Bronze Ambition

It begins with an unmanicured pointer finger. Pressing it firmly against the small triangle embossed on my stereo’s smooth, rectangular buttons, I am greeted by warm bossa nova melodies winding their way through my living room as they follow me into the bathroom. There on the counter beneath the vanity mirror, a bottle of Corona with a lime wedged in its neck just begins to sweat as the bright bulbs do their best impression of relentless sunshine. Welcome to my beach, my bronze ambition.

For years now, well alright – decades, really, I have been attempting to change my body through a strict self-tanning regimen.

My first encounter with sunless tanning cream happened in middle school during a time when I was desperate to break free from my geek status and join the world of teen popularity. It never happened, thanks in part to the quality of sunless tanning lotions in the early 1990s. The anticipation of my newly bronzed body as I worked the cream over each arm, leg and plane of skin made me dizzy with excitement. I went to bed anxious to wake up as the new and exotic me.

Morning came, and I ran to the full-length mirror in my bedroom the way a child charges the tree on Christmas. The reflection was devastating.

Slowly, I peeled the layers of clothing from my body to reveal a pattern of swirly, striped and splotchy skin in various hues of beige and orange. A kind of paisley inspired wandering of color covered just enough of my body to suggest that it was meant to be more consistent, but not enough to look as though I’d had any clue as to what I was doing. Despite exfoliating and careful application of the cream, I looked like a sepia girl in a Technicolor world.

Over time I perfected the sunless tanning technique, baring my sun-kissed limbs without the zebra-like stripes on the wrists, ankles and knees that plagued less seasoned “sunbathers.” For a while I could credit all of the muscle tone in my arms to the many times per week I applied self-tanning lotion, and the methodical massaging technique I came up with that ensured it was going on correctly.

While living abroad in Italy as an exchange student, I finally got a real suntan after vacationing in Sardinia for two weeks with my boyfriend and his family. We spent our days lounging on large rocks that jutted into the Mediterranean sea, a landscape so magnificent that I wasn’t sure who had the starring role: the emerald waves ebbing and flowing into the shoreline, or the rocky fjords that broke them up.

It was such a magical environment, that my skin miraculously responded favorably to the sun. For the first time in my life my body darkened into a rich bronze color contrasting with locks of dirty blond hair that soon transformed into platinum strands of gold. It was as if my “Fairy Bod Mother” had visited me. Suddenly I saw myself as an attractive woman. And I was in love, and I was speaking fluent Italian.

I had never before encountered the woman I was while standing before a mirror during those days and it was very hard to see her fade as my time in Sardinia, and then Italy came to an end. The next four years I was a student at Ithaca College, and then went on to live in New York City before ending up back here in Syracuse. At times, it seems that I’ve spent the last eight years looking for that version of me that was glowing from the inside out on the beaches of Sardinia. New York State weather and the romantic endeavors of my twenties did little to reinstate that glow as any attempts to surrender myself to the sun or men have left me badly burned.

It seems that with the first nice day of each summer, I somehow forget that I am fair and freckled and should really be putting SPF on to avoid damaging my skin. For whatever reason, I convince myself that it will be different this time – that laying on a towel all day in late May is a good idea and “sun protection factors” will only hamper the sun goddess within me that has been waiting patiently to emerge if only she could find a few rays of solar splendor.

How very wrong I always end up being. Solar splendor quickly changes to solar sizzle as the day comes to an end. With a bottle of aloe in hand, I do what I can to make things better.

Similarly, I do this very same thing with men. I meet one that is seemingly wonderful and commence to invest in him without worrying too much about the consequences. As the “chase” comes to an end, so too does our relationship. With a bottle of Chardonnay in hand, I do what I can to make things better.

It amazes me that I have proven to myself time and time again that I am not built to receive large quantities of sun and that using an SPF is in my best interest. I wonder if there is such a thing as a “Spinster Protection Factor” – something I could apply before first dates that would ensure my heart won’t get broken after the first few months of getting to know someone?

Luckily, we live in a world that has started to realize how terrible the sun can be for you and even the people who easily tan are starting to change their sun-worshipping ways. This makes it easier for us white folks to carry on with our pastiness as we take precautions to protect ourselves from the effects of too much sun. A tan might look good, but it’s not always the best thing for our overall well-being.

The same can be said about a husband, at least in my case.

These days I still visit my special bathroom beach, and though I’m not laying on a blanket of white sand with a tropical beverage in my hand, I still find it plenty relaxing. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to care less about what people think about me and more about what I need to do to think positively of myself. I’ve been an athlete for nearly 15 years and it has made me appreciate my body in important ways. I no longer regard it as just a canvas that I need to paint and decorate to look good for the viewing pleasure of others – I see it as a means to an end. This body allows me to run, bike and swim – to feel myself persevere through pain, push past limits and get to know myself from the inside out in a powerful way. I know how my breathing sounds when I’m running a seven-minute mile, and I know how free I will feel if I continue running at that pace to push through moments where I thought I had to stop running or I would collapse. These things aren’t just significant to me as an athlete – they’re also good for me to know as a human living in a tough world. When I think of all this body has achieved in my life, it seems petty that I get upset with it for not tanning easily in the sun.

Now when I sip Coronas in my bathroom while applying self-tanning lotion, I use it as a time to relax with myself and honor my body for what I demand of it each day. I say hello to the beauty mark to the left of my knee, and drop by for a lengthy visit to my right trapezius muscle. I love the added bonus of finding myself a bit bronzed the next day, but I no longer do it because I feel that I have to in order to impress someone. I do it for me.

I do it because I look forward to that time spent with myself and feel proud that the process of self-tanning no longer means I’m trying to change who I am because I think I’m supposed to be a certain way. I do it because I like the woman that I have become and I don’t tell her so enough between workouts, family and career obligations. Sometimes I put too many walls up and I forget that she needs to hear it.

So here’s to a healthy glow – both inside and out. Bottoms up, walls down and bronze away!

A Tribute to the Last 40,000 Miles

When we first met, I wasn’t sure it could ever work. She required so much more maintenance than I was used to, and she was much more hands on than I like to get on the first date. My father actually set us up and I didn’t have much choice but to get to know her, to listen and understand her needs and follow her lead. We spent a lot of time in my driveway those first few weeks, and she didn’t usually smell so great when we were done. Those were the first few miles on my 2000 Volkswagen Jetta.

She was a used car, with 60,000 miles on her and plenty of life left in her wheels. There was a nick here, a scratch there, but an impeccable stereo with good bass and space for six CDs at a time. That was all I needed to know.

A year and 40,000 miles into our relationship, she’d already seen me cry countless times. Draped over the steering wheel as the proverbial shoulder to cry on, I sobbed in the protective environs of my Jetta several times while working at a horrible little publishing company with more dysfunction than Dunder Mifflin. Soon after starting there as online editor, I would also splash the dash with (gross) tears of desperation as I tried to pull myself together after countless break-ups with my on-again/off-again personal trainer boyfriend. The Jetta would wait patiently while I moaned and snorted my way through a few minutes of concentrated angst, and then she’d rumble to life when I turned the key to go home. It was almost as if she were offering me her condolences as we moved along the road…

“Now, now…Did you really want to hang around and pine for someone with a lava lamp and a week’s worth of dirty dishes piling up beside his water bed?” A few quick maneuvers from second to fifth gear told me I did not.

As in all of my relationships, there came a time when I started to lose some faith in the Jetta. She was always so good to me that I didn’t know how to react when she started to become a slow drain on my bank account. Her taillights went out frequently, and I started to think she enjoyed it when the same state trooper on Route 20 pulled us over time after time.

“You realize that we spoke about this problem last week, right?” The cop asked as he peered into my car.

I always felt bad for him because I was usually pulled over late at night after coming back from my parents’ house where I spent the evening doing laundry after a long run in my old stomping grounds. As a result, I probably didn’t fit the profile of the usual suspects trolling the highways at 2:00AM with malfunctioning cars. With my laundry neatly stacked in the passenger seat, my wet hair back in a pony-tail, and NPR humming in the background, I peered over my dark framed glasses at the officer and promised him I’d have the lights checked out. Not too exciting, where cop stories are concerned.

Due to the ever-demanding maintenance the Jetta required, she earned herself the nickname Junka. Born from a blog I wrote about her in 2006 when she had just 110,000 miles on her (posted below), the nickname was a result of some ranting I felt the need to do after a series of repairs that cost me almost $1000. I once took an all-inclusive vacation to Aruba for that much money. It pained me to shell out the same amount to fix parts of my car that I’d never even see.

My relationship with the Junka wasn’t all bad, we did have many good times together. I’ve traveled to almost every triathlon I’ve ever competed in and every race I’ve ever run in that car. She’s kept my hands steady many a time as I nervously drove to each event, visualizing how it would go over and over again, anxious to know if I would be able to do as well as I’d hoped. And she was there to congratulate me with a soft seat after I crossed the finish lines, practically saying “I told you so” when I’d hang an age-group award medal from the rear-view mirror. She’s waited patiently in parking lots as I called everyone I knew to tell them how it went, while my sweat-soaked racing garments soiled her fabrics in the hot summer heat.

The Junka has taken quite a bit of abuse over the years. She’s suffered through hot coffee spills on her center console as I jerked the car to work in a hurried frenzy, and spilled barbecue sauce from late-night stops to Burger King when I needed a little snack after happy hours. She’s a potpourri of stray blonde hairs, old winter road salt, and caked off mud from running shoes that are tossed into the car without care. I seldom vacuum her or wash her out because the time and effort seemed stupid to spend on an “old car.” Though I did have her detailed once a couple of years ago when I realized that there was barbecue sauce in more places than I could reach with a toothbrush.

I’m amazed that the Junka has hung in there for so long after I wrote about her at 110,000 miles. Nearly 40,000 miles later, I’m actually sorry to see her go. In the last year she’s lost a muffler, developed an oil leak and seems to have developed “dashboard” Tourette’s syndrome, where the warning lights will randomly flicker on and off, and the needles in the gauges surge forward then back to normal with no rhyme or reason. Her key has broken in half so that I now carry around the remote end in one pocket, and the manual entry half in the other. When I lock her from the outside, she pushes out a homely, sickly honk akin to a goose with a sinus infection, perhaps. Patches of rust flake from her sides like old skin from a bad sunburn.

As I prepare to part ways with the Junka, I reflect on all the time I spent at her wheel. We’ve come a long way, so much further than the 87,000 miles we actually drove together. We’ve been through three jobs, three boyfriends and one fiancé. Ironically, just last night as I was tearing through the glove compartment to find the title to the car, I came across a piece of paper folded up – an email from my ex-fiance with directions to his place. It was the email I’d printed for the very first time I went to his house. Those directions once represented a beginning, found after almost three years in a car that was coming to an end. I couldn’t help but pause for a moment, letting myself dabble in sad.

I remind myself that when one door closes, another opens. I’ve started to come out of the long, dark funk I’ve been in since breaking my engagement. I see that life goes on, as it must. I know that not everything can last forever and sometimes you have to stop investing in something if it’s doing you more harm than good – like my engagement, like my car.

I wasn’t sure about getting a new car…dealing with another monthly payment, getting rid of something that’s become such a time capsule for my twenties…but I’m 30 now. I’ve made a lot of changes in my life in the past year, and I guess getting a new car was something that was bound to happen at some point.

I looked at lots of options – thinking that maybe I wanted an SUV – maybe the Tiguan? Or a Honda CRV? But what about something cheaper, like a Civic?

I ended up going with another Jetta, even after I was sure that I hated the 2009 model -- probably because I was convinced I ought to go with something different after so many years in the same car.

She’s a lot fancier than the Junka, and it will take a while for this new kid to develop the kind of character that the Junka had, but she is pretty spectacular and I look forward to a long relationship with her, too. Because the Jetta isn’t the kind of car you drive a couple of times and then kick to the curb. With the Jetta, you go steady. I’m looking forward to the next 87,000 miles of my life.


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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Volkswagen Junka

Here's a new tagline for the Jetta:

"The Jetta - For people who like to throw money into a black hole." How about this one: "Farfegbankrupten!"

True, my car and I have had a love/hate relationship from day one. I test drove it with my father in the passenger seat nearly three years ago. The test drive will be forever memorialized as the time when I demonstrated to my father how poor my stick shift skills were.

About three miles from the dealership is a gravel parking lot where I was given the simple exercise of moving the car forward just one inch at a time, so to show my father that I could take the car on the road and integrate with actual traffic (as opposed to flying down back roads where only a random squirrel would suffer the consequences of my rampant driving). I've never heard swear words combined in quite the same way as when my father braced himself on the passenger door and dashboard after a session of bucking about the parking lot in the Jetta that afternoon.

"Jesus Chr*st, Lisa. I don't have any confidence that you will ever be able to drive this car," he concluded.

Despite my apparently poor display (I was actually pretty good at this point - my friend Danielle had taught me to drive standard months ago and worked with me in a much more "serious" condition), I ended up getting the car and the Jetta and I have had a fairly decent relationship over the years, save for past few months.

Jetta has been pissing me off. To start, her exterior lights have gone out one after the other which has prompted many annoying pull-overs by the local police. Then her wiper got messed up, so that a long black strand of rubber would trail behind the rest of the blade every time I turned them on. For months my dashboard was lit up like Vegas - with every possible warning light turning on at random times for no reason. My personal favorite is the orange light shaped like an engine with a thunder bolt striking it. What exactly is that supposed to mean?

Is the car about to blow up? Am I going to be damned for driving 4,000 miles over my oil change number? It's very vague. I usually let that one go for a while before pulling into a garage to inquire. That's another thing about car troubles...

"Inquiring" about these troubles usually leads to a hefty swipe on the credit card. Turning off the orange light costs about $200 dollars. I can make it go away with a Sharpie for about 75 cents. YOU do the math.

Following all of this, I noticed my car starting to feel like a saucer sled on wet roads. It was mid-July and I lost control of my car going 40 mph on a major highway with some drizzle on it as if I were on black ice in mid-March. Upon further examination, and after my father's plea to come outside and "look at the goddamn tires," I saw that the front wheels were all shiny with little silver threads. What's the remedy? An alignment and new tires - cha-ching!

Another favorite ailment that plagues my car, is the fun game of "power window hide and go seek." The game is really short. Driver attempts to lower window using "down" button, window decides to fall inside of door and screw you with a 20 minute drive to work in the rain, yeah! Oh yeah - and cha-ching!

Finally, my brakes decided to call in sick Monday morning. While pulling out of the parking lot at my apartment, I missed mowing down the kids waiting for the school bus by about five inches when I discovered that Plan A) Brake for children, would be replaced with Plan B) Swerve to avoid hitting children. (And please note that this action has nothing to do with my prior blog, Kids Suck).

Not all of the Jetta's problems are from old age and quality German engineering. I take some of the blame for things gone wrong, because I have been known to inflict pain on the car. Backing into a boat hitch twice inside of five minutes comes to mind. And after a fight with an ex boyfriend a year ago, I attempted a fast exit in reverse out of a steep and narrow driveway, which resulted in my careening through the lawn over a grassy knoll. I removed a large portion of the earth with something underneath my car (a big, plastic black part broke off that I've since relocated to the trunk for safekeeping), moonlighting my Jetta as a backhoe.

Ah yes, me and the Jetta and the love between us. She's got 110,000 miles on her and things can only get better with time, right? Like a bottle of wine...the longer it's around, the more money it will cost you.

Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Perhaps one of the biggest disadvantages to being single at an older age is the fact that you become so reliant on yourself, that you find it hard – and possibly even detrimental – to allow yourself to rely on anyone else. And conversely, allowing someone else to rely on you.

I was once obsessed with the idea of being in a committed relationship. I remember having a crush on a boy named Waylon as far back as Kindergarten and asking him ridiculous questions at lunch.

“If I were about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, would you try to save me?” I’d ask.

I don’t remember what his response was, but it seemed to me that at some point I decided a man was supposed to save me in some way if he really liked me. Maybe I never learned how to rely on a guy for much of anything because Waylon decided it was fine if I went over the falls in a barrel.

Things didn’t get much better as I made my way through elementary school. In an effort to woo my crush in the fifth grade, I borrowed a pair of my older cousin’s tap shoes from her dance class. Though they were much too big for me, I wore them over a thick pair of socks and click-clacked my way past his desk en route to the pencil sharpener, pausing dramatically to see if he’d noticed me when I got there. He did not, but my teacher seemed to take issue with tap shoes in the classroom and I was asked not to wear them again.

By middle school I was well into my three-year phase of sporting a bowl cut – something my mother plagued me with for as long as she could before I started to take more interest in my appearance. Many of the girls in my grade were starting to pair up with boys, declaring themselves as “girlfriends” and it became clear to those of us without boyfriends that we were huge dorks. The bowl cut didn’t help, nor did the fact that other girls were starting to get boobs while I began to enjoy the nickname “Flatware” from boys who teased me – and not because they were flirting with me.

In high school I realized that the serious relationship was not something that would happen to me any time soon, and set out to find other ways to become noticed in lieu of being romantically linked to someone who was “cool” or “popular.”

Eventually, I would graduate from high school with a reputation for being a good singer, a humorous girl, and a strong track runner. Though during my senior year I finally got to kiss the boy who sat near the pencil sharpener in the fifth grade, we never became more than friends and I left high school still lacking the experience of a committed relationship. What’s more, the guy that I was probably closest to through most of high school eventually came out of the closet and declared he was gay. Thus, the man issues continued.

As an exchange student the very next year, I finally found love in Italy with a boy, who like me, had never been romantically involved with anyone before. I came to enjoy the idea of being someone’s girlfriend, though I have to admit that experiencing these things with Northern Italy as the back-drop may have set the bar a little high for the rest of my life.

Case in point, my Italian boyfriend and I broke up after I came back to the United States and dating in college proved to be an utter disappointment in comparison. It didn’t help that the very next boyfriend I had was a self-indulgent baseball player from Boca Raton who whisked me away to the Bahamas for a weekend after which his girlfriend from another school found out and made him introduce her to me. I became painfully aware of what a broken heart felt like.

During the rest of my college years I would go through an assortment of awful dating experiences, including another emotional interlude with pencil-sharpener boy from high school, a grown man who still used the word “mommy,” and a boyfriend who I was seconds away from kissing for the first time before we were in a horrific car accident that resulted in several injuries and the death of someone in the car. I graduated college in pretty much the same condition that I’d graduated high school. A well-rounded woman in many areas, save for the long-term relationship.

Through four years of high school and four years in college, I had girlfriends who were always somehow “officially” attached to men. I’ve been marinating in conversations of love, anniversaries and commitment for more than a decade now and only in my late twenties did I finally come to peace with the fact that I was just not having those same experiences. It used to bother me a great deal because I felt that I was missing out on something, that I wasn’t able to truly be a grown up without that strong bond to a man. I had some more serious relationships with a few guys after college, but they proved to be their usual dysfunctional experiences in the end (one guy was reading my journals and hacking into my email, another was a pot-smoking verbally abusive loser, and the other was an alcoholic from West Point who used the word “ain’t” in every sentence. I could go on about him, but it would exceed the PG rating I try to maintain for this blog).

My past has taught me that being in a relationship isn’t always the key to finding stability. While my friends seemed to have thrived and grown as women while in their relationships, I actually was at my best when I was NOT in a relationship. This gave me time to indulge in all sorts of soul-searching activity, the least of which was running and training for triathlon – both things that made me feel strong, empowered and worthwhile. I had an identity: Maybe I wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend, but I was an athlete. I was focused on making myself into the best ME I could be.

Since I could never rely on any of the guys I was involved with for much else than a guaranteed argument and the occasional dinner date, I started to regard men as extraneous entities in my life. They were like chew toys for a dog – if one was hurled my way, it might have piqued my curiosity to play with it for a while, but I’d eventually get bored and move on. If another dog came along to chew on the toy I may have convinced myself I needed it back again, but I always got over it.

When I was engaged I felt that I’d finally found a path away from dysfunction because my fiancé was everything that my previous boyfriends were not – he was polite, responsible, professional, and respectful. I finally felt like I was with someone that I could rely on – someone I even started to rely on, until it became apparent that there were some hurdles in our relationship that we couldn’t get over. Tempting as it was to ignore those hurdles and continue on with the bliss of being a bride-to-be, I am not trained to stay in a relationship for stability’s sake and I had to end it. I’ve never had a rock, but I’ve always had myself.

I realize that I have had to be my own rock, and maybe that’s not always a great thing.

The allure of going through with my wedding and living happily ever after was hard to walk away from. It felt like a diss to the girl that has cried herself to sleep so many times since grade school when nobody would come to find me during the slow songs at school dances, when I went to the prom with a friend instead of my crush, when holidays came around year after year and my friends shared stories of their significant others’ gifts and family get-togethers and travel plans. Each time I wondered when it would be my turn, and then it was…and then it wasn’t anymore.

While some women find comfort in their families – their husbands and children – I still turn to the tried and true miles that wait for heavy shoes to find them as I move silently over the terrain to find my rock. Running brings an inner peace that slowly makes its way through my core, diluting my worries with a simple, “Shh…” as I feel myself unwind from within, relaxing to the realization that I can access this kind of stability any time I want to, and it doesn’t require anyone but me.

I’ve started dating someone new and the relationship has been moving into more serious territory, the kind where we should “be there” for each other.

It’s come to my attention, that I might have work to do in that area. It’s not that I’m selfish and don’t think of what someone's needs might be, it’s that my relationship experience has never required me to be someone’s rock.

I’ve never been in a relationship with someone where we are both willing to share our inner most thoughts and feelings, and have conversations that require each person to really try and authentically understand what the other person is saying.

I’m not sure if this is part of being someone’s rock, and them becoming yours, but it’s the first time that I’ve ever been able to discuss raw emotional feelings with someone with such ease – and I need that in order to trust someone enough to ever rely on them. The absence of this ability in my engagement is what caused me to end it and move on. I don’t feel that two people can be truly connected if they withhold some part of themselves from the other – no matter what that part is, or how painful it may be to share it. I think of it like the Carfax services…how are you to know how a vehicle will run and the maintenance it may require to be at its best if you don’t know its history and what you’re dealing with? What may seem like a minor detail in the car’s history may come back later to cause engine failure and then nobody is going anywhere. But if you’d known about it sooner, things could have been done to prevent that from happening.

It has been more than a year since my wedding date was postponed, and nine months since the engagement was officially broken. It has seemed like a long and impossible road to travel and many of my closest relationships were tested during that time. Some of them didn’t survive and it has made me even more aware of how much I’ve come to rely on myself for stability in this world.

I know I have to learn to let go a little bit, and trust that there is someone in the world that wants to be there for me who believes I am equipped to be there for them. My relationships won’t always feel as one-sided and dysfunctional as they have in the past, and while it’s good that I can be my own rock, I don’t think I need to continue fighting the opportunities to experience what a truly healthy relationship could be like. I never thought of being there for myself as a bad thing, until I realized that it just might be getting in the way of letting someone else be there for me too.

Do Peeps Give You the Creeps?

If you're ever totally clueless as to what time of the year it is, just take a stroll through your local grocery store. There is always some kind of themed candy being hawked invariably in the direct path to the nearest check-out line. So came the realization that Easter is just around the corner, after a little run-in with some Peeps last night in grocery store.

Am I the only one that is totally freaked out by Peeps? Is there a more disturbing candy than a Peep? I contend that there is not. How lazy was the artist that decided a baby chicken's body should 1) be made of marshmallow, and 2) be comprised of nothing but a large brown eye and a huge swooping ass. Top that off with a neon yellow sugary coating and yeah – I'm thinking baby chick. What did the Just Born manufacturing company say on the morning that the creative team rolled in with the first Peep?

"Whoa, folks. The resemblance to an actual baby chick here is uncanny. The Cadbury Egg will be a thing of the past, let's jam this cash cow into the nearest Easter basket, STAT!"

Apparently they were onto something though because people seem to love Peeps. Don't ask me why, because I think they are totally nasty. The only candy that could beat them in a Gross-Off would be the pastel orange Circus Peanut, which is another marshmallow goody that has the texture and consistency of a Pink Pet eraser.

I hear people talk about eating their Peeps in various stages of decay. Some like to leave them out for two weeks before biting into them, others wait way longer – knowing their perseverance will pay off when biting into the Peep will actually produce a crunching sound. Um, it's marshmallow…it's not meant to make crunching sounds unless it became part of a Smores, OK?

Then you have your recreational Peeps users. These are the people that were always told to stop playing with their food when they were younger. According to Wikipedia, blowing up Peeps for fun is a regular pastime. Behold the marvels of "Peep Jousting" (as described under Alternative Uses on the Peeps page as per Wikipedia):

The messy and largely self-entertaining game, "Peep Jousting" is played with a microwave. One takes two Peeps, and licks the right-hand side of each until sticky. A toothpick is thereby adhered to each Peep, pointing forward like a jousting lance. The Peeps are then set in a microwave, squared off against one another, and heated up. As they expand, the toothpick lances thrust toward each opponent, and the winner is the one that does not pop and deflate. There have been many confirmed deaths of peeps. Ties (both fatal and harmless) are common. Both usually are eaten after the competition, however, regardless who the victor was, calling into question the nature of "winning" in such a circumstance. This folkloric tradition has been noted by the Washington Post. Rumors of Peeps' purported indestructibility have evolved into a veritable myth that has come to define the product's place in the lore of pop-culture ephemera. In an effort to establish this legend as fact or fiction, scientists at Emory University performed experiments on batches of Peeps to see whether they could be dissolved. They concluded that the candy is indeed difficult to destroy, according to CNN reports.

The talk of Peeps being indestructible brings to mind the similar cases made about Twinkies. Isn't it strange to anyone else that both of these soft, yellow substances appear to have an infinite lifespan? Do you really want to put something like this in your body? I can picture it now…I swallow a Peep and there it is in my stomach planning its revenge. It will stand up and take note of its new environs with that gigantic brown eye and start walking back up my esophagus until it reaches the larynx upon which it will choke me. I'll take the Cadbury Egg, thanks.

Unfortunately, just because you run into a few boxes of Peeps in the grocery store it doesn't necessarily mean Easter is coming up. Just Born expanded upon its initial creation to include Peeps for all seasons. From the scary ghosts of Halloween, to the jolly snowmen of Christmas, to the smitten teddy bears of Valentine’s Day – there is a sugarcoated swooping ass for every occasion. Aren’t we the lucky ones?

* This blog was originally published on my MySpace profile on March 21, 2007

Single at 30: Time to Switch Teams?

Recently I experienced a Saturday that I can safely say was very much out of the ordinary. I spent my afternoon at a dodgeball tournament, and my evening at a gay bar.

I haven’t been involved with dodgeball since I was in sixth grade, save for the many times I’ve watched the movie about the beloved elementary school sport starring Ben Stiller. Based on that, I was expecting to see squads of muscular men hurling wrenches at one another to prepare for the event, but in actuality many of them opted to simply drink beer from a can while placing brightly colored sweatbands on their heads and wrists. Most teams were comprised of the kinds of guys that probably do something “officially athletic” (re: someone’s keeping the score) only a couple times per year, and looked as though they were wearing the first T-shirt and pair of mesh shorts they could find. There were a few serious contenders on the scene though, and one guy with a buzz cut that seemed particularly threatening and probably started most of his sentences with the word, “Son.”

The tournament was held in a school gym, which made it feel somehow wrong to be drinking beer atop the bleachers amid random posters made from construction paper promoting the school’s “anti-bullying” policy, but then I’d drank beer many times beneath the bleachers in my own high school, so I warmed up to the idea. The format of the tournament was that each team got to play until it lost three games, and then the two teams that wound up on top got to play for the championship. I was there to support a team of my co-workers who almost immediately lost two games, but then managed to pull out a win so to prolong their inevitable loss in the tournament.

Carrying our team was a random substitute player the referee scrounged up at the last minute to round out the six guys the team needed to play. My friend Mariel and I cheered loudly and obnoxiously for him, as only women drinking Budweiser from the bleachers can, screaming “Go Ed!” to the substitute. We learned later his actual name was Ben.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a grown man freak out at full capacity, you should get yourself to a dodgeball tournament. One of the rules is that your foot cannot cross the center line on the court of play when you throw the ball at the opponents. If you hit someone with the ball and your foot was even an inch over the line, it doesn’t count. Being that this wasn’t exactly an ESPN-sponsored event and most participants were drinking beer all afternoon, the referees didn’t catch everything that was happening – but the spectators sure did. The “sweatbands” team happened to catch an over-the-liner while watching two other teams play, and proceeded to call the ref out on his negligence with the kind of anger usually reserved for things like “blackouts on TV during the Super Bowl.”

Last year’s defending champions ended up winning the tournament again, and a buffet of pizza and wings was unfurled in the gym to conclude the event.

I didn’t think I would feel like going out that night having spent my afternoon drinking crappy beer, but my friend Mariel convinced me to meet her downtown to watch an artist she wanted to see performing. I agreed, with the caveat that we had to end up at the gay bar to go dancing.

A month or so ago, it was Mariel’s birthday and a bunch of people were out celebrating. After many martinis, a group of us decided we felt like dancing and ended up at the “college bar” on a Saturday night dancing in a sea of sweaty, rude students to songs I did not know the words to, and beats that did not make sense to my body (I should mention that few moves outside of the power fist and running man make sense to my body when I’m dancing, but I digress).

The experience left me feeling happily too old to partake in the college go-out scene, but with an insatiable need to dance. Recalling an episode of Sex in the City where Charlotte goes to the gay bar to dance herself crazy, I decided that I too needed to go where I knew the music would be good and the people would be fun.

I knew the moment I arrived at the club later that night that I had found my happy place. “Disco Inferno” was playing, mirror balls were whirling, and many people were power-fisting to the music (that was not a pun).

I made my way back to the main dance area and for a half an hour straight, I danced to songs I knew the words to and felt the kind of calm that only a Britney remix paired with Cosmopolitans can make one feel. And how freeing it was to be able to move about without having to peel layers of inebriated men off of my Seven jeans -- because I should not be able to tell what scent of AXE Effect someone has on without consenting to it. This time nobody was crossing the line into my personal space, and it was refreshing.

But wait…is that girl giving me “the eyes?”

That’s when things started to get weird. I’m no stranger to being hit on, since all it usually takes at 12:00AM in a place where the music is too loud to talk is eye contact lasting for longer than three seconds, but I found myself momentarily confused by this girl that was quite obviously taking an interest in me. I’m also not a stranger to communicating my explicit non-interest in guys that cross the line with me on the bar scene, but this girl was tripping me up. She was respecting my space, despite her optometric solicitations for further interaction. She had me hiding behind my long hair, taking a peek between my bangs just long enough to see if she was still staring at me. It felt like I was a child peering through the door of my blanket fort to make sure my mom wasn't going to come into the living room and give me hell for dismantling the sofa again (those cushions made the best blanket-fort walls!).

For starters, she looked more or less exactly like me. Long blonde hair, average build, same height. Add to that the fact that she was stealing almost all of my moves AND my dance pout, and I couldn’t feign one more second of indifference.

She was working the dance floor from every angle. Breaking it down to J-Lo near the pool table, then flitting over to the stage area for Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You.” When Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” came on, I was coquettishly dancing in place (for fear that any movement in her general direction would give her the green light to totally get in my space and challenge everything I believe to know about my sexuality), but I was not able to stay there long.

You see, the girl continued walking past me shrugging her shoulders and giving me the “I invite you to a dance-off” face, which is apparently a turn-on for me from any sex. I can’t stay still when someone is inviting me to “bring it” and I know that I can. Not only that I can, but also because it is more like a sense of urgency – like I MUST bring it. I become far too excited to remain calm. To me, a good Duran Duran song inspires the kind of enthusiasm that third-graders get when they hear there’s a snow day.

By the time “Poker Face” ended, a remix of the Tings Tings’ “That’s Not My Name” came on (did I mention I love the gay bar?) and the square foot of space I was occupying was no longer big enough to contain me. Like microwaving spaghetti sauce, I was about to bust all over that place in a fury of splattering movements.

I got on stage and started throwing out elbows as if I were alone. Split fingers were gliding smoothly over my eyes, then dissolving into jazz hands somewhere near my hips. Enter the triple hair toss somewhere thereafter, and it was on.

It didn’t take long for my female admirer to join me and we danced together for one song (ironically it was the “Hot and Cold” song by Katy Perry) She took my hand and twirled me around, then laughed and said, “this is where it’s at, girlfriend!” While I did not “taste her cherry chap-stick,” as the aforementioned artist would have suggested, I did smile at her lots and was having the best time out that I’ve had in a while.

By the time I got home, it was nearly 3:00AM. For someone that seldom stays up past 11:00PM even on the weekends, this was extraordinarily out of the norm for me. It’s not that I don’t like to be out having a good time, it’s more that I’ve gotten tired of the bar scene over the years and have learned to invest my time in other things that fulfill me – like training for triathlon, which requires early nights to bed and early mornings in the pool, on the bike or out in the running shoes. These are the things that have come to make me feel good about myself, and the things that I can invest in knowing full well I’ll get something out of them.

It has been a long time since I’ve gotten anything out of a $50 bar tab and a hung-over Sunday morning. To be honest, the best thing about that investment always seemed to be the “these calories don’t count” mentality I engaged in the next morning while mowing through greasy breakfast platters with my friends at the local diner.

What I took away from this random Saturday was that it doesn’t matter what team you’re on – whether it’s in dodgeball or dating, it’s all about having a good time, and not crossing the line!

Barbie at 50 – Iconic and Ironic

There has been much in the media about Barbie’s 50th birthday, as our favorite 11 and a half-inch style icon hits a milestone. I’ve read some interesting articles about Barbie pertaining to “spinsterhood” with regard to the fact that Barbie has managed to remain single even as she reaches the half-century line. (I suspect that many girls will contest that Barbie did in fact marry, and many times. I myself spent countless afternoons dragging her perfectly stiletto-ed toes along a makeshift aisle on my carpet at the end of which was a Ken propped up awaiting her arrival. Then I would choreograph their perfectly vertical bodies through a ceremony deeming them “man and wife”).

As many young girls likely concluded, it would only be natural for Barbie to marry Ken. After all, he was sold alongside the Barbie Dream House and Barbie Corvette, as items that Barbie needed to have in order to maintain her perpetually smiling face.

I played Barbies in quite a few circles when I was younger, and it always ended up the same way. You could count on two things: The first is that your best friend would immediately call “shot gun” on hairdresser for her Barbie’s job (a coveted position because it meant you basically got to be in charge of your friend’s Barbie’s hair), and the second is that the afternoon of Barbie-play would always lead to a wedding.

Mattel’s “doll du jour” did more than make me recall the ins and outs of playing Barbies and the time I spent marching her around my bedroom amid the accoutrements of a perfect life. It made me think about how my own success story was forming when I was only nine years old.

At that age, I think playing Barbies with each other is a way for girls to manifest their feelings on what life ought to be like as they grow up. They’re just beginning to identify themselves as “women” and as women among women, “peers.” The landscape of their Barbies’ lives emulates what they know about their own lives and ultimately where they think they should be going. Based on this, I think most young girls conclude that they’re supposed to get married.

The problem with this is that nobody ever counters the idea of a wedding with any thoughts on how it might not be right for Barbie. Young girls don’t say, “You know, my Barbie is kind of sick of dating and she’d really like to spend her time traveling and writing and not worry about her biological clock. And also, she’s tired of doing your Barbie’s hair. She’s going to go work at an advertising agency in business development. Peace out.”

Young girls have also never snatched their Barbie out of a wedding after all of the set-up was complete gasping, “My Barbie’s gut instinct says this isn’t right and she can’t go through with it!”

Much work had to be done for the Barbie wedding, and it would have been pretty upsetting if the event had been hampered in any way. Seating was already arranged (Kleenex boxes were gathered from all corners of the house and lined up as “pews” for whatever random dolls had to be called in as extras for the festivities). Your friend, the hairdresser in Barbie-ville, had already spent hours brushing your Barbie’s hair into the perfect ponytail for her nuptials. Barbie’s best clothes and accessories were taken out of the very special case you kept your most sacred toys in, and festooned upon her as she prepared to walk the aisle to a tuxedo-ed Ken whose lines were already written for him…(Ken’s vows were always some combination of what we wish boys in fifth grade would have said to us, and our interpretation of tidbits we’d catch from the soap operas our mothers watched).

The point is that to disrupt what we as young girls had already accepted as “normal” in our afternoon microcosms, was to challenge what we would later perceive as acceptable behavior from our peers growing up.

Young girls romanticizing what their lives should be like via Barbie dolls and other “fairytale” networks is nothing new, but I never thought about how ironic it is that the very doll that has done so much to inspire young girls to believe that they should accomplish certain things in their lives to become successful, is the same doll that I’ve been reading about as the “ultimate spinster” on her 50th birthday.

I wonder what would have happened if one afternoon my mother knocked on the door during a Barbie wedding ceremony and dropped the bomb on us that Barbie actually didn’t want it that way? That she would go on to be the same stylish and successful icon she’s always been WITHOUT a Ken by her side and a “Mrs” before her name. Would we have still been drawn toward the fuchsia aisle in the toy store if our perception of Barbie went from “beautiful bride with a dream house” to “independent woman who listens to her gut instincts?” It’s an interesting thought.

Of course Barbie isn’t the only thing out there giving young girls the notion that they should grow up to be “have-it-all housewives.” The Easy Bake Oven has been hawking the home-making dream for decades now, and Cabbage Patch kids have young girls excited about baby clothes about 10 minutes after they stop wearing Onesies. Throw in the whole “self-esteem” problem where girls start looking for “favorable male reactions” to validate their entire existence, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster that even a Stepford Wife couldn’t fix with an arsenal of secret ingredients.

I’m inspired by the idea that Barbie is in fact a spinster. I’m inspired because I have fond memories of those afternoons playing Barbies with my friends – afternoons where I dumped all of Barbie’s belongings onto my floor, uprooting her life and sorting through her things haphazardly to prepare her for a date with Ken – and that despite the mess that was sometimes made, she came out alright. And so did I.

*Image courtesy of Getty Images

Etiquette – Not Just For the Dinner Table

In the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing a lack of manners in a variety of situations. In no particular order, I wanted to share my observations with the hope that some of this rude behavior might be corrected. Most people can pull together a basic set of manners when they’re in a formal dining situation, but I think it’s important to recognize that etiquette goes beyond the salad fork and the bread plate.

The Bathroom

I know there are men out there who believe the women’s bathroom is a place of powdered noses and eyelash curlers, but I’m sorry to say that it’s not. Lately I’ve been opening the stall door and asking myself if I’ve mistakenly walked into the men’s room because there seems to be a trend with women urinating on the toilet seat.

I understand that us women have to get creative when we’re using public bathrooms that seem to be negligent in their hygienic maintenance – rather than place our bare skin on any questionable surfaces, we opt for a quick thigh workout and perform a balancing act over the toilet bowl that could pass for an audition to be in Cirque du Soleil. Be that as it may, there is no excuse for finishing your business and then leaving it behind for the next person to discover. If you tinkle on the seat, wipe it with a sheet (Let’s all commit this to memory by way of the cute rhyme).

The Theater

While recently attending a play, I found myself momentarily removed from the world on stage after noticing a small stream of sound coming from behind me to the left. It was as if the playwright had penned in parenthesis after one of the leading character’s most dramatic lines:

“Insert crinkling M&Ms wrapper here.”
“Cue annoying blonde chick to start talking about Facebook stalking again.”

In case you weren’t a musical theater geek in high school like I was, with a chorus teacher who preached etiquette to us as often as she ran scales, let me be the one to tell you that making extraneous noise in the theater while a show is going on is super rude. If you must fuss with wrappers and other noisy items, you should wait until a louder scene is being performed – preferably something where a cannon might go off, or several people break out in song during a large musical number that will dilute your fidgeting into irrelevance. Otherwise you should sit still and enjoy the show like everyone else manages to do. Or leave.

The Parking Lot

The other day I pulled into the parking lot at the store and was gathering my things to get out of the car. Just as I was about to open the door, a truck rounded the corner to park in the space right beside me. This wasn’t an issue until I realized he’d left me only five inches to open my door and slide myself out of the front seat. What made it worse, was the driver looked across the passenger seat of his truck and directly into my eyes, before he decided there was no problem. He got out and walked away from his vehicle with no concern for the fact that I was desperately trying to shove myself through the small crevice between my car and the door. Since my body has a girth that is larger than a sheet of paper, it would have been nice for him to see the panic in my eyes as my non-verbal communication begged for more space. I probably could have made it through the opening, but would have definitely had to slide my body down the side of the car for a good two feet before I could clear the door.

If you know anything about upstate New York in March, you would know that you do whatever it takes not to make contact with the outside of your car lest you want to be covered in a special kind of dust made from the salt, dirt, and powdered debris that stays faithfully stuck to your vehicle for the entire winter season.

The parking lot is a fairly easy concept, people. There are two yellow lines, and you pull the car in between them. The yellow lines are wider than the outlines they put in coloring books for a one-year old. The margin of error is two feet! This shouldn’t be a challenging task, so let’s park between the lines, not on top of them.

The Gym

Ah, the gym. It’s almost as if donning Lycra and sweating in public gives you carte blanche on all things polite. Stand at the water fountain for long enough, and behold the parade of ball-scratching, wedgy-picking, nose-wiping individuals who will amble past you to place their salty, sticky bodies onto the surfaces of all of your favorite machines (and then walk away without wiping them down). It’s not the hygiene factor that irritates me the most though – it’s the sense of entitlement I notice from the benches of the locker-room to the lane lines in the pool.

The other day I was changing after my swim, and was taking up about two feet on the bench. My bag was placed beside me and I was routing through it for various articles of clothing. A woman approached the bench, set her things down, and proceeded to pick up my bag and place it on the floor so she could place her items in the same spot. Confused by this, I apologized for apparently taking up so much space on the bench, despite the fact that she was now occupying three-quarters of its total surface area. She said nothing back to me. The same woman would later use the blow-driers provided in the gym to dry her feet, but that’s a story for a different blog.

Other times in the locker room I will find myself leaving and nearly running into someone in the hallway because they are barreling down the middle of the walkway without any concern for “oncoming traffic.” While I’m flattening myself and my many satchels of gear to the wall to avoid being knocked over, this person continues to walk by as if I was inconveniencing her by using the same hallway in and out of the locker-room.

Basic etiquette resides in two simple words: “Pardon me.” A simple “Pardon me” as the woman moved past me would have immediately changed my attitude to this situation. It would imply that she is somewhat accountable for her reckless walking. That’s all I’m looking for, a little accountability for one’s actions.

The Door

I have a theory that you can tell if a person is a jerk by the way they deal with the door. Most everyone knows to hold a door open if you are approaching it with someone. If it’s a woman and a man, old-fashioned tradition says that the man will open the door for the woman. Or if someone is carrying many items, the other person will open the door. However it plays out, one person opens the door while the other enters.

But that isn’t what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the gray area where two people approach a door, and the first person will likely make it in the door just as the second person arrives to it.

The problem with the “gray area” is that the person is at an awkward distance away from you. If you stand and hold the door open, you’ll be there for a minute and could come off like some kind of weird stalker-type as you stare at the person advancing toward the door. In that scenario, you could look away while you’re holding the door open, but then you risk looking like you have one million things that are better to do that taking a couple minutes out of your day to be polite. The other option is to go in the door and let it close. Then you have to deal with the awkwardness once the person makes it inside with you and they give you the look.

The “Really? You’re so busy that you couldn’t hold the door open an extra second?” look.

My feeling is that if you’re the kind of person that can take a couple of seconds out of your day to hold the door open for the person coming in the building after you, then you’re alright in my book. It’s simply polite to do this when the alternative is to basically let a door “gently slam” in the face of another person.