Sundays with Stretchy Pants

It was just a matter of time. I didn’t actually take a stick to the eye, but I was momentarily blinded while concentrating on running. It’s a dangerous sport. There was a low-hanging branch on the trail and I was keeping the beat (RIGHT,left,RIGHT,left,RIGHT,left) and really focused on not dying my startling athleticism when the branch hit the bill of my orange Detroit Tigers hat, forcing the bill down over my eyes and knocking my head back a little bit.

It’s clear by my illustrations that the hat saved my life. My sister bought it for me, so thanks for that, Tracey.

My hairstyle might say Leather Tuscadero, but everything else says Michael Jackson, all the way.

My first concert. My first bedroom poster. My first celebrity letter-writing experience. My first fan club. My first cassette bought with my own money. My first reason to stay up late to watch Friday Night Videos. My first reason to carry a portable tape player around with me. My first reason to dance in front of the mirror. My first love.

The first thing I ever won was tickets to the Jackson Victory Tour. Packy’s Pizza in Chesaning had a drawing and very late one night while my sister and I were babysitting, we got the phone call. I don’t know who called, but my sister answered the phone and had to wake me up to tell me. I was too tired to be excited, but I think I shit myself when it finally sunk in. I went to the Silverdome with my dad and I didn’t even mind that it was all the Jacksons. It was the shit, man. I still have this picture disc and it’s never been played:

The first time I scraped together my very own money with the intention of buying something specific besides candy, I bought Off the Wall on cassette. I already had Thriller and Victory and I was at the point where I needed MORE! I had the glove, I had all of the pins, I had a concert t-shirt, I had his new music, I fiercely coveted the red leather “Beat It” jacket and tried it on every time I went to the mall. There was nothing else to buy, so I bought Off the Wall. And I carried my first portable tape player around and played it outside until I knew all the words.  And then I put Thriller back in and danced on a picnic table in front of a window until my neighbor saw me and I got embarrassed.

I remember fighting with my cousin over the words to “Beat It!” She said it said “funny,” when clearly it said “funky.”

I remember watching the news and learning about an old celebrity who had died. I don’t remember who it was, but my parents were both kind of like, “NO! I can’t believe he’s dead!” I very clearly remember that seeing my parents react like that made me realize that Michael Jackson would die some day and it would be on the news and I would be an adult and I would be so sad.

I loved him in the maniacal way that 8-year-old girls love celebrities and I don’t think even my love for Eddie Vedder compares to how I felt about Michael Jackson. Nobody compared to him back then. Even my brother, with his heavy metal leanings, learned how to do the Moonwalk and then taught me and my sister. And today I’m teaching it to my kids.

It’s time to flip my morning routine around. I can’t run in the 9:30am heat. I usually put laundry in the washer, drink my coffee, eat my breakfast, check my email, let the coffee go to work *cough*, then hang the laundry on the line, then at least 1 or 2 kids are up, so I feed them, and then I run. But now it’s hot and on today’s run, my fingers swelled up to look like 10 portly thumbs, and I was really thirsty and around mile 4 I felt chilly and I thought, “Huh, that doesn’t seem right.” And the heat melted my Vaseline barrier that I always make in order to keep the rivers of sweat out of my eyes. So rivers of sweat ran in my eyes. And have you ever tried to dry your eyes with a tech shirt? It doesn’t work. That material might be made for wicking sweat away from my body, but it isn’t made to mop up the buckets of stinging sweat that my head produces, thus the Vaseline barrier. It usually works like a charm, as you can see by this rough sketch:

See how the sweat runs into the barrier and goes around and down without stinging my eyes? It’s lovely. See my big smile?

But today, The Heat wanted to punish me so this happened:

See my frown? That means I was sad. The Heat made me sad when it tried to kill me.

I’ve been trying to work on my running speed without much progress. Every weekend a group of menopausal women passes me going super fast. I know they’re menopausal because I can hear them laughing and chatting about vaginal dryness and hot flashes from the time they’re a quarter mile behind me until they’re a quarter mile ahead of me. They zoom past, yukking it up and they’re not even short of breath. And they’re old. I want to be like that when I’m old so I’m working on it. I could just run later in the day on the weekends so I won’t run into them anymore, but it’s getting kind of hot out now and sometimes I think the heat might make me die. My goal is to at least quicken my pace to the point where it takes them longer to pass me and I keep them in my line of vision for longer before they disappear on the horizon. It’s a lofty goal, believe me.

I do well on my “speed work” days, but then on  my regular runs, I go back to slow. I don’t know how to get the feel of a certain pace, so I just go at a pace that doesn’t hurt very badly. When I started running a few years ago, I used to listen to music, but then I found that once I listened to certain music while running, it was impossible for me to listen to it in real life. It made me feel weird so I started listening to a combination of audio books, “This American Life,” “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” “The Moth,” and “RadioLab.”  And my speed has suffered. I really get into the stories and I find myself pretty much just shuffling my feet with my mouth hanging open from time to time. It’s a wonder that I don’t veer off the trail and run into a tree every now and then.

But Dawn introduced me to these podcasts that are organized by beats per minute, so all I had to do is figure out what BPM will keep me at the pace I want. And it’s all house music or club music or whatever the kids are calling it these days. I don’t listen to that in real life, so it doesn’t ruin any music for me! And it doesn’t have words, so I don’t get caught up in the story! I do sometimes get distracted, “Is that a cat yelling? I wonder if that’s a foley artist effect or if it’s somebody’s cat? What did they do to get the cat to make that sound? I wonder if they gave it some kind of designer club drug. I wonder what the new designer club drugs are called these days. ‘Ecstasy’ was just about the best drug name ever. If I hadn’t been afraid of man-made drugs, I totally would have taken something called ‘ecstasy.’ That’s just good marketing.” And sometimes,, because it’s club music, I think about Bryan’s former co-worker in Michigan who showed up to work one day with a tether bracelet on her ankle. Bryan asked her what she did to deserve that and, with complete nonchalance, she said, “Shot up a club.” (He didn’t press for details. Can you believe that?) And then I snap out of it and find myself off beat (I like to keep the beat with my right foot), so then I do a little stutter step to get back on beat, which means one day I will probably fall down and take a stick to the eye, but for now it’s working.

And yet I’ve lost a whole week since my last post. Huh.

Well, there was packing and then a trip for Kids Know Stuff. The kids and Kristen have to review the trip, but I don’t. I just pretended like I was Kate and used my precious twins for the free stuff they could get me. It was fairly satisfying. Part 1 of the kids’ review (Lincoln City, IN) is here, if you wanna know. Spoiler Alert! Abe Lincoln spent some time there as a young man. And there are several monuments so you can never, ever forget it.

Then I had to unpack and I got a new clothesline so I did all of my vacation laundry on my new clothesline. It smelled good, but it took a long time to dry. Stupid sun.

And then I vacuumed the basement.

And I might have cooked something and then cleaned it up. Aren’t you glad I skipped blogging for the week?

Tomorrow the kids and I will drive halfway up to Michigan to pick up my niece, Riley, for a nice long visit. Taylor isn’t coming for the long visit this year because she has a life. It happens. Cody never visits anymore, but I texted him and asked him if he would start visiting us again once he reached legal drinking age and he said, “duh,” so that’s something to look forward to. Riley’s still too young for a life. Except on Woogi World. Anyway, the kids have been squealing non-stop since before the trip and now they’re squealing again because Riley’s visiting. Thank god I didn’t finish all that tequila. That’s gonna come in handy.