Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Playing Catch


I gave myself a blister throwing a frisbee with my brother Brandon and our best friend Zac in Miami a couple of weeks ago. 

I'm actually a pretty good frisbee thrower. But when you have an older brother, pretty good isn't good enough. You have to be:

"Wow!" Brandon said, "I didn't even have to move my hands for that one!"

Once you make a throw that good, you have to keep making throws that good, until you get a blister.

Of course, nobody can throw that well every time.

Soon my throws were sailing over Brandon's head and way to the right of Zac, near the couple making out under an umbrella.

Unlike me and Brandon, Zac has never been obsessed with being the best in ridiculous physical activities like frisbee. He understands, innately, that sometimes being the best means blisters, and so he sat down in the beach chair when Brandon and I headed into the water to practice our "diving catches."

"You're overthinking it!" Brandon yelled as he waded into the deep for the umpteenth time to retrieve one of my bad throws.

"That's because I'm having flashbacks to when we were little and you would say exactly that!" I screamed back. "I feel like I'm 7 years old again!"

Still, no matter how many bad throws I made, Brandon stayed across from me trying to catch them. There is no passage of time with siblings. You are always one throw away from the best throw ever.

And a blister.








Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Look Before You Lock


Stop in the name of love.

That's what I wrote on a sliver of a sticky note to put above our top door lock recently. I had no choice. That morning, like several other mornings in the past few months, I found myself locked in our apartment by my gorgeous, kind, terribly forgetful fiancee.

A few months ago, Tiffany and I locked ourselves out of our apartment and paid several hundred dollars to have new locks made. But apparently it takes several hundred more dollars to make the inside lock match the outside lock. I'm not sure, really, since we weren't given that choice. What this means is that we cannot lock (or unlock) our top lock from inside our apartment. We can only lock it from outside our apartment, which Tiffany does quite often when she leaves for work, and I'm still sleeping inside.

The other day I dialed Tiffany's place of business.

"Hi, this is Rebecca, and my partner Tiffany is training someone in your gym. Can you tell her she locked me in the apartment... again?"

"You're locked out?" the receptionist said.

"In."

"Wait, hold on, let me take this down. What happened?"

Sigh.

By the time Tiffany got home--sprinting up the stairs and apologizing from the hallway while I waited inside with my backpack and sunglasses on--I had forgotten that I once thought the situation was funny.

But later that night we both remembered that it was. Still. I'm not taking any chances.

Hence the sticky for Tiffany:

Stop [locking me in our apartment] in the name of love.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Bad Hair Day


I recently got my latest bad haircut.

"Oh!" Tiffany said when she saw me. "You cut your hair! It looks..."

"I hate it," I said, preempting her lie.

"I still love you."

You might not think someone could be bad at hair, but I am. I'm not talking about other people's hair although I must admit I'm bad at that too. I'm notoriously bad at my hair. After nearly 32 years, I haven't the faintest idea of what to do with the stuff on top of my own head. This is especially egregious since, because I prefer my hair chin length, I cut my hair quite often. I should be a hair genius.

There are multiple factors at play. First off, I don't do anything to my hair. Second, I don't know what should be done to my hair. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, I don't have a hairdresser I love to do my hair. I almost walked into a salon the other day because I like the fact that the owner's dog lies outside the entrance.

"Forget the dog--what does the owner's hair look like?" Tiffany asked me when I told her my idea.

I tried somewhere else.

The truth is, most of the time it's a moot point. I usually wear my hair up in a bun-for-people-who-are-bad-at-hair (make a ponytail and don't pull your hair all the way through). So when it's time for a haircut, I convince myself that it doesn't matter where I go since I don't care that much about my hair. That works out fine until I see the final result and get home to Tiffany who says:

"Oh! You cut your hair! It looks..."

"I hate it."

"I still love you."