Tag: funny

Clicka Clack

Pavowski5 Comments

The body has all sorts of delightful ways to remind you that you’re getting older.  Some are obvious, others are subtle.  Some are tsunamis that strike without warning, others are the slow inevitable creep of continental drift.  (I’m looking at you, my slowly-but-surely receding hairline.)  Today I’m keenly aware of one nasty one in particular — my crackling bones.

I’ll go ahead and be judicious and say that it’s possible I can’t attribute the cricks and cracks in question entirely to age, but I’m living in denial that my running career of the last couple years is causing lasting damage to my body.  It’s not.  IT JUST ISN’T, OKAY?  Now that that’s settled…

I posted last week about another kind of drift, that being the outward slide of my waistline and the upward trend of my bathroom scale.  Okay, my wife was pregnant so it was impossible to be careful about what I was eating, not that I was trying anyway, but that’s over with now, Sprout the Second is a month old tomorrow (!), and it’s time to restore normality.  So: diet starts this weekend, and my new exercise regimen has been ramping up for about a week and a half.  Or maybe two days.  I don’t know because, as I’ve mentioned before, my house exists outside of space and time as we know it.  Or, at the very least, space and time are playing silly buggers on me.

Anyway, that new regimen has me doing some bodyweight exercises on days on which I do not run.  I have a feeling that this is a pretty good way for things to start off because on the first few days I did these exercises, I could not climb stairs properly afterward, nor could I reach the top of my head to wash it in the shower.  I have it on good authority that destroying your muscles like that is a good way to wake them up, so those must be good signs, yeah?  That workout is getting easier, so I’m ramping it up, doing extra sets and extra reps.  But during yesterday’s session, I dunno if it was especially quiet in the room or if I was in a higher state of awareness due to the blood flow or the dizziness induced by my 60-second plank attempt, but I heard a funny sound while I was doing some jumping jacks.

Quick sidenote on the jumping jacks.  I’m not sure if I’m doing them wrong, and I feel that I must be, because they are the easiest part of the workout for me.  Unless of course I perfected the technique in 5th grade gym class and my muscles stored it in memory which is tapped into and processed with perfect efficiency now twenty years later.  That works, right?

Whatever.  The jumping jacks are easy, but I hear a sound.  Sort of like when you have a handful of pop rocks in your mouth; a low crackling that fades in and out as you open and close your mouth.  Or maybe like the consistent repetitive clack clack of chips at a poker table.  Damn, where’s that coming from?  Oh, it’s just my entire both feet clicking and crackling away with every jump.

I’ve had a pretty constant pop to my right ankle for a lot of years: the detritus of a pretty gnarly ankle sprain that I never went to the doctor for because I’m a man.  It goes off if I rotate my ankle in bed or flex the foot going up or down stairs, stuff like that.  But this noise is not that.  This is my entire foot, in fact both feet.  I tune in more closely as I finish the set, and it’s like I can hear dozens if not hundreds of tiny little bones and ligaments and tendons clicking and sliding and ticking against each other like a bunch of ball bearings trapped in a spider web.

What do I do with this information?  Go to the doctor I saw a few months back for my plantar fasciitis and say, oh, yeah, now I can hear every bone in my foot move when I do jumping jacks?  He’ll only tell me to stop doing jumping jacks or stop running, so that’s right out.

I guess I just have to accept that this is my new body, one that makes all sorts of noises I wasn’t planning for it to make.  (I’m sure my wife could tell fantastic stories about my unintentional emissions.)  I have another birthday in a few weeks, maybe by that time my entire skeleton will calcify and I won’t be able to scratch my nose without sounding like a set of dominoes falling down a marble staircase.

Why the World Cup is Awesome, Even if You Don’t Know Anything About Soccer

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I imagine that I am not all that much unlike many other Americans at the moment in that I know very little about soccer (sorry, football) and yet at the moment I’m trying to pretend that I’m obsessed with it.  Except I’m not so much pretending as I am actually becoming actually fascinated and interested and a little bit mouth-foamy over it.

Seriously, I cannot pull myself away from the games.  If the USA is playing, I’m watching.  This is deeply and personally important even though I’ve never particularly cared about soccer (sorry, football) in my life.  (Also, full disclosure, I coached middle school soccer for a year and yes, I am probably more invested in these games than I was in those.  Something about watching from the air-conditioning from my home instead of the sweltering heat of the sideline, not seeing my team (yes, actually my team that I actually coached) get trounced 6-1 just makes it more enjoyable.)  But if I happen to catch another game on, I’ll watch that, too.  My wife gets frustrated — “you never watch soccer, you never talk about soccer, what is this all of a sudden??” — and I find myself saying things which might be true, like “well since USA won their game, they might meet the winner of this match down the line, and I want to know what they’re up against.”  Because, naturally, team USA needs me, the average schlub, to know what their potential opposition might try to pull so that they can hopefully stop it.

There is something infectious about it, though, soccer (sorry, football).  It’s one of the strangest and most natural sports I’ve seen.  Strange because the pacing of it is off the wall.  Seriously, televised bowling has better pacing.  Ping-pong is more predictable.  Soccer (sorry, football) is twenty minutes of dinking a ball around a field that really is just too big for anything that isn’t motorized followed by ten seconds of frenetic, heart-pounding mouth-foaming blood-boiling couch-stomping action.  But it’s incredibly natural because it simply flows like melted butter across piping hot pancakes.  Nobody has to be told what to do.  Things don’t have to be explained, reviewed, argued, discussed.  The game just happens and continues to happen until a goal is scored or until somebody gets their knee dislocated, but even then they only stop for maybe five minutes.  True story: I was at a football game — college football game, mind you, not the World Anything — and a player was injured.  Okay, injured player, that’s bad news, but the action was stopped for thirty minutes while a parade of coaches, trainers, officials, and I think even the player’s scholarship official ran on and off the field seeing to this kid.  Thirty minutes!  The soccer (sorry, football) game (sorry, match) is half over by that time!

I should mention, also, that I’m watching most of the games on Univision, and if you’re not watching the games on Univision, you’re missing out.  Okay, the real reason I’m watching on Univision is because I don’t have cable and ESPN has a stranglehold on the broadcast rights, so I’m boned otherwise.  But seriously, watch the games on Univision.  Or at least flip over now and then.  I don’t understand a word of what’s being said, and I don’t pretend to.  It just sounds like a couple of guys — I picture that guy, “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from the beer commercials — and another guy in a mariachi hat for some reason — discussing what might as well be politics over cigars in some dive bar, and then all of a sudden one of them is jumping on the bar, throwing his headset across the room, and shouting GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL and so am I, thrashing around my living room like some mariachi marionette.  (Seriously, how awesome is that little turn of phrase: mariachi marionette.  I don’t care, I’m kudos-ing myself for that one.)

As an endurance athlete…

Okay, sorry.  I had to pick myself up off the floor from the laughing fit that calling myself an “endurance athlete” induced.  As a practitioner of an endurance sport, let’s say, I have tremendous admiration for the soccer players (sorry, footballers).  You can’t watch these guys trot back and forth across that field (sorry, pitch) which might as well be a well-manicured airstrip without having a sense of the tremendous training and physical prowess they possess.  The kind of endurance that, well, let’s just say my wife would have a worse laughing fit than I just had if I compared their endurance to mine.  The kind of physical prowess that… god, you get the idea; let’s just move on, okay?  Jeez.

A thing occurs to me in watching these games, though, which is that I think I know why soccer (sorry, football) hasn’t taken off with American audiences (outside of the World Cup of course).  It’s the flow.  There are no stoppages, no timeouts, no ten-minute breaks to warm up a new pitcher.  We Americans are spoiled by the ever-present commercial break in which we go to the bathroom, grab another beer, serve up some bean dip, flip to another station to check the other game… whatever you do during the commercial break, you can’t do it when you’re watching soccer (sorry, football).  Because you never know when the sharknado is going to break loose and you’re going to have to throw a chair through a window because team USA just gave up the win with less than a minute left in stoppage time even though they had the victory completely locked up, I mean SERIOUSLY, did we just forget to play DEFENSE there at the end or WHAT!??

Er, I got sidetracked.  So yeah.  It’s not that American audiences can’t handle soccer (sorry, football).  It’s that the game itself doesn’t lend itself to standards of American advertising, which keeps it off the air because there are more profitable things the networks can air.  (If you thought networks were in the business of providing content to their audiencess, you were sorely mistaken.  Networks are in the business of providing audiences to their advertisers.)

But we’re a bright people.  Certainly one of us can come up with a way to stick some commercial breaks into the middle of a soccer game (sorry, match).  Mandatory three-minute water break when a new player comes on the field (sorry, pitch).  Mandatory review with commercial break every time the ball goes out of bounds.  Ten-minute explanation with graphics and holograms anytime offsides is called (seriously, if you can explain offsides in a single sentence that makes sense, you deserve a mariachi marionette).

So?  Get to it.  I’m back to watching some FOOTBALL.

What Day Is It, Even? (Or, a teacher’s ode to Summertime)

Pavowski1 Comment

I mentioned several posts ago how babies are basically localized black-holes that wander through your house and crash into your coffee table, sucking up space-time and stuffing stale Cheerios in their mouths, those slobbery, germy little event horizons.  So time has no meaning in my house at all right now.  Basically, if it’s daylight out, we try to remember to eat and wash the stale sweat off ourselves.  If it’s dark out, we try to put the kids in their beds so that we can put ourselves in our beds.

But that’s life as a new (repeat) parent.  (As soon as I typed “repeat” before parent, just there, it immediately struck me that the phrase was not so very different from “repeat offender.”  Which is horribly apt.  Parents of multiple children should be referred to as repeat offenders: obviously they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around and they need to go into the penalty box again.  The penalty box filled with poop, urine, vomit and tears.)  I’m down with that.  Trouble is, I’m also a teacher, and for teachers, a similar phenomenon takes place annually.Read More »

The Barnacle

Pavowski2 Comments

The times, they are a changin’ at Casa de Pav.

Once upon a time, back when it was just my wife and myself and Sprout #1 (the animals don’t count for these calculations), my wife was head and shoulders the favorite parent.  Like, don’t even bother with the three-legged race or the egg-spoon relay, she had this thing wrapped up with Sprout #1 from the word go.  It’s not even worth trying to break the thing down into categories; the boy clearly preferred her in virtually any situation in which there was a choice.

His language even told the story.  He has plenty of vocabulary to say “Mommy” or “Daddy” in response to questions like, “who would you like to read your bedtime story?” or “who would you like to brush your teeth?”  or “who would you like to scoop the pulverized, mashed-potato consistency poop out of your butthole?”  (It’s not always bad to be the second choice.) Read More »

Why Servers Hate Me (Even Though I’m Not a Jerk)

PavowskiLeave a comment

I get it.

If you live long enough, things start to repeat.  The soundtrack loops, the plotlines and scandals in your life and the lives of those around you begin to sound disconcertingly familiar, and from one moment to the next you find yourself in situations saying, “Oh, sharknado, THAT’S what was going on.”

Having kids is like that, only doubled and viewed through a magnifying glass.

I used to be so judgmental of people with kids.  Oh, how I hated them.  Inconsiderate, self-absorbed people, hauling their litter of rugrats around to make noise and throw tantrums and stomp and throw trash and toys and food while the rest of us are, I dunno, shopping, or trying to enjoy a meal, or generally to partake in any activity that adults partake in without the involvement of toddlers.Read More »