Phobic to Philic
Before I was exerphilic, I was exerphobic.
Until my mid-twenties I felt shyer, slower, bigger, and klutzier than anyone else. What is clear in retrospect is that this had nothing to do with my body, and everything to do with my brain.
I still feel looming anxiety during excellently sunny spring days: perfect frisbee-throwing weather. Deep in some scarred and scaredy lobe of brain, I wonder, “Am I expected to go outside? Am I expected to have fun? Don’t. Wanna.”
Why would I feel this way? I do wanna, actually.
I have a wince-worthy memory of doing a 100 yard dash in the playyard of my grammar school. I was about 10. Running probably wasn’t the problem; rather, I suspect it was the social anxiety of people watching me run that tied my feet into a knot. I fell and tore the knee of my pants open. And then, instead of assigning me some sort of fake score, or suggesting that I do it privately after school, or staging a political overthrow (it was for the Presidential physical fitness test), the teacher made me do it again.
That day, I went home in pants with 2 shredded knees, and self-esteem in similar condition.
My anxiety fed upon itself. For most of my life, I could not have told that fitness-test, falling-twice story because it seemed far too sad and close to the bone. On the one hand, it’s just a story about skinning your knee, which absolutely everyone does when they are a kid. But on the other, it seemed to signify so much that I should be ashamed of.
So, just in case, I’d do anything to avoid physical activity. Consequently, when I got to middle school, I could barely jog around the track. The track is only a quarter of a mile. When I was done, I was one of the last, and came into the locker room winded and splotchy and expected to undress and get to my next class in four minutes. Again: my dislike of the physical world fed upon itself.
I was never a kid who got a note—or who wrote myself a fake note, thank you very much—proclaiming that natural human female adolescent situations precluded me from participating. No: I showed up for gym, got dressed in the stupid uniform, acted respectful of the teacher, participated in the hellish activity, and then got chastised and “progress reports” about my poor performance.
That’s how to get shy kids to like gym. Don’t try to find something they might be good at, or interested in. No: mock them! Tell them that they are failing! Make them write papers.
(Heh. You want me to write a paper? Fine. I will stun you with my flexible vocabulary. I will dominate you with my muscular transitions. I will leave you in the dust with my ace pacing. Be careful, though, for carrying all that paper around will probably make you immolate extra fast once you are in hell.)
Swimming, I enjoyed. I had always taken swim lessons and I was a perfectly confident and strong swimmer. My sister, who also did stuff like color guard and who managed the hockey team, had been on the swim team in high school. Once I was in high school, I signed up for swim team because my best friend was doing it, too. I was predictably slow, like a person who has refused to participate in the physical world for 15 whole years would be. But hey, I got every lap I was ever assigned done, and I know that I improved. Being a participant in relays would have been alright, or at least alright with me.
What’s upsetting is what the coach would say to me. She reinforced whatever self-loathing and grim thoughts I had about myself in some sort of armyistic speech that was meant to, what, make me feel worse about myself and her feel better about herself? Break me down to build me up? Oh, please. I wasn’t smoking or having a bad attitude, and I was showing up to practice at 5:59 in the morning, and that is not a typo, so who in the name of Vishnu was she to complain about my attempts? I don’t like to blame other people for my shortcomings, except, except no. I would actually like to blame some terrible gym teachers. I may have had a low PQ, but it was soaring as compared with her, and her, and her, EQ.
When I was 25, my new friend from work, April, suggested I join her at her exercise class. My first instinct was to pretend that I didn’t speak English. We were editors, so she quickly called my bluff. Um, hiding? I made excuses about my busy, busy schedule. The problem was that April was always going to this class, and I was always invited.
[Deep sigh.]
I knew that I needed to get over my fear of gyms and working out. In a radical break in character, I mentally appointed April as a person I could do anything in front of. If I turned red and fell down in a pile with complete exhaustion, so be it. If I tripped on my leg and broke it, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d broken my leg for a completely weird reason, and hey, at least this time, I wouldn’t be by myself. Doing it with April would be like doing it alone, I decided.
So I went to her class. Her class was called JAZZERCISE.
Do you know about Jazzercise? Are you laughing at me? Do you think I am a dork? Yeah, well, I am a dork, a Jazzercise-loving dork, and don’t knock it til you’ve tried it. You should be so lucky to be this much of a dork, who broke through the wall of anxiety.
So, let me tell you both about Jazzercise, and also, why Jazzercise has become relevant in my life once again.
During Jazzercise, there is a lot of un-ironic marching in place to Top 40 music. There are a lot of housewives. There is a lot of spandex, there are a lot of jazzhands, and you will do a lot of the grapevine.
And since Jazzercise was held at Central Texas community center where I was not the youngest, or the oldest, or the fattest, or the thinnest, or the richest, or the poorest, I was able to achieve a sort of back-row anonymity that made me calm enough to do it once, then twice, then a million times.
The moves are stuff that other people may have done when they were 8, at tap or Dance & Drama, but there was no way you could tear me away from Harriet the Spy when I was 8 for something as scary as dancing. And hey, maybe it’s a godsend, because when I experienced it in my 20s, I was so hungry for it that it was like the biggest, coldest, bubbliest Coca Cola on the hottest-ever day. It burned my throat with its complete excellence. I was quickly addicted.
As it happens, I love to twist my hips to Ricky Martin songs with lots of middle-aged ladies. If there is an opportunity to pretend that I have a rose between my teeth, I will take this opportunity, and then ask you for another.
So, in an abject plot twist, I learned that I love to exercise. I even sort of love to run, so long as I have a dedicated partner who can tell me funny stories for the whole entire run, and then we can eat dinner after. And I love to try new exercises, especially those where I can be solidly in the middle.
Sadly, New York is too cool for Jazzercise, so I gave that up 11 years ago. But now we do have Zumba, which is an exercise class which is choreographed dancing to Latin music. It affords many of the same opportunities to be with people who have already have kids, and who secretly like to wear spandex, and who are dying to get out of the house and dance around whilst trying to be fitter.
By the time I tried Zumba for the first time on Saturday, I’d taken tiny doses of foxtrot, Western Swing, bellydancing, and salsa-dancing classes. Once, I took a Bhangra lesson. Am I good at any of these things? Absolutely not. I’ve also taken yoga, pilates, and gyrotonics. One day in my life, I ran a 10k. I wasn’t the Pride of Lowell, but I did cross the finish line.
I was really nervous when I arrived at the Zumba class. IS THE CLASS ALREADY IN SESSION? DO I WEAR SHOES? DO I WEAR SOCKS? WHAT DO I WEAR? AGH!!!!
It was in a dance studio with a mirror. It had a lithe Peruvian instructor with a lots of long lean muscle and a washcloth on his head. I jumped right in. Twist those hips, shake those shoulders, claps those hands.
Open teeth, insert rose.
Most importantly, laugh.
When I finished an hour later, I had a flushed face and a blood blister on the big toe of my right foot and scarily filthy feet. I was elated. I said to the teacher, sincerely, “thanks, that was a lot of fun.” And he said to me, “Oh, I’m glad. You’re very good, you know.”
I believed him. Can you believe it?
Dream
Today’s post was to be about something else entirely, and was shaping up in a way that I was so pleased with, but then a wordpress gremlin reared up and ate my draft. Twice. Growl. I hope a goat bites you in the knee, gremlin. Or a troll. Or that giraffe at the top of the page: chomp! In sum, bad tidings.
Instead, this tiny negative dramatic thing is what I will share for today:
Normally the dreams I share are about inventions I make up in my sleep: edible dreams of Zoasters and ancient ice cream cones.
Last night I had one in the “disaster” genre.
I was in the back of a car-service car with Matthew, to whom I am married. I think we were going to the airport. Our son wasn’t with us, thank goodness, based on what happened next:
Planes started crashing. The first was not too close but was very dramatic. It was a real cinematic scene unfolding through a window, like a movie, except it was actually happening. Well, happening to me at least in my subconscious, rather than to Will Smith at the Cineplex.
The second crash was far more intense: huge barrels of welded together metal painted rich blues and orange, flying low and close, beginning first to swerve heavily and then to tumble from the sky, twisting into a collapsed structure before it even hit the ground.
The first crash made me flinch, but the second was so close that we immediately knew it meant possible death: it looked like it might hit the car or at least cause a huge fiery explosion. I turned to Matthew and he turned to me and we held each other’s hands, not two hands but four hands—all hands on deck—and shut our eyes tight and waited to die.
And then we didn’t die, and I woke up. I looked over at him. With his head cozily sandwiched between two pillows, he seemed completely unconcerned, at least with that matter.
I had another dream like that once, long ago. A tsunami was rearing up over my Tercel and had curled tall over the roof and I was looking up through the windshield and waiting for it to slam an unbelievably tall bright blue wave into the bright blue glinting metal of the roof of my car, and then straight into my skull. Then, too, I closed my eyes and waited. After I’d waited a while and nothing had happened, I opened my eyes and saw the green-glowing numbers of my clock radio. Hey! It’s morning!
It sounds awful but once you just close your eyes and wait, it’s really not that bad. Is that what the dream is about? It almost feels like it’s about stopping worrying about something really bad.
A dream like that makes you really need a nap, though.
I wonder why all of this royal blue in scary disaster dreams.
A New Fact About Butter Has Come to Light
I went to grad school with a woman who wrote evocatively about her lifelong battle with anorexia. One thing that stuck with me is a description of her as a teenager at the dinner table with family. At that point her relationship with eating—or not eating—had moved so far away from being typical that she is trying to remember what to do in order to act normal at the table.
In the scene she has been served a plate with some chicken on it. She wants, very badly, to seem like she is eating while not eating it. She’d move it around, she’d cut it up, she’d manipulate it in some way. So in the scene, she’s having an internal dialogue with herself, wondering what to do next “Should I spread butter on the chicken? Wait, do people put butter on chicken Is that normal?” She is so far removed from the world of eating that she has no idea.
Ooh ooh ooh ask me! As a butter lover and chicken eater, I knew the answer. Clearly no, right? Unless the chicken is raw. When it is raw, you might put butter on it to make the skin crisp up real nice. Or you might cook it in butter to make it taste great.
So: butter on chicken? No, except for when it’s raw.
Except yesterday, a revelation. A friend was crowdsourcing the best roast chicken recipe. My contribution were tips rather than an actual recipe — like, “brine it or get kosher; use butter; cook it upside down for a while; etc.
A few people cited Bittman. Bittman pisses me off, for some reason, I think because he isn’t angled towards ethnic cultures, but I loved that his recipe was basically “put a cast iron skillet in a really hot chicken, s&p&evoo a chicken, and cook it for like 50 minutes til it’s done.”
That actually seemed like a really useful (read: easy) recipe that I might try.
Marcella Hazan also got some props for her chicken with 2 lemons. I love Marcella. It cannot be said enough times. Ina apparently makes good chicken, too.
But then my friend JJ weighed in, saying that anyone who didn’t use Thomas Keller’s recipe, which she claims is the easiest and the most delicious at the same time, was basically an asshole. She provided a link to the recipe. JJ is a really good cook and a really discerning eater and very forthcoming with her opinions. Thomas Keller is like, the most famous chef ever and the most expensive chef ever and there is no way I could afford a chicken that he cooked, so I clicked immediately to get the scoop. His was easy? I had a hard time believing it.
It’s a completely scandalous recipe that you must read, and the sort that I absolutely love, because it brings in his personal desires. It reminds me of MFK Fisher talking about how she loves to dry out an orange on the radiator during wartime and then eat it, or Julia Child and her own personal passions.
I’m cutting and pasting here. I hope that’s okay with Mr. Epicurious and Mr. Keller. You should check out that site if you don’t, normally, and the recipe originally appeared in this Thomas Keller book, called Bouchon, which I will need to investigate further if it has things like this in it.
Read the sentence third from the bottom. No wonder Keller is one of the best chefs in the world; that is a dirty trick if I have ever heard one! PS I am not going to contact the anorexic about this, but I am going to try it myself, though I don’t even know if I, butter-lover extraordinaire, could manage to follow that instruction in good conscience.
My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken (by Thomas Keller)
Ingredients
- One 2- to 3-pound farm-raised chicken
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 2 teaspoons minced thyme (optional)
- Unsalted butter
- Dijon mustard
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 450°F. Rinse the chicken, then dry it very well with paper towels, inside and out. The less it steams, the drier the heat, the better.
Salt and pepper the cavity, then truss the bird. Trussing is not difficult, and if you roast chicken often, it’s a good technique to feel comfortable with. When you truss a bird, the wings and legs stay close to the body; the ends of the drumsticks cover the top of the breast and keep it from drying out. Trussing helps the chicken to cook evenly, and it also makes for a more beautiful roasted bird.
Now, salt the chicken—I like to rain the salt over the bird so that it has a nice uniform coating that will result in a crisp, salty, flavorful skin (about 1 tablespoon). When it’s cooked, you should still be able to make out the salt baked onto the crisp skin. Season to taste with pepper.
Place the chicken in a sauté pan or roasting pan and, when the oven is up to temperature, put the chicken in the oven. I leave it alone—I don’t baste it, I don’t add butter; you can if you wish, but I feel this creates steam, which I don’t want. Roast it until it’s done, 50 to 60 minutes. Remove it from the oven and add the thyme, if using, to the pan. Baste the chicken with the juices and thyme and let it rest for 15 minutes on a cutting board.
Remove the twine. Separate the middle wing joint and eat that immediately. Remove the legs and thighs. I like to take off the backbone and eat one of the oysters, the two succulent morsels of meat embedded here, and give the other to the person I’m cooking with. But I take the chicken butt for myself. I could never understand why my brothers always fought over that triangular tip—until one day I got the crispy, juicy fat myself. These are the cook’s rewards. Cut the breast down the middle and serve it on the bone, with one wing joint still attached to each. The preparation is not meant to be superelegant. Slather the meat with fresh butter. Serve with mustard on the side and, if you wish, a simple green salad. You’ll start using a knife and fork, but finish with your fingers, because it’s so good.
Domains and Stasis
Remember how men used to be famous for never changing a diaper in their lives?
That is not the situation we are living in now. Saturday in the parking lot of Fairway, I saw at a manly looking guy climb out of a car and apply a baby-wearing device to his body, and as he got ready to stuff a baby-shaped object into it, I commented to Matthew, “In Brooklyn a baby-wearing device, not to mention a baby, is the top accessory for a certain kind of guy. It’s like having a purse with a tiny little dog peeking out of it is for a certain sort of girl.”
Matthew looked over at the man. “What, that’s just an Ergo he’s putting on,” he said, dismissively.
My husband, a man of few words but a man who knows an Ergo from a Snugli from a Babyhawk at a glance, had deftly reinforced my point.
Right now, I’ve taken a break from stuffing plates into the dishwasher while he and Henry have a tooth-brushing party in order to jot down my thoughts. The tooth-brushing party sounds fun but I go to so many myself —like 5/7ths of the tooth-brushing parties— that I’m happy to be sitting this one out. There many aspects of this co-parenting thing that I love.
That said, it would seem that there are certain aspects of our domestic, uh, bliss, that might be simplified if my partner and I had held more dear the repressed and divisive gender roles we so proudly shucked like we were so much corn.
Gay corn at a Halloween party, is the kind of shucking I mean we have done.
Though I parent, I also work. It’s an important part of my identity. It’s an important part of our budget. But just as the world has advanced to a place where I earn money, it has also advanced to the place where Matthew gives a shit about what the living room looks like.
Even if money were no object, we’re not going Danish modern just because I feel like it. Or because he feels like it. We are far too stubborn to cede control. So folks, we are embracing the new style: a style called gridlock. It might not look so great, but think of all of the money you’ll save! Lots of contemporary couples I know go for it, in fact. In lots of domains, not just the living room.
That’s because everyone in the house having a say in not just the living room but everything else, too, can get complicated.
If these are the domains: parenting; decorating; earning money; shopping; cooking; housework; managing the finances; managing the sitter, someone needs to be easygoing about at least some of them. In our house, this seems impossible.
Both adults over here seem to have the sort of analytical and editorial personalities that make it seem like a top priority to save the other person from themself and the terrible decisions they are about to make. Not to mention save ourself from the other person and their potentially ghastly decisions. And so everything requires much careful presentation, and discussion, and disagreement, and standoff, and then hugging, followed by a change of subject, and then a fallow period of no discussion on the topic, and then a resumed discussion fourteen to sixty-five days later. At this meeting, we both have done a lot of thinking, and are both prepared to be reasonable. Except it quickly becomes clear that our positions have switched in an absolutely polar way. So while each party came ready to do the other’s bidding — not because we are easygoing but because the other person has, upon reflection, made a really strong point — as it happens the other person has switched too, and so we remain at exact and perfect odds. Always. Gridlock. Us. We astound even ourselves.
There are no arguments in our house like the arguments spawned by paint chips. No desperation as deep as that of one person wanting to buy a new chair, and the second person saying that the chair that the first person wants to buy looks like it was sculpted out of a hunk of lard. When the second person realizes how this might sound, or that they have been speaking aloud, or something, there is a quick and quiet apology. The first person has shifted focus and feels done shopping, perhaps for the day, more likely for life, and has started to think about the positive qualities of lard, like flavoring the best of the best flour tortillas. The first person would like a margarita. It seems like a margarita would be better to get than a chair. The second person clearly needs a margarita more than a chair, too. And so we are off, chairless, to forge some sort of peace at a Mexican restaurant.
I do revel in the fact that I won’t be doing every pile of laundry myself until the end of time. And I know that our shower might teach itself Greek and Latin while it waits for me to clean it, that is in part because I am married to a guy with high standards. If I clean the shower, chances are good—nay, excellent—that I will do what other people might consider to be a miserable job, and because I’d rather die than, at the age of 39, ask for a lesson in cleaning a shower, or worse, be given one after the miserable fact without asking, I am less likely to undertake the project than ever; I would rather learn Greek or Latin. So first, I try to hire someone. Then, I try to comfort myself with how great I must be if someone with such high standards chose me.
He chose me, despite the fact that sometimes, I am a person who cannot even have someone else boil water for her. “How come this is on medium high rather than high? Did you salt the water? You’re supposed to SALT IT LIKE THE OCEAN.” But if he never tried to boil water, he would never do it wrong; we would not have this argument. We would have a different argument, is the thing. It would almost definitely be worse.
I am not allowed to complain about a man who is interested in domestic projects. Not everyone is married to who I am married to, who is a man who loves me and loves our child and cleans and makes money and feels passionately about how the diaper bag should be packed and doesn’t own video games and doesn’t even want to own video games. But they might be married to people who are happier existing in a higher level of squalor, just the sort of a cozy level of squalor that I would be really adept at bringing to life. Instead, stasis. And that is why we bought an apartment whose walls are colors I really like. We really like.
Listen Up, Internet: BACUNIVES!
Ben, who I once worked with, used to play a game where you had to try to come up with a Google search that would yield exactly one result.
In other words, you were trying to think up something almost, but not entirely, obscure. This is not easy.
Imagine my surprise when I did a search today for “bacunives” and came up with 56 results, NONE OF WHICH HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH BACUNIVES.
Do you know about bacunives? They are prunes, stuffed with pimiento-filled olives, then wrapped in a strip of bacon, and broiled.
Apparently not everyone’s peer group calls them bacunives, as does mine, or there would be some mention of them on the Internet, aside from my friend Heather’s last week.
I would like to now have a year-end moment of appreciation for my own peer group.
[Pause.]
Not that there is anything wrong with the name “devils on horseback,” which is their other name. Tomorrow I will also be making something called “angels on horseback,” which is the same principle, but executed with apricots rather than prunes.
The theme of 2011 will be things that are put inside of other things before you eat them.
Or perhaps that is the theme of the end of 2010. At any rate, knock yourselves out with these.
You can soften the prunes in water if you are inclined, or add cream cheese or fontina instead of olives.
Clearly, you can do whatever you’d like, since you’ve already committed to wrapping bacon around everything.
Happy new year in advance!
Church Avenue Chomp 