There's a Reason People Aren't Fish

One day last week, I swam 1/2 mile without stopping for the first time. But I didn't believe myself, so on Sunday, I made Tiffany go with me to the pool to make sure I hadn't counted wrong (thank God, I hadn't).

She took me to her pool. When we got there, we stopped on a platform overlooking the lanes so I could get the lay of the water. I didn't like what I saw. There were at least 20 lanes and all of them were full.

"What are these people doing?" I said. "Don't they have anything better to do on a Sunday?"

Tiffany raised her eyebrows but kindly didn't point out the obvious.

"What is that woman doing?" I asked, pointing my finger at one of the slow lanes.

"Sidestroke."

"At least I'm better than her."

Tiffany rolled her eyes.

"I'm not sharing a lane with any of these people," I said, "look at that woman! She looks like a turtle trying to flip over! Is that the backstroke? That man there isn't even swimming. He's floating. They all look like idiots."

Tiffany dragged me into the locker-room before I could berate the entire pool. When we came out in our flip-flops, the lanes were still full. Despite my glaring, no one got out. We had to settle for the right side and left side of two adjacent lanes for our new strategy, devised after my first triathlon debacle, in which Tiffany will set the pace and I will follow slightly behind her so she can see my bobbing head when she breathes to her right and I can see her kicking feet when I breathe to my left.

"I can't touch!" I cried, as I slipped into the water. Tiffany's pool is deeper than mine.

"You don't need to touch," she said, "you're swimming, remember?"

Then she looked at me. Took me in in all my glorious swim-capped goggled-ness, and burst out laughing.

"What?"

"I love you, but you look... like an idiot."

Date Night!

Tiffany and I went on a date to a movie on a school night last week. Of course, I'm not in school, and Tiffany is between classes right now, so technically "school night" is incorrect, but it's how we refer to Monday thru Thursday nights in a bit of nostalgia for the years when school nights were the worst thing ever. "Work night" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Work nights do, however, have the same effect on us. We rarely go out Monday thru Thursday. This is partly because we both get up before the garbage trucks and partly because we're mental octogenarians.

On this particular occasion, I was running late from work, so Tiffany picked me up on the scooter. She doesn't like to go out-out on the scooter because the helmet messes up her hair. Also, it's hard to look glamorous on a beat-up two-wheeler with a gigantic dent and a missing tail light and side-mirror. One of my presents for her most recent birthday was veto power on a trip for which I insist--in the name of efficiency and frugality-- on the scooter. So far, she hasn't used the coupon.

We were headed to the Castro for the opening night of the gay and lesbian film festival. As I'm sure you can imagine, the gay and lesbian film festival is a really big deal in San Francisco. One of Tiffany's clients gave us tickets (thank you!), and, when we got there, the neighborhood was hopping with the usual characters (If you remember, this is the neighborhood where we saw two, count-'em two penises one Sunday.). Parking would have been a disaster, but not on a scooter! We slid right into a space between two cars at meters and pranced into the theater, failing to notice the gigantic "No Parking" signs that had been taped to the meter poles.

When we came out two hours later, a gigantic party-supply truck was trying to back into what would have been a huge series of open metered-spots except for this beat-up scooter plopped right in the middle of its path.

"Why is our scooter all by itself?" Tiffany asked.

"Uh-oh," I said.

A crowd of gay men had gathered to watch the truck-scooter face-off unfold. It was obvious our scooter would lose.

"Wait!" we screamed, darting across the street. "It's ours! Wait!"

Thankfully, they did. The man directing the truck rolled his eyes as we fumbled to put on our helmets and find our keys.

"Go, go, go," I hissed to Tiffany.

"My earrings are stuck on the helmet!" she cried.

The gay men laughed at our panic.

"I told you it was lesbians," one called drily to another as they smoked outside a bar.

"Well, duh," Tiffany whispered to me as our scooter finally started. "Like gay men would drive an old thing like this."

Nanas Know Best

It's a good thing I stopped caring about winning when I walked off the soccer field for the last time in college.

On Saturday, I did my first triathlon. I didn't win. I wasn't last, either, but three of the people I beat were: 74-years-old, 9-years-old, and recovering from a kidney transplant. Literally, that's what the announcer said about each of them as they crossed the finish line.

The swim killed me. And, because Tiffany is my caring, wonderful, supportive girlfriend and would never abandon me in search of a medal, it killed her too. I didn't like not being able to see more than a few inches in front of me in the lake or having bodies splashing all around me. With no black line at the bottom of a pool to follow, I had to stop every few strokes and make sure I wasn't swimming in the total opposite direction.

I thought I would be fine. In fact, I was so confident as we waded into the lake (which at 70 degrees was warmer than the 50 degree air temperature) that I reassured a girl who looked more nervous than me.

"You'll be fine," I soothed before lowering my body into the muck and beginning my freestyle stroke in water so shallow I was pulling up algae.

In fact, she was fine. She left me in her wake, plodding along steadily while I alternated between freestyle, treading water, breast stroke and willing the lifeguards away from my vicinity. (Despite my glacial pace, I did not need to be rescued. But they were watching me closely.)

Anyway, I called my grandmother later that day to tell her I'd finished.

"Congratulations!" she cried into the phone.

"I didn't win, Nana," I said.

"But you finished!"

Aren't Nanas wonderful?

Pant Like a Dog

When I was little, and it was time for me to get my shots, my older brother always sat in the exam room with me. I sat on the papered exam table, staring wide-eyed at the door I knew the doctor would eventually come through, and my brother stood beside me, distracting me with Highlights magazine.

When the doctor came in, Brandon took charge.

"Don't worry, Rebecca," he promised. "You'll hardly even feel it."

He pinched me.

"See?" he asked. "It's not even like that. Did that hurt?"

"No," I whispered, lying.

When the needle came out, though, my brother grew pale. He grabbed my hand and told me to squeeze it, but squeezed mine instead. While my mom looked on from the chair, Brandon coached me the way he had been coached by her.

"Pant like a dog," he said, his eyes darting wildly from the needle to the soft skin of my arm, which the nurse was swabbing with a wet cotton ball.

(I'm not sure where my family picked up this "pant like a dog" distraction technique, but we were sort of famous for it in the small pediatrician's office we used until my brother and I went to college. "There goes the Beyer family," the nurses probably whispered to each other as the four of us made our way from waiting room to scale to exam room over the years. "You know, the ones who pant like dogs.")

"Don't look at the needle!" Brandon cried, turning his head 180 degrees away from the approaching syringe.

But I did look.

"Rebecca, don't look... I can't do it," he finally yelled, throwing my hand down and racing from the room as our doctor chuckled.

"Pant like a dog!" my brother yelled, vanishing behind the door.

As I've gotten older, I've become more like my brother in my aversion to the sight of other people's pain or potential pain. The other night, my chicken-shittedness came out in full force. Tiffany and I sat down to watch 127 Hours, the movie about the hiker who has to cut off his own arm to survive after being pinned to a wall by a falling boulder. (Strangely, my brother recommended this movie.) When the inevitable scene began, Tiffany got up to wash the dishes. But I stayed on the couch, trying to be brave.

"Tell me when he's done!" she yelled over the sound of the water, which did nothing for me in the living room to mask the sound of flesh being penetrated with a pocket knife.

"Oh god," I whispered.

"Rebecca?" Tiffany called.

But I couldn't answer. I had turned away from the television to press my face into the couch cushion.

"What are you doing?" Tiffany asked, coming into the room.

"I think I might pass out," I said, my voice muffled, "but don't tell my brother if I do."

And then I started panting like a dog.

We're a Sticky-Note

Every time I mail something to my brother, I have to look up his address. I pretty much have my mom's address down, except for the zip code, which I often confuse with my grandmother's, which, until my mom moved and got the similarly patterned zip code, was the only address in my family I had memorized.

This is a sad state of affairs.

I've mentioned before that there are five people in my nuclear family: my mom, my brother, me, my grandmother and my dad. As a family, we lived in four different houses in three different states. Today, we live in four different cities and three different states. My brother and I have moved so much for work and school that we bought my mom a three-faced clock to keep track of the different time zones we live in.

Tiffany and her sister, too, have moved several times in the last few years. By my count, they've hit six cities in six years. The last time Tiffany and I moved--last summer--it was only a few blocks down the street. Still, a move is a move is a move: Not too long ago, Tiffany's mom mailed us a tub of chocolate chip cookies and accidentally sent them to our old address. This was tragic. But-- thank God for mail-forwarding--we received the cookies before they went stale.

When my mom came to visit last, we joked about the state of her address book, with its whited-out entries, penciled in additions and entire pages scratched out. I was sure Tiffany and I had merited a new spot in ink, but my mom shook her head.

"You and Tiffany?" she laughed. "You're a sticky-note."

Life in the Medium Lane

I was the first person waiting outside the Y for it to open this morning. The second person was a little old lady with a pink swim noodle. We nodded at each other politely. In the few minutes before the doors opened, twenty or so more people lined up behind us. I remained the youngest early bird by a good 30 years.

After the old lady and I swiped in, we both headed for the elevator. I hesitated for just a minute--considering the size of my bike and the width of the stairs--and in that instant, the old lady tried to close the elevator doors on me.

"Can I squeeze in?" I asked, thrusting my front tire forward to block the doors.

She waved me through curtly.

After I locked my bike up on the gym's roof, I sprinted down the stairs to change into my swimsuit (yes, I had to buy a new one after my ancient Speedo could not be located). See, after my moment of bravado in which I said I might do a triathlon with my girlfriend Tiffany, I had a second moment of bravado where I actually signed up and paid money to do a triathlon with my girlfriend Tiffany. Now that I've paid for it, I'm sure to follow through. Which means, I have to start swimming. And biking. And running more. But mostly swimming.

"Oh, wonderful!" my 87-year-old grandmother said when I told her what I was doing. "I remember going to your swim meets... when was that?"

"When I was 8 and swam for the Shawnee Sharks," I replied.

"You'll be fine, sweetie," Nana said. "I just know it."

My dad expressed less confidence, much like the time I told him Tiffany and I were going to replace my mom's leaky toilet ("Rebecca," he said. "This is a no-brainer. Call a plumber.").

"Whoo," he said, "that swim's going to be tough."

Anyway, that's why I've been at the Y every morning for the past week, doing my damnedest to swim exactly 1/2 mile without stopping. I'm very slow. Which is why I was sprinting from my bike to the pool. I had a feeling I knew where the little old lady was going.

Sure enough, as I came dripping out of the shower, she was shuffling along with her noodle toward the slow lane.

"Are you going in the slow lane?"I asked, looking over my shoulder at the "activity" pool where all the other little old ladies were bouncing around on their noodles.

"Yes," she said, snapping her swim cap around her head.

I looked reluctantly at the medium lane, considered diving into the slow lane before the old lady could make her way down the ladder, and then thought better of it.

"Today, I'm medium," I whispered to myself as I eased into the water.

And, you know what, all things being relative, I really was medium. While I adjusted my goggles, the little old lady straddled her noodle and began to paddle backwards down the length of the pool.

I looked like lightning next to her.

I Know It's Here Somewhere...

"This dresser does not reflect my life."

I kept my head ducked down searching through a bottom drawer while Tiffany tore through a drawer above me. We were looking for my swimsuit. Not my bikini. My full-coverage swimsuit that I bought... you know, it's so old I probably didn't buy it. I think my parents bought it for me when I was nursing a knee injury in high school and couldn't run. In a moment of passing bravado, I may have suggested to Tiffany that I could run a triathlon with her despite the fact that I've never combined swimming, biking and running in a single day, let alone consecutively in a race with other people who combine such activities regularly. On the off-chance I follow through on that suggestion, I figure I should swim, and I don't think triathletes swim in bikinis.

Anyway, we had already looked through the gigantic suitcases at the top of our closet where we keep out-of-season clothes (read: any summer-weather clothes since San Francisco doesn't have a summer).

"Maybe it is in the dresser," I said softly as Tiffany stood on her tiptoes on our kitchen stool, straining to shove the suitcases back into the corner of the top shelf.

"What?" she said. "You mean you didn't look in your dresser?"

"Well, I looked," I said. "But maybe not as good as I could have."

"I swear to God, Rebecca, if I get down there and find that swimsuit in the dresser after standing up here on a one-by-one stool..."

She trailed off, but the message was clear.

"You know how I am," I said, offering her my hand as she hopped down.

You know that disorder some people have where they can't recognize things right in front of their face. Agnosia, I think? I have "whatever-I-am-looking-for-agnosia," so that if I am looking for AA batteries in the cluttered drawer where I know batteries should be, I don't see them. And when I complain to Tiffany that I don't see them, she comes to help, and, lo and behold, they are found.

But strangely, instead of sympathy, my particular disorder elicits irritation. Especially because in looking for things, I tend to leave chaos in my path. Hence the dresser drawer Tiffany was pawing through. I'd already pawed through it, so it looked like a tiny tornado had breezed in and out.

Thankfully, no swimsuit.

"No big deal," I said casually, "it probably had a see-through butt by now."

TIffany glared at me.

"Oh, but I would have worn it if we'd found it," I back-pedaled. "I mean, I'm sure no one would have noticed."

In the Ring

"Is she going to punch us?"

This morning Tiffany and I decided to take a beginner boxing class. At beginner boxing class, they loan you a pair of gloves. I almost vomited when I put them on--that's how bad they smelled.

"Hands up!" the tattoo-covered instructor yelled. She was bouncing all around the room in her boxing shoes. "Hands in front of your face! Do you want to get pummeled?"

"No," I whispered, putting my hands up. I made the mistake of inhaling and then gagged, throwing up in my mouth a little. "No, seriously, babe, is she going to hit us?"

"Don't breathe through your nose!" Tiffany hissed.

"Don't push your bag!" the woman yelled.

I was totally pushing my bag. To stop it from swinging, I hugged it discreetly.

"Don't hug your bag!" the woman yelled.

I glared at her.

"Have you boxed before?" the woman asked Tiffany while I circled my bag, one-twoing, one-twoing.

"No," Tiffany answered.

"Are you lying to me?" the woman said, raising her eyebrows. "You're a natural."

I rolled my eyes.

"Pivot," the woman said coming over to witness my feeble attempts at appearing natural. She wrenched my ankle out from under me. "P-i-v-o-t. Move your feet."

Then we got to spar. I thought I would be a good spar-er, but I wasn't. Not even a little bit good. I called out one punch for Tiffany and then held my gloves up in the total wrong position. Also, I left my gut exposed, which the instructor demonstrated by reeling back and pretend-punching my stomach.

"One, two, three, four!" I shouted to Tiffany, holding my hands up for her to hit them and then moving them out of the way.

"I'm punching you," Tiffany reminded me. "Keep your gloves still."

"Hands up!" the woman shouted somewhere near my right ear.

Tiffany and I burst out laughing.

"What are you doing!?" the woman yelled.

"Boxing!" I shouted back, giggling.

Naturally.

Camp Out!

There's nothing like camping: the stars, the gigantic redwood trees, the sound of Frank in the morning.

Oh, you don't know Frank?

Thank your lucky stars. The stars we were sleeping under were a little bit hateful.

Tiffany and I went camping with our friends Joe and Betsy this past weekend. Joe and Betsy, who are experienced campers, brought everything we could possibly need: a lantern, a cook-stove, matches, pots, plates and silverware, coffee filters, and bear protection (on the itemized list on the side of their big tupperware camping-bin, all these things were listed. Bear protection, which came in what looked like a hair-spray bottle, had two exclamation points after it.) Tiffany and I don't have a big tupperware camping-bin. We have a tiny lime-green tent from Target and two sleeping bags.

When we arrived at the campsite and pitched our tents, Tiffany and I stood, jaws dropped to the forest floor, as Betsy and Joe unwrapped their palatial estate. Their tent could hold four of our tents. Plus, they remembered pillows. Tiffany and I lay our heads both nights on folded up clothes.

But, it turned out, of all the things Joe and Betsy had, they didn't have the one thing we really needed: Frank-repellant.

We didn't see Frank the day we arrived. We heard him the next morning.

Shortly after the birds began chirping, I rolled over to cuddle Tiffany without my arms, which were cocooned in my sleeping bag.

"Isn't this awesome?" I whispered. "Listen to those birds."

And then...

"Hello? Steve? Steve? Can you hear me? It's Frank!"

From nowhere, the sound of a man's voice boomed throughout the forest. I froze.

"Steve? I'm here camping. You've got to come out here!"

"What is that?" I hissed.

"Shhhh!" Tiffany hissed back.

"I've got my skull-and-cross-bones flag and everything!"

I unzipped our tiny lime-green Target tent's window to see what I could see. A 60-something giant of a man was sitting in front of his campfire the next site over. Bald and hulking, he looked like an aged version of Sloth from Goonies. Indeed, he did have a skull-and-cross-bones flag flying high. He was shouting into his phone.

"Steve! They've got turkeys out here! I see one now! GOBBLE-GOBBLE-GOBBLE!"

"Babe, he's gobbling!"I pleaded.

But Tiffany was ignoring me. She does that sometimes when I complain about things that cannot be controlled. I heard Joe and Betsy groan in their tent as Frank hung up on Steve only to call another friend.

"How are you!?" he shouted. "I'm just out here camping. I don't know about the reception, though..."

"Crystal clear," I said, loud enough for Joe and Betsy to hear so they knew I knew Frank was a pain in the a** too. They giggled from their canvas mansion.

Eventually, Frank got off the phone. Later in the day, he blared Tom Petty on his boom-box, threw knives at a dart board, operated a remote-controlled car from the comfort of his camping chair and smoked a bowl.

When we weren't doing our own fun camping things--riding bikes, laying by the river, playing catch and poking our fire--we tried to imagine all the possibilities for Frank that did not involve him murdering us.

"He's too nice to be a serial killer," I told Joe after Frank offered to turn his music down when he caught us all staring at him over our steaming cups of hot chocolate. It was 7:15 in the morning.

"That's the trick serial killers use," Joe said.

Of course you know Frank didn't kill us. After a while we began to think of him as our own reality television show. The only problem--we couldn't shut him off.