there are 40 or so people in this city– in my neighborhood, no less– who saw me fall off the treadmill last night when How I Met Your Mother made me laugh too hard.