You know there are classes that help people practice mindful eating? I think they sit at a table and they pace you. (I’m making it off.) But my real life mindful eating training was first grade, where we paid a quarter a week for two pretzel rods. Every kid in that class ate the grains of salt off the pretzel rods one my one, slowing licking off the each and every layer of pretzel epidermis down to its white sloppy, mushy heart. It must have taken like thirty minutes. No idea how the teacher ever tolerated it.
K.C. Royals
First Son has begun an obsession with baseball, but all is not lost. He got a card featuring a player on the Kansas City Royals, and he held it up as he sang “Royals†by Lorde to me. Heh heh.
With this latest obsession, I am regularly recruited to hit a ball with a bat, pitch, and run bases about twice a day. I have not held a bat since seventh grade. It is actually fun to hold a baseball – it truly is the perfect size for a palm (or mine).
As an adult, I have the wherewithal and experience to take that simple step of extending the bat, analyzing the best point to swing, and actually hitting the ball. This never happened back in the days of adolescent yore. I, probably like many kids or girls, felt too self-conscious to even extend the bat. To appear that I was trying would demonstrate that I cared, and if I failed without trying, that was better than failing with trying.
I was telling all this blathering to Husband how I took the time to extend my bat to judge where the ball should go and the background as an adult, an impossibility when it really counted (junior high school, when it could have made me more popular). He paused and asked me in all reverent seriousness, “would you like me to teach you?” I’m like, god no! Sure, if we could time travel, a lesson would have been fantastic when I was young, but now I’m 45. What do I care?
Nevertheless, he made me get off the TV watching couch to take his lesson and I allowed it without rolling my eyes. Sigh.
serena williams
There is some hullaboo over this recent portrait of Serena Williams, whom I completely worship. The piece mentions how there was something that bothered her about her backhand, she decided to drill it 2,500 times and started the count over whenever she messed up. When she realized she was pregnant, she strategized winning each match in two sets, to minimize exerting herself. Ugh, she’s brilliant. The article is bout her and her fiance, the founder of Reddit, who said “she makes me want to be a better version of myself.†Lame. Dude, the lady makes _all of us_ want to be a better version, uh doy. What is so special about you? But then, perhaps that’s too tough a question to ever answer. Serena is exceptional and trying to come up with an equal is a losing game. Couplings happen when both parties are ready for the next step at the same time. Besides, they detail how their first date was a six hour walk in Paris and that the wonder for her was going through the city like a normal person. It’s exactly the plot of “The Prince and Me†starring Julia Stiles. (Like my version of charming royalty would be take them to the public library, CVS, and Starbucks. “See Prince Harry, this is where I buy toilet paper,†etc. etc. etc.)
The writing by Buzz Bissinger is fantastic and the hullaboo I mentioned was the fact that Serena poses nude in her pregnant body. I get that people are tired of celebrity indulgences, but this is Serena. Her body and her mind are essential elements to her game and legacy. She can do whatever she wants.