We're getting married!

Well, we're having a wedding, at least.

Screw waiting for legality, we want to have a party and wear pretty dresses like all the cool hetero couples, so we're planning for a wedding in July 2012. Well before the apocalypse, you know, so we can get our honeymoon in before the end of the world. :D

We wanted to get married on the date we already celebrate as our anniversary (July 24), which would be our 8th anniversary in 2012, but it falls on a Tuesday. A Tuesday wedding would be kind of weird, so we'll have to go with a plan B. We're thinking the 28th instead. I suppose it all depends on when we can reserve a space we like.

At this point it's still in the "hey, we could totally do it like this" phase, although I signed up at TheKnot just to have a better idea of all the things we should do and when to do them. But at this point we're thinking a casual, simple affair. We'll wear wedding dresses because we're excited about that part, but casual for everyone else. No bridesmaids, because that gets complicated and expensive. No flowers (except maybe our bouquets) because there are other materials with which to decorate, and flowers just die so it's a big waste of a lot of money. We plan to DIY a lot of stuff, and I'd like to have the ceremony and reception all in the same spot so everyone can watch the ceremony from their tables and then nobody has to go anywhere for the party. My philosophy has always been that a wedding should be a short, minimalist ceremony and then a long, fun party, not a long, boring ceremony and a stuffy, short party.

So now begins the wild and weird process of wedding planning. I went through the checklist on TheKnot thinking I'd be able to just delete half of it, what with the lack of need for florists and bridesmaids dresses and such, but the list is still quite long. We're hashing out the "how are we going to pay for this" part. And at this point the first big thing is probably to tell my parents. I don't expect them to be very excited about it, although I'm sure they'd be pretty upset if they didn't get an invite. I guess we'll just see how it goes.

Nothing like looking out your window and seeing...

...flames shooting 20 feet in the air from a burning van.

Of all the potentially scary things I've encountered at work...

...today was the scariest.

I've had people throw things at me.  I've called 911 from work more times than I can count.  I've had people get in my face and scream at me.  I've had people case the place and make me think they were about to rob it.  Hell, I've been through a tornado at work.  But none of those things have left me truly shaken.

The first mistake I made today was to forget my cell phone at home.  It spent the day on the bathroom counter instead of in my pocket.  I very rarely forget my phone.  I feel naked without it, and was annoyed at myself all day for forgetting to bring it along. 

The second mistake I made was going outside for a smoke break.  I was supposed to quit smoking at the first of the year.  I'd been doing okay at cutting back, at least, and for a good while had stopped taking breaks at work.  For some reason recently I've fallen back into old habits. 

So anyway, after spending several hours working on organizing and stocking the cooler, I went outside to have a smoke and warm up a bit.  We're not supposed to smoke where customers coming in and out of the store can see us, so we go around to the back of the building.  I like going back there, since it gives me a chance to make sure none of our usual panhandlers are hanging around out of our sight, trying to convince people that they need money for gas for the cars they don't own. 

What I usually don't see when I go out back for a smoke is a dog trotting around dragging its leash behind it.

Now, I'm not a big fan of dogs.  I'm a cat person.  I prefer animals whose methods of showing affection don't include a lot of wiggling and slobber.  I don't hate dogs, they're just not my thing.  I certainly am not one who would ever try to pet a dog I wasn't really familiar with.

Anyway, this was a large-ish dog.  I would have said it was part Rottweiler, although I've been told it's a German Shepherd.  Whatever, I'm not good with dog breeds.  The point is that it was certainly not a small dog.  I assumed it had run away from a nearby yard, since it was still wearing a chain.  It was walking a little funny, like maybe one of its back legs was tender, but otherwise didn't seem aggressive in any way.

So I lit my cigarette and watched it go by.  After a minute or so I went and looked around the corner to see if it had left the lot, since I didn't want to just ignore it and let it wander around all night bothering customers.  It was still there, just wandering around the lot, and when it saw me there it came over.  Again, not aggressively, just trotted over. 

My first thought was that it hoped I had food or would pet it, and I certainly didn't want to touch it.  I don't touch stray animals if I can help it, especially at work where I deal with food.  Who knows what a stray animal has been rolling around in.  So I just stood there, hoping it wasn't about to come over and jump up on me wanting food or affection.  But when it got closer and I noticed again that it seemed to be walking funny on one of its legs, I said, "aw, are you hurt?" 

It growled, charged, and snapped at me.  I just stood there, frozen, knowing there was no way running from this dog was going to end well for me, and praying that if I stood still long enough it would back off.  It didn't.  It stopped growling after a bit, but it just stood there within biting distance, staring at me.  I was behind the building, meaning I had no idea how long I might have to stand there before somebody happened along who could get this dog away from me.  I couldn't call anyone -- my phone was sitting unhelpfully on the bathroom counter at home.

Luckily, the dog wasn't a stray.  It belongs to one of our regular customers.  I've heard that there have been complaints about his dog snapping at people, and he's been told not to bring his dog around, but I hadn't actually seen his dog before so I didn't recognize it as his.  He had chained it up on the back fence, but the dog had broken the chain.  As soon as he came around, the dog went right to him. 

I lit into his owner.  I've never yelled at a customer like that before.  He admitted the dog was aggressive even at home and had already bitten somebody.  I made it clear that if any of us saw that dog anywhere near the lot again the authorities would be called.

It took a half an hour for me to stop shaking.

What if it hadn't been me?  What if it had been some kid who wanted to pet the stray doggie?  People should have to get a license to own a pet.  That dog has NOT been treated right.

4 Reasons Gym Class Failed Me As A Kid

I was never a fan of gym class when I was in school. I wasn't obese at the time, but I was surely technically overweight, and despite the fact that I was a cheerleader from 8th grade through high school I just generally wasn't very athletic. Why didn't twelve years of gym class help me at all?

1. Most gym teachers treated me like I wasn't as important as those who were athletes.

I don't know how it is now, but in my day once you got into junior high the gym teachers were usually also team coaches. That meant that half their time was spent coaching athletes to compete with other athletes, putting them through workouts intended to improve specific skills. The rest of their day was spent with classes made up mostly of unenthusiastic, out-of-shape kids, forcing them into some kind of activity for an hour at a time.

From my perspective, those classes seemed to be something these coaches had little enthusiasm for, themselves. Those of us who weren't participating in team sports were treated like we were either lazy or incapable of actually being athletic. Those who were already athletic were praised heavily and got a lot more activity during gym class, which is actually pretty backwards when you think about it.

Granted, the rest of us had a pretty bad attitude about even being in gym class, but that might have been helped tremendously if the classes had been conducted differently. As it was, I remember spending a lot of time standing around while more athletic kids played games or being talked down to because I couldn't do a pullup or climb a rope or generally perform as well as the proven athletes. I got the clear message that the gym teachers really didn't like me much, being all weak and unable to run a mile in 12 minutes. They certainly liked the kids who were good at those things.

And yes, before anyone comments to correct me, I'm sure I was on the other end of that equation in academic classes. I got plenty of praise from math, science, art, and English teachers, but I don't recall those teachers treating the rest of the class like their brains must just not be capable of learning. If anything, the extra praise got me less work to do, not more. But gym class felt like ultimate judgment. "Climb that rope. No, three feet isn't good enough. You get an F. Sit over there with the other losers and watch these guys show you what a winner looks like."

2. Gym class didn't actually teach me how to be more physically fit.

With the exception of the one weightlifting class I took in high school, most of the time I spent in gym class was focused on either finding a way to make us sweat for an hour or teaching us the rules to various games and sports. All the things I've learned about exercise as an adult is pretty much new to me. We didn't learn about the benefits of strength training (even in weightlifting, really -- we only learned how to do it, not why) or how to properly do cardio. We'd briefly talk about obesity in health class sometimes and why we should want to be a healthy weight, but not in enough depth to really teach any of us what to do about it beyond "eat less and be more active." I remember talking about target heart rate a bit during a semester class I took in high school on aerobics (Not aerobic activity in general, aerobics tapes. We did aerobics tapes for gym class. Seriously.), but we never learned how to actually improve our fitness level. We did activity just to do activity. Until it came time to do the President's Physical Fitness Test each year (or semester? I don't remember now.) our fitness abilities weren't regularly tested or tracked for improvements. We showed up, did some kind of calisthenics or stretches to warm up, and then played some kind of game or did some group activity for the remainder of the class. And that was it. And while for most of us who are now trying to lose weight it's a good thing to just get in the habit of moving around more, that's not all there is to being physically fit. But they didn't really teach us anything beyond "it's good to move around enough so you sweat sometimes."

News flash: learning how to keep score during flag football doesn't improve one's fitness level.

3. They tested us, but didn't make us practice for the test.

Remember the President's Physical Fitness Test? I don't know if they still do this, but back in the 80s and 90s in my area, the school system used it as a test for all students at the end of every year. I remember it consisting of a mile run, a flexibility test, situps, pullups (eventually the girls only had to do a bent-arm hang), and some other things I don't remember. I remember that the test was actually intended to be a program where awards would be given to students across the nation who scored really well on all the exercises. But that's not how it was used in the classroom. If you didn't score well enough to qualify for the award on each exercise, you didn't get a passing grade for that exercise. The only reason I got good grades in gym was that there were usually some written tests or participation points or bonuses you could get for wearing school colors to class every day that made up for my lack of performance.

You know what would have helped my performance? If we'd have actually trained to be better at the things we were tested on at the end of the year. As you know, I'm now training to racewalk a marathon. To prepare, I'm doing a lot of walking. I'm not preparing by playing a lot of raquetball because playing a lot of raquetball isn't going to help me come race day. Unless the spectators will be throwing balls at us as we go by, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Anyway, in gym class we were tested on our ability to do situps and run, but trained for those tests by playing frisbee golf, standing on the sidelines of basketball games, and sometimes jogging a couple of times across the gym. If they wanted us to run a mile in 12 minutes, why didn't they make us do more running? If they wanted us to be able to reach past our toes, why didn't we spend time on flexibility? (And I was actually good at that one because of all the time I spent on flexibility for cheerleading. See how that works?) If they wanted us to do pullups and pushups, why didn't we do exercises to strengthen our arm and back muscles? Or if they were going to spend most of the time teaching us to play team sports, why weren't we tested on our ability to play team sports?

4. It sucked, and I hated being there.

I always got the sense that gym classes were really meant to get kids to have a more positive attitude towards physical activity, which is an admirable goal. But even beyond being treated like useless non-athletes and tested over things we hadn't trained for, nothing about gym class was really pleasant or fun for anyone who wasn't already athletic. It wasn't fun to play team sports when nobody wanted you on their team and you spent most of the time on the sidelines or in positions where you were least likely to screw things up. Exercise is fun for me now not because the act of doing it is somehow less painful than it used to be but because I know there's a purpose to it and I can see a payoff. But that's not how it felt in gym class. The only purpose I could see to going through the motions of gym class was to preserve my GPA. I didn't see improvements, I had to do the same activities I didn't enjoy week after week, year after year, with seemingly no purpose other than keeping us corralled and moving around for an hour at a time. It didn't make me enjoy physical activity. In fact, it made me dread it. I dreaded being made to feel fat and incapable.

It's really not that I don't like playing team sports. I do enjoy them in the right context. I used to work for a company that competed in corporate league sports. Okay, I use the term "competed" rather loosely, since we never won a tournament or even harbored the delusion that we might. But we had fun. I played volleyball and softball and bowled. I wasn't especially good at any of it, but I wasn't forced to the sidelines or made fun of. And because I spent time actually playing I did get better over time. I found the things I was good at, like serving a volleyball. I was allowed to play shortstop because I was better at it than being in the outfield. Office sports were fun and I looked forward to them despite my lack of natural skill or athletic ability. Hell, I actually played hard enough that I got injured a couple of times! It's never been the sports I didn't like, it was always the environment in which I had to play them.

It's just that gym class was seemingly engineered to be discouraging. We had to do things we weren't good at in an environment that didn't make us feel like we had any hope for improving. And I was somewhat middle-of-the-pack. God help the obese kids. It must have been forty times worse for them.

I can only hope gym classes are less horrible these days. My gut feeling tells me they're not. Of all the classes I could have benefited from in school, gym was probably the one I needed most. And yet it was the one that totally failed to deliver.

I do have to say I had a few understanding, non-judgmental, encouraging gym teachers. One even fudged my mile run time one year because she didn't want my gym grade to damage my GPA and I had just barely failed the mile by a few seconds. When I got to high school and was able to select what gym classes I signed up for, things were better. I didn't dread going quite as much. But I didn't really learn more. I didn't get in better shape. And those classes didn't teach me what I needed to know about being healthy and active. They did teach me that there were certain physical activities that I enjoyed more than others. Valuable lesson, but not enough to keep me from gaining a ton of weight later in life. And when I did go to the gym as an adult, I had no idea how to really get the most out of it. No gym or health class had ever really taught me how to create a workout regimen that actually did much of anything to improve my fitness level.

It's rather sad to think that we spend all sorts of time in school learning things that aren't directly useful in our adult lives, and yet when it comes to something vital like our physical health we get a small amount of basic information on diet and fitness and spend a lot of time being herded into classes that mostly teach us to play games we won't ever play again.