Project: B.S.E. The Reading List

Okay, so part of my Project: Best.Summer.Ever. is a personal goal to read all of the books on my bookshelf that I haven't read yet.  I'm a fast reader, so with no professor telling me what to read I should be able to plow through these in the next three months, no problem. Except that I'm also a fickle reader--I read the way I eat, based on what feels good at the moment. None of these books has compelled me to make time to read them yet, so reading these books might be the literary equivalent of eating my vegetables.

Because a blog is good for nothing if not oversharing, here's my Summer Reading List.

Fiction:
The Swan Thieves - Elizabeth Kostova (borrowed from Luisa two years ago, maybe.)
Beyonders: Book Two - Brandon Mull
Crossed - Ally Condie
Where Nothing Was Long Ago - Virginia Sorenson
Night Soil - Levi Peterson
Big Trouble - Dave Barry
Before You Know Kindness - Chris Bohjalian
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
The BFG - Roald Dahl
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper
These is My Words - Nancy Turner

Non-Fiction:
The Digital Diet - Daniel Sieberg
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
Pledged - Alexandra Robbins
The Tiger - John Vaillant
Twinkie, Deconstructed - Steve Ettlinger (This I've only borrowed for a year, maybe)

Travel:
Lost On Planet China - J. Maarten Troost
Turn Left At The Trojan Horse - Brad Herzog
The Ridiculous Race -

Memoirs:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - Anne Fadiman
Same Kind of Different As Me - Ron Hall
The Color of Water - James McBride
If I Die In A Combat Zone - Tim O'Brien
52 Loaves - William Alexander
Denial - Jessica Stern
I Feel Bad About My Neck - Nora Ephron
Science Fair Season - Judy Dutton
The Tender Bar - J.R. Moehringer
Girl Meets God - Lauren Winner


Have you read any of these books? Any that you'd recommend starting with? (Or, conversely, any that are so bad I should donate them to Savers and buy a new one to replace it with?)

Project: Best.Summer.Ever

After a long internal debate (you're welcome for sparing you the agony), I've decided to take the summer off of school. I was awarded a fellowship through UVU to continue researching the Woman's Exponent, which will keep me busy and also mentally stimulated. But I get a little nervous thinking about that long expanse of summer days, completely structureless and full of children. Enter my brilliant new idea--Project: Best.Summer.Ever.

Project: Best.Summer.Ever. is my plan to stay sane and engaged during the next three and a half months. Phase One is planning. During the month of May, I'm going to scout out great ideas for things to do, places to go, goals to accomplish. Then from June through August it's Phase Two: Go Time. Finally Phase Three is the cool-down phase, where we ease back into school and regular life. (Okay, Phase Three is kind of a joke at this point, but you can't have a plan with just two phases. It's like only having two Stooges, there has to be three. I'll work on a better Phase Three later.)

The real genius of the plan is in the name. You've heard the phrase "fake it till you make it"? Well, this is "name it until you brainwash your kids." That's right--the goal here is not to overschedule the kids until they weep with submission every night, nor is it to actually create the best summer ever--it's to say, over and over again, that this is the best summer ever until they start believing it themselves!  We normally do some swim lessons in the summer; this year, they are going to be referred to as the Best.Swim Lessons.Ever. Because who doesn't want to do that?! We're going on the Best.Campout.Ever, eating the Best.Barbequed.Hamburgers.Ever, watching the Best.Minor.League.Baseball.Games.Ever. See?  All the stuff that we already do, just made more impressive, and therefore more fun, by the name. Can you hear my evil cackle from where you are? It's loud.

Two years ago, we had what I thought was a fairly miserable Christmas. The basement flooded and I was stressed out by that to the point where I didn't even make Christmas dinner and instead we went out to the only restaurant open in Orem, the Chinese buffet down the street. No one felt the same way I did, though--the kids got their presents, spent the day playing and basically thought it was great.  Then last year, what was just a standard Christmas got labeled by one of the kids as the "best Christmas ever." Ryan joked that we'd cancel next Christmas, since it couldn't get any better, and Zack believed him, at least for a minute. Other than the flooded basement, which is sure to get any homeowner down, the main difference between the two Christmases was labels. I labeled one Christmas a failure and the other a success. I look back on one in regret and the other in fondness. I don't want to do that with this summer.

Project: Best.Summer.Ever. is for me, mostly. If I give it a great label, then I'm going to try to live up to it, make it what it should be. It's the structure that I crave and that the kids secretly crave as well. And it's also a program of psychological warfare, which makes every summer better, don't you think?

We Aren't Young

There's this catchy song on the radio right now called "We Are Young" by the band Fun. It bugs the crap out of me. I really hate it when a song does that, when it's all cute and sing-along-able but has these lyrics that make me want to either scream or write a blog post expressing my frustration. Screaming gives me a headache, so here we are. Let's see if I can't exorcise this demon.


The chorus of the song goes like this:

Tonight, we are young,
So we'll set the world on fire
We can burn brighter
Than the sun!

Here's the music video, if you are young enough to want to watch such things. If you're not, I'll recap: a bunch of young people have a slow-motion bar fight, at one point a guy is punched and sprays what looks like milk at the camera, a girl licks something, possibly a smashed watermelon? off a guy's face, and the lead singer looks like he's in pain the whole time.

Now, I will admit that when I was in high school, I would have freely adopted this song as my personal anthem. There is something appealing about the idea that us young people can go out and change the world. We will leave a blaze of glory in our wake! When we are done, the world isn't going to know what hit it!

Here's the problem: I'm not actually all that young anymore. I wouldn't say that I'm old necessarily, but thirty-five is solidly middle-aged in my book. And besides, when the hipsters in the band were sitting at the bar writing song lyrics over their Pabst Blue Ribbon and they got to the part about being young, were they picturing a woman in a minivan with four kids listening to NPR? No, they were not. So regardless of my actual age, I am not what they meant by "young." Also, when I think of young people setting the world on fire, the picture in my mind is less "world-changing" and more "anarchic riot." (If you're wondering if you're young or not-so-young, watch the music video. If you're going, what the heck was that about? then welcome to my club.)

Despite being not-young, though, I still want to set the world on fire. I mean, I want to do something that changes the world. I want to blaze trails of glory! I want my name to be remembered, possibly in the form of a Final Jeopardy answer! And I want to do all of this and save for retirement, make it to all of my kids' Little League games, and still get to bed by 10:30! That's the problem with not-young people, we've got all this real-life stuff that gets in the way of our world-burning. Unless we get hired specifically to incinerate the planet, we've got to find spare time to get it done, and that is a challenge. And in this economy, jobs like that are nearly impossible to find.

I wonder if songs like this contribute to the disappointment of middle-aged life. I'm happy with my life, I'm working on achieving things and pushing myself to personal growth, but I'm not naive like I was at eighteen, when anything was possible. Part of the reason why young people can throw themselves into a risk-filled life (a garage start-up or a band or whatever) is because the cost for failing is so much smaller than it is once you've got a mortgage and a family and a kid that needs braces. Responsibility is so much more work than wanton combustion. Does the typical mid-life crisis come when we realize that those big dreams we had at eighteen have turned into 40-hour work weeks and health benefits? Are we setting up our children to be massively disappointed when the world consistently refuses to even smolder?

You know why else it's so hard to set the world on fire when we're not-young? Because we don't have an anthem, that's why. No one writes songs about middle-aged people achieving work-home balance and funding their IRA's and still finding time to write the Great American Novel on the weekends. No, we get Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire": don't look at us, we were standing over here when the fire started.

Someone needs to write us an anthem. A fight song for the law-abiding, riot-avoiding, middle-aged middle class that obeys the speed limit and provides the stability for this country so that young'uns can go out there and wield their metaphorical flame-throwers at society! Maybe something like this:

Tonight, we aren't young
But we'll pay all of our taxes
We'll send faxes
To our accountants!

See, I told you, it just doesn't work for us. But this was quite therapeutic. Next week, an exegesis of Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" - a song celebrating that great night of the week when somehow it's okay to drink to excess, drive around town, have sex with (multiple) strangers, wake up bruised in a trashed house...and plan to do it all again next week! Music these days is great!

I Am Fundamentally Different From My Husband

If you would like a peek into how Ryan sees the differences between him and me, here is a (slightly embellished) conversation we just had.

I was browsing on Pinterest and came across a recipe for Crockpot Greek Yogurt. "Ooh!" I said to Ryan, who was sitting across from me watching me browse the internet (slightly less boring than watching paint dry, because paint never shouts "Ooh!" for no apparent reason.)  "Here's a recipe for making your own Greek yogurt in a crockpot!"

"If I were to write a recipe for how to make Greek yogurt, it would go like this," he said. "Step One: Go to the grocery store. Step Two: Buy Greek yogurt. Step Three: Go home and think about all the time you saved by not making your own Greek yogurt."

"Ha ha," says I, only slightly meaning it.

He continued. "And if you were to write a recipe for how to make Greek yogurt, it would go, Step One: Go to Greece."

"Step Two," I said,  "Switch my major to Modern Greek Yogurt Making."

"Step Three: Tell all your friends about the joys of making your own Greek yogurt. Blog about it. Change your entire diet to revolve around Greek yogurt. Get tired of Greek yogurt. Get to the point where Greek yogurt is the bane of your existence. Become anti-Greek yogurt. Then head to Pinterest to find your new favorite thing."

I had stopped listening at that point. "Ooh! Here's how to turn your old t-shirts into knitted dishcloths! Imagine all the things I could knit with our old clothes."

And scene.

Four Months in One Post

So, it's been a really long time since I posted, yadda yadda fill in typical mommy-blogger apology for not posting more often. If you were to read my journals from my childhood you'd find that just about every entry started with an apology for not writing since, like, the year before.  Writing that sentence made me go hunt down my old journals from the box in the basement--reading them is a mixture of hilarity and embarrassment. As a penance for my long absence, here is a gem from an entry dated December 15, 1989 (I was thirteen): "I got my braces off! I must admit, I look 100% better." Somehow I crammed excitement, pride, vanity, and a keen math mind into a mere eleven words.

Anyhow, I thought it would be a good idea to see what everyone's been up to over the last few months. We've sure been busy! Ryan's been doing this:

The stickers made the rounds on Pinterest and for a few months, all Ryan could do was stuff envelopes for hours and hours a day. The sales have dropped back down to a reasonable amount so Ryan finally has more time to play online pool. (He'll probably wish I hadn't said that...)

Brad has been a busy, busy boy. First, he did this:

Okay, so the nail didn't end up in his brain, nor did we take him for a cat scan like we probably should have. But he did swallow a nail. It happened like this: he was hanging a picture on his wall and had a few tiny nails that he was holding in his mouth. When he was done, he spit them out, but one went the wrong direction and he swallowed it.  Apparently, it did get a little stuck in his throat, but after a minute of coughing, it went down just fine. By the time he told me, with a gigantic grin on his face, I might add, it had been half an hour or so. After much debate, we decided to wait and see what happened. He never experienced any pain or bleeding, and after two days, he would no longer answer my questions about the contents of his bowel movements. So we assume it all came out okay in the end, although if he gets stopped by the TSA on our next family vacation, we'll know why.

But wait, there's more!  Because Brad also did this:

Brad and Ryan were playing catch in the front yard and Brad threw the ball from the yard across the street. Ryan missed it, but luckily the window was right there to catch it. The ball went through the first pane, but we have triple-paned windows, and could slide another pane over to cover the hole. Replacing the windows just moved up on the list of home maintenance priorities.

Noah, fortunately, has been less destructive than his older brother. He's been doing this:



Noah and his friend Daniel entered this original dance in the Reflections contest at their school. They won first place. The prize was a trophy and $10, plus the entry moved on to the next level for judging.

They won the next level (council level, maybe?) and moved on to the whole school district level, which they lost. But they thought it was great that they won and they are planning on doing it again next year.  Although next year, Daniel's mom can stay up for hours the night before the entries are due, trying to burn a dvd and fill out half a dozen forms.

Last year, Zack was the child who provided the most comic relief (and also the most agonizing phone calls from the principal/teachers/concerned neighbors.) This year, he's been pretty chill, and for that I'm grateful. This is what he's been up to:

This, my friends, is a Conference Hog. In February, I mentioned that we had to wait six more weeks for General Conference. He joked, "Did the Conference Hog see his shadow?" We laughed and he scurried downstairs to his Lego laboratory. An hour later, he came upstairs with this, a Conference Hog, complete with Conference Hole to pop out of. His creativity amazes me--I wish I were more like Zack. Although, at parent-teacher conference, Mrs. Savage mentioned that she had to untie Zack the other day when he tied his shoelaces to his chair...I don't want to be like Zack in that way so much.

And there's Darcey. Darcey, Darcey, Darcey. The little girl, sent from Heaven to fulfill all my raising-a-daughter fantasies. The child who loves dresses and twirling and letting me put sponge curlers in her hair on Saturday nights so she could look like Shirley Temple at church on Sunday. The girl who was thisclose to having hair long enough to put in a bun for ballet class. This is what my little girl was doing in her room, while watching Netflix on the ipad.

The only reason she had the "party in the back" was because she missed that spot, otherwise it would have been gone too. Here's the story: I was standing in the kitchen, minding my own business, when I heard Brad going up the stairs. He met Darcey coming down and said, "Darcey, you got a hair cut!" I gasped so loudly that I sucked in all the air in the entire room, and turned around to find Darcey's smiling face. She had cut her hair so dramatically that I could barely believe it was still her. And she was so proud of herself, she was convinced that everyone would think she looked fantastic. She couldn't understand why I was on the verge of tears, hyperventilating, and calling my hair-cutting friend in a panic to ask what to do. Honestly, I don't think I could have been more upset if it was MY hair she cut.
You want to see a before picture?

It makes me want to cry, and it's been nearly three months since it happened.  Anyhow, back to the story.

This is what I found when I went upstairs:

Those are children's safety scissors. If they don't stop a child from cutting all her hair off, what on earth do they stop her from cutting? Her skin? I think if she had cut her hand, she'd have put the scissors down before the hair damage was too bad. That's what I get for helicopter-parenting. From now on, the kids cut with hedge clippers and a Sawz-All.

I took the girl to Great Clips and ended up with this:

Look at that poor, sad girl, regretting horribly the mistake she made...Yeah right. To this day, when I tell the story of Darcey's haircut, she always says, "I thought you were going to like it. I thought it would make you happy." I don't even know what to do with that maternal guilt.

As for me, well, isn't it enough that I've survived all of that? I'm taking a Mormon Lit class this semester and doing a research internship with the same professor. I finally bought a wheat grinder for the 300 pounds of wheat in my basement. I got a new bookshelf for my office and it's already 7/8's full. I went to Maryland to visit my mom and help my grandmother pack her house. And basically I've just enjoyed my life. Things are good, I'm happy, my moods have been completely stable for six or seven months now, the kids are giving me plenty of interesting Facebook statuses. Can I really ask for more than that?  I submit that I cannot. And that's great.

Reading All Day Long

I had this fantasy in my head for many years, and it went like this: I would get a job where all I did was read all day long. Eight hours a day, a constantly changing stack of books which in turn entertain and provoke deep thoughts, just me and my La-Z-Girl recliner. That's the life.

Or is it? (Dun, dun, dunnnn!)

I've had the chance to test out my all-reading-all-the-time theory this semester, and wouldn't you know, it's not quite as fun as I expected it to be. By the end of the semester, here's what I will have read:

Writing for Mass Media: about 200 pages
American History Before 1865: about 450 pages (plus a 300 page textbook, the spine of which is perfectly intact and will remain so)
Literature of the Sacred: 1,659

Seriously, one class has over 1600 pages assigned, and that's a conservative estimate. I'm not even including the two 200 page books and many articles suggested as research for the paper due in at the end of the semester. I've done a fair amount of skimming where I could and picked up a couple of audiobook versions of novels so I could squeeze every drop of productivity out of my day. This semester is truly testing my love of reading. I may have to take up a new hobby, like bullying nerds or playing kickball or whatever it is that non-readers do for fun.

I knew when I first saw the syllabus for my lit class that it was going to be a killer, so I have no one but myself to blame for this deluge of paper and ink. No one but myself...and my professor, of course. Not only did he assign an acre's worth of dead trees to be read in 15 short weeks, but he made the class so freaking interesting that I couldn't possibly make myself drop it. This is probably my second-favorite class I've ever taken. It has a lot in common with my #1 favorite class, Ethics and Values. Both are extremely thought-provoking--I lay in bed and churn over what we discussed. Both make me examine what I believe and why. But I don't remember Ethics and Values even requiring a textbook, so it's going to stay the winner. Sometimes practicality trumps quality.

Since misery loves company, and I'm all about the misery this semester, here's a list of the books I've been reading.

History:
The Jesuit Relations: about the French Jesuit missionaries in Canada during the 1600's. They were trying to convert the Native ummm...Canadians? Wait, what do you call them in Canada? I'm going with Indians here, because the book was all about being not politically correct; the Jesuits called them savages and worse. The missionaries were required to send yearly reports back to France, telling about all their baptizing and conquests and such. I couldn't read this without being outraged at the treatment of the Indians and the arrogance and superiority exhibited by the Europeans. Outrage--it's the emotion of the semester.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, respectively: More outrage, this time over slavery. I'm not quite finished with Slave Girl, but when I'm done I'm going to write a paper about the role of Christianity in the lives of the slaveholders. The hypocrisy! It's insane. The violence and mental torture is too much for me to read sometimes.

Literature of the Sacred: The Literary History of Adam & Eve

Eve & Adam - this is our main textbook, which has a cartoon picture of a naked Eve on the front, causing much uncomfortableness for my tween-age son. The book is an anthology of documents that show how the Adam and Eve story has been interpreted for the last, oh, 2500 years or so. The fascinating thing about the story in Genesis is that it is basically a blank slate for each culture/society to write their own meaning onto. Does your society value women? Then Eve saved humanity from being stuck in a boring garden. Does your society value men? Then Eve was an evil temptress. Want to keep women subject to men? Stress the superiority of Adam. Reading how people (priests, rabbis, novelists, etc) interpreted Adam and Eve tells more about that culture than it does about Adam and Eve.

Book of Urizen by William Blake: Almost completely incomprehensible. Thank goodness for wikipedia, so I could actually understand what was going on, mostly.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly: This book was slow to start but picked up speed further in. It's obviously a Creation story and an entertaining one at that. My professor wrote his dissertation on Frankenstein, so we spent a good bit of time talking about it. I read Dracula two years ago for a Brit Lit class, and frankly, I enjoyed Dracula more than Frankenstein. I don't know how that's relevant to this blog post, but there you go.

Cain by Lord Byron: This is a play, I think, and I skimmed it.

Autobiography of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain: The first and only (so far) book in this class that I would read again for fun. Twain writes (in two separate stories) Adam's diary and Eve's diary from the time that they are first created to when they're kicked out of the garden. It's funny and it has that great timelessness--written like 150 years ago and still nailing the stereotypes of men and women. I highly recommend reading this.

Just because I like you, here's a link to the free Kindle version of Eve's Diary and Adam's Diary. Read Adam's Diary first.

Tomorrow's Eve by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam: The other book my professor wrote his dissertation about, but this was deeper than Frankenstein and less entertaining. It was written in the later 1800's and contains the first use of the word "android," to describe the robot a fictional Thomas Edison created to be the girlfriend of a friend of his. If you like science fiction, this might be of interest to you, as it's an early entry into that genre. My prof considers it one of the most important books no one's read. I'm just glad to be done with it.

God's Grace by Bernard Malamud: This one is on tap for Thanksgiving break. Also sci-fi, and maybe post-apocalyptic to boot. The only thing I know is that Prof. Peterson warned the class that there is a scene of human-monkey sex, and the most disturbing part of the scene is that by the time it happens, the idea of human-monkey sex is not disturbing.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett: This is also on the syllabus for December. I've read it before, wasn't impressed the first time, but then I tend to read for plot first and this play has basically none. But it's one of those classic things that English majors have to read and pretend to find really, really deep and meaningful. This time I might just rent the video instead.

Women and Authority by Maxine Hanks (editor): Now this is an interesting book. It's a collection of essays written by Mormon (or soon-to-be-former-Mormons) about LDS feminist issues. When I told Prof. Peterson that I wanted to write my final paper on women in the LDS Church, he looked at me carefully and asked, "Are you a practicing Mormon?" I said that I was, and I could see him weighing whether or not to encourage me in this topic. Finally he asked me, "What are you going to do with information you find disturbing?" A good question. The problem is, when you spend ten weeks (so far) studying women's issues in a religious context, questions are going to pop up. It's fine to say, "Oh, so that's why Paul was such a jerk about women two thousand years ago," but the next thought is, "I wonder what my religion teaches about this issue." I told Prof. Peterson that it's too late--I already had disturbing information, and I think the best way to deal with it is just lay it all out on the table and accept the good with the bad. When it comes to information, I have to go all in. He relaxed a little--I think it would have bothered him to have a faithful member leave the church over what we learned in his class. He said, "The important thing is for you to stay in. The church won't change because of what people outside the church say or do--it'll only change from within." And then he gave me this link to the book Women and Authority .

He was right to warn me. Thought-provoking? Oh, yes. Disturbing? Also yes. I don't agree with a lot that the authors in the book say, and in fact several of the authors seem to contradict each other as well. But the ideas in the book--primarily about the equality/inequality of women in the church, the church hierarchy and women's place in it, and women's relationship to the priesthood--several of the ideas reinforced questions I've asked myself. For example, why aren't women ever asked to pray in General Conference? Why does so much time and money go into Cub & Boy Scouts but not Activity Days and Young Women? Why don't sister missionaries get to stay for two whole years, and why do they have to wait two years longer than the boys? I've had wonderful male leaders and I sustain all of them, but sometimes I have to ask myself why men and not women? Fundamentally, why? Women and Authority looks at that question and comes up with a lot of disturbing answers. I don't know exactly what I believe on this topic right now, but I know that the Holy Ghost will confirm the truth of all things, and that's what I'm relying on.

Well, that was a little bit of a diversion, wasn't it? Possibly I'll write more on the topic of women in the LDS church at a future time, after I've written my paper about it and, of course, when I've finally finished reading the 500 pages I've got left this semester. If I ever finish the 500 pages I've got left. In the meantime, if there's an earthquake in Utah, you can find my broken body crushed under the weight of too many books. And here I thought reading all day would be fun.

Today's Very Dumb Thing

Sometimes I do dumb things. Like not turning the wheel sharply enough when backing Ryan's car out of the garage, causing the passenger mirror to hit the wall of the garage and snap the plastic housing into pieces. That was one dumb thing I did today, but not the dumbest, not by a long shot.

I have this idea in my head that I can do anything if I try hard enough. I don't know if my mother specifically said those words to me once when I was a kid and she was trying to get me to do my 5th grade math homework, or if it was just implied in an effort to "give me wings" or whatever. Anyhow, the idea stuck, and it's served me well, for the most part. But the dark side of that theory is a little bit of hubris, that feeling like I'm invincible and there's nothing I can't do. Arrogance, I think.

Today's Very Dumb Thing started innocently enough. Ryan and I were looking at the latest in a long line of get-thin-quick schemes, and landed on Boot Camps. I found one that was only thirty minutes a day, three days a week and had a Groupon available. Sounds great, right? Never mind that I weigh as much as I did when I was nine months pregnant with Brad. Never mind that my current exercise regimen consists of ab curls to roll myself out of my La-Z-Boy chair when I'm too La-Z to flip down the footrest. Never mind that the treadmill I bought six weeks ago serves as a 6-inch step for reaching things in my closet. I can do anything if I try hard enough!

Then yesterday, the day before my first Boot Camp session, I'm browsing UVU's website and find buried in the Student Health and Wellness section that the school offers free Zumba classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays from noon-1. I know, right?! I love Zumba! So much! And I'm already at school until 11:50 those days! And it's FREE! How lucky am I to find the class I love at the absolute most convenient time ever and for zero dollars?! I tell everyone in the house about the class and I'm so excited that I have to start right away and check it out. That means Monday, today, the same day as my first Boot Camp class.

How come the dumbness is so blatant in hindsight when the original plan seemed so realistic? I mean, Boot Camp is only thirty minutes long, so how hard can it be? How hard can it be, indeed!

I am now going to skip the details of both the Zumba class and the Boot Camp class and sum it up like this: Bad, bad idea. Pick one or the other, but not both. By the time Boot Camp was over, I had all of the normal hard-workout symptoms: shaky legs, sore muscles, headache. But it's worse. My ears are pounding. I've got this cough. My throat is like sandpaper. My back is shaky, which is wiggling all the back fat. The roof of my mouth hurts. Why would the roof of my mouth hurt? I have no idea, but it does.

I stopped at a gas station at the mouth of Provo Canyon on the way home to get some chocolate milk, which is recommended as a "recovery drink" after a workout. I'm hoping that, due to its location, the gas station employees see red-faced, shaking, sweaty, mouth-breathing post-workout victims all the time. I bet I didn't even stand out! Until, that is, my debit card slipped out of my trembling fingers and it took me a full ten seconds to bend all the way down to the ground and pick it up. And then I messed up the swiping/pin entry/button-pushing three separate times because nothing seemed to be making sense in my head. Now I should put in my pin? No, now? Green is for what?

The bottom line is this: technically, I was right. I can do anything I want if I try hard enough, even if it's dumb things like going from sloth-mode to two workouts in one day. But it's really not a good idea. Not only will it hurt really, really badly, but it will make me want to eat ice cream to soothe my exercise-induced sore throat. Or the Halloween candy that I bought a week early. Seriously, I'm on a roll with Very Dumb Things this week.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to super-glue Ryan's passenger mirror housing back together. Somehow, that seems like a much more manageable thing to do.