Everything I don't love not about biking

“Last week I started biking to work” I’ve been saying to any person who stands still long enough.

“How do you like biking?” ask people who know me, or who feel like talking to an enthusiastic stranger.

That is a great question thanks for asking. I LOVE some things about biking to work. I love the biking part. But there are a lot of things that aren’t the biking part. 

There’s the getting the bike down the stairs part. I noticed last week one of my legs is covered in bruises and I assumed I was growing muscles so quickly they were pushing through the skin. But this morning when I fell down the stairs holding my bike it hit me, it’s got to be the falling down the stairs that’s causing the bruises.

The front handlebars always twist and my wrist gets stuck, and the bike pins me against the wall and I’m just sort of standing there sweating and brainstorming but soon I’m out of my apartment and biking and that part’s fine. 

While biking there are a few bad things I have to do at the same time, like trying to unzip the armpit zippers on my jacket. If you ask if I enjoy unzipping the armpit zippers I will say no, but if you ask if I enjoy biking I will say definitely yes.

When the biking stops things get really bad. That’s when I have to get my keycard out of my backpack, and decide whether to try and carry my bike up the stairs or get my bike into the elevator and deal with the keycard again. I have to get the lock out, and I have to figure out how to use the lock, and at this point my nose is always running so I have to keep my head up and manage just by feel instead of sight.

Then I take my helmet off and I have crazy wind hair. If I could leave my helmet on all day it would make it all worth it.

But I love biking. Thanks for listening, woman in line next to me at the grocery store.

And thanks infinity to Krissy for loaning me the bike. Without her who knows what my hair would look like.

In your dreams, Pop Tarts

If it's true that if you can dream it you can do it than I can't do very much at all.

Last night I had your standard "Save a dozen of Brangelina's children from a haunted house" dream and suddenly all the running and saving made me starving and suddenly my fifth-grade gym teacher started tapping me on the shoulder.

"Hey. Hey." She was sort of yell whispering, and she shoved a Fred Meyer bag into my arms. I looked inside and saw it was filled with every variety of Pop Tarts.

"That is so kind of you." I told her. "But I think these have gluten, I can't eat them."

Gluten is I something in wheat, rye, and barley and even in my dreams I have Celiac Disease and can't eat it. I spend most time in REM asking strangers, friends, and celebrities about cross-contamination and reading packaging labels.

"Aren't you hungry though?" she took the bag back. She was actually whispering now.

"Don't worry about me, I actually swallowed a lot of blood earlier so my stomach's full." I told her.

As a side note this blog post covers two of the seven subjects that are too boring to talk about.

My right ear is worth two hundred dollars

I started taking an All About Judaism class and last week was on mysticism.

Usually I like the class a lot, and I take a lot of notes. But in mysticism none of the words were spellable, all I wrote down was “shebeeti” and “sheriti” and now I’m not even sure if those are two different words or two attempts at spelling the same word. The class was still useful though, because to be honest before the class I thought I wasn’t into mysticism, and after just two hours, I KNEW I wasn’t into mysticism. 

We spent the last part meditating. She explained that the most common side effect of meditation is weight gain because your bones become dense with love. Then before we had a chance to ask questions about that, she told us to close our eyes, and to imagine God’s name on our bodies. It’s not the first tattoo I’d choose, but it’s way easier to spell than shebeeti so I was game.

Sometimes, lately, to be honest, I feel bad about my body. I guess it’s just proof I’m a girl, but lately to be more positive and more masculine I’ve been trying to think of things I do like about it and the complete list includes my eyebrows, my thumbs especially my left thumb, all ten of my fingernails, a birthmark on my right arm that looks like a division symbol ÷, and my left ear. That’s plenty of skin space for a name. I closed my eyes.

“We’re writing God’s name with honey,” she announced. “It’s a pile of honey, it’s landing on your head and dripping into your scalp.”

Obviously this was horrible news.

“The honey is back behind your eyes. It’s the most gold honey in the world. Now imagine it filling your lungs. Slowly. It’s viscous, this honey. So incredibly viscous and it’s filling all of your lungs.”

The woman sitting behind me started choking.

I learned about the word viscous in seventh grade, at an after-hours science lecture. My middle school would invite scientists in various fields to come talk in the cafeteria once a month, and if you went and listened and took notes you got extra credit. I never missed one. Not because I loved science but because science is one of those subjects that can suddenly take a turn at any moment. Everything’s going fine, you’re learning about ecosystems and cells and gravity and then HEY! here are mols, velocity, centripetal force, and you’re going to need all the extra credit you can get.

For the last ten years I’ve used the word viscous to try and make myself sound smarter but I knew that now it was just going to remind me of this woman choking and the feeling of my hair being incredibly sticky.

Now the honey was moving in between the muscles in our calves. The woman behind me continued to cough up negative energy into the air, which at this point was probably thick with flies.

When our socks were completely saturated we got to open our eyes and see who was still awake, and write down anything we wanted. We didn’t get to weigh ourselves before and after to see how much love we gained but I'm sure it was substantial.

Thinking about honey isn’t really my jam. Instead I like to imagine I’m in a plane, in the window seat, and we're taking off from LAX. It’s just huge in every direction, ocean and city and mountains and sky and I imagine that whatever is stressing me out is the size of a contact lens. Or a sequin, or an earring back. That makes the bad thing seems unbelievably small, so small I can’t even see it and I get distracted and start looking for shadows of whales in the ocean.

It works great when I’m stressed about a woman chocking to death in my All About Judaism class, or when I’m stressed about how mols work, or how shy I am, or how unfortunate-looking my ankles are, but it doesn’t work as well when there's a spider in my shower or I need to pay my utility bill.

Portland General Electric doesn’t accept a human body full of honey as payment, even though by my calculations a bodyful of honey is probably worth about $105. That’s if you just replaced your blood with honey, not the rest of you. Organic honey, not raw, adult male body, before meditation. Ask in the comments if you have any more questions about how I got this number.

Here is today can also make you feel better, if it's easy to make you feel better.

I also found the word "maymonetize" in my notebook, which I think is my spelling of Maimonides.

Your heart will beat 150 times while you read this

I hate everything about going to the doctor except a few things, and one of those things is getting my heart rate measured. I love getting my heart rate measured.

The average human heart beats 60-100 times per minute at rest. The whole time you’ve been reading this your heart has been beating, it’s beating while you sleep and while you shower, and while you listen to your favorite song or shop online.

At a doctor’s appointment last year I found out my heart beats 55 times per minute at rest, which the doctor said was very impressive, the rate of a marathon runner or a half decent Olympic athlete. Lately I've been running even more and yesterday at the doctor took my pulse and go to the next line:

47 beats per minute! That’s what my resting heart rate is.

Look at all this chart do you even see 47? I don’t. But my eyes aren’t that strong, it’s my heart that’s super strong. According to this chart it's even better than EXCEL'T.

When I was growing up my heart wasn't super strong, it was full of holes. Murmurs is the word for heart holes, it probably comes from the whispering sound of blood slipping out of your heart every second but I'm not sure. I got my heart holes when I was eight, as a side effect of Rheumatic Fever, which I got because I had strep and didn’t do anything about it.

There were five kids in my family, and complaining about feeling sick seemed like an annoying thing to do. I thought "not a big deal, this seems like something I can sort of handle myself" which is a dangerous thought I've had hundreds of times. It's the type of thought that puts you in a hospital with a disease people usually only get in Little House on the Prairie. It's how my heart got full of holes.

On the way home from the hospital my dad decided to take me to McDonald's. Either he thought I was so brave I deserved it, or he figured that my new sponge-like heart condition would make transfats just sort of float through it like gentle rain. The gentle rain theory seems the most likely. Because he didn’t make a big show of it, we just went through the drive-through and ordered a Happy Meal, and the McDonald’s employee who couldn’t see me in the backseat, asked if it was for a boy or a girl.

My dad and I pondered this question while we waited at the second window.

The internet is amazing because I searched "glitter nugget" and found this.

“I bet there are two different toys you can get, and one's for boys and one's for girls,” I said. I was hoping I was wrong and it was actually two different types of McNugget dipping sauces, a glitter sauce for girls and one with crunchy peanut pieces for boys, and suddenly I was starving for glitter sauce even though seconds ago I had never imagined such a thing existed. 

My dad also hoped my toy theory was wrong, he said there was no such thing as toys for boys and toys for girls. My parents were strict about this growing up, we owned only gender-neutral blankets, toys, and books. And clothes, as babies we wore as much green and yellow as newborn die-hard Packer fans or Oregon State fans GO DUCKS. And probably a few other teams but I don't know that much about sports because I'm a girl.

Our parents reminded us all the time: other families thought boys and girls were different but other families were wrong. There are boys and there are girls but on the inside, our hearts are all the same. Except mine, my heart was full of holes.

Ten years and maybe two trips to McDonald’s later I found out at a doctor's appointment that the holes, or the murmurs, had miraculously sealed up, and that my heart was pretty much as watertight as a really expensive brand of ziplock bag. 

And now, ten years after that, or less than ten, now my heart beats half as slowly as a lot of other human hearts, like a whale floating slowly through a crowd of panicked guppies in a McDonalds, now my heart is super muscular and strong, the type of heart some families would say a boy would have, and now exactly forty-seven times a minute it grabs a heart full of blood and holds all of it tight for 1.3 seconds, and none leaks out because there aren’t any holes.

It was a different toy for girls and for boys, in case you were still waiting on why they asked that question at McDonald's. I got a mini Barbie, and a boy with holes in his heart would have gotten a mini Hot Wheels.

I hope it wasn't a marmot.

Sometimes I remember that in college, six years ago, I took a Molière class and read seventeen Molière plays, in French, and wrote papers and took tests on all of them. 

Molière is a playwright? That seems like a good guess. But if you held a gun to my head I could not tell you a single thing about even one of those plays. And if you put the gun away and asked me nicely, thinking maybe the gun was stressing me out, maybe I could answer if I had a minute to catch my breath and answer calmly, I still wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about them. Then I guess you’d have to decide what to do next. The gun didn’t work, no gun didn’t work, what’s your plan? Why do you need to know about these plays? There’s probably an easier way to get the information.

They say that our cells are replacing each other every second, so fast that every few years we’re a completely new person, a lifetime away from plays we read and studied and used to care about. But when I think of this Molière class I think that isn’t true. 

Because one morning when I was getting ready for that Molière class I don’t remember, I made myself tea but forgot to drink it before I left the apartment. 

I just decided to run out the door with a thermos full of tea. The class started at 8 am, and I was going to be late, and why was I holding this stupid thermos? I didn’t feel like drinking it anymore. 

The tea was lemon which you would expect to be lemonade-colored but instead it was dark red, and the temperature was between molten lava and soup on the planet Mercury. I ran into the closest bathroom and filled the first sink with the dark, rust-colored steaming liquid. More bad news - the drain was broken. So the tea didn’t go anywhere, it just splashed around the way it would if a feverish mid-sized animal had met its end at 7:50 that morning in the first sink in the women’s bathroom. I ran water to dilute it but instead of getting clearer it somehow got darker, bloodier, more steamier, just then the door opened and half a dozen middle aged women walked in. At eight am. I don’t know why, maybe they were sharks in disguise, but one took the only stall and the other five stared at me, the mirror covered in steam, the sink filled with hot blood, the entire room smelling so much like lemons. 

And I think the theory about your cells multiplying every few years is garbage because every time I think of those women staring at me and my thermos in the bathroom seven years ago, I can still remember exactly how that last sip of tea tasted.

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to use this shark picture.