We hold these truths to be self-evident

My nine year old son came home a few weeks ago with an assignment that required him to memorize a portion of the preamble to the constitution.

I should explain that this assignment did not appear in conjunction with a lesson on the content of the words they were memorizing. Oh no. They were just supposed to learn it, to hell with meaning. But I try to be a good mother and roll model, so I joined the crazy party and made him memorize the thing.

The assignment, common to all the fourth graders at my local elementary school, sparked a gaggle of facebook banter. A sea of disgruntled and incredulous dissent swept across the familiar blue and white screen, but in the end, we all caved. Every single one of us.

I actually wound up memorizing the darn thing right along with him – even my six year old knows a bit, maybe the dog does, I don’t know. We moved through our lives with a sliver of paper flopping around like a pathetic appendage that I would whip out at traffic lights while in route to soccer games, soccer practice, church, the park, the grocery store, wherever.

Whenever I did this, I smiled and reminded my son that this was “the introduction to an amazing document, a work of rhetorical genius that has served as the foundation for our country and for others in their pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!”

Of course, when I said it, I sounded like Tour Guide Barbie and my kids can smell insincerity like dogs smell fear. My son, inconvenient genius that he is, was not having it. He gave me the same, yeah whatever mom smile he gives me when I mention Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy: the smile that says, “I know this is a crock, but I’ll play along.”

And you know what? I have a sneaky suspicion he might be right. I mean seriously, what exactly is the value of memorizing those lines? For that matter, what exactly is the purpose of myriad little requirements he’s had in his four years since kindergarten? If I had a dollar for every seemingly pointless process, I’d be a fairly wealthy girl.

Case in point: around the same time that the now-infamous memorization fiasco occurred, my son showed me something called a Boss chart. Several steps that helped you understand how to round numbers up. Apparently, the number on the right is the “boss” and the “boss” is always right.

Seriously?

Are there kids out there struggling with this? 5 & up round up. 4 & down round down. I’m done.

But they have a chart, a story and maybe even a song (yes, I actually do see songs from time to time) designed to help them remember equally inane processes. It might just be me, but isn’t it harder to learn all the extra stuff? Maybe they’d remember the tree a little better if you didn’t make them touch the whole forest just to do so.

That’s just me, though. What do I know?

Clearly the necessity of these steps is considered “self-evident” to the powers that be. If not, then why in the heck do they subject our kids to it?

I realize the idea of what is or isn’t necessary when it comes to education can be tricky. Trust me, I know, I was in the classroom for 11 years hashing out many of these idiotic processes. But even I drew the line when they asked me to recite rap songs about the parts of speech. I think I’d rather show my boobs on the internet thank you very much.

Of course, it isn’t just educators who are at fault, this insanity transcends the classroom. I mean, do kids need someone hovering over them when they play outside? Do I need to enroll them in sports at age 3 and hire a trainer at age 6? Do I need to establish play dates so they won’t be weird? Do I really need to pump them full of fluoride or vitamins or only feed them raw vegetables that they have chewed 23 times (the recommended average)?

I don’t know.

I mean, I should know. I’m mom, after all. I’m supposed to know everything, but I don’t. So for now I’ll be the girl assuming that all of the frantic hovering goes with the territory. I’ll err on the side of caution and all that. Yeah, I'll play along, but in the back of my mind I’ll be wondering if this was one of those self-evident truths that will revolutionize the world (or at least the lives of my children) or if it’s all just a crock.

No Sweat

On most days, I can be found at my local YMCA sweating and straining and grunting in the most embarrassing of ways. I do it on purpose, by the way, despite the fact that it really sounds kind of masochistic when I put it this way.

Unlike most people, I didn’t join my gym to lose weight. For me, getting in shape was secondary; I joined my gym to fight the crazies.

That’s right, you heard (read) me correctly. My therapist, juggernaut of insight that she is, suggested that I start working out to ease tension and release stress. And she was right, I mean, I’m not one for self-diagnosis, but I believe I was suffering from a bout of the hohums and an acute case of Shleprockitis. Don't even ask about the woe-is-mees.

But I have drifted off topic just to explain that I was in the gym for an hour six days a week and that I wasn’t there to lose weight. My apologies. So much for exercise increasing your ability to focus.

You know me, I'm one for analysis and it doesn't stop when I'm working out. I watched the crowd over my first months of membership and decided that it could be be split into two basic categories. No, not the sexy and the sloppy. It’s a YMCA, not a Bally’s for crying out loud. No, the two categories I registered were those who drip and those who stayed dry.

The drippers were splotchy and wet and a little gross if you must know. They were the ones who left the gym in desperate need of a shower -- STAT.

The dry crowd might have worked into a glow. They looked aware and ever so slightly rejuvenated, like the people in a coffee shop, or folks with recent Botox injections. These are the folks who'd leave the gym, still clad in their lycra and spandex, and continue comfortably on to a series of errands when their workout was done.

Until about a month and a half ago, I was proud to be in the dry crowd. After all, sweating is gross and I was a delicate flower.

Unfortunately, I was a delicate flower with a fat ass.

Of course, anyone who’s ever spent time in a gym knows that you can only go so long before stories of amazing weight loss come rolling in. There were people who’d done what I was doing and the results were 20, 25, 30 – even 35 missing lbs.

Me? Not so much.

I worked out six days a week for six months and didn’t so much as lose a pound. In fact, a gained a few – damn that “muscle weighs more than fat” clause.

Well, call me a genius, but after six months I started wondering how I could maybe get in on the weight loss action. I studied my peers to see what they did that I didn’t do. There may have been eating differences, but I couldn’t prove this. The one glaringly obvious difference was that they were all drippers and I wasn’t.

So I kicked it up a notch and found that I (delicate flower that I am) am, in fact, capable of sweat.

Oh, I can get downright beastly if you let me. I actually did tricep push-ups the other day and sweat so hard that I couldn’t see. I don’t soak the floor like my new role models, but I have a dream. . .

Baby steps.

I’ve also stopped eating like the calorie rules don’t apply to me (it turns out they do). That helped. So far I’ve lost 9 pounds in the last 4 weeks, ten if you catch me in the morning.

Tuesday morning a gym buddy and I were briefly discussing this idea. The idea of sweat, I mean. She was soaking wet and we were kind of celebrating. It’s gross, I know.

Our conversation got me to thinking about the importance of sweat and the effort that it both requires and reveals. I considered the journey I’d made from one who never sweats to one who can drip with the best of them.

Thinking about the journey naturally led me to consider my starting point and I realized that it’s been a long time since I’ve felt stressed out the way I did back in February. I thought of the many things that had originally stressed me out then (landing me on my therapist’s couch) and I realized that many of these things still bother me, but they don’t overwhelm me.

I work not to let them. I pray for strength. I reframe issues to gain proper perspective. I delight in the long-term benefits of short term sacrifice and a willingness to be uncomfortable.

In many ways, I treat the challenges in my life the same way I treat challenges in the gym.

I won’t lie to you and tell you that it’s easy. It isn’t. I work my booty off (literally) every single day, but that’s okay because I feel good. And the stresses and strains? Well, that’s no sweat.

Hope is the thing

There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that I love called "‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers." I considered opening this blog post with it, but then thought it might just freak you out to be bombarded with random nineteenth century poetry without warning. If you’d like to read it, I did post it at the end :o).

This poem begins to run through my head whenever the concept of hope is introduced into my day. It captures the buoyancy of hope, the floating, flying feeling that we get when we allow it to sustain us.

It sounds cheesy saying so out loud, but in many ways, hope is so like a little bird that flutters in our spirits and keeps us floating when life looks bleak. I dare say that hope is more accessible than faith, because it lives in you regardless of belief.

For someone like me, who’s part Vulcan and entirely too cerebral, hope is like a delicious basket of fresh baked bread when you’re on the Atkins diet: all wrong but oh, oh, oh so right!

Hope is ridiculous. It is illogical. It is unfounded and unlikely. Still, hope is beautiful in its irony.

So why is it that the hopeful sometimes find themselves getting screwed so hard? This is the question that has rattled around in my head since last night. That’s when I learned that a friend of mine’s relationship is not likely to float, despite all the hope in the world.

Sure, we could analyze what she did wrong – the times she zigged when she should have zagged – but in the end, her crime was hoping and that just sucks big, hairy man tail.

Don’t we hear stories of unlikely successes that result in happy endings all the time? Hope, ridiculous, illogical, unfounded, unlikely, dumbass hope is rewarded every day. So why do some of us crap out when we attempt to be players in the hope game?

I don’t know, but it hurts me to be on (or close to) the losing team. When I’m on this end, I am sobered into remembering that I love logic. I like the equations that make life simple: hard work + perseverance + ambition = success.

Ah, now that’s a world that sounds comfy.

Unfortunately, it’s not the world in which we live. Our world is topsy turvy, unpredictable and often blaringly unfair, but what can you do except hope for the best?

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson

"Hope" is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the Gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land

And on the strangest Sea

Yet never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

It’s been a long standing joke that I may, in fact, be part (if not at least half) Vulcan. What can I say? It is hardly my fault that I’m intensely cerebral. Notice that I say that I am cerebral, not necessarily smart – there is a difference.

I think first. Always. It’s what I do. It’s who I am.

I didn’t say that I think smart thoughts. Nope. Only that I think. A lot.

And hey, it could be worse, right? It’s not like people are calling me part Klingon – now that would be a drag.

Being cerebral has its advantages. It’s what allows me to become immersed in a book. It’s what allows me to over think even the smallest idea, dissect it, and serve the result up to you in this blog. I’d venture to say that it is what makes me wonderful in a million little ways. Okay, admittedly, it also makes me a bit creepy at times as well. But I’ll take it.

The down side of being cerebral is that sometimes it gives me the appearance of being somewhat robotic. Shocked? Don’t be. It’s okay. You can hold off on the violin solo because like I said, there’s an upside.

In my past life, the Vulcan thing always seemed to trip me up. I viewed the world through quantitative glasses, processing everything in a series of binary assessments. Unfortunately, I was working with humans who were (1) fallible despite the fact that they were responsible for molding and shaping lives and (2) Southerners who needed. . .well, more than I had to give at the time.

It was fine with students of course. Children are incomplete. They are not to be expected to have their collective crap together. Even a robot could spot ‘em the points. But adults? For adults I had expectations that I never seemed able to concede.

I don’t think there is much secret to the fact that I married my husband – who has more heart than the Lion in Oz – because he is the keeper of all things human. Generally speaking, I love that he has emotions. I watch him sometimes, feeling and experiencing life in his human way, and I wonder how he does it.

On these occasions, I feel like that robot Sonny from I, Robot watching Will Smith and working to emulate the wink. “Ah ha! I’ve got it!” I shout, celebrating my little victories and yet, there is still something stilted in my movements. The Vulcan thing.

Alas, my husband also married me. I suppose this is where the challenge is introduced. It can’t be easy to be married to a robot Vulcan, even someone who is only part robot Vulcan. Every now and again, you need them to throw you a bone, to get excited about human victories that may or may not compute.

It happened last Sunday in our household. My husband, generally not one for throwing so much as an expletive, threw down the gauntlet. It was time for a little appreciation – and I don’t mean in a dirty way, although I must admit I like where you were headed!

What’s a robot Vulcan girl who loves her all-heart Lion to do?

I’ll tell you: I made a call to a member of my task force: A group of women who are bilingual, speaking brain as well as heart. Impressed? You totally should be, it’s not easy – the verb conjugation alone is murder, but I digress. I spent hours being tutored in how to value rather than expect. (Seriously, at some point these women should write a book). People, my head nearly exploded. By the end of the day Monday, I had only one small, sincere point of gratitude – and I had to sweat bullets just to get it.

But a funny thing happened when I began to talk to my Lion. Standing there, with only a kernel of evidence for all my hours of toil, the least likely, least logical of things happened. More and more and more gratitude began to flow from my lips – and okay, who am I kidding? From my hips.

I found all the things that robots think are par for the course, and that humans celebrate. Things like effort, attempt, desire, and intention. For a moment, I glimpsed humanity and I gotta tell you people, this robot Vulcan has never been more certain that a little gratitude for imperfection is a beautifully illogical thing.