Hit by a Pitch

Song: Abusadora by Wisin & Yandel
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It’s the bottom of the ninth inning at Coors Field. The Rockies and Cubs are tied and I’m sure it’s a tense moment for all involved (when the Cubs come to play the Rockies, Coors Field fills up with annoying (redundant?) Cubs fans who couldn’t name five players on the active roster but act like they’re really into baseball until they get way too drunk to fool anyone) when Carlos Gonzalez comes up to the plate, the sounds of Wisin & Yandel filling the warm evening air. Carlos Gonzalez has been on fire today — he’d already hit a single, double, and triple, and George Frazier (one of the tv guys) was saying that he just needed a home run to complete the cycle. That never happens, right? I mean, it hardly ever happens that anybody hits for the cycle, and there’s no way it’s going to happen when the dude on tv was just talking about it.

Well shit, it did happen. Gonzalez smoked the hell out of the first pitch he saw. It was a walk-off home run, giving the Rockies a 6-5 win over the Cubs.

That’s pretty bad ass, right? You’d think people would be talking about that shit on Twitter.

Well, no. (Click the picture to get to a larger version. I tried to post the big version here, but it totally broke my site. I know you can’t really see what I’m talking about when it’s this size, but I guess that’s better than jacking up the whole site.)

(Pls. note my groundbreaking tweet, wherein I said, “What’s sad is that if Carlos Gonzalez played for the stupid Yankees or the Stupid Red Sox, he’d be trending on Twitter right now.” I actually thought about adding the stupid Phillies, but 140-character limit and all, I knew I had to stop somewhere.)

Do you see what the #1 trending topic on Twitter was when I took this? Robinson Cano. As far as I can tell, Robinson Cano, who plays for the stupid Yankees, hit a home run and the Yankees won. Oh, wow. Later, Brad Lidge, Phillies closer, was a trending topic. As far as I can tell, Brad Lidge sucks ass and blew another save. Wow.

Since Carlos Gonzalez accomplished the monumental feat of hitting for the cycle and hitting a walk-off home run to beat the Cubs, he has not been a trending topic on Twitter.

Wait! I lied! As I’m writing this to bitch about people on Twitter not talking about the awesomeness of Carlos Gonzalez, he is finally trending!

That kind of defeats the purpose of me writing a post to bitch about people on Twitter failing to talk about Carlos Gonzalez, but I’ve already written a post to bitch about people on Twitter failing to talk about Carlos Gonzalez. So here it is.

Song: Id Engager by of Montreal
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It happened innocently enough. I’ve become Twitter pals with someone who lives in my neighborhood. (Maybe one day I’ll write about how weird it is that I know someone from the ‘hood online and not in person, but then I’d probably also have to mention how I have a neighbor as a Facebook friend and never talk to him in person. You’d be right to suspect that I weigh 500 pounds and am incapable of leaving my house.) One evening, he was tweeting about a neighborhood shooting, and I was amazed by his inside knowledge. Yo dawg, I asked him (I didn’t actually refer to him as “dawg” or say “yo”), do you have an inside source at the DPD? No, he said. He was listening to the police scanner.

The police scanner? Holy shit. I didn’t even know this was possible. That night, I found RadioReference.com, which lets you listen to Denver (and other!) police, fire, and EMS. I curled up with my MacBook in bed and listened to it until I got nice and tired. I did that for the next few days.

Most of the time, you hear pretty routine shit. An officer will get called out because there’s some sort of altercation or a no-injury car accident. These are fine. My favorite is when there’s an “unwanted party,” which is a nice way of saying a trespasser or someone who shouldn’t be there (I always like imagining an unwanted party, like you’re just sitting at home one night and all of a sudden a party appears in front of your house and people are like drinking champagne and dancing and using those noisemakers you get on New Year’s Eve and don’t really understand, and you call the cops because you’re just not having that shit).

Of course, there’s all kinds of bad shit, too. There’s the grandma who calls the police on her teenage granddaughter who allegedly burned her baby with a curling iron (and they give names and addresses — there’s no confidentiality on the police scanner) or the mohawked kid who goes off his meds and tries to kill himself. One of the first nights, there was a woman at the Grand Hyatt who called EMS around midnight because she was shaky and hadn’t pooped in three weeks (I’m not making fun of her and hope she was okay, but I’m also trying to imagine how you go that long without pooping and then decide to call EMS while alone in a hotel — she must belong to the Tracy school of trying to ignore any potential health issues until they become unignorable).

Most of the time, the scanner is all business, but one time I heard two women talk about how one of them just got married and her husband lost his job so she was “wearing the pants” in the family. She didn’t seem very happy about it. I’m starting to recognize the voice of one of the EMS guys, but I still don’t really know who anybody is.

Of course, Ben makes fun of me for listening to the police scanner, which I now do every night as we’re going to sleep, using the Scanner911 iPhone app. (I can’t fall asleep for shit these days, and having something to listen to helps prevent my mind from racing like it usually does.) However, one night there was a police chase near our neighborhood, and we heard the whole thing. It was kind of awesome (even Ben thought so, although he won’t admit it), except for the parts that weren’t (somebody was killed and police officers were injured). The police were speeding down neighborhood streets chasing some dude, then blocked off his vehicle and he took off running, possibly wearing one or no shoes. Eventually the hounds were released. (The guy got away. I don’t know if he’s been found yet.)

Anyway, I recognize that listening to the police scanner is pretty freaking dorky, and puts me dangerously close to becoming one of those old people who sits outside with a cane and yells at the kids to get off her lawn while her little yappy dog barks her head off. It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?

#1: Holy crap, Soren is nine months old today. Wow! Nine months go way faster after the kid is born than when you’re pregnant. (Although isn’t a pregnancy technically 10 months? I’ve kind of forgotten everything educational about pregnancy, which I guess is okay considering the overwhelming likelihood that I’ll never do it again.) Having a baby is much more fun than being pregnant. Having a nine-month-old is much more fun than having a newborn. It’s kind of cool how this being-a-parent thing keeps getting better and better, especially because none of the stuff before sucked or anything.

#2: I really love the Denver Botanic Gardens. I got a membership when I was pregnant, because I was crazy and thought I’d want to take a newborn there all the time, like, in the winter. I imagined getting dressed up in sweaters and cute boots and popping over to check out whatever is alive at that time of year. That was dumb and I never did it and you’re lucky if, in those early days, I left the house or even changed out of a horrible nursing tank and paint-spattered maternity pants, but now that Soren is old enough to kind of appreciate stuff, it’s really fun to go there. If there’s ever a day we don’t know what to do with, I’ll suggest going to the Botanic Gardens. I’m never disappointed and Soren and Ben seem to like it.

What’s cool is that it’s really close to our house. It’s easy to get there and park, so there’s no pressure to have some big, awesome, amazing time because of how much effort it takes to go. I hate that sort of thing (and that’s probably why I’ve always hated New Year’s Eve — so much effort, never that much fun). It’s never annoyingly crowded and it’s easy to navigate, even with a big giant jogging stroller.

It’s cool, too, because you can find spots where you feel like you’re not in the middle of the city. I mean, yeah, you’re surrounded by buildings and stuff, but sometimes you find just a little bench looking out over a pond or a tiny little waterfall, and it’s like you’re in your own little world, at least until you hear someone’s kid yelling about how she doesn’t like this part of the park and it’s yucky, but in a few minutes your kid is going to be making pterodactyl noises while practicing not-crawling on a nice patch of grass, so whatever. It’s all good.

I don’t even mind the weddings. We often go to the gardens on Saturday/Sunday late afternoon/early evening, and there’s almost always at least a wedding or two. Today there were two (and weirdly, yesterday when we went for a walk at City Park, there were two weddings there, also — I kind of feel like a wedding magnet right now). It’s kind of a bummer when you’re at the Botanic Gardens and sections are closed for a private event, but it’s also kind of fun to watch people arrive and depart. You’re always tempted to crash or at least try to snag some beer (although I’m not sure that people have receptions there — the big-ish wedding we saw today was just the ceremony, and people just about flew out of there to, we assumed, get to the reception and start drinking beer). It’s almost like you get to enjoy the fun of a wedding — watching people, scoping out the fashion, and listening to the music (today’s wedding featured “Could You Be Loved?” by Bob Marley, which is totally awesome) — without actually having to attend the wedding. I don’t know.

I kind of enjoy the buzz of a wedding while we’re just there, doing our thing. That’s probably weird — but sometimes I like people watching or being a passive observer of an important event. I also really like listening to Ben talk on the phone. That’s weird, isn’t it? Sometimes, maybe when I get overwhelmed with too many things to worry about, I just like to slip into mellow mode and enjoy being around other people’s lives, without worrying so much about my own. It’s like a kind of meditation for people with ADD who are too impatient to actually meditate.

It’s actually kind of a good lead in to my new hobby, which I’ll tell you about next time. It’s kind of weird, but I hope you’ll find it at least a little entertaining.

Song: As We Enter by Nas & Damian Marley
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After writing that last post wherein I used approximately 9,000 words to say what could’ve been said in 50, as promised, I went to the new gym. Like anything, the new gym has its benefits and drawbacks. In the interest of brevity, I will summarize its differences from my old gym in analogy form:

old gym : upscale country club :: new gym : ex boyfriend’s sweaty garage.

That’s not to say I didn’t like the new gym. I did. The woman who gave me the fastest gym tour ever was not salesy at all. She was all hey, want a tour, here’s this and this and this and yeah, wanna work out? It was awesome. (As you may know, I don’t like salesy.) I navigated the locker room, which had a kind of nice, unassuming hippie-ish vibe, and got a good workout on an elliptical and a treadmill. I even, after staring at a blank screen for a good 10 minutes, managed to turn on the tv without totally embarrassing myself.

The cardio equipment clearly meets my needs. It’s the weight equipment that has me concerned. It appears that they don’t have any traditional weight machines. There are free weighs and cable systems and all that sort of thing, but no machines (at least not that I saw). Currently, my weight training routine is pretty much half free weights and half machines.

I probably could make the transition to all free weights with little difficulty. However, the thought of drastically changing my routine has me a little flustered. As much as I hate to admit being any sort of “routine” person, I really do have my routine set when it comes to working out. (I realize that this actually is a bad thing because I’m sure I’ve plateaued and am not really challenging my body.) Do I want to go to a gym where I can’t do my normal routine? Will that freak me out? Worse, will my muscles suffer? Will I lose strength as I start something new?

Well. Thanks to a professional portrait I had taken at work, I’m no longer that concerned about my muscles. I received two 4×6 matted high-quality prints of this photo that I promptly hid in the only locked drawer in my office, which contains such embarrassing things as copies of my yearly self-evaluations. That’s because, and I shit you not, in this professional portrait, I look like Brian Urlacher’s sister the lumberjack. (I kind of want to post the picture here because oh my stars and garters, you have to see it to know that I’m seriously not exaggerating, but if this picture ever sees the light of day I’m pretty sure my life will actually be over.)

You guys, I’m not even kidding. It’s not just that I look fat in the picture. Don’t get me wrong — I look fat! Very fat! But I also look like a linebacker. A long-haired, bespectacled, girl linebacker. With wonky eyes of some sort (I have no idea what my eyes are doing in this picture). It is the second-worst picture of me of all time (the worst is my driver’s license picture, in which I look almost exactly like a cross between Monica Lewinsky and a kitten in the sense that kittens usually have faces that are too small for their heads and in the case of kittens that is adorable but for an adult woman it is never okay and I will never, ever, ever have dark brown hair again in my life, what was that about anyway?). I don’t know what it is about these two pictures that makes me look so gigantic and awful. I mean, I’m no skinny little thing, but good lord. I’m not even overweight! My BMI is in the normal range! I swear! Even taking into account my top-heavy-ness, tendency toward broad gigantic shoulders, and bizarre fixation on building upper-body strength, I shouldn’t look like Brian Urlacher’s sister the lumberjack linebacker.

I guess the middle-of-the-road terrible photo in which I’m wearing a hoodie will stay on my work’s website forever.

Anyway, the fact that in a recent photo I look like I should be donning a flannel shirt to spend a morning chopping wood at a pancake breakfast to raise funds for a wayward girls’ football camp tells me that maybe I need to shake up my strength-training routine. Maybe lightening up a little is a good idea because, holy shit, maybe I’m actually overdoing it. Maybe I don’t need to do three sets of eight reps of ye gods the heaviest weights I can possibly lift that many times. It would be fine if doing this made me look like Serena Williams, but it doesn’t. I look like the angry woman who’d give you a massage at the bath house before kneading dough for 12 hours straight with no breaks because breaks are for wussies.

I’m not sure that’s really the look I’m going for here.

Song: Word Up by MSTRKRFT (Warning: song awesomely contains very bad language.)
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I’m thinking about changing gyms because a personal trainer talks to me too much.

Well, that’s not the only reason, but it’s a big one. I’m putting this shit behind a cut because it is long and totally ridiculous. Also, please keep in mind that I have PMS.

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