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Wet, heavy, sticky, problematic thundersnow

The second Nor’easter of the winter season has ravaged the Boston region, dumping nearly 18 inches of wet, heavy snow with blizzard-like ferocity and leaving the majority of us housebound. “You can see that the roads behind me are empty,” says the on-the-scene television reporter, standing in front of Route 9 near Framingham. “People are heeding the Governor’s plea to stay off the roads and let the plows do their work!” Of course, all employees of local news stations obviously ignored the Governor and headed to work to devote themselves to around-the-clock storm coverage, not only getting in the way of the plows but also getting in my way to watch Judge Judy. Instead, I’m stuck with an infinite parade of perky reporters, standing in front of piles of snow while pontificating repeatedly and banally: “This is wet, heavy, sticky, problematic snow!”

And they repeatedly used the word “thundersnow” like two-year olds who just learned to say “poop.”

I worked at home from 6am until noon, when I tossed aside my laptop to head out into the thundersnow’s aftermath to start digging out the driveway. Staring at the expanse of mud-heavy snow, for a split second, I hated snow, I hated winter, I wanted to sell all my skis and move to San Diego. And that’s before my forearms burned effusively from the strain of lifting shovel-fulls over to the front yard. Fucking thundersnow!

Soon Mr. P emerged to excavate the end of the driveway from the plow truck’s wrath, and our downstairs neighbor came out to help. “I’m seriously thinking about buying a snow blower,” she said, which is what she says every time we meet to dig out the driveway. I don’t say much, as I hardly think the piddly size of our driveway warrants a snowblower. In fact, I generally look forward to the task of shoveling if I’m going to be stranded at home for the day. Six inches, ten inches, it’s a joy to dig my shovel into. And the more she ranted about the snow blower, the more I became resentful to the idea of a snow blower taking away my right to bear shovel — aside from light gardening and occasional trailwork, this is really my only time to engage in purposeful manual labor — and I began to almost savor sweating over the effort of moving inches upon inches of wet, heavy, sticky, problematic thundersnow.

Thundersnow is a recent phenomonen, no? We certainly didn’t have thundersnow when I was young. Stephen Colbert noticed this in 2006, and theorized that God is pissed…

Thundersnow
www.colbertnation.com
 

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By Meredith – January 12, 2011

Magical Butt-toning Shoes

A California woman is suing New Balance shoes for allegedly overstating the benefits of their butt-toning shoes (here). The lawsuit seeks in excess of 5 million dollars in “damages.” Ahem.

I will share a semi-shameful fact: 2 years ago, I purchased a pair of MBT sneakers — an odd, expensive sneaker with an oversized, unbalanced sole that promised to revolutionize my butt, thighs, and calves as well as burn more calories than “regular” sneakers. The sneakers came with a DVD (!) that explained MBT’s inspiration: to recreate the uneven terrain of our primitive, barefoot ancestors. MBT takes their inspiration from the Masai people, an East African ethnic group who, as the DVD explains, “wear no shoes, and have no cellulite.” Maybe this is because they subsist chiefly on cattle meat, milk, and blood, but maybe it’s because they go through life walking as if they had unbalanced, heavy sneakers laced to their feet. Ha, who knows.

I wore the MBT sneakers faithfully on walks. Indeed, they were quite a conversation starter on the walking path, and more than a few women approached me to inquire about the effectiveness of the sneakers. For once in my life, I was a maven, on the cutting edge of walking technology, and I cautiously praised the shoes, admitting that it made walking more difficult and hence must have some fitness value, right?

Inwardly, I regretted my expensive investment — I climb mountains in my spare time, so any lack of tone to my hindquarters is probably impervious to physical activity — and sold the MBTs for a nice price on eBay to a man in Florida who wanted them as a present for his girlfriend (he is either very sweet, or a huge dickhead).

And now, the world is full of toning shoes, as well as consumers who are discovering what I discovered: that no mere shoe can conquer cellulite. And maybe the shoe companies have used misleading claims to coax a desperate demographic of saggy-assed women with disposable income to purchase an expensive pair of magical sneakers that will give them buns of steel, but really, does this warrant monetary damages? Can’t you just stash the sneakers along with all the other empty-promise fitness gear you have purchased and chalk it up to a market-economy life lesson?

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By Meredith – January 5, 2011

The Painted Bird

When I was younger, I re-read books constantly because I had a finite number of books and seemingly an infinite amount of time. Now the circumstances are reversed, and I have an infinite number of books to read and precious few minutes to read them. The idea of re-reading a book seems like a waste of time, so I’ve been ruthlessly culling books from my library to unclutter both my living and cerebral space. During one of these audits, I found The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, which I read in college for a sociology class. (Oh, how I long for my college years, when my sole responsibility was to read books.)

As I held The Painted Bird, I developed an intense ache to read it again. Twelve years later, I still remember passages in great detail. It’s a brutal book based very loosely (though not autobiographical) on Kosinski’s experiences during World War II, when as a young boy he was sent by his parents to go into hiding from the Nazis in rural Poland (though Kosinski never names Poland nor makes clear if the boy is Jewish or a “Gypsy.”) The boy encounters horror after horror as he flees from one village to the next, mostly as a servant for extremely effed up peasants. I mean, not even in the darkest recesses of my imagination could I conjure such depravity. And amidst all this cruelty, violence, and all-around nastiness, a young boy struggles to make sense of a senseless world and against all odds, he survives and is reunited with his parents, damaged and fractured as the post-war world around him.

In the afterward that Kosinski penned in 1976, ten years after the book’s publication, he writes:

As I began to write [The Painted Bird], I recalled The Birds, the satirical play by Aristophanes. His protagonists, based on important citizens of ancient Athens, were made anonymous in an idyllic natural realm…the symbolic use of birds, which allowed him to deal with actual events and characters without the restrictions which the writing of history imposes, seemed particularly appropriate, as I associated it with a peasant custom I had witnessed during my childhood. One of the villagers’ favorite entertainment was trapping birds, painting thir feathers, then releasing them to rejoin their flock. As these brightly colored creatues sought the safety of their fellows, the other birds, seeing them as threatening aliens, attacked and tore at the outcasts until they killed them. I decided I too would set my work in a mythic domain, in the timeless fictive present, unrestrained by geography or history. My novel would be called The Painted Bird.

But of course, Kosinsky’s book has a very specific geography, a very specific history, of Eastern Europe during World War II. It is impossible for a modern reader to transcend this backstory and make it applicable to, say, modern-day America. It is impossible to forget that this is a work of fiction, not an autobiography, of a man who killed himself at age 57 by wrapping his head in a plastic bag. I started re-reading The Painted Bird, encountered the brutality, remembered, and stopped on page 68. I decided that I really didn’t need to read this book again.

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By Meredith – January 3, 2011

New Years Ski

January 1 is a really rotten day to commence with resolutions, especially when you wake up half-hungover in a Hampton Inn in ski country after 6 hours of sleep and a belly full of factory-farmed red meat. (Hmm, what’s good at the complimentary breakfast buffet?) But despite all of my indulgences, I could solace myself with the excellent physical outdoor activity reaped from a day of XC skiing followed by a day of downhill skiing at Bretton Woods. Because if your shoulder and thigh muscles are screaming though your mind is serenely blissed, you must be doing something right.

It was our first official ski outing this season for both downhill and XC (though we did take our backcountry skis for a quick neighborhood run in the aftermath of last week’s blizzard). New Hampshire is hurting for snow, so we had to go as far north as Bretton Woods to find a fully-open nordic center. It took about an hour for me to rediscover my balance and rhythm and fully feel comfortable on my skating skis. But Mr. P was, of course, born on skis.

Schuss!

After three hours of XC skiing, during which we sufficiently released our pent-up frustration of not having been able to ski for the last nine months, we relaxed and reveled in the outdoors.

Looking at Mt Washington

Since ski lift tickets are ridiculously expensive, we woke up at 7:30am on New Year’s Day to be at the Bretton Woods downhill area when they opened at 9am. Because I’m going to get my money’s worth.

The slopes were quiet until around noon, though the weather stayed dismal all day. My new ski helmet afforded little tenacity; I still ski incredibly slow. “I’m working on my technique,” I explain to Mr. P, who is eternally waiting for me. Plant the pole, lift the back ski, turn, repeat. Even on the green trails, where technique is wholly unnecessary, I work on my technique.

After passing the day pleasantly at Bretton Woods, we returned home and snarfed wine and an abundance of unhealthy foodstuffs. Because resolutions can always start tomorrow.

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By Meredith – January 1, 2011

Champagne and Svanasana

My local hot yoga studio had a “Champagne and Svanasana” event on Thursday night sponsored by lululemon, the company that manufacturers the “must-have” yoga and athletic apparel famous for making anyone’s butt look good. The class was free if you signed up with lululemon, who also provided after-class cocktails and munchies. Even though I had already done hot yoga the night before, my sweat glands can handle another 90 minutes when given such enticements.

I suspect that my local hot yoga studio has been struggling. I go 1-2 times a week (dividing my time here and a bigger studio in Cambridge with horrible weekday parking), and class attendance is usually around 5-8 people. Last Thursday, there were 2 of us. It’s great to receive individual attention from the instruction and a gracious reception from the owners, but I worry that the stagnant attendance will cause the studio to close. The heating bills alone must cost a fortune.

So I was gladdened when I showed up on Thursday and found dozens of extremely fit women cavorting through the studio. Mats covered the floor but I found a place next to possibly the least desirable person that one could aspire to do hot yoga in close proximity to: a rather large, older man wearing a bizarre light-blue full-coverage leotard that looked like something the super hero squad rejected. To accommodate the crush, the owner instructed us to move our mats closer together, and when the light-blue leotard man bent over to shift his mat, he knocked me hard in the head with his butt. All told, there were around 70 people squeezed in the tiny space, and they had to turn people away. The teacher — a favorite of mine — was busy socializing with the yogarati, but she greeted me warmly as she made the rounds, saying “This isn’t like our usual Thursday evening class, is it!” with a flush of excitement.

After determining that we could not possibly cram any more people in the studio, we began. It was a pretty standard class, except the teacher choreographed the practice so we would not be jumping back into chatarunga, probably to avoid breaking the floor. When the flow of poses intensified, the room grew not just hot but humid, and I and everyone else sweat in earnest. The teacher paid particular attention to me, giving me at least 4 assists to deepen various poses. The man in the light-blue leotard panted heavily, to the point of distraction. Though disappointed that I could not practice my inversions — I just recently achieved a free-standing tripod handstand as well as a headstand supported against the wall — I did manage to eke out an awesome crow pose.

After the class, I went downstairs to rehydrate with some sparkling wine. The cocktail table was manned by a gauntlet of lululemon employees from the store in the Burlington mall — young, slim beautiful women who glowed. I resisted the urge to comment that I owned thousands of dollars in lululemon stock but not a stitch of their clothing. (In fact, up until last September, my yoga outfit had be cobbled together using a variety of years-old workout gear before I went to the Gap, where a sale supplemented by a Groupon allowed me to purchase 2 whole yoga ensembles roughly for the price of a single lululemon headband.) I bantered lightly with a few people before the crush of people impelled me to the door. I tried to say goodbye to the owners, but they were busy handing out class schedules to the newcomers, who I selfishly hope lose them.

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By Meredith – December 31, 2010

Descending the Void

Today a ski lift at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine dropped five chairs and six skiers to the ground, where they escaped injury by luckily landing in 20 inches of soft ungroomed powder (here).

Nothing strikes fear down my vulnerable spinal cord like the words “ski lift accident.” My head may be protected by a moon-sized ski helmet, and I may totter down the slopes like a tentative turtle, but downhill skiers are forever at the mercy of those swaying wires, grinding pylons, and rickety chairs that convey us uphill. Because you cannot go downhill until you are uphill.

It took me awhile to feel comfortable on a ski lift. Vertigo-prone, untrusting, I would clench the safety bar and stare at my gloves, willing the onward progression of the chair with all of the sentient awareness not obsessing about the precarious bearings of my corporeal being.

Gradually, I began to loosen up. I looked down at the skiers below. I slackened my grip on the safety bar. I anticipated the next run. I breathed easy and ventured to assume that the ski lift had cured my fear of the void.

The void. Because it’s not really heights that I fear: it’s the void. And there are few voids more profound than the expanse of cold air below the dangling skis on a ski lift. But if I had to choose between dropping from a ski lift into a bed of fresh snow or remaining trapped on the ski lift for two hours in bitter wind, well, I might prefer the plunge.

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By Meredith – December 28, 2010

Driving in a Winter Wonderland

Our automobile journey from Pennsylvania to Boston was not well planned. Though the assignment of blame is a negative process that undermines healthy personal relationships, I could not help blaming Mr. P — silently, fiercely, as we inched 20 mph on the Massachusetts Turnpike in blizzard conditions alongside hundreds of other poor planners. He was the one who looked at the weather forecasts and surmised that the storm would stay off the coast until it arrived in Boston in earnest at around 7pm, by which time we should have arrived safely at home to batten down the hatches and enjoy our forced domestic sequestration. But he was also the one who was driving, so he certainly didn’t need me to eulogize his folly.

I started out at the wheel on Sunday at 10am after we packed the Jetta full of gifts and foodstuffs and bade farewell to family, who beseeched us to have a safe journey. Flakes were falling in New Jersey, but the roads seemed to absorb them, giving us a false sense of safety until the accidents started. We passed a pickup truck that had crashed bed-first into the side rails. A full-sized van started to pass me on the left when I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the van hurtling towards us backwards. “He almost hit us!” I kept repeating as Mr. P coached me on using the manual transmission to brake the car. All of his instruction flew out my head when a black GMC truck sailed sideways in front of us and I slammed on the brakes, whimpering as the truck hurdled gracefully into the side rails. That’s when Mr. P took over the wheel.

Ironically, we made it over the George Washington bridge in better time than usual owing to the dearth of traffic, but slow-moving gridlock awaited us in Connecticut. The roads began to coat as we inched forward at 30 mph, calculating with dread the time that this pace would have us home. We did pick up some speed as we worked our way through Connecticut, but the certifiable mess on the Massachusetts Turnpike slowed us down to 15-20 mph. Our wipers began to freeze, leaving splotches of ice on the windshield that impaired visibility, but it was hardly the time or place to pull over. As Mr. P had been driving for 7 hours straight, I offered to take over. It was a token gesture, and we both knew it.

We arrived home at 7pm, tired but jubilant. “Looks like I won’t be going into the office tomorrow,” I said when we read the the governor had declared a state of emergency.

“Oh shit,” Mr. P said. “I had a floating holiday to use by the end of the year, so I took the day off tomorrow!”

“Poor planning,” I commented.

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By Meredith – December 27, 2010

Put a Helmet on It

So much to blog about, so little time to funnel all my stray thoughts into a cohesive post. And I’m wondering who wants to read about how my scratchy sore throat escalated rapidly into a semi-debilitating sinus-based cold; about how I was in the laundromat, folding my husband’s dryer-warm handkerchiefs when a swell of love for him nearly knocked me over; about how my favorite yoga teacher took savasana to a whole new level by dabbing lavender essential oil on the backs of our necks as we lay in repose after her rigorous class; about yesterday’s biannual dentist appointment, and how my dental hygienist really believes that I floss regularly because my gums no longer gush bloody gore when she scales my teeth; about how I left work today at 2pm because the snow was falling at a pretty good clip, and upon returning home I sat at my work laptop and actually worked without even turning on Judge Judy — a wonderful testament to my professional maturity, self-control, and insane work-orientated to-do list.

Cohesion. Where is the cohesion in all this?

Mr. P and I couldn’t resist a gift-giving Christmas preview. We exchanged one present each: Me, I gave him a tube of his favorite uber-expensive French after-shave balm that smells of musky meadow grass, while he presented me with a ski helmet, size XL because I’ve got a oversized skull. Now I am fully outfitted to go downhill skiing, and the helmet will give me the courage to sustain a decent speed as opposed to quaking from one side of the trail to another in a near-horizontal line. Ask any football player how empowering a helmet is.

And I received my helmet not a moment too soon, as next week we will be going skiing and the New Hampshire ski community is all abuzz about the second death in two weeks on Cannon Mountain (here). Two young men, one skier and one snowboarder, died apparently as a result of head trauma, and neither was wearing a helmet. There’s some tragic cohesion in that.

After reading about the two skiing deaths on Cannon Mountain, I effusively told Mr. P, “You can return whatever else you bought me for Christmas to the store. The only other thing I want for Christmas is for you to buy a skiing helmet for yourself.”

He laughed. “I don’t ski with helmets. I’m going to die like a man,” he told me.

This sort of casual, European attitude towards basic safety precautions like helmets makes me laugh and cry. Mr. P views helmets as pessimistic objects when used in the context of, say, a leisurely bike ride to the subway on the path or while coaxing me down the bunny slope. He also doesn’t floss. Ever. (Ah, cohesion, a bit, at last.)

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By Meredith – December 22, 2010

I Should Be Blogging

This time of year, there is no shortage of excuses for my blogging lapse. There’s parties, presents, cards, and a general early-winter fatigue — a byproduct of the short cold days that have remained horrifyingly snowless in Boston. Yesterday I curled up on the coach with a book — me, on the coach, with a book, at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. I should be blogging, I remember thinking before dozing off with my fingers spliced in between the pages. I woke up to find the sun had disappeared and it was time to get ready to go out to eat.

I should be blogging, I thought today, as I made biscotti for tomorrow’s cookie swap at work. I should be blogging, I thought as I wrapped presents. I should be blogging, I thought as I wrote out Christmas cards. I should be blogging, I thought as I agonized in the aisles of Whole Foods over what trinkets I should buy for some close co-workers. I should be blogging, I thought after I logged into my WordPress account with all intention of blogging, only to get caught up in the task of deleting the hundreds of spam comments that have steadily accumulated. (I simply cannot weed through 800 spam comments about Cialis on the off-chance that someone has actually left a real comment in the past month.)

Even in my 7am hot yoga class — which I could only summon myself awake to attend on the strength of yesterday’s prolonged nap — I was mentally blogging instead of putting all my focus on breathing, opening, and blotting rivulets of forehead sweat before my tweezed-puny eyebrows were breached. An entire blog post, inspired by the teacher’s faux-profound comments that were made as we reposed in half-pigeon pose. “All my friends complain to me about how they hate sending Christmas cards,” she said. “And then yesterday, I open my mailbox and find it jammed with cards from all my friends who tell me they hate sending Christmas cards!”

An amusing anecdote that garnered a few titters from those of us who weren’t grimacing from hip-wrenching pain. But she didn’t carry the story to its logical conclusion: We fill our days with things we don’t really want to do. I should be blogging, everyday I should be blogging, but nobody wants to open a mailbox to find Christmas cards that nobody wanted to send, and nobody wants to read a blog filled with posts that nobody wanted to write.

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By Meredith – December 19, 2010

L’Assommoir

I’m about 90% finished reading Emile Zola’s gritty 1877 novel L’Assommoir about a working-class Parisian laundress named Gervaise and the shiftless drunkards who love her. Though I’m reading an English translation, I like to pretend that I’m absorbing enough French to warrant the many hours spent with my nose in this densely-typed, 450-paged book. Indeed, it’s the longest novel I’ve read in a few years. (Take that, faltering attention span!)

“You’re reading Zola? Huh, I read him in school,” Mr. P commented.

“Which one did you read?” I asked, since Zola was quite prolific.

“I don’t remember. I just remember that it was so boring!” he said.

I consider this. “Well, that’s why you became an engineer, because you found Zola boring,” I said. “I became an English major because Dickens enthralled me. I love this stuff.”

Indeed.  The opening chapter features a rip-roaring cat fight between Gervaise and Virginie (the sister of the woman her husband runs off with) in a clothes washhouse, during which they fling pails of water at each other, exchange slaps as the spectators cry “the sluts are murdering each other!”, and then beat each other with the clothes beaters. Owing to her training as a laundress, Gervaise perseveres:

With extraordinary strength she seized Virginie round the waist and forced her over so her face was pushed down on the flagstones and her bottom was in the air; despite her struggles, Gervaise pulled her skirts all the way up. Underneath were drawers. Slipping her hand into the slit she tore them off, exposing bare thighs and bare buttocks. Then Gervaise raised her beater and began to beat… the wood smacked into the flesh with a wet thud. With each blow, a red welt appeared on the white skin. At first there was more laughter. Soon, however, cries of “stop! Stop!” began again. Gervaise didn’t hear, didn’t tire. She wanted every inch of this flesh beaten, beaten and scarlet with shame.

Anyone who calls that boring just isn’t using their imagination. Then again, the novel does proceed to very nearly gloat about the societal ills wreaked by alcohol; I can see how that would turn off most Frenchmen. As Henry Youngman once said, “When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.”

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By Meredith – December 14, 2010