Thank You Jesus For Mumbo

There are a few facts about me that provoke interesting reactions when people learn them for the first time.

Since I've been blogging regularly, people who are familiar with my writing tend to fall in one of two categories. They either want to be mentioned, no matter the potentially embarrassing context of the story, or they're terrified I'm going to make them look stupid.

I just spent an evening with a friend, (let's call her "Minga") who was absolutely paranoid that I was mentally recording her ever misstep for blogging material. To be fair, she did accidentally say a few hilarious things, like: "I have two party balls" and "I'm very familiar with women," but really I probably would have forgotten if she hadn't made such a big deal about it. I coach basketball, and it's not a real practice unless there's a good ball joke.

Grab the balls, take care of the ball, keep the balls below your waist... The permutations are endless. A silly remark won't get you blogged about.

Keeping a dead guinea pig in your freezer will.

A group of us were chilling in Minga's dining room, laughing, talking, the usual party-going stuff, when three of our friends walked in from the kitchen solemnly.

Bijou was in the front, holding a blue shoebox. Something was scribbled on the box in Sharpie and I tried to make it out as she announced:

"I have to show you guys something." A voice from behind her shouted,
"Wait! I have to get my camera."
"Hurry up!" Bijou said. Kish bounded to the front and clicked record as Bijou lifted the shoebox lid to reveal a dead guinea pig.

We laughed and screamed and asked why.

This was Mumbo, Minga's beloved family pet. Mumbo had died sometime during the summer and it just never seemed like the right time to bury him. So, he'd taken up residence in the freezer, right between the peas and frozen lemonade.

I touched Mumbo and he was chilled and ready to serve.

On the box Minga's daughter had written a little account of his life and exploits, ending with "Thank you Jesus for Mumbo."

I turned to Minga.
"You're going to blog about this, aren't you?" She asked.
"Oh, most definitely. Thank you Jesus for Mumbo." 

3 Cups of Pee

I've always been slightly critical of people who can't hold their liquid.

I don't mean liquor. I can get pleasantly buzzed and ready to sing ABBA medleys after one beer, and consider this a great talent. I mean liquids, as in the kind that come gushing out of you after you've had enough alcohol to consider ABBA medleys a good idea.

I have the ability to hold it through the unabridged editions of Lord of the Rings and consider it a lack of personal will when others are always getting up and tripping over my legs because nature has called with the frequency of an underquota telemarketer.

My steel bladder is the result of intensive training dating back to kindergarten. I was mortally afraid of the school bathroom stalls because someone, probably an overzealous PTA member, thought it would  be a great idea to make the stalls in the child bathroom child-sized. I'm not sure what I was more afraid of: someone looking over and seeing me do my business, or, being on the tall side even then, that I might inadvertently witness some little girl in my class taking a number two.

The thought of this was so traumatic that I refused to go in the school bathrooms and ended up wetting myself in the classroom. But, and this is important, no one could see my hoo-ha, so this was still less mortifying than the alternative.

Yes, I thought that having been in training all these years I was invincible to the common prodding of the bladder suffered by ordinary people, until last Wednesday when I nearly crashed my car to relieve the agony of an angry urethra.

I blame my boss, the editor-in-chief of a green magazine, who believes in saving the earth by never turning on the heat in the house where we work. At lunch I sipped own several cups of hot tea to try and regain some feeling in my extremities, then proceeded to drive the 30 minutes from Boulder to Denver. I had to pee as soon as I left the restaurant, but unwisely trusted my steely digestive system to remain dormant until I arrived home.



10 minutes on the road and I started getting bladder cramps. 15 minutes and my jeans were unzipped. 20 minutes and I was recounting the scene from Major Payne (where the Major says "You want me to show you a little trick to take your mind off that pain? then breaks the guy's finger) and biting my hands. I whipped into a parking spot in front of my house, too blinded by pain to notice that I parked illegally, and too in agony to care if I had, and then was faced with a dilemma.

I am a stubborn one-tripper. I take everything into the house in one trip. When unloading groceries I will saddle my arms with ten bags, tucking the laundry detergent and milk under my armpits, rather than come back outside for a second venture. My one-tripping policy is deeply rooted, even when I should clearly make exceptions. For instance when my bladder is seconds from explosion.

I reached down to grab my backpack and suddenly realized I couldn't lift it. Lifting the bag required ab muscles, which were currently busy spasming uncontrollably. I sat there a moment, paralyzed by indecision and a lack of core mobility. Leaving the backpack behind violated my one-trip conviction. I managed to roll slightly to the side and hooked my arm under the strap, then roll back upright.

I triumphantly got the bag and still had a few seconds before my ticking time-bomb of a bladder went off. Then I tried to get out of the van. Apparently exiting vehicles also requires the use of abdominal muscles. I was stuck. I did not have to time to think of the irony of making it all the way home only to wet myself in the car outside. I could only think.

NOOOO!!! ARRGGGHHH!!! I AM NOT GOING DOWN LIKE THIS!

I half-slid, half-rolled out of the car, slammed the door and sprinted in short, waddling steps to the house. I threw my bag, phone and keys to the ground, and raced to the bathroom, praying that no one was inside.

I sat down, half-crying from relief, as the 3 cups of tea turned to 3 cups of pee and thought to myself that I was sure glad no one could peek over the edge of a stall and see me now.

Corporate Juice Pimps

I've been doing some temp work the past week for a family friend, and she mentioned to me her fear that I would blog about how it was the worst job ever. While filing for 8 hours is certainly tedious it's not the worst job I've ever had. I get to put my head phones in and not have to talk to anyone. It's practically heaven compared to some service jobs I've had. I worked at a country club where we'd get barraged with orders from socialites. They added it to their tab, which they accessed by giving us their name and one woman came in every day and without so much as a hello said:

"Fucarino. F. U." It took everything in my power not to say "F.U. too lady". She taunted me like that every single day.

But by far the worst job I ever had was for the corporate juice pimps of Jamba Juice. I worked at the Jamba Juice on campus and every day we had a line twenty people deep at any given time. About eight of us were crammed into a tiny space and given absurd instructions.

"Greet every customer" was one of our mandates. Ya. All eight of us. My manager expected eight people to say hello to every single customer out of the hundreds we saw each day. If I walked into a restaurant and eight people shouted hello at once I think I'd slowly back away and get the hello out of there.

On my first day, as I was furiously shoveling fruit into a blender and trying to learn the recipes, my manager Cody sauntered over and to do some real managerial inspiration type stuff.

"You are doing great, but...I need you to have more energy," Cody said.
"Excuse me?"
"You're not making that smoothie with enough energy. I need more."
"Um...Okay." I replied, a bit confused as to how I was supposed to accomplish this.
"I mean look at Justin. He just started here and he's already invented a song for when he makes a perfect smoothie."

Justin whipped around from his where he was cavorting at the pour station, gelled hair sticking out from beneath his black Jamba visor.

"I adapted an old slave spiritual I learned in my folk music class," he explained.
"Does anyone else see the irony in that?"
"JAAHAHAMMMBA!" Justin belted out the first line of a call and response.
"Anybody?"
"Then you all shout 'JUICE' in a kind of tribal chant." Justin said, his eyes glowing like a Razzamatazz with whey protein powder.
"Anybody at all?"
"That's great! I think we should all practice that," Cody said.
"Excuse me, I need to go stick my hand into this blender now."



The day I quit I went straight to Tribal Rites and got my eyebrow pierced in what I deemed my "Jamba Liberation Piercing" since any kind of tattoo, piercing, individuality, soul was forbidden there. To this day I can't drink a smoothie without hearing that haunting melody in the background.

Island Misadventures

WARNING: If you are squeamish about lady troubles you might want to just read through the archives and skip this one.

I'm going to hate myself for this later I thought standing in the empty stall of a public bathroom tucked in a half-abandoned strip mall between the Maddog saloon and a men's swim wear store called Over Easy Down Under that sold one too many speedos on one too many crotch mannequins to convince me it was just a men's wear store. I clutched my razor blade and took a deep breath.

This story really began a few days earlier. I was preparing for my trip to Hawaii and scouring the Cherry Creek mall looking for a bathing suit. Not an easy task in Colorado in October. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted. Board shorts and a bikini top. I didn't think that would be too hard to accommodate but I was wrong. The few places that still sold swimsuits were completely shortless. I figured I could find some in Hawaii.

Our first full day there sent my boyfriend and I trolling through the downtown streets of Waikiki looking for something that would work, but somehow everywhere we went we hit a dead end. Things were too expensive or too big or too small or too plain ugly.

On about our tenth store I was tired and since the prices were reasonable I was determined to make it work. Things seemed to be looking up when the sales woman said she'd sell me the tops and bottoms individually. Finally I was getting somewhere. I picked out a top, and after trying it on, I handed it to Phil who held it as far from his body as possible and waited patiently as I tried to find a pair of shorts that would fit the butt that derby built.

After trying on several pairs, the sales lady then informed me that the top I had chosen was one of approximately three in the store that she could not sell separately. When she offered to knock ten bucks off the price I caved. I waved goodbye to the dream of shorts and walked out with a nice regular bikini.

This presented a new challenge,however,that reared its ugly head as soon as Phil excitedly suggested we now head to the beach.

"I have some serious cosmetic maintenance to do down in the borderlands," I told him, "before we get anywhere near the beach."

This is mostly why I wanted shorts in the first place. Because while my Italian ancestors gave me excellent genes in the skin department, they also passed along the DNA which makes my hair grow at a speed and thickness that is rather alarming. I looked around and noticed a dinky little nail place and suggested we pop inside.

A formidable Chinese woman sat behind a station massacring a lady's cuticles. She stared at me without saying anything until I stammered out:

"How much for a bikini wax?"

She then asked me a question in a thick Chinese accent which I didn't make out and began shouting for me to look at the sign on the door. When I finally found the sign my eyes popped out. $40 and up! There's no way that was happening, especially since I would almost certainly be in the "And Up" category.

I scoffed and then we wandered into an ABC store and purchased a three pack of bic razors and a small can of barbasol. While lunching at Onos Philly Cheese Steak Hut, I calculated the odds of contracting meningitis from the bathroom of the dive. I'd put money on it in Vegas. Phil, who is on the short list for sainthood, suggested we go to the Starbucks next door. Perfect. They have individual bathrooms there. Except this one apparently. My query as to the location of the restroom resulted in the answer:

Across the street, up those green stairs and to the left.

And that's how I ended up in a deserted public bathroom, razor clutched in one hand and thinking to myself that I'd never felt more like a crack whore. The shaving process was difficult and unpleasant without water but by God I did not shame myself on the beach. When we finally made it to the water, Phil and I shared a touching moment reenacting the last scene from Titanic on Phil's boogie board. I'll never let go. Until the board shot out from under me and struck Phil in the jugular and while flailing he punched me in the left ovary.

You'd think I was done being awkward for the day but no. After walking along the beach we decided to meet Phil's brother for dinner. My bikini top still hadn't dried so we went back to the car so I could change. Phil waited outside while I switched out of my swimsuit top. After several minutes of patiently waiting he turned on the car alarm, I presume to alarm me, and to not so subtley ask what was ask taking so long.

Inside the car I was fighting an epic battle with the strings of my swimsuit which had gotten wrapped around my neck like the umbilical cord of a stillborn baby. I tried to do the old switcheroo where you put one bra on without removing the other, you know in case anyone is lurking about. Turns out this is not a great idea when there are multiple strings involved. I fought for a good five minutes to untangle it before giving myself up to the inevitable humiliation that seemed to characterize this day. I threw my shirt on and emerged from the car with mt bikini wrapped in a Gordion knot around my neck, and gruffly asked Phil to help me untangle it, while he smothered his choking laughter.

Next time I'll find one of those old fashioned suits that cover you all the way to the toes.

-Shadow 

Awkward Times At The Yoga Studio

As a response to my last tirade about nudity (read here) my friend Mij, an avid yoga practitioner and instructor, informed me that there is such a thing as naked yoga. Naked yoga is exactly what it sounds like. Interestingly, repulsion was not my first reaction to this piece of news, rather it was curiousity.

As in: How does one practice naked yoga without extreme chaffing? There are many misadventures I foresee with naked yoga, but chaffing is at the top of the list. This problem would also be aggrevated by the fact that, well at least I and probably most people, would have to be involved in some extreme feats of shaving/waxing/threading/lasering/chemically burning and/or any combination of the above before getting into the studio.

Now I enjoy yoga, but that doesn't mean yoga isn't weird. It's gotten much more mainstream, but there are plenty of kooks out there and I've experienced my fair share. Like Yuki, the instructor of an aerial yoga class I took for several months. It's not fair to call Yuki kooky. She was actually an excellent instructor. Aerial or aero yoga is a practice that involves a lot of partner work. It's best to go with a friend because you'll be lifting and tossing people in the air.

At it's best it looks like this. That's actually a picture of Yuki on the bottom.

One day Yuki decided to get a bit creative during our class.  I always attended with my roommate, a 5'2'' petite asian girl named Miyoko. This created many a problem when Miyoko would base (that's what Yuki's doing) our moves, because it was a bit like an orange on a toothpick to borrow a phrase from Mike Meyers. Basically we were far too top-heavy.

On this fateful day Yuki split Miyoko and I up because all of the partners needed to be of equal size and strength. Turns out this meant I got matched with two dudes. Yuki then proceeded to show us the move we'd be working on. One partner got into a crab walk position...

...and the other partner did a headstand with their head tucked between the other person's legs. This is how I ended up with my head between a guys legs while he thigh-squeezed my neck for "support" and nearly suffocated me. In case you were wondering my eyes were FIRMLY SHUT the entire time.

It's hard to believe that this is not my worst yoga experience. That honor goes to Cynthia of the YMCA yoga hour. Cynthia, a skinny black woman with blond spiral curls and buggy eyes, gathered all of us in a circle before the stretching began. She began a long speech about how we should write LOVE on the bottom of our water bottles because water can feel the vibrations and ended with a lesson on the power of chanting.

"I want everyone to say their name, color, and purpose," Cynthia said. "Then the circle will chant it back to them. Our names have a marvelous power when people say them. Okay, I'll start. Cynthia. Radiant Gold. Unconditional Love."

Then we all chanted "Cynthia. Radiant Gold. Unconditional Love. Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia."

Note: I am not making this up or even embellishing. 

I think the worst part of yoga is when something is inadvertantly hilarious, but of course laughing is taboo. I already have a tendency to laugh at inappropriate times. For instance, one time, while I was riding an elevator with an older friend of my parents and a few other teenage girls, the family friend related the story of her aunt's untimely demise. It seems the aunt had pressed the button for the elevator and stepped inside when the doors opened. However no there was no elevator car and she fell down the empty shaft and died. In the silence of elevator my snicker was deafening.

"Lauren!" My sister hissed. I mumbled an apology which was accepted with an air of wounded dignity, but I still maintain YOU CANNOT TELL ME A STORY LIKE THAT WHILE WE'RE IN AN ELEVATOR!

Yoga  brings out the inappropriate laughter in me, even without Cynthia Radiant Gold. I forced myself to stare at the ground because if I made eye contact with a single other person I would have to escort myself from the class. Perhaps this would have been for the best. When it came around to my turn it was all I could do to stammer out: Lauren. Blue. Love?

After the chanting portion we moved into balancing our chakras. This involved placing our hand on the appropriate chakra and mimicking Cynthia's deep grunting noises. I proceeded, if awkwardly, until we came to the pelvic chakra. Cheeks burning, I placed my hand on the very topmost of what could still be considered my pelvis. Cynthia gave a loud, low grunt and I half-heartedly repeated wondering if this was legal as I was still a minor.

"Lower!" Cynthia shouted. I whimpered and lowered my hand an inch. Finally, Cynthia decided we ought to do a few poses and the class became something recognizable.

It was a long time before I returned to yoga, and my chakras have remained happily  imbalanced ever since.

Hilarious video courtesy of Mij:
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-3179/Every-Bad-Yoga-Teacher-Stereotype-in-7-Minutes-Video.html

Let's All Keep Our Clothes On

This morning I stumbled across an article on msn.com about a group of old men  who decided to pose naked in a calendar in an effort to raise much needed funds for their church (see link below). The first thought that ran through my mind was: "Again?" It seems like every year since "Calendar Girls" came out some group of senior citizens decides to get naked for a good cause.

One of these geritols who bare it all was quoted as saying: "I felt very comfortable. I removed my clothing, and it felt natural to me."

Well there's a shocker. Anybody who's ever been to a gym knows that old people feel no compunction about prancing around in the buff, parts flapping and swinging,  that once remained more or less stationary. I've been personally mortified in the ladies room.


Really? I can't unsee that you know.

 And from what I understand the men's room is even worse. At least women don't unabashedly blow dry their reproductive organs.

I've got a novel suggestion. What if we all just kept our clothes on? It used to be called modesty, but that seems like an old-fashioned concept, so let's call it emulating Annie Edison. This character from the NBC sitcom Community sums it up perfectly in an episode where the school puts on an STD fair in an effort to raise awareness among college students about how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

She says: "I like being repressed. I am totally comfortable being uncomfortable with my sexuality. And maybe, just maybe, if everyone were a little bit more like me, we wouldn't have to have an STD fair."

Amen to that. Another question: Who is buying these things? Either it's friends and family...


Hey kids, let's all look at this picture of grandpa hiding his business behind a trashcan lid! 

...or it's random strangers with a fetish for naked old people. I'm not sure which is more frightening.

I like walking around sans pants as much as anyone, but, and this is important, only in the privacy of my own home. So grandpa please, for the love, put on some suspenders so those trousers stay securely in place.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44778024/ns/today-today_people/t/full-monty-geritol-men---doff-duds-church/?gt1=43001#.TpHT85sUpts

-Shadow