gratefulness audit

This morning, I got up at 5:00 and went to the gym for Thanksgiving Body Pump. Having skipped workouts this week for such reasons as a) needed to scrape wax from 200 candle holders, b) ate a frozen burrito for lunch and felt too gross to move and c) skipped lunch and was so hungry when I got home that I ate a HOT DOG (Ben's fault), I was actually pretty excited to do this. I fully realize that under any other circumstances, getting up early on Thanksgiving to hit the gym is ridiculous and disgusting.

The class is mostly fifty-and-up, unlike the afternoon BPs which have their fair share of young women in pursuit of Hayden Panetierre's body. (I wanted to say Jennifer Aniston, but have been making an effort lately to not expose myself so obviously as someone whose cultural references were formed and cemented in the '90s). There is a sixty- or seventy-year-old man who wears super-short cotton bike shorts and brings his own fan to set up on a stack of yoga blocks. The full-blast air conditioner isn't enough, apparently.

Anyway, the point of bringing up the gym was that our teacher, who must have taught peer ed in a high school, gave us each a turkey sticker to wear, then handed out cheesy Thanksgiving "riddles," which we were asked to call out in between songs. (Example: What did the turkey say before dinner? I'm stuffed!") She also taped a big piece of paper to the mirror and asked us to write things we are grateful for. Entries included "stretching!" and "that the squat track is over!" I was, of course, too shy (not to mention cool), to say anything, but my list would go something like this:

Things I am grateful for:

* That I have reached such a level of maturity and non-vanity that when I picked at a bump on my eyebrow yesterday and it caused my whole eye to swell up like a boxer's, I wasn't too proud to go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients for our contribution to tonight's dinner at my Grandma's.

* That when my examination of my eye caused me to realize how much my face has aged since I was, I don't know, Hayden P.'s age, and to wonder whether I am aging much faster than I should be, and to collapse in bed and started terror-fantasizing about going blind (from my eyebrow thing, which introduced killer staph into my eye) and wonder if my school staff would band together to help pay for my medical bills and if I would get permanent disability and have to learn braille, I only let this despair-spiral spin for about half an hour.

* That today I made a pecan pie, cornbread and roasted fall vegetable stuffing, and shaved brussels sprouts with caramelized shallots, all of which prove that I am a normal, functioning, and seeing person.

* That I was able to hide my insanity from Ben long enough to trick him into marrying me.

what not to wear

After Ben gave me a huge guilt trip over having two pictures of Theo in my classroom and none of him, I hung a framed wedding picture over my desk. Admittedly, I had been hesitant to bare any wedding images at school, lest I have my ego deflated by some rude comment about how strangely nice I looked. (I have become the quintessential frazzled teacher who has really let herself go. Only luck has kept me from showing up one day wearing my mouthguard.)

Today a boy in my class caught a glimpse of it, and couldn’t contain his shock.

“Whoa, miss! That’s you!”

“Yup, it’s me.”

“Now that’s a hairdo,” he said approvingly. (Really.) “How come you don’t wear your hair like that all the time?”

“Um, because I don’t have a lady to do my hair every morning?” I replied.

He then proceeded to tell me about a contraption his grandpa sells (of course, his grandpa probably went to school with me) that you wrap around your head, wear to bed, and are rewarded by in the morning with a head full of perfect curls.

“It’s only twelve dollars,” he added helpfully.

So, it’s come to this. A fifteen-year-old Filipino boy is staging a fashion intervention. I might as well be in the early stages of menopause, enduring the depredations of my mortified teenage daughters who make me drop them off half a mile from the movie theater.