14 Days of Peloton: Day 6

I have decided that because I hate the pilates class so much, I will take it before my workouts to motivate me to be better at things. After all, it is only ten minutes long. How bad can that be?

I realize that categorizing things in time limits is not always helpful. Getting waterboarded for ten minutes is probably terrible. Better than twenty minutes, for sure, but also much worse than zero minutes. I am nearly a week into doing these workouts and I realize that my inner thighs hurt and walking is difficult.

But on the plus side, my shoulder pain which is pretty much omnipresent hasn't been bothering me at all, and I attribute this to actually using my arms for things! Even if it's not using the weights, which I don't do in any of the classes, because it seems impossible and I am certain Hannah's weights are not weights at all but props, because no human can physically lift five pounds in the fashion she recommends for any extended period of time.

I have also started to rank the classes in order of which ones are better to take on which days, the days being categorized as:

1. I Don't Want To Do This But I Should

2. I Really Don't Want To Do This But I Am In A Hell Of My Own Making

3. I Hate Everything About This And I Hope I Die Before The TV Boots Up

I think that perhaps today is the day I miss another class, but we have exactly 25 minutes before I need to get ready for dinner, which means I have exactly enough time for a 10 minute Pilates class and a 15 minute barre class.

I categorize my experience as #3 but the TV boots up and I do the workouts, and then I proceed to drink two martinis at dinner, continuing my journey as a paragon of health.

14 Days of Peloton: Day 4 (because I missed one)

Two days in and I've already failed my own challenge. There is absolutely no good reason for it. I had all day to do it. I just kept saying, "I'll do it later," and then later was 5pm, I was hungry, and wanted tacos. I knew once I ate them, there was no going back. 

I eat the tacos, and the tacos are delicious. I rationalize that I will just do extra stuff tomorrow. I drink a second margarita while telling myself I am practicing self-care by letting my body rest. After a third margarita, I am certain I am a health whisperer, and my body will get itself in shape if I just let it take its natural course.

In the cold light of morning, my lies are revealed to me (except the part about the tacos, which were delicious). I have posed myself a challenge because letting my body take its natural course means it will consume donuts ONLY and I want it to consume donuts SOMETIMES and also have muscles that will carry my skeleton around.

I decide to do two classes to make up for my error, but I do not want to do two barre classes back to back. Hannah has told me that her Intro to Pilates class is a good way to open the hips or wake up the lungs or deliver eggs to the glutes, I am not sure, I was not listening. But I did hear the words 'Intro to Pilates,' so I fire up the video.

One minute in, and I like it. Hip rolls! I need these. My hips always hurt.

Three minutes in, and I don't like it. Everything hurts. Why do I have to move my legs? Why are there seven more minutes?

Five minutes in, Hannah keeps telling me to keep a space between my waist and the floor. I do not think she realizes that I am here because there IS no space between my waist and the floor. Only donuts.

Seven minutes in, I hope I die.

Intro to Pilates ends and Hannah says I can take her other pilates class which are harder, and I am sure this is some sort of joke, because no one can do more than what I have just done in ten minutes.

Except I have to, because I said I would do an extra class today. My butt hurts and I have a headache because I am hungry and haven't eaten enough lunch (my stint as a health guru was clearly fleeting), but I have said I would Do The Thing, so the thing must be done.

I take a 20 minute barre class and I have chosen wisely, because the thing has me ROLLING with laughter. Dammit, Hannah, I am trying to hate you for hurting my butt with pilates and you are not making it easy!

I want to write more about my time with this class, because it was excellent, but I am also dying, and so I pat myself on the back for a job well done, but it is a metaphorical pat, because my arms don't work anymore.

14 Days of Peloton: Day 2

 I have the notion that I must do class today, but when or where is yet to be determined. After a series of truly horrendous errands that involved GOING PLACES and DOING THINGS, I am considering not doing a barre workout. My second Corona whispers to me, "Doing things is for chumps, and you are a champion."

I am inclined to listen to my beer, but then Hannah texts me and says she has a live barre class happening in twenty minutes. She is much more persuasive than my beer, probably because in the hierarchy of things that are persuasive, boobs are above beer. I go to look for my workout shorts so that I may attend barre not in jean shorts.

WHERE ARE MY SHORTS AND WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS MISSING.

This will be the title of my memoirs, because I have only one singular pair of workout shorts. This has been true for many years now, and I have done little to rectify the situation. In fact, when I realized I needed another pair of workout shorts, I just stopped working out, as to prevent having to find more. But workouts are my life now, at least for two weeks, and therefore my workout shorts have a responsibility that they are CONSTANTLY SHIRKING by always being missing. 

I realize that they are not missing but merely placed safely in the drawer they should always be in. This is why I was confused, because I never put things away, and it is absurd that they would be somewhere they ought. I do not puzzle through this because I have found them and that makes me happy that at least some inanimate object is doing its job today (I'm looking at you, GPS that wouldn't take me to the right place earlier). 

Dan has recently returned from the dentist and declines my invitation to assault our bodies with isometric movements. I tell him that he will miss Hannah saying funny things and also wearing a sports bra, but he is oddly unswayed by boobs, and this is the curse of marrying a level-headed man. 

This is a 20 minute barre class, and that suits me fine, because I am an hour into happy hour and doing things has been a real study in continuous failure today. A few minutes in and I am thrilled that I am taking this class, because Hannah is funny and keeps saying 'squish your peach', which is such a delightful collection of words and sounds that I am giggling except my abs are dying so this is all very excellent/terrible. Then she refers to tucking your pelvis as 'moving your front magic' and I just fucking lose it, because that is the best way anyone has ever described a pelvic area. 

I will be referring to vaginas as front magic from now on. This also implies the presence of back magic, and strays close to implying that either you need to cast a spell to get in or it will cast a spell on your way out, and I am good with both.

I promise Hannah that I will take videos of me working out, which is a challenge, because I am not very coordinated in my workouts, and adding a camera to this is novel.

But nevertheless, I persisted. Day 2 done. Fitness update: still not ripped like Xena.

14 Days of Peloton Barre: Day 1

I have resolved to do fourteen days of Peloton barre, because I don't really do anything, and this seems like a good way to hang out with Hannah without her actually being there. 

The original plan was 14 days of fitness. After talking to Rama, I added 14 days of also doing whatever else I want, which includes eating donuts, because fitness should not be about getting skinny, it should be about luxuriating in my dumb body that rarely wants to do anything but eat donuts.

I feel good about this plan, and decide to execute. 

I think that I will do twenty minutes of barre, because that is a Good Workout, but I also want to go to the store to buy a particularly excellent pair of shoes I saw, and will not have enough time to do that if I do twenty minutes of barre. So I opt to do the ten minute Intro to Barre class. This is good because as I start the class, I remember that I had made a plan two weeks ago to do the classes in increasing difficulty, and then work backwards, back when I had thought I was going to start the program and then kept saying, "Maybe tomorrow," until the shame of disappointing myself became too much to bare and I finally said, "FINE I WILL DO IT."

Dan agrees to do barre with me and I am elated. He is a strong and capable athlete, but I am a solid small box of balance, and am thrilled to be better at something for once. I am very proud of my balance, because it was honed completely by accident and through boredom at a Courtyard Marriot front desk hotel job in Spokane where they did not have any internet, and I did not have a smart phone. I would try to sneak read, but my manager was strict, and wanted my eyes up in case an errant guest wandered across the lobby and became livid when no one looked at them. So instead, I would stand on one foot, and then the other, and then my toes, and eventually I had more balance than someone with a complete lack of coordination or athletic ability has a right to.

Dan and I enter our ten minutes of barre, thinking it will be a light workout. This is not the case, because Hannah is a slave driver in spandex and her graceful body full of functional muscles moves her effortlessly through the moves, and she is able to dance at the same time. She tells me to find the beat. I do not find the beat. I lift my legs up in complete un-rhythm. She is a fluid dancer, I am a Rock-Em Sock-Em Robot but doing barre.

Halfway through, my butt hurts. She tells me that this is just an intro and it is 'just a taste,' much in the way the first guy who got me stoned said, "This isn't even that much weed," as I wandered aimlessly in a field wondering if I would ever remember what feeling normal felt like again. I am fluttering my dumb legs filled with concrete and I am upset that there is a future in which I have to do this but for twice the amount of time.

The class ends and I lay back in child's pose with Dan. "If you breathe out of your butthole, it feels good," I tell him. He asks what that means, which I find absurd. Doesn't everyone know how to do this? "You know, like when you sit back, and then you breathe in, but you imagine your butthole is breathing out?" He stares at me, but ever the sport, he lays back in child's pose and tries it.

"It feels good, right?"

"I feel like I'm in prison," he says.

Day one, complete.

Day 1: Portland to Redding

In addition to all the other reasons we decided to go on this trip, there was one more, which is that I love to travel, but Dan and I also have been discussing having a baby, and society has told me those two things do not go hand in hand. 

Unable to accept such stupid restrictions, I told Dan years ago that I was excited to have his baby, because that would mean I was also moving to Latin America for three years. When he asked why, I said because America is some insane mishmash of people who love babies but never agree that you are raising them correctly, and people who think you are the devil for deciding to procreate while the world is burning.

Naturally, to those people I always say the same thing, which is if the world is devolving into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of roaming tribes of killers, it is in my best interest to breed some new tribe members before things get too rowdy, and of course such an answer pleases neither the people who love babies and can't imagine them growing up to be war criminals, or people who don't love babies, and can't imagine them growing up into people like them. 

In Latin America, though, people are happy that you have decided to have a family in kind of a general way. 

And cheese is half-price!

Instead of impregnating me and leaving Dan vulnerable to what are sure to be more excellent ideas fueled by shifting hormones, we compromised on going on an extended trip before I got pregnant, but with the idea that we would investigate if there were any American places that we liked better for raising a family. 

Things that will influence our decision:

1. Proximity to friends and family

2. General coolness

3. Attitudes toward having a baby

4. Attitudes toward people owning a moody dog made of garbage who is basically a teenager that will punish you for forgetting to cuddle her the appropriate amount in the morning and will take her revenge by barking at things she previously never barked at because she knows it upsets you and then will act like she has no idea what you're talking about later when you try to talk it out and slams the door to her room shut and says she hates you and you say you hate her but cry into your whiskey glass anyway cuz you don't really hate her and also a nice dash of salinity really brings out the flavors

5. Price of cheese

With that in mind, we take off from Oregon, in search of greener, cheesier pastures.

And my trusty road pony.

Nothing happens on our drive in Oregon because nothing ever happens in Oregon. We drive down I-5 and it is sunny and looks like summer, and we consider perhaps we have made a mistake in leaving because this is clearly not December. But when I roll the window down to feel the warm sun, I am buffeted by cold air and the scent of dead dreams, so I know it is not summer and also we have made the right choice.

We settle in to the open road, snug inside our car where the pandemic can't catch us. 

I think.

I am distracted by trying to decide which place I like less, Oregon or California, and so I completely miss the Welcome to California sign. Because of this, I am not convinced that there is a Welcome to California, and probably they have a sign that says Ugh I Guess You Can Come to California. With no evidence to the contrary, I sit back and enjoy the countryside, which is all California has going for it.

Also the raisins.

Our first destination is Redding, a place I have never been. I see a mountain and ask Dan if it is Mount Shasta, and he is driving so he says probably. I am now in the distressing situation where there is An Important Thing that has not been properly identified in my immediate vicinity, so I consult multiple maps to find out if it is Mount Shasta.

My lack of ability to read maps quickly becomes an issue. I do what any good explorer would do and point to the mountain and say, "That is Mount Shasta."

And now it is.

We arrive in Redding after eight hours. I had heard that Redding was a cute little town in Northern California, and was interested in seeing it because it was a potential place we could live.

I immediately reject Redding because it is clearly full of insane people, or people who can't read, or both. In the face of every news and science report ever, they are operating like those men in WWII who were fighting in small places and never heard the war was over, but the exact opposite of that, because they are going about their lives as if there is not a major global event happening, and sitting in restaurants like actual psychopaths. I tell Dan we are not safe because everyone in Redding is a murderer, and not in the cool way.

We hole up in our hotel room for the evening. I decide a good plan is to drink and watch Bob's Burgers and forget that we are in California. My plan is complicated by the fact that I have a very judgmental dog who will side-eye you if you drink because she was an alcoholic as a puppy and now thinks she's better than everyone else because she doesn't drink. 

"Soda?"

"I hate you."

Dan leaves only once to get some terrible and overpriced food, which of course it is terrible and overpriced, because this is California, and the whole state is basically an entitled hot chick who shows up to a date and thinks that is all she needs to do and you are so lucky that she's there and she is not required to provide any personality or worth because look how pretty.

I do not enjoy California.

Redding Livability:

Proximity to friends and family: 3/5 

It's kind of close, but not so close that I'm willing to overlook the entire population being illiterate.

General coolness: 0/5 
NOT COOL GUYS

Attitudes toward having a baby: 0/5 
Probably very bad because they are happy to murder adults so babies are probably also on the murder list

Attitudes toward people owning a moody dog made of garbage: 5/5 
They seem to be happy to tolerate garbage behavior so I think Likely would be quite at home

Price of cheese: N/A 
I did not purchase any cheese in this cesspool

Final score: 8/25 

That is a very bad score. We are not living in Redding.

Choosing Austin

People are always asking me, Roxanne, why did you decide to move to Austin for six weeks, and I am glad they are always asking that, because I have an answer.

For everything.

The decision to live in Austin for six weeks hinged on the amazing house we found while daydreaming of living in sunnier places. See, Dan and I both have a quality where we like the sunshine and feel deprived of vitamin D when it is gone, a unique quality, and one I am sure is shared by no one else. We deliberated on what we would do when there was an inevitable resurgence Winter COVID, which we knew would somehow be worse than its more whimsical cousin, Summer COVID, even though Summer COVID is the more murdery of the pair. Worse because at least with Summer COVID, the sun is out, and you can go outside, and for about ten minutes a day you can imagine that the world isn't burning, and worse because even in the best of times, I succumb hard to the winter blues, doing absolutely nothing to prevent them and in fact inviting in the dearth of vitamin D which then manifests as intense anxiety and depression, welcoming it into my home every year like a shitty parent who comes to stay for the holidays and makes terrible suggestions about how you should run your life, like maybe you should just give up doing anything forever because you're bad at all things, and look how pale you are, garbage child, have you considered no one ever seeing your face again, because it would be preferable to having to see your face.

And Dan likes the sun because in the winter he gets kind of tired sometimes. 

So we figured living in a sunny place during winter might be an equally good idea for both of us, but we were yet to be sold on it. We looked on a map of sunny places, and pointed to all the people who we knew who lived in those sunny places, and Austin is home to two of my very good friends from high school and their very good partners, so it seemed like a good place to start daydreaming. 

We then looked at AirBnB, and almost immediately found an incredible house in the neighborhood we wanted to live in. Better yet, all in it would be less than our rent and monthly expenses on a home, so we would actually be saving money, a concept foreign to me (why would I save money when we are all going to die, most likely every winter?) but Dan has pointed out that I have spent many winters not dying and it is starting to sink in. We think about what a beautiful world it would be to not think we are going to die this winter, and we click the shiny red Reserve button on the house, which belongs to a musician/tech guy named Blaine.

Probably this guy.

Since at this point our rental was six months away, Blaine called us personally to discuss our stay. He first of all wanted to make sure we were "cool," because it was actually just his house that he lived in all the time, and all of his stuff was there, and we would be touching it. I was concerned about passing the "cool" check, because I usually do not pass the cool check, but Dan usually does, and that is why you get married, so one of you can pass the cool check.

We asked Blaine if he thought COVID would interrupt our winter plans to stay in his house, and he assured us we would have no trouble with our rental because he not only lived in his house, he also lived in a van and had no problems taking his van-house to a small swath of land in the desert he also owned and camping on it for the duration of our stay. 

I was not sure I was comfortable staying in the house of such a lavish person who owned two homes while we were about to have zero, but Dan pointed out that a van is not a home, so Blaine really only had one home. I countered that home is where the heart is, so if his heart is in the van then it is his home and also that is why trucks transporting organs are temporarily homes. Dan patted me on the head and left the room, which I have determined in our relationship means I have won the argument and is not in any way a method he's devised of comforting himself about his marriage choices.

I celebrated our very fine decision to stay in Blaine's very nice home probably by getting drunk, and we went about our lives, which involved alternately being concerned about catching COVID and who would be the last president elected before the Republic fell and America turned into a wasteland made of disparate roving bands of killers, which will be an approved career choice in the New America, or in Dan's case, who the new president would be. 

But as we neared our departure, we started saying things like, "There's no way he would cancel, right?" and "He made it like very obvious that we would have no problems staying there, didn't he?" and "Roxanne, if you are worried about the AirBnB you should talk to Blaine and stop following me around asking me about it." So I decided totally on my own to reach out to Blaine and just make sure everything was fine, which it probably was, because this is something you learn in therapy when you're an anxious person, that things are probably fine, and you're probably stressing out for no reason.

That therapy account on Instagram would never lie to me.

I quickly realized that Instagram lied to me and that things are not fine and that I was absolutely right to be afraid of things going wrong, because they very much did. COVID Problems, or CPs as I shall refer to them once and then never again, struck Blaine in a medium fashion that did not ruin his life, but did prevent him from renting his home to us. Dan ended up winning the argument about how many homes Blaine had, because Blaine did not want to live in his second home (aka his van) while his fiancee found a new job, which was understandable, and also the opposite of what he had said before.

But we live in unprecedented times, and Dan says that calls for unprecedented not-calling-people-assholes-when-they're-just-trying-to-get-by, and also Blaine seemed like a really nice guy who was doing his best, so I forgave Blaine. But now we are three weeks away from leaving and have nowhere to live. This is fine though because our lives encompass having nowhere to live as a rule, so I can't be mad that we continue to have nowhere to live. Even so, I returned to the fertile grounds of AirBnB, where nice Austin homes are surely still a dime a dozen as they were six months ago.

I learn quickly that Austin seems to use AirBnB in the way it was meant to be used (they are notorious originalists) in that people actually just rent their whole house to you and then go away while you're using it. So much of the inventory is just a person's house, and there are few houses that are straight rentals, unless you are a fabulously wealthy person who is willing to spend $12,000 a night on an artist's compound, which I assume is a misnomer because any artists I know are spending that $12,000 on paying back student loans, or acid. 

So if you have $12,000 a night, you can live in a compound, and if you don't have $12,000 a night, you can live in someone else's house, but that is a more difficult proposition than six months ago because there is some sort of global pandemic, and slowly people have begun realizing that it is not going away quickly and therefore they need to live in their homes themselves.

"Looks real nice in there."

Pickings are therefore slim, much slimmer than six months prior. We find mostly houses far out of our price range, or with no yard, and having promised Likely a yard, I am unwilling to disappoint her and suffer whatever revenge she devises, because she is a spiteful animal. 

We find a house that says it has five bedrooms and two bathrooms, which seems impossible and highly suspicious, because I have never seen a house with five bedrooms and two bathrooms before. But it looks nice, so we go to the reviews. Our process for booking AirBnBs has always been to rely heavily on reviews, where I make sure to comb them for someone who has written 'The beds changed my life' and then I book that place. This process has never steered us wrong. 

However, this place had only three reviews to illuminate our future by, and they said:

Great location and nice space -boy who describes himself as a Student, Adventurist, and Friend

Great place, close to Lamar and South Congress -man who describes himself as a world changing father of 2

Nice place -woman who doesn't describe herself at all, I assume because all the good tag-lines have already been taken by the first two guys

The suspicion deepened. And with no reviews about the quality of beds to go by, we were...concerned. But we threw caution to the wind and booked it, because we may be excited about being homeless, but we were much less excited about living inside of our car like some sort of tauntaun-sheltering-us-from-the-elements scenario.

"That'll be $12,000."

Our only hope was that everything went right this time. With my Instagram quote firmly plastered on my brain, I was sure it would.

Interlude: Thoughts about Reindeer

Dan and I are in Pagosa Springs, CO, and it is covered in snow and Christmas lights, because apparently Colorado is the only place that observes Christmas as it is meant to be observed, which is to say all the way until January 6th.

As I have recently learned, the 12 Days of Christmas (a concept made popular by a song where a woman terrorizes her one true love by sending him increasingly horrifying gifts including geese which are the national bird of hell and then finally culminates her break with sanity by sending twelve men to leap into her one true love's home after twelve days of him trying to figure out if he has to pay taxes on the five golden rings) actually start ON Christmas. Then they go all the way to January 6th, the Epiphany, where the three kings showed up and showered Jesus with gifts.

Catholics know what I'm talking about.

So Pagosa Springs is still in the Christmas spirit, which means I am still thinking Christmas thoughts, and such thoughts are as follows:

Santa's reindeer were female. Male reindeer shed their antlers in the winter, and female reindeer do not. Also, there are too many feminine names for them to not be female. Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen are about as feminine as you get, and no one will convince me that back when they were coming up with Santa stories that they were comfortable with the idea of males and females working industriously alongside one another.

Which means that Rudolph wasn't an outcast because he was bad at stuff, he was an outcast because he was the only male reindeer. Which follows that his 'red nose' was probably actually his raging reindeer erection, and none of the other reindeer wanted to play with him because he didn't have a waistband to tuck it into so he could pretend it wasn't there.