Grapevining
It was an enjoyable weekend for certain. On Friday night, we headed out to my favorite Asian restaurant and ate spring rolls with peanut sauce, a vermicelli noodle bowl with shrimp and pork, and some coconut chicken soup, and for dessert, we shared a giant leftover slice of birthday cake. We watched the first hour of Babette's Feast but turned it off because life is too short. (Other movies I have tried to watch but have given up on in the past month or so: Ponette, But I'm a Cheerleader, the new All the King's Men, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.)
On Saturday morning, we went to the farmer's market and replaced the birthday and Valentine's jewelry that I lost like an imbecile. We ate a gigantic orange blossom muffin and banana nut muffin and went running. It was my first run back after the half-marathon and the three miles went pretty well. I was a little winded because I tried to speed up a little bit, but it was a gorgeous sunny day and it felt great to be moving again.
After running, we headed to our massage appointments at the fancypants spa. I really did enjoy my massage overall, especially the use of the hot stones, which I'd never experienced before, but I wonder why they have you fill out little forms saying what you want them to focus on or skip if they blithely ignore your requests. I guess it's my own fault for being too paralyzed to speak up when the massage therapist does things I expressly asked her not to. I'm trying to remember what we did after the massages. I know we went to Starbucks. Oh yeah, we went to Supercuts! Which is always a fun time.
Eventually it was time to go see Zodiac, which was really interesting and had a great cast but was ultimately way, way too long. People used to bitch and moan about the interminable length of my beloved The English Patient that I sat through three times in the theater in a blissed-out reverie as time lost all meaning, but Zodiac is ten minutes shorter than that and it just really got slow sometimes. I do recommend the movie, but go during the day when you're not sleepy or you might be looking at your watch and yawning a lot. After the movie, we got takeout Lebanese food and watched a little bit of Saturday Night Live.
We tried to go out for brunch on Sunday morning, but there was a 30-minute wait all over the place, so we settled for cereal at home. My boyfriend went home, and I went to a giant garage sale and to Target with Maryelizabeth. Target is exhausting. My favorite garage sale purchase was a nearly full bottle of this for 12.5 cents. I also bought some old drinking glasses and a couple of sweaters that look like they've never been worn and spent a total of $4. Satisfying, I tell you.
After spending all the money in my bank account at Target, I took a bubble bath and got about halfway through The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, one of my birthday books from my boyfriend. It's devastating, unsurprisingly, and it's nice to be able to picture a lot of the women interviewed for the book because they were also in Anne Frank Remembered.
In the effort to diversify my exercise habits, I attended the most insane class possibly ever held at a gym. There are different stations -- stationary bikes, jump roping, jogging, push-ups and sit-ups on big rubber balls, sit-ups with small rubber balls, various lunging with big poles, step aerobics, this weird bouncy blue thing that you sort of jump on with your feet, I don't even know. There must have been more than 100 people there. I kept messing up during jump roping and could definitely not do some of the moves at all, but I tried to follow what some of the people around me were doing. It was also very challenging in terms of my germophobia because I was using balls other people had just held or rolled around on, gripping jump rope handles that others had just gripped, and lying on mats that actually had splashes of other people's sweat on them. At first I had to keep telling myself that there's really no catastrophic disease that I can catch from someone else's sweat and eventually I just decided not to care. I think it was a healthy thing.
By the time I would figure out the moves half the time it was already time to switch to the next station and once I skipped a station on accident. It was very hard and very intense but also very, very amusing because I had no idea what I was doing and kept thinking of my friends. I first met Shelley, after all, under a tree in the second grade when we engaged in a rousing round of "I Like Coffee, I Like Tea," and Maryelizabeth will be very happy to know that there was grapevining. There was also a lot of yelling. People yelled throughout the class. Yelled in pain, yelled in triumph. Bizarre. (I wonder if there is yelling at Grace's boot camp.) It was an altogether different experience from running, obviously, and definitely a lot more fun.
On Saturday morning, we went to the farmer's market and replaced the birthday and Valentine's jewelry that I lost like an imbecile. We ate a gigantic orange blossom muffin and banana nut muffin and went running. It was my first run back after the half-marathon and the three miles went pretty well. I was a little winded because I tried to speed up a little bit, but it was a gorgeous sunny day and it felt great to be moving again.
After running, we headed to our massage appointments at the fancypants spa. I really did enjoy my massage overall, especially the use of the hot stones, which I'd never experienced before, but I wonder why they have you fill out little forms saying what you want them to focus on or skip if they blithely ignore your requests. I guess it's my own fault for being too paralyzed to speak up when the massage therapist does things I expressly asked her not to. I'm trying to remember what we did after the massages. I know we went to Starbucks. Oh yeah, we went to Supercuts! Which is always a fun time.
Eventually it was time to go see Zodiac, which was really interesting and had a great cast but was ultimately way, way too long. People used to bitch and moan about the interminable length of my beloved The English Patient that I sat through three times in the theater in a blissed-out reverie as time lost all meaning, but Zodiac is ten minutes shorter than that and it just really got slow sometimes. I do recommend the movie, but go during the day when you're not sleepy or you might be looking at your watch and yawning a lot. After the movie, we got takeout Lebanese food and watched a little bit of Saturday Night Live.
We tried to go out for brunch on Sunday morning, but there was a 30-minute wait all over the place, so we settled for cereal at home. My boyfriend went home, and I went to a giant garage sale and to Target with Maryelizabeth. Target is exhausting. My favorite garage sale purchase was a nearly full bottle of this for 12.5 cents. I also bought some old drinking glasses and a couple of sweaters that look like they've never been worn and spent a total of $4. Satisfying, I tell you.
After spending all the money in my bank account at Target, I took a bubble bath and got about halfway through The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, one of my birthday books from my boyfriend. It's devastating, unsurprisingly, and it's nice to be able to picture a lot of the women interviewed for the book because they were also in Anne Frank Remembered.
In the effort to diversify my exercise habits, I attended the most insane class possibly ever held at a gym. There are different stations -- stationary bikes, jump roping, jogging, push-ups and sit-ups on big rubber balls, sit-ups with small rubber balls, various lunging with big poles, step aerobics, this weird bouncy blue thing that you sort of jump on with your feet, I don't even know. There must have been more than 100 people there. I kept messing up during jump roping and could definitely not do some of the moves at all, but I tried to follow what some of the people around me were doing. It was also very challenging in terms of my germophobia because I was using balls other people had just held or rolled around on, gripping jump rope handles that others had just gripped, and lying on mats that actually had splashes of other people's sweat on them. At first I had to keep telling myself that there's really no catastrophic disease that I can catch from someone else's sweat and eventually I just decided not to care. I think it was a healthy thing.
By the time I would figure out the moves half the time it was already time to switch to the next station and once I skipped a station on accident. It was very hard and very intense but also very, very amusing because I had no idea what I was doing and kept thinking of my friends. I first met Shelley, after all, under a tree in the second grade when we engaged in a rousing round of "I Like Coffee, I Like Tea," and Maryelizabeth will be very happy to know that there was grapevining. There was also a lot of yelling. People yelled throughout the class. Yelled in pain, yelled in triumph. Bizarre. (I wonder if there is yelling at Grace's boot camp.) It was an altogether different experience from running, obviously, and definitely a lot more fun.
posted by eliza @ 6:41 PM
4 Comments:
I have to plead with you to try Ponette again, Eliza. It's one of my all-time favorite movies.
E, does the blue bouncy thing look like this?
http://www.bosu.com/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=bosu/story.html?src=SPBC
It's a bosu. And they are torture.
Coleen, I will have to give it another shot. It pretty much put me to sleep on the first try.
Erin -- that is it! People were sort of jogging in place but bouncing their toes on it, and I was like, WTF? I tried to do it but I kept kicking it and sliding it around instead. I wish you could take this class with me and be my guide.
I was going to say the same thing as Coleen. Give Ponette a chance.
What a little actress!
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