This was an exciting week. Not in the way that last week was trip-to-Texas exciting. And emotionally different than the previous weekend’s trampolining exciting. But exciting nonetheless!
Most of that derived from the fact that RespectCon, the conference on sexual assault prevention/response that I helped organize, happened this past Friday. Like, actually happened. People came! Presentations were made! Cameron and I got to have a wonderful discussion about armadillos and leprosy! There was a hashtag!
So that was very nice. I think it went well. If it didn’t, then I know a lot of very polite, very convincing liars, which is emotionally equivalent.
Image courtesy of Shu Tu, licensed under CC 2.0 BY SA.
As happens every few years or so, I spent this past weekend in Austin, Texas. (Austin is, of course, the only part of Texas that anyone in my family will admit to going to. We spit at Houston.)
Rather than being down there to hone my South by South Best* skills, I was in town courtesy of my cousin, who–kindly–agreed to be bat mitzvahed*, so that I might eat many breakfast tacos and migas.
She, like her brother a few years ago, interpreted a portion of Leviticus in a way that made my heart swell. Leviticus, for those who are unaware, is mostly full of rules that most folks in the family flavor of Judaism don’t really follow, as mixed fibers are great and smiting is not so much. It takes some skill to really consider what that means for a modern reform Jew, and of course my cousin was great and at the end we got to pelt her with marshmallows. (Ritual pelting = my favorite quality in a faith.)
I defy you to come up with something that is more out-of-character for me to do than a 9am Saturday trampoline workout class in the suburbs. And yet, Saturday morning, I found myself in Sky Zone Roswell*, which is essentially a gym floor made entirely of trampolines, with extra trampolines on the wall for parkour/safety.
This was, incidentally, not my idea. I came at the invitation of a friend of mine from nerd camp (lo these many years ago), about whom I feel roughly the same as Leslie Knope feels about Anne Perkins. She is beautiful and terrifyingly smart and has the legs and cardiovascular system of someone who enjoys running as much as I enjoy breakfast tacos.
But my friend had assured me that every time that she had gone before, the workout had consisted of basic cardio, done on your own little individual section of the trampoline mat. We (I) could suck quietly, in a corner, she reasoned, and that seemed fine to me. (It was in Roswell. This is the first time I’ve been there in the 10 years I’ve lived in Atlanta, so if I reasoned that if I was truly shamed by my failure, I didn’t have to go back ever.)
Unbeknownst to my friend, however, this week’s trampoline fitness extravaganza was led by a new trainer. This man had biceps like hams and the relentless cheer that comes from being a personal trainer for a class full of people making fools of themselves on trampolines. And he did not want for us to do cardio on our little trampolines. He wanted us to sprints across the entire trampoline floor.
There is something special about being in a room full of people screaming, in unison, “Fuck the burger–rerun it with just the cheesy fries!” And that was just where I found myself standing at about 8:45 on Saturday night.
As part of my apparent quest to see every Masquerade-featured white boy internet-famous rap act of 2013, I went to Watsky‘s show this past weekend. By myself! Which was very exciting for about 30 seconds, until I realized that it was an all ages show and so I probably just looked like someone’s chaperoning older sister, since I was standing in the back next to the put-upon parents. (Even better was the part where I realized that the 21+ show above us was actually a Rocky Horror Picture Show-themed burlesque event. I love my weirdo city.)
(I go feel superior for approximately two minutes while I drank my overpriced PBR at the 8th-graders, until I remembered my dad very kindly attending a Decemberists show with me when I was in 7th grade, and then realized that that Not That Long Ago that I was the irritating wee concert-goer. I am young! But older than the average audience member! Cognitive dissonance!)
There is nothing that Atlantans love quite so much as walking their dogs in public (except, perhaps, drinking beer at festivals or patios, as a concept). And so it was not surprising that on the near-enough-to-room-temperature-so-we’ll-take-it Saint Patrick’s Day that we had this year, everyone and their mother’s great Dane was out walking the Chattahoochee trails with my friend and me.
The dogs came in all shapes in sizes. There were little terriers which were trotting along, and a few robust rottweilers, and 800 labby labs (“Are you a person? I love you!”) walking along with us.
But my favorite dogs were probably the paired set that I saw rounding the back of a muddy trail. As my friend and I were walking this side trail, we saw a couple with two dogs–one, a Great Pyrenees, and the other, a Bernese Mountain Dog.
For those of you who do not creep on dog breeds as a stress-reducing hobby, that’s basically 200 pounds of giant, fluffy dog. That’s a sofa’s worth of dog. They were completely great to see out and about.
Some weird part of me is, I think, fond of big dogs because I enjoy the fact that we as a species of ape have trained another species to walk on strings that we hold and be totally into it. I mean, really now: if those dogs had decided to peace out, they could have with ease. They are basically black bears, on leashes. Continue reading →
So, this past weekend, I turned 22. Taylor Swift released a new single about just that thing. Coincidence? (Yes.)
And the thing is, I like it very much. It’s silly and fun and easy to scream along with while drunk, like Kimya Dawson without the addiction problems or depth. I mean, lyrics like:
We’re happy free confused and lonely in the best way
It’s miserable and magical, oh, yeah
Are painfully dumb, but they’re also really descriptive of the tail end of growing into an adult human being, which as a process is also pretty dumb. I mean, last week, I went out with coworkers and drank fancy bourbon in a cool bar when–not 10 minutes earlier–I had totally failed to parallel park in a non-embarrassing way, which is something that I should really Know How to Do by now. Continue reading →
This was a weekend of highs and lows. I will, as is my way, start with the lows:
First off, the actual temperature. It was snowing on Saturday, but–this being Atlanta–none of the snow stuck. So basically what happened is that small pieces of freezing rain made it hard to see and unpleasant to be outside. Y’all, I live in Atlanta. The social contract that we have with Our Lord Weather Jesus is that in exchange for living in a place that is pretty much going to give you asthma is that in does not snow in March. So, basically, ugh.
Low point number two is that I woke up on Sunday morning fresh-and-ready to do some Major Thesis Writing, which I had put off on Saturday in favor of grocery shopping with my dad, because a) I am a good child and b) there were almond horns to be had. This would have been fine except that–much like last Sunday, when I also tried to do some Major Thesis Writing–I woke up with a debilitating migraine. (It’s like my body knows what I’m about to do.) Trying to soldier on, I ate some cheese and drank some orange juice, at which my body pulled a walking octopus and “nope nope nope”d my string cheese right back out of me.
Is there anything better to start your morning with than freshly-regurgitated breakfast cheese, while blinded attempting to do something you don’t really want to do anyway?
And then, the first Gawker-featured scandal of 2013: our alumni magazine’s Letter from the President*, in which our university president wrote about American compromise, presumably in reference to the cuts. His example was not, as you might guess, the Bill of Rights, or a bicameral legislature. It was the 3/5 compromise. During Black History Month. A few weeks after a (terrible) student TV show made a lynching joke.
Like I said: rough couple of years. Courageous inquiry leads you to hire bad PR people, apparently.
And it is so, so frustrating to me because I want to like Emory. If I liked Emory, I would probably be less unhappy than I am. And I remember being at Oxford (referred to, horribly enough, as Emory’s “separate but equal” campus), and being–at least some of the time–really, truly happy about being there, even when I was frustrated with the institution. Continue reading →
I occasionally joke that I am a woman without hobbies. To some extent, this is true–when asked what I do for fun at job interviews (or, you know, dates, if I want to pretend to be less weird), I have difficulty coming up with anything. I like to take naps and listen to music while staring into space.
But, as this weekend reminded me, the joke isn’t entirely true. I know this because I indulged in almost all of my hobbies this weekend. To wit:
Organizing things: Something in my soul finds it deeply soothing to fold my clothing into bundles, and so I did. Every piece of underwear and every t-shirt I own is now ranger rolled, and opening my dresser is now a profoundly soothing experience. Neuroses!
Eating food on patios: I wound up lunching at Tomatillos, ie the only tex-mex place in Atlanta that isn’t trying to do some misguided fusion thing. For $5, they will give you pinto beans and cheese on your choice of tortilla. They have an outdoor patio, and sangria–like the tacos–is $5. There is nothing in life that I like quite so much as that kind of food, and this is the only place in town that approaches anything in the midwest. The weather was nice, and my friend was hysterical, and afterwards we got to go to a used book shop that had both a VC Andrews and a PG Wodehouse novel available for a reasonable price. (Did I buy the Wodehouse so the clerk wouldn’t judge me? Maaaaybe.)
Despite the gloom-and-doom* of last week’s post, this week has been remarkably uneventful. Not good, not bad, just… there.
There were good things that happened: I weathered my first corporate function (a birthday party) without shaming myself too badly. I’m baking brownies in a cast iron skillet. I watched the last three episodes with the Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who and cried disgusting snot tears. I considered re-reading Ender’s Game, but decided not to on the grounds that I had already cried too much for one weekend, in the good, cathartic, prompted-by-TV kind of way.
(Seriously, though, readers: is there anything that could have predicted my anthropology degree quite so well as my absolute, shuddering sobs when I got to the “the aliens are only trying to save their babies, and the humans didn’t understand” twist at the end of that book? No. No there is not.)
Dances With Nerds 
