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.

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.

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."

Check, Please. I Mean, Check-Mate

For Christmas last year, Tiffany's mom Patty gave us a hand-painted Peruvian chess set. It's beautiful. The pieces are stored inside the board, which opens and shuts like a box.

Tiffany and I don't know anything about chess. That's not true. I did love the movie Little Man Tate, and my mom's stepdad showed me how to play once or twice as a young girl...you know what, I really feel I must stick with:

Tiffany and I don't know anything about chess. But we decided to play a few nights ago.
While I was finishing the dishes, Tiffany found an app that explains the rules of the game and also lets you play against an unknown, unnamed, virtual competitor. When I came out of the kitchen, she was sitting with her phone in front of her face, giggling:

"Oh, shoot," she said. "He got me!"

"Tiffany, let's play."

"Yeah, hold on.. it's so nice because he suggests moves for me...Whoops! Bad move!"

"Do you want to, like, play a real person?"

As beautiful as our board is, it's not quite regulation. Tiffany didn't have all her pawns (little kneeling men), but she had three bishops (slightly taller, non-kneeling men). So we made one of her bishops a pawn by coloring a "P" on his underside.

The app said the player using the white pieces always goes first. But our Peruvian pieces are reddish and blue-ish. Except for my two rooks, which were grey and looked kind of like the ghosts in Pac-Man.

"You go first," I said. "You're wearing a white t-shirt."

Early in the game, things went poorly for Tiffany.

"Is that your queen?" I asked politely.

"Yes, I think this is her hair."

I took her queen with my knight (a bucking horse).

Tiffany's knights were actually llamas. And she lost them not too long after her queen when she put them in spots diagonal from my pawns.

The app said kings are weak because they can only move one spot at a time. But Tiffany's king was even weaker because even though the app specified that kings can capture, he failed to take my bucking horse both times he was next it.

"I need suggested moves," Tiffany said.

Ultimately, our kings were a couple of spaces apart in the middle of the board by themselves. I began to wonder if they might negotiate a peace accord underwritten by their humans' incompetence. 

But then suggestion-less Tiffany moved her king right next to my ghost.

(Full disclosure: Tiffany beat me in about 5 moves the next night.)

Halloween: No Rush Orders

I was never huge on Halloween. Asking people for things still makes me uncomfortable, so I always felt a bit awkward about ringing the doorbells of even neighbors we knew and holding out my pumpkin-shaped bucket. Also, I watched a lot of "Unsolved Mysteries" with my brother and was terrified of ringing the doorbells of people I didn't know. 

I gave up the holiday much earlier than my friends, preferring to stay at home and pass out candy with my mom.

The 5-year-old daughter of our friends is another story altogether.

Julia loves Halloween. 

On one of our recent visits, Julia told Tiffany and me she was going to be a celebrity this year. She pointed to a picture of a girl in a silver-sequined dress on a well-worn page in her Halloween catalog (did you know there are Halloween costume catalogs?). 

"Cool!" I said, "I wore a dress just like that for prom one year."

Julia looked at my soccer shorts and tanktop and raised her eyebrows. I think she may have been slightly impressed.

I pointed at a cowgirl on another, much less well-worn page.

"I was a cowgirl once," I said. "Maybe I'll be a cowgirl again this year."

"I wish you had told me sooner," Julia said solemnly. "Then we both could have been cowgirls."

Now it was my turn to be impressed.

"We have plenty of time," I said, thinking I could make her a cowgirl in a couple of hours. A hat. Some boots. A bandana. Yee-haw. 

She shook her head and smiled at my ignorance of the time it takes to assemble a proper Halloween costume. There were shoes to consider, she explained. And make-up. And the perfect bag.

"Maybe next year," she said kindly, turning back to her sequins.

Fly-By

For Christmas, Tiffany's dad gave us an electric fly swatter shaped like a tennis racket. All through the winter and spring, it sat in the corner of our apartment, untouched. But Tiffany finally unsheathed it one night when the summer flies came around to spoil our deck time.

"Is it dangerous?" I asked her.

"Hold out your finger," she suggested.

"No way! Test it on yourself!"

There were lots of flies circling our dinner that evening. But Tiffany, whose hand-eye coordination leaves something to be desired (she once got a horseshoe caught in a tree), couldn't hit a single one. And, I, unwilling to swat anything to its death, wouldn't take the racket from her hand.

I guess the flies told all their friends what a great hangout they'd found because, later that night, just as we lay down, an enormous fly rose above the foot of our lofted bed. It looked--and sounded--like an Apache helicopter. 

"Disgusting!" I yelled.

"Get me the zapper!"

I scrambled down our ladder and came back up with the Racket of Death. It turns out it is dangerous. Before I had time to take cover, Tiffany wound up and swung, narrowly missing my head. 

"Watch it!" I cried, diving across her body to get out of the arc of her swing.

She swung again and again, letting out little screams each time. 

"Is it possible you are missing it every time?" I asked, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. "Maybe it doesn't work."

ZAP!

The fly suddenly dropped, lifeless. Onto my pillow.

"Disgusting!" I yelled again.

"Ha!" Tiffany laughed. "I knew I could get it!"

Childless Adults

"So, how many kids are going to be there again?" I asked Tiffany as we packed on Thursday for a weekend in Cape Cod with some of our best friends and their children.

"Seven, I think," she said.

I considered the number in my head.

"Weren't there seven dogs at Thanksgiving last year?" I asked.

"I don't think it's the same thing," she said.

It's not.

First of all, at last year's Thanksgiving, humans outnumbered dogs 18-7. In Cape Cod, children outnumbered parents 7-6. When you count Tiffany and me, grown-ups outnumbered small people by one sleep-deprived body. But I'm not sure you should count us. Tiffany and I are not parents. We are childless adults. I have a new appreciation for what that means after this weekend. It means:

1) We can go to bed when we want.
2) We can wake up when we want.
3) We can leave when we want.

But we didn't want to do anything without the kids. So we went to bed late and got up early and didn't walk out the door without holding the hand of or carrying someone's child.

As non-parents, Tiffany and I are extra cautious. Whenever we left one child to attend to another, we made an official hand-off to a mom or dad:

"Molly, your son is sitting in your car in the driveway with headphones on. The keys may or may not be in there with him."

"John, does your daughter eat sand?"

"Darren, your son took his pants off. Again."

"Bobby, your daughter tried to pee in her bathing suit behind that tree. You might want to get a hose. And some soap."

"Teresa, your youngest is starting his 1,000th ascent of the hard wooden stairs."

"Megan, your youngest bit that one."

Releases of liability aside, the truth is, we had a blast. When Tiffany and I got back to the relative calm of Manhattan (we aren't in charge of anyone here), it felt weird to just hold each other's hand as we walked to dinner. When we came out of the restaurant, I saw a baby in a stroller and had to think for a second:

"Am I partially responsible for making that baby smile?"

And I was kind of sad that I wasn't, so I made a funny face at her anyway.