OMG! IT’S A BABY SQUIRREL!!

He fell out of his nest, and I think maybe he was too heavy for momma squirrel to carry him back up to the nest. I heard a squirrel in a tree near the neighbor’s driveway making a sound that I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t an alarm, or any of the usual chatter that I hear squirrels make. It was a low grumbly, talky sort of a sound. I stopped to watch for a minute, and the squirrel was looking down at the ground, but I was in the middle of doing something and I didn’t walk over to see what it was. A few minutes later, I was in the back yard and I heard Preston yelling at Magoo to “drop it!” (Magoo is such a dog sometimes, cuz she totally dropped it.) Preston scooped Magoo up and I headed toward the little fuzzy grey form squeeling on the sidewalk.

Of course, I expected it to be bad. Magoo has a history of inappropriate behavior with small fuzzy baby wild animals. (the link is to an archived version of the page, with some wonky formatting, but it’s still worth reading). But I picked up this little guy, and I could see by his fur that Magoo had just been holding him by the scruff of his neck. He was small kitten sized, and his distress call was like a high-pitched kitten distress call, and I wonder if Magoo thought he was a kitten. In any case, I couldn’t see any puncture marks. Within a couple seconds after I picked him up, he relaxed and curled up. His little eyes weren’t open yet, but he seemed to fall asleep. Every minute or so, he would wake up again, give a little distress call, and then fall asleep. We brought him inside, put him in a little box with some towels and turned to our #1 emergency resource, Google. We learned that you should keep them warm, that baby squirrels have very high metabolisms, and that if you leave them under the tree where the nest is, momma squirrel will probably come pick him up within an hour or so.

I also knew, from an interview a year or so ago, that the local human society contracts with a wildlife rehabilitator, so we called them to get the rehabber’s number. Her name is Tammy, and she said that we could try putting him in his box with a jar of warm water at the base of the tree and see if momma would come get him, but it was really cold out that day, and she didn’t think we should just leave him out. I think the way this is supposed to work is that the baby is supposed to be concerned about his safety and making distress calls so momma hears where he is and comes to get him. But this little guy is pretty comfortable with the world, and as soon as he was warm, he just curled up and went to sleep with nary a peep. Momma never knew he was there, and we started to worry that he would get too cold even with the towels.

When Tammy got off work, she came by to pick him up. She has the resources and knowledge to raise him. But she and I got to talking, and it turns out that she needs a fair amount of help with web design, and marketing, and maybe even a certain amount of feeding baby animals. It came up that Preston surfs, and she said, “Oh darn, it’s too bad I didn’t know you all last year! I had a baby river otter and I really needed someone to teach him to swim.”

!!!

Can you even imagine how cool it would be to take a river otter surfing with you!? I guess they are not born knowing how to swim or how to catch fish. Tammy ended up using a rescued raccoon to teach him to fish.

Anyway, so I’ve been working on some web design for her, and some brochure stuff, and she works during the day at the local vet hospital so I’ve been stopping by in the mornings before work to say hello to the little baby squirrel, who she carries around in her pocket. So cute! His eyes are open now, and he tries to suck on my fingers when I hold him.

So a snake-handling faith-healer and a Presbyterian minister walk into a tent revival meeting…

If you don’t get why that’s the setup for a hilarious joke, you might not get the rest of this post, and possibly you won’t understand why I spent a week of rock climbing and camping in the desert feeling like an uptight Presbyterian surrounded by people speaking in tongues and writhing in the aisles. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I would be working as a camping/climbing instructor for a group of sophomore girls. You can read in that link about my intentions to just model enthusiasm and competence, rather than try to “teach” anything. Things didn’t turn out quite as I had planned.

All the instructors get together for two days before the trip starts to plan the trip and make sure we’re on the same page as far as boundaries and rules (can the girls have their own snacks, do we eat meals together, how do we decide who’s turn it is to clean up the kitchen, etc.). The rest of the staff is all amazing, well-qualified, and fabulous. There are 6 instructors (2 to a team) as well as 2 rock specialists who will be there for part of the time setting up climbs and monitoring big picture site safety. 5 of the instructors and one of the rock specialists are women, one of the instructors identifies as genderqueer, and one of the rock specialists is a man.

The first sign of conflict happens in the first day when one of the instructors points out that the male rock specialist is going to have to really be aware of the fucked-up ways that all these sophomore girls are going to want to interact with him. He is an attractive rock climber in his late 20’s with a South African accent. He says he’s aware of that, and will be careful to be appropriate, but “at the same time, I won’t emasculate myself”. You could watch the hackles go up on the hardcore feminists in the room. This women’s empowerment stuff tends to attract fairly hardcore types (not necessarily feminists, but hardcore climbers, hardcore survivalists, just really intense alpha personalities in general). In this group, 3 of the women had worked together extensively before, two of the three were in a committed relationship (with each other), and all three considered “smash the patriarchy” to be an apt description of their basic platform. Wow. Try being the one man in that crowd, and find a way to not be emasculated.

Instructor teams had been decided for us, and we broke into those teams to get to know a bit about the person with whom we would be sharing responsibility for the physical and emotional safety of ten 16-year old girls in the desert for the next 5 days. I will call my partner Ashley, in part because that satisfies a childish and petty desire to call her something that I think would bother her, but mostly just to avoid using real names. Ashley and I are really different people. She’s a radical feminist, a lesbian in a committed relationship with another instructor on the course, a recovering alcoholic with tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive behavior, and has been running girls’ empowerment and wilderness courses for around 6 years. By the end of the course, I came to respect many things about her, and I learned a lot about different styles but, like the Presbyterian at the revival meeting, there was so much about her style that made me really uncomfortable.

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When I was in high school I went through a rebellious phase that involved regularly attending the local Assembly of God church and trying to bait my mother into debates about whether evolution was a supportable scientific theory. I went to church every week, and “got saved” (at least three times, cuz I was afraid that it wasn’t sticking), and went up for altar calls, and spoke in tongues at summer camp one year, and had a mad crush on the youth pastor (who later dropped out of the church and hit on me). At that same summer camp where I first spoke in tongues, we had a particularly charismatic motivational speaker. One evening, just as he was building up to a great climax, he suddenly stopped and focussed intently on someone sitting on the other side of the stage from me. I couldn’t see who he was looking at, but I heard the speaker say, still holding the microphone up to his mouth, “Is that your wife?” He was pointing at someone that I couldn’t see, but since we were all high school kids it’s unlikely that the boy was sitting next to his wife. I couldn’t hear his response, but he must have muttered that she was not. The speaker, notching it up a level both in volume and pitch, asked, “Are you going to marry her?!” The boy, probably wishing he could sink down below his seat, must have muttered something non-committal.

“THEN GET YOUR ARM OFF OF SOME OTHER MAN’S WIFE!!” the speaker yelled.

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After our first day of rock-climbing with the girls, we all stood in a circle to offer appreciations to each other. As you felt called, you could say something that you were really impressed by or thankful for from the day of rockclimbing. The girls said things like, I really appreciated how everyone cheered for me when I didn’t think I could go any further. After several appreciations, one girl said, “I appreciate Rob’s accent” and all the girls giggled. Ashley stepped forward into the circle, animated and pissed.

“There are girls here who rock-climbed for the very first time today, and ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT IS THAT ONE MAN!!” And she says “that one man” in the same way you might say “that turd that the cat knocked out of the litterbox”.

***************************

I thought Ashley’s point was a good and valid one. In fact, I supported her intentions throughout the trip. But her approach made me so uncomfortable, with its roots in emotional manipulation, that I had a rough time playing along. Her approach was all about the emotional build-up, creating a scenario where the participant really starts to see how fucked-up they are, how undeserving, how sinful, (or in this case) how intolerant, how middle class, how brainwashed by society. And when you have people genuinely freaked out, you offer them an amazing solution, you throw out the altar call, you tell them what they need to do to be all right. If this had been church camp, we would have told them that they need to accept Jesus as their lord and personal savior. Since this was about girls empowerment and breaking down cliques within their class, we told them that they should eat lunch with the Asian students and stop acting stupid around boys.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally in support of breaking down cliques and not acting stupid around boys. For that matter, I’ve got no problem with folks practicing Christianity. I just don’t think that emotional manipulation is a very effective way to create long-lasting change. And I think it’s dishonest and, well, manipulative. Everything about Ashley’s approach to the week was about creating a situation where the students would be out of their element and vulnerable. They would not be allowed to go into their tents until bedtime; they would not be allowed access to their personal snacks except at one regular time after dinner (this is a big issue when half of the students are from asian countries and the only food we are offering is mac and cheese and pb&j); everyone must wait for everyone to have food at each meal before eating; there will be no downtime or time for personal reflection or journaling; we will run one “trust exercise” after another during times when we aren’t climbing or eating; etc.

There is no doubt that these are effective ways of creating community and breaking down barriers. When you make people emotionally vulnerable, make the group the only possible means of support, and create a situation where people will feel physically unsafe (like rock-climbing), you will have a rock-solid group of supportive girls after three days. But will you have a rock-solid community after 30 days, when they are back in their comfort zones with their pre-existing means of support?

Obviously, there are a lot of charismatic Christians out there, so this must be an approach that works for people.  The emotional build-up and catharsis of it must be effective for people, but I never found it so. That’s why I kept having to get “re-saved”.  The effects never lasted much longer than a few weeks past summer camp. Pretty soon, alone in my bedroom trying to pray, I would start to wonder what was the point of speaking in tongues anyway? If I didn’t even know what I was saying, could I possibly mean it? Why would God care what language I pray in anyway? And actually, while we’re at it, why would God even care if I pray? It’s not like he doesn’t know what I’m thinking, right? And why would God care what I’m thinking, since he already knows what I will do with my whole life? And that doesn’t even really make sense, so maybe this whole thing doesn’t make sense…and pretty soon I had headed down the dark tunnel to sin and iniquity, or at least to wearing too much lipstick and hanging out with the stoners.

These girls have been indoctrinated in the marketing of women’s empowerment from early on. It’s a pervasive part of our culture to give lip service to women’s equality in order to
sell shampoo, or tampons. (”Shouldn’t you be leading a carefree life?”) These girls know how to talk the talk, they know all the right answers, just like I knew how to explain to people how speaking in tongues is a valuable gift from God. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think these girls believe it either. And all you get with the emotional approach is people who feel it for a while, but there’s no intellectual commitment to it. The fervor fades. They’ve never seen anyone living it in the long-term.

On the last morning, I offered that if anyone wanted to get up early enough to climb a nearby bluff with me and watch the sunrise, I would be willing to wake people up for that. All but one of the girls agreed, and we woke up at 5am to hike up the hill in the dark and watch the sunrise. We sat, scattered in our own spots, while the sun came up over the far-off and flat horizon, past the freeway and the powerlines receding into the distance.

Afterwards we talked about the things we had seen and heard, and mostly about the things we thought about while we sat. Many of the girls had very interesting things to say, but the one who, unknowingly, had a message for me was the girl from Korea who said, “I mostly didn’t think about anything, I just wondered how the sun would rise. I have never seen the sun rise before.”

My mind was blown. Can you imagine never having seen the sunrise? Not even being sure *how* it rises? I felt really ashamed of how much I take for granted. I didn’t admit to them that mostly what I had been thinking, while we sat, was that I wish something good would happen. All there is is the sunrise and some cliff swallows calling, and I wish something really *exciting* would happen. Her thought made me realize, how freaking exciting is it that the sun rises every day!? How amazing is it that I have the opportunity to sit here on a windy desert cliff and watch it in silence with a group of people whose minds are blown by the simple fact that it is happening!?

And that was the most real thing that happened all week. And I was glad that I had a chance to share with them a real experience, one where a regular person chooses to get out of bed before dawn and experience the real world. Because that is what I believe in. I don’t particularly care about smashing patriarchy, or about who you share your lunch with. But I do care about creating connections, between people and people, between people and earth. If I had to choose something to smash, it would be civilization, and the idea that people need to be coerced into caring about each other and the world, and the fact that people don’t care enough about the sunrise to have ever seen one. I believe in the sunrise.

So, you might have noticed that things are looking a little different around here. I know it might take a little getting used to, but I wanted to point out one of the cool shiny new features on the new design. Now you can subscribe to Feedburner e-mails, which will send you each new post in an e-mail. That way if you don’t like the site design, you don’t even have to come see it if you don’t want to! And also, it’s an easier way to learn about new content than having to click over here every day, even though I only post every week or two. Anyway, if you just put your e-mail address in the nifty box in the blue column to the right and click Subscribe, you’ll be set. It’ll send you a test e-mail so you can be sure they won’t end up in your Bulk Mail folder or something, and then it will send you any new posts I make. How did we ever live without the niftyness that is the innernets?

Next week, I will be heading out to the desert with a group of sophomore girls for the second year in a row. I wrote about it last year and I hope for it to be as good this year. Mostly, I am really looking forward to some camping and being outside. I am hoping to go into it with the idea of just modeling excitement about being there, and less intent to actually “teach” anything. I think I am moving further and further away from the idea that kids need to be taught. Mostly, they learn exactly what they need to if you can just create space where adults will step back and let them learn. And also model that the “cool” thing to do is to learn new stuff. The more I learn about skateboard culture, the more I realize that these kids are incredibly motivated to learn new things and strive to attain goals. No one has to force them or grade them or ground them if they don’t practice for a certain number of hours every day. And mostly that’s because people that they like and respect have modeled for them that skating is cool and worth pursuing. People who make money on skate-related products do so because they utilize the voices of those role models to encourage skaters to keep pursuing their goals.

I think educators could learn a lot from those marketers. And I realize what a crazy thing that is to say.

So anyway, I’ll be out in the desert camping and climbing for the next week. Possibly there will be stories when I get back. Also possibly there will be pictures of knitting and spinning that I will be working on during the drive. Also possibly there will be pictures of the garden that I started this morning.

I had just got to my spot in the backyard, next to the garden, when I saw a dandelion leap into the air all by itself! It leapt up along with all the dirt around it in a neat mound and then settle back down into the ground looking as if nothing had happened. This seemed like unusual behavior for a dandelion, so I kept watching. This action repeated several times, and seemed to be moving underground across the garden bed, leaving a trail of slightly mounded dirt on the surface. A mole in the garden!

Or was it a gopher? It didn’t move any dirt to the surface, and I didn’t see any dirt hills nearby.

While it was fascinating to watch, I also don’t really want moles cavorting about in the garden, so I thought I might try a little test. I’ve seen those nature documentaries where the coyotes dig madly after some burrowing rodent and often come up empty-handed. But how fast can a mole really move? They don’t even really have legs to speak of, just big hands attached right to their bodies. So I thought I’d see if I could catch a mole, and also maybe give it a little scare to convince it that it would rather dig somewhere other than my garden.

I didn’t come anywhere close. The first time, I didn’t think strategically, and just started digging where I saw the motion. Of course, it had plenty of time to retreat before I got as deep as it’s tunnel (about 8 to 10 inches deep, but I didn’t measure so I’m just guessing). After uncovering its tunnel, and realizing it was long gone, I want back to sitting quietly. In only a few minutes I saw dirt being pushed into the exposed hole of the tunnel from the inside, blocking the entrance. And shortly after that, I saw the earth moving from further excavations in the same spot, only about 8 inches deeper. This time I waited for it to get a little ways further than where I expected the new tunnel to be and started digging behind the guy, thinking that I would collapse the escape tunnel and have him trapped. I’m not sure what went wrong with that plan, but there was definitely no mole or gopher or any other critter in the tunnel when I got to it.

I waited several minutes to see if he would come back again, but either he had moved his construction plans for the morning, or he simply outwaited me, and I eventually had to get up and go to work. I left the second tunnel uncovered, and I’m curious to see how the area looks when I get home this eve.

Also, I’m using this month as a kick in the pants to choose a new sit spot, since I haven’t done so after the last time I moved. I wonder if this is one vote against using the garden as a sit spot. Rather than just observing what’s going on, I have a vested interest in who resides in my garden and I am tempted to intervene.

I bought myself a banjo for xmas! That’s right, and I’m even practicing and everything. This morning I stopped at the music store on my way to work and got a set of those nifty banjo picks that slide over your fingers like big ol goth fingernails. I can’t strictly say that I know how to play any songs yet, but I’m working on Wildwood Flower, which is one of my favorites. And I’m learning chords and finger-picking rolls. Oddly enough, I just learned from my mom that she spent most of the time that she was pregnant with me learning how to play the banjo! And then when I was born, she gave the banjo away so I never had any idea that she played it.

I also got my number one most wanted thing for xmas, a spinning wheel!Oddly, I don’t have a good picture of it, but it’s an Ashford Traveller and you can see a picture of one here. It took a few weeks to get it here from Boise. It’s too big for a carry-on and too fragile for checked luggage. I thought we would have to drive all the way back to Boise in the snow to get it, but then Craigslist came to the rescue. Someone was advertising a rideshare from Boise to Portland, I offered to pay some gas money if they would bring over my wheel. It worked great, we met them in Portland, and I got my wheel! (And also some other stuff that I’m sure Preston thought was very important, but whatever cuz this isn’t his blog). So I’ve been spinning and spinning for the last couple weeks.

That’s Pavi down there in the left corner. He likes to help with the spinning very much. I made a trip up to Weaving Works in Seattle to buy some more roving (after I spun all of the dark brown roving that Kathy had supplied me with, and that I thought was a lifetime supply, in a few days). I’ve learned that I can spin and ply about 2 ounces of prepared merino roving in about 3 hours. At around $2 per ounce for the roving, that’s not a bad price for a few hours entertainment. But since I want to do it ALL THE TIME, it’s starting to cost more than I really want to spend regularly. One solution has been to buy white roving instead of the color dyes. I’ll either dye it myself (which I’m a little overwhelmed by) or just use it white. I’m spinning up some of the white stuff now, doing it as fine as I can, and I think it’s very beautiful. (click for bigger)

I’m also planning to go to the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in a week and a half. I’m interested in buying a whole fleece and just getting it processed into roving (rather than trying to hand card the whole thing). I found this little processing facility called Big Sky Quality Wool whose prices don’t seem too bad. Also, I know Kathy sent of her fleeces somewhere to be processed, so I’ll get some info from her about the pricing and if she was happy with the quality of their work. Anyway, it’s possible to buy a fleece online for a fairly good price, but I don’t know enough about the different kinds of wool to know which kind to get. I know I don’t need a Merino fleece (super-nice, but expensive) but I don’t know what other kinds are soft and good to work with. So I’m planning to go to the Fiber Arts Festival and take a notebook and start educating myself about different kinds of wool in a place where I can actually touchy-feely a lot of different breeds. And while I’m sending stuff off to be processed anyway, someone in my knitting group offered to give me a whole alpaca fleece! She said someone gave it to her more than a year ago and she just doesn’t think she’s going to get around to doing anything with it. Alpaca roving is a lot more than $2 per ounce, so it would be a raging deal to get a free fleece and send it off for processing. I can’t wait!

Bonus picture for the fiber folks out there (click for bigger):

I signed up for a membership for the next couple months. Been feeling like sitting at a desk all day and then being stuck inside because of the rain and cold the rest of the time is wearing me down. So I thought a little indoor exercise would be a great thing. When you sign up for a membership, one of the “perks” is a fitness orientation. Naively, I thought this would be some sort of you know…orientation. And maybe it would have something to do with getting fit.

Him: “What are your goals? Why did you decide to sign up for a membership?”

I explain about how I’ve been doing wilderness education for a couple years, and just switched to a desk job and feeling like I need to have some exercise to keep from going crazy in the dark wet winter. He blinked at me a few times. “so…would you say that you’re more interested in losing weight or in building muscle?” I explain again that neither of those categories really apply to me. I understand that both of those things are side effects of exercise, but I would not say that either of those things are my goals. He blinks at me some more.
Him: “Do you take any supplements or multi-vitamins?”
Me: “No.”
Him: “Well, everyone can really benefit from taking a multi-vitamin…”
Me: (mildly) “I disagree with you, but that’s okay.”
Him: (blink, blink) “Why do you disagree?”
Me: “The human body is highly evolved to harvest the nutrients it needs out of the food that it was designed to eat. If a person eats food that their body was designed to digest, they have no need of supplements.”
Him: (blink,blink) “But everyone can use more vitamins, even if it just means that you might live longer, I mean it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are unhealthy, but you could always be more healthy.”
Me: “I disagree.”
Him: “Well, I’m not going to argue with you about it!”
Me: “Okay.”

(Note: I am not claiming that I eat the diet my body was designed to digest, just that it’s possible to do so.)

He’s obviously feeling really frustrated now. He hasn’t managed to get me to fit into one of the two boxes he understands for why people exercise, and he hasn’t even got me to listen to his schpiel about vitamins. He shuffles some papers around on his desk for a minute, and then offers to take some measurements in order to give me a sense of my “current fitness level”. (Cuz, apparently, I’m not capable of knowing about my current fitness level by how I feel.)
And here’s the part where it gets really shitty. Up until now, the story has to do with this particular employee’s ineptness as a salesman, but from here on out, it’s a systemic process designed to make you Feel Bad™ about yourself. This is where the management of 24Hour Fitness has decided that the process all of their salespeople follow should involve as much humiliation and degradation as they can get away with.

To start, he’s going to take my measurements. And in order to understand how this is set up to make a person Feel Bad™ from the first, you should know that the sales desk isn’t in some nice little office in the corner of the gym. It is in an open space centrally located so that when you are at the sales desk you are in plain view of the rows and rows of stairsteppers, treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary bikes. Dozens of people have nothing better to do than watch whatever happens to be going on at the sales desk while they puff away on their going-nowhere machines. So we proceed with the measurements: neck, bust, bicep, waist (but not the dressmaker’s waist, they make it a point to measure the biggest part of your belly), hips, thigh, and calf. He writes all those numbers down as we go.

And then he pulls out these huge cheap-ass plastic calipers. This is what he’s going to use to calculate my body fat percentage. So keep in mind that we are standing right in front of the whole gym while he lifts up the side of my shirt, grabs a big fold of love handle as he can grab, and “measures” the thickness with these plastic calipers. Fortunately for me, I don’t have a whole lot of body-consciousness, and I feel pretty okay with the way I look. In fact, some of the folks I hang with might even get off on the whole “degradation in front of strangers” scene. But I think the vast majority of women would be mortified and humiliated to have their naked love handles measured in front of a crowd of strangers. And I assume y’all are smart enough to know that the thickness of your love handles has very little correlation to your percentage of body fat.
But whatever, I mean he took all these other measurements, so I was thinking maybe he had some complex formula to relate all those different measurements. We also go around the corner to the height/weight scale (hidden in a little Closet of Shame, because now that we’ve just shown the world my naked love handles, they want to hammer home the point that your weight is something you should be ashamed of).
So then we head back to his desk in the middle of everywhere to look over all these figures. So we’ve got height, weight, measurements from neck to calf, and the love handle measurement. And I’m really curious what he’s going to do with all these numbers, and I’m watching him do some figuring on his scratch paper. I can see that the only numbers he’s using are the height, weight, and love handle thickness numbers. All the rest of those measurements were taken to heighten the sense of exposure (and possibly to make it seem like he was actually doing something scientific).So he comes up with a number and turns to this chart next to his desk. It’s basically a simplified version of the BMI. The 24Hour Fitness version has been converted from weight ranges to body fat ranges (how? I don’t know…probably by applying some sort of generalized formula about common body fat to weight ratios, thereby making it even less accurate than the BMI was to start with). And then they’ve added pretty colors to separate the Good (green), Fair (Blue), and Unhealthy (red, of course). And each little box in the chart is super-precise, like 19.7, 22,3, 24,1, 26.9, etc. So according to this guy’s calculations, I fall right in the middle of the red range. He points to my number, and then looking directly at me with a Sense of Deep Caring and Concern™, he says “That’s not good.” And I think here is where I am supposed to wilt into a Ball of Humiliation and Shame and throw myself into his professional hands to tell me what I can do to gain his approval and that of the whole world and I don’t care how much it costs.

But I don’t. In fact, I don’t respond at all. (blink,blink).

Him: “So where on this chart would you like to be?”
Me: “Sure, somewhere up there in the blue range, that would be great.” (read: Whatever, I’m really ready to be done with this now, and let’s just finish up your schpiel in a hurry.)
Him: “Go ahead and pick one of the actual numbers.”
Me: (sigh) “This is a chart designed based on averages. Since it is a chart that doesn’t apply specifically to me, it doesn’t seem relevant for me to choose a specific number. The 31.2 doesn’t really have anything to do with me as an individual.”
Him: (blink,blink)

And then he starts trying to tell me about how the only accurate way to find body fat is with the dunk tank method, but this caliper method gets close so blah blah blah. I interrupt.

Me: “Actually, a couple years ago I worked in a research facility where we studied women’s health and where we had a very fancy and expensive machine similar to a CAT scan that actually analyzed each molecule in your body and gave you an in-depth readout of body fat percentage, bone density, calcium percentage, body organs by weight, and much much more. So I do actually have pretty good sense of where I am in terms of body composition, and also to what extent this chart doesn’t apply to me.”
Him: (long pause) “Okay, how about we just choose this largest number in the blue range, 31.5.”
Me: “Okay, sure.”

We turn back to his desk and he starts punching some numbers on his calculator. After some concentration and application of some apparently highly specialized knowledge on his part he pronounces, “It will take 6.2 weeks for you to accomplish this goal.”

Now it’s my turn to blink. I consider briefly trying to explain to him just how many ways that is bullshit, but I drop the idea quickly. In that pause, he decides to dive in for the kill.

Him: (with a Sense of Deep Caring and Concern™) “I’d really like to help you with that. I have designed a personal training program along with a diet program that will help you reach your goal.”

Um, hello? What planet are you living on? Cuz, it apparently is not even in the same dimension as the planet I am living on…you know, the one where I started out by saying that my goal was to get some exercise. But yes, he would like me to pay him $1000 (yes, that’s right one thousand dollars) for personal training. And he seems genuinely surprised that I am not responding to his sales techniques. It seems that the only two lines he can remember from his sales training class are “I would really like to help you with that” and “is that something you would be interested in?” The second line he keeps throwing out every time I say no. He goes back to the basic idea of personal training and ask if that’s something I would be interested in, desperate to get me to say yes to *something* that he can upsell from.

And of course, if things had gone according to plan, I would have been so humiliated by this point that I would have been willing to pay any amount to have someone help me become presentable to the general public. Too bad for him that I have a solid sense of self-esteem and I don’t buy in to popular bullshit about there being one way to look if you’re healthy. And too bad for so many people that this sales technique is probably very successful.

This is a slideshow of the progress in our living room since we moved in, starting with taking out the carpet all the way up to yesterday when I brought home a chaise from the antique store. It is still very much a work in progress, but as I was going through these pictures I was encouraged by the progress. Each of these images was taken from the same spot in the corner of the living room, so it’s kind of fun to watch it as a slideshow and see the progression.