New Olympic Sport

If I were really self-deprecating or reader-indulgent, I would post a YouTube video of myself training for the new Olympic sport of pregnant woman putting on her pants in the morning. I would include an excerpt from the score of "Rocky" or perhaps my favorite anthem ever from a sports-related movie: "You're the Best!" by Joe Esposito, yeah, you know the part from "The Karate Kid."

And really, when I think about it, it must look like I am performing a very sloppy martial art, complete with lunges and kicks, when I am trying to get into my dang preggo pants in the mornings these days. The belly has tipped my center of gravity so much recently that we are really beyond any practical attempts to don the slacks while standing up. Which has been my ritual for the last 27 years. Or ever since I could dress myself - whenever that was - maybe when I turned 19? Don't know. But until now, I have never had to sit on bed or chair to pull legs into pants.

Not that sitting on a prop is a huge handicap, mind you. The problem is that I keep forgetting that because I am up a SWEET TWENTY POUNDERS, Y'ALL, I sit on the edge of our crappy bed and try to gracefully pull one pant leg on and suddenly find that I have tipped the bed so that the other end - the end I am not sitting on - is cresting up over me like a wave off of Maui. So then I stand up to try to get the other pant leg on, but, again, aforementioned tippage of center of gravity occurs. So sometimes I am resigned to plopping my fat toochis on the floor with my pants out in front of me, which goes smoothly enough, until, of course, I have to get back up, which, let me spare you the theatrics, is too sad, even for YouTube.

The Dairy Queen

I've reconnected with one of my old workmates from Dairy Queen through that online showcase meant to impress the people we never liked in high school anyways. Only, our reconnection was very sincere and one of the few reasons I am glad to have spent hours shamelessly plugging myself and euphemizing all of the stupid ways I've spent my early twenties.

Lola, my former DQ mate, just posted pictures of her wedding. I can see from the pictures exactly where in our little hamlet-on-the-Lake she was married. I can also see her smile and know that she was happy on her wedding day.

Lola and I go way back to my first days at DQ. She was one of the few who stuck it out for all of the summers I spent there, and she continued on as an assistant manager after I went away to school. We worked a lot of hours together and we worked well, because Lola worked hard and she was not a talker-behinder-of-backs. She always had a handful of suitors, some punk rock, some clean cut crew boys. They would constantly stop in to ask if she was working, and what her schedule was for that week. I could tell why they liked her. She always spoke sweetly. She was very talented - she had an amazing singing voice - but leveraged it with humility. And she was very pretty. She's still beautiful, in a Jennifer Aniston in "Office Space" next-door girl kind of a way.

I was only fifteen when I first trained in perfecting the Q-top cone. I couldn't work past 9 p.m. I was so so young, when I think about it, not just young and naive, but young and so inexperienced. Sometimes Lola and her boyfriend would break up and my other co-workers would tell me that I should let her "do dishes in the back." I didn't understand the scope of that back then. Needing to not deal with people, even Blizzard addicted people, because your heart, your fragile teenage heart already fizzy and aching from trying to contain all of those hormones and confusion, had been shattered in multiple places. But eventually, I would learn what it was to have a broken heart, and to be visited by boys at work, but not when I was only fifteen.

I feel as though I spent a thousand long years at Dairy Queen. For me, it was what saved me from myself in high school. I was such a loner, mostly by choice because I was trying so hard to do the right thing all the time. Dairy Queen forced me to take my social inexperience to the front counter, along with my unplucked eyebrows, my size A cup chest, my total fascination in boys with cars, while Lola mended her broken hearts in the back, doing the dishes.

I saw her smile in those wedding pictures, and I felt such happiness for her. Happy for her present bliss, and happy to have known her during high school, even when we were both probably a little sad on the inside. I hope her marriage and her life are as sweet as the wedding cake she was shoving into her new husband's face in the picture.

How's this for poetic justice? Lola became a pastry chef after she realized that decorating DQ cakes had netted her the most satisfaction in this life.

Their Other Lives

When you were wee, what exactly did you think that your parent(s) did in their respective workplaces? Did not the world of office and/or manufacturing seem so brimming with wonderful possibilities and privileges, such that whole days might be spent getting to play with extra special paper clips with huge (!!) black clamps?? Were you not enthralled with the idea of getting to decorate your cube or office with personal memorabilia, i.e. Cathy cartoons, pictures of your children?

When visiting my parents' in their workplaces, I was struck by the way that people regarded my parents. My mother's co-workers were so transparent about their admiration for my mother. They saw her doing her bidness, which she obviously did very well. But I somehow understood why they thought she was so remarkable. I somehow knew that they only saw my mother through a limited scope. And I was able to reduce this scope to the simple fact that they saw her wearing make-up and nylons every day. Surely they did not know my mother, I thought. Because they never saw her sans make-up. And I did. So, I, therefore, knew her better. And even though I found her somewhat remarkable because she knew how to write straight on fabric with puffy paint, I probably just knew that she wasn't all that. Brat.

My father's workplace was an eerie place, so I thought. We generally visited his office on weekends, when the empty desks were filled with the ghosts that played with the mug full of pens marked LAW OFFICE and the ghosts that guarded the special notary press whose purpose was never satisfiably explained to me, and the lack of explanation threatened to make my six year-old head explode. There were a few opportunities to parley with my father's partners, and I was often interested in how old these partners seemed. You think of your parents as a certain age, no? That age always seemed to be much younger when compared to my father's avuncular colleagues, who treated him like a young, beloved pup. This was important for me to see, I think, since in my mind, my father had only recently begun writing with the LAW OFFICE pens, when he realized that the feather and inkwell were quickly becoming obsolete.

I wonder if my parents visited me in my workplace now if they'd be proud, if my co-workers would fawn over me like my mothers did her, or speak affectionately of me like I was their young cocker spaniel. I hope they'd be proud of my desktop memorabilia, and the fact that I never ever go into work on the weekends.