M.O.T.S.

"More Of The Same" This was our assignment for the last four days. I spent four days watching the sky over the Gulf of Thailand, the clouds taking turn forming dragons, apsara dancers, long boats, wats and a few poodles. Funny, how the clouds took on the shape of those things engrained in the culture of the place. Yesterday afternoon, The Girl pointed out a band of clouds near the horizon were the demons and gods churning the sea of milk. I promise, the clouds did at times look like Angkor Wat. My favorite cloud was the dragon being ridden by a Siamese warrior. And no, I haven't been nipping the Mekong Bug Juice. I think we are leaving Cambodia in the nick of time, the rainy season is starting. We had a night long deluge and both of us awakened at the same time, with the same thought: what about the road. There are low parts of the road and low bridges, our journey might be made even more interesting by having to ford standing water. We just made a pit stop about an hour outside of PP (to the north) and it was raining cats, dogs, pigs and water buffalo. Of course, my rain jacket is in my backpack in the luggage hold. But the bus driver almost pulled under the restaurant patio so we didn't get wet. TG finally ate a bug, brave thing that she is. The cricket she sampled was sweet. It was courtesy of the cutest kid, about 13 who shared his snack with her because she bought an older woman trapped beneath a sleeping toddler some water. I had thought all this spider eating, bug imbibing stuff was for the benefit of the tourists but it isn't: people really do eat the bugs. TG's new friend demonstrated one must pull the wings off the cricket first and then eat it in one big bite. She compared the coating to the sesame flavoring Spider Rolls have. All day, our little world rolled through the countryside, honking at cars, cows and bikes along the way. The ditches around the houses were filling and it's fortunate they are on stilts. I can't imagine what this country looks like in July. I'm almost phobic about muddy water (read the leeches episode in On The Banks Of Plum Creek too many times) so I would be hard pressed to venture in such a country during rainy season. Snakes and leeches and pointy stuff to cut me. I sound like such a pussy. If there had been mud puddles in PP, I wouldn't have left the bench in the waiting area.

PP wasn't as overwhelming today as it was a few days ago. TG ventured into the Russian Market across from the station and bought some local fry. I stayed put and made friends with a Buddhist nun. That is, I shared bread and grins with her. I know we both prayed for the obviously demented old woman begging. The woman approached me and I shook my head several times as she was persistant. Tried to kneel before the Buddhist nun but couldn't and instead bowed three times in prayer while holding her hand out. The nun shook her head and pushed her away. This woman had a handbag with her and despite her thin and frail build she looked cared for. It was also obvious she was lost and probably confused. I felt the hackles on the back of my neck raising--why was she alone, didn't she have family?--when a worried young woman rushed into the station area and gently led the woman away and casting back an apologetic look for the people her mother had begged from.

On the way into PP, I had put away the camera and missed Best Picture Of All Time. We had just entered the outskirts of PP and all the sudden we come to a dead stop in the middle of the road; horns are tooting and honking around us. TG stands up and looks over the tops of the seats: "No one's moving big traffic jam.: Our very game and brave bus driver inches his way to the left and begins to make a turn when suddenly everyone who speaks Khmer (that would be everyone except four of the passengers) are furiously screaming at the bus driver. One woman, obviously from the country with a leathery sun darkened face and an assortment of missing teeth, marches down the aisle and is admonishing (?) the driver, pointing and exclaiming when everyone else joins in and the bus is alive with voices no doubt telling the driver what to do. Usually at home, when there is a problem on public transit, the passengers become quieter so the driver can concentrate. I started to laugh because it was just so hilarious, we had busses and trucks and motor bikes and bicycles in this mass of wheeled vehicles going every which direction when all the sudden an ox cart pulling two stunned farmers is coming toward sthe bus as we were making a left turn. Priceless. Worth the cost of the ticket here. Pulitzer material.

The other priceless shot I missed this morning was one I could have taken but wouldn't have in a million years. We had stopped at a small village outside Snookie and a water buffalo was grazing in a ditch just outside my window. I had my camera raised and was snapping a picture (under exposed, I'm still learning) and had lowered to adjust the settings when I noticed a large group of people coming down the road towards the bus. There were three older adults and a few young women, two had small babies in arms. One young woman, was dressed to the nines, and had a large rice sack with her, no doubt her belongings. She was collecting her things and got on the bus and was seated just behind us. I could hear her calling out to her family and urging her baby to wave at them. I pulled the camera down when I saw each member of her family wiping away tears. She was leaving home. Her sisters wrapped their arms around one another, waving and wiping tears from their cheeks, her father bowed and beamed up at the bus, the babies waved and her mother cried. The young women was excited and knew the boy she was sitting with; he had boarded the stop before. Their conversation was enthusiastic and they laughed at things her baby said. Perhaps this was a wedding trip of some sort for them or they had been visiting their respective villages and were on their way home to PP. He married her despite the fact she had another man's child. Or they had decided it was time to leave home and he spent a few days with his family down the road before leaving home. They were tired of farming and she was promised a factory job and he was going to help in his cousin's garage... I could invent one hundred stories. The sisters were older and had the look of young matrons; soft around the middle but still young, maybe they were crying because they weren't leaving their village, maybe she carried their dreams with them to the big city just down National Highway 4, two hours and one world away from home.

Tales From The Treadmill

Once upon a few months ago, I seized upon any excuse possible to avoid going to the gym. Hell, I even went to work one morning in an effort to avoid the gym. I would almost even cook, as an excuse to not work out. I blame my behavior on being overwhelmed by the prospect of getting in shape, coupled with my gawky unathletic demeanor and embarrassment for evolving into a dumpy middle aged woman. I also wasn’t sure where to begin. So I signed up for a few sessions with a trainer. This process has also given light to my inner masochist. I spent hard earned money to allow a miniature drill sergeant to make me contort my flabby middle section and my sagging ass in an effort to reduce and firm them up. (The trainer I worked with was about a foot shorter than me and a fireball who was indeed a retired army drill sergeant.) Who knew the simple act of walking like John Cleese in the “School of Silly Walks” sketch while bending my knees, holding five measly pounds in each hand would result not in an immediately hard and flat abdomen, but a hobbling gait resembling one of my ninety year old patients? But now the pain is gone and I can actually do a lunge without paying for it the next day. I can even do ten lunges without feeling the adverse effects. The trainer taught me how to use the weights and the machines and gave me a little program to do. Too bad the program doesn’t include my favorite 16 ounce Lone Star curl or the put the cookie in your mouth bicep exercise. I have hurdled over the whining stage of: “I can’t eat what I want and need to go the gym” to the place of “Yeah! I’m going to the gym! “I even miss it on days I work too late or need to take The Beav somewhere and can’t go. I’m not to the point of getting up at 4 am and going before work because that is just crazy talk.




When I started working out regularly a few weeks ago, twenty minutes of cardio almost killed me--heart throbbing out of my chest--now I can go forty minutes before I feel like I’m about to die. I don’t think it’s the endomorphines that make people go and go and GO on treadmills, stair climbers (oh there’s fresh Hell, no thanks, I‘ll save my Syphian punishment for after death) and the elliptical. No, it’s the satisfaction of knowing you just walked, ran, climbed or cross country skied at full speed for forty minutes and didn’t die. Like walking away from a plane crash.




I would also like to thank Steve Jobs for the Ipod. I can listen uninterrupted to This American Life, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and All Songs Considered. Without my little green pod, working out is hell. I am almost forced to watch CNN and the red ticker tape parade of bad economic news; or men’s basketball, or stupid fuckhead Rush Limbaugh or one of the other dumbass conservative pundits. On the days I have forgotten the pod, I close my eyes and chant positive affirmations to myself or I write in my head. I assure you, the stuff I’ve “written” while I’m on the treadmill is better than any of Anne Lamott's lovely musings. This genius also occurs while I’m singing in the shower and sound better than anyone on Broadway. Such a shame such genius isn’t…you know…real.




I am a voyeur and I like to watch people at the gym. Such a variety and different times of the day give me different sorts to watch. Of course, I make up stories for them. In the mornings--my preferred time to work out--the gym is filled with the retired and the unemployed. I love that these old folks are at the gym, doing “Silver Sneaker” classes and water aerobics because it keeps them out of my hospital and away from over prescribing doctors who often do more harm than good towards the end of life. I want to stand at the window just outside the group class room during the Silver Sneakers classes and cheer them on; especially the ones who are obviously modifying because they have joint replacements.

One lady reminds me of Linda Richardson. She wears the most outlandish outfits to the gym, like it’s too much trouble to change before going out to lunch with the grandchildren so she will just slip around to the gym and work out in her bedazzled cowboy hat and sequin trimmed sweater. I almost ran into a pole staring at his woman as she sat on an exercise ball, doing a sort of core strengthening bounce in her festive outfit. Imagine my disappointment when I saw she wasn't wearing high heels.

Another regular is a Russian woman who is maybe 3 feet tall and at least ninety. Every morning I am there I see her and she never fails to speak to me in her lovely Russian tinged English. The first day she spoke to me, I was standing on the scale and sighing over the big number that won’t get smaller. She tapped my arm and said: “Don’t forget to subtract your shoes, they must weigh twenty pounds! And if you have on pink underwear, that’s good for another five. Just a little game I play with myself, dahlink” I loved her immediately.

The gym seems littered with the young and unemployed, too. This gym is part of a big chain and it isn’t too expensive so I can understand how they manage a membership. It’s something to do and it’s cheap. But the neighborhood is hardly a “hip” place. One of the guys is definitely out of place at this gym. He has the “I wash my hair once a week” hipster hair style, wears indie band tee-shirts and retro high tops, tall and skinny, not too hard on the eye but certainly not the type of guy you would see who lives at the gym. A coffee shop downtown? Yeah. Gym in inner tier suburbia? No. I'm guessing he is a 20 something IT geek, graduated in the top of his second tier east coast university class, downsized on one of the coasts and now lives with his grandmother and grandfather because he hates his parents and they still live in Westchester. It would be too painful to be at the grocery store with his mom when his tenth grade English teacher stops and says something like: “Zack! Lovely to see you, visiting? What? Oh you live here now, with your parents in their basement…they had such hopes for you, too.“ it probably makes him shudder and he can hear her tongue clicking as she pushes the cart away from them. No, he is better off in Flyover land with Bubbe and Zayde for now. . .

The evening crew at the gym is totally different. Cube farmers who work Monday through Friday at some sort of soul-less job but they love it because they have the luxury of working. They look sort of boring and white bread. They think Josh Groban is hot, hope Brad and Angelina work it out and can deconstruct The Bachelor like Prime Time Derridas. One of the evening regulars is a women edging close to her sixties. She needs “I am a cougar and I want you boy!” tattooed across her forehead. Rather than a silly outfit, she has a silly body and is afflicted with the new malady I call “Madonna Arms”

Now I like women’s bodies. A lot. But I gotta say, I would trade the well defined grisly guns for soft not so defined arms on a woman. She also made a terrible mistake and didn’t wear her glasses when she went to the plastic surgeon for her boobs. They are almost under her chin and give her the appearance of someone about to topple over any minute. Besides that, they are way way too perky. No one’s boobs are naturally that perky. And she is proud of them too. She has this way of strutting around the gym that makes me want to either laugh out loud or kick her; depending on the kind of day I’ve had.

Another woman is terribly odd and eccentric. Her outfit looks something like this
and is accentuated with Uggs. Her workout consists of standing in front of the mirror dancing with jazz hands. She is probably a few years older than I am and about thirty pounds underweight. The bizarre is made of awesome. I’m not sure what the point of this workout is but everyone around her is immune to it, except me of course and I probably made an ass out of myself blatantly staring at her.

I’m plagued with jealousy as I watch women my age effortless run for what seems to be hours at top speed on the treadmill. Last night one woman, a Mediterranean beauty with the body of a goddess, made me want to weep. It just wasn’t fair that I not be blessed with effortless beauty and a fabulous well-toned body. To make matters worse, she had intelligent looking eyes and was very kind to an elderly gentleman having trouble with his treadmill. Beautiful, fit kind and smart? I don’t even want to know she is the only person in America who didn’t lose substantial value in her stock portfolio because odds are, she is that person. My first impulse was to kidnap her, take away her moisturizer, keep her from the gym and force feed her Little Debbie snacks until she looks like me. Fortunately, I quelled that impulse and am not typing this from an undisclosed location. Chances are, I wouldn’t share the Little Debbie’s and she would become even more svelte and a hero for withstanding the torture of being held hostage by a crazy premenapausal woman obsessed by her weight and midsection. “Please be kind to my captor, she really just wants to be a size eight and weigh what she did before her youngest son was born. She didn’t mean to harm me.”

I’m in awe of the women I see who are struggling with obesity as they work towards a healthy weight. A few of them have become noticeably smaller these last few months. It humbles me, the work they are doing: I’m bitching about single digit inches and double digits pounds I want to lose and these women are probably trying to lose the equivalent of a person. I wish I could think of a way to say: “You Go Girl!” without sounding smug and I want to hug them so some of their discipline and resolve rubs off on me. These women deserve much more respect than the cougars who have invested too much money and too much time into their bodies.

Today when I’m at the gym I hope I see my Russian lady and I might get the courage to speak to Hipster boy--I really want to get his story--we usually row next to one another and will mumble hello to one another. And maybe just maybe that scale will budge below a certain number.