Absolutely Bananas: Seattle mom blog

Our dog has hypnotic powers

A lot of people don’t know this, but our dog Bella has hypnotic powers.

You’ll be sitting at the dinner table, eating a piece of pizza, when you feel these strange… impulses.

Admit it, if you HAD a piece of pizza, you totally would have dropped it.

Doppleganger schmoppleganger

It’s DOPPLEGANGER week on facebook. And if you don’t know what I mean by that, clearly you need to get a life.

Doppleganger week is where people on Facebook replace their profile picture with a picture of the celebrity they look like.

Like this,

or this,

or even, this,

Right away I notice a disturbing trend. All my attractive friends are posting profile pictures of these super-duper hot models and celebrities. And I find myself thinking, “you know, she kind of DOES look like Christie Brinkley.” And then I read the comments where everyone says, “You TOTALLY look like Christie Brinkley” and I start feeling like I want to throw up.

The thing is, I’ve never been told I look like a celebrity.

Probably because I don’t. And that wasn’t even one of my ISSUES until this blasted doppleganger week had to hit Facebook like a tsunamai and give me ONE MORE THING to feel inferior about.

But then I remember this fancy little widget-wadget-whatchamacallit that I played with a couple years back where you could upload your picture and it would tell you which celebrities you look like.

I decide to give it a try, secretly hoping that it will come up with Jennifer Aniston or if I’m lucky, Angelina Jolie.

I upload my picture, like so:

And I wait for the MAGIC.

It spins…

And spins…

and THEN!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!

DO I REALLY LOOK LIKE THIS GUY?

Alexander Lukashenko

the President of Belarus?

AND IS THAT EVEN A REAL PLACE?!

I’m sorry, but I refuse to see the resemblance.

40 things worse than turning 40

Next week Jay turns the big four-oh. He’s dreading it, but I keep telling him THERE ARE WORSE THINGS!

Like, for example…

1. Being eaten by wolves

2. Getting your leg caught in a meat grinder

3. Poking your eye out

4. Running over a baby bunny or duckling

5. Finding a finger in your soup

6. Irritable Bowel Syndrome

7. Losing the winning lottery ticket

8. Mullets

9. Being chewed up by hamsters, rats or cats

10. Bed bugs

11. Falling down the stairs

12. Stepping on a rusty nail

13. Kevin Costner with webbed feet

14. Lice and scurvy. And all that other stuff they used to get on boats.

15. Drinking lumpy milk

16. Taking the red pill.

17. Getting eaten by a shark.

18. Teenage girls

19. Filet-of-Fish sandwiches

20. The stuff Mike Rowe does

21. Having gas on an airplane

22. The Real Housewives of Orange County

23. Comb-overs

24. Trying to figure out how to sync your iPhone to a new computer without losing all your music

25. Taking your baby to get his shots

26. A root canal

27. Anything by Paris Hilton

28. A runny nose when you don’t have a kleenex

29. Catching your hair on fire

30. Windows XP

31. Paying taxes

32. Accidentally brushing your teeth with hemorrhoid cream

33. the 80’s… back in style

34. Having the pilot of your airplane pass out from bad fish and all the other people  pass out too and you have to fly the airplane but you don’t know how

35. Mean aliens that come to Earth to exterminate human life

36. Throwing up in your mouth

37. Dropping a baby

38. Stepping on dog poop. In the middle of the night. With bare feet.

39. Lower back pain.

40. Falling down and you CAN’T GET UP!

See? Don’t you feel better now?

Pain

Saturday morning I woke up to blaring back pain.

Back pain so intense that I literally wept as I pried myself out of bed.

One leg over the side. OUCH! Then the other leg. OUCH! Pull myself up to sitting. OUCH! OUCH! OUCH! Ever-so-slowly I ease to standing. OUCHIEMCFREAKINGMOTHERBLASTER!

And so my weekend goes right down the toilet. Instead of Nordstrom and Starbucks it’s Heating Pad and Advil. On my Big Fat List of To-Do’s I got zero done.

Now, not to get all husband-bashing here, but the fact is that whenever I have a crisis of health- like for example I get swine flu or Lyme disease or strange and suspicious lumps- I never really feel that Jay is quite supportive enough.

It just seems like he has this air of skepticism about him. Here I am, MOANING and WRITHING in agony, and he’s looking at me rather like he thinks I’m making it all up. Or being OVERLY DRAMATIC.

And you and I both know that I am NEVER overly dramatic.

Ok so maybe TECHNICALLY I don’t have to yell “OUCH” every time it hurts. Which is frequently. Which means I’m yelling OUCH a lot. But I guess deep down I feel that if I’m suffering, the ones I love should suffer with me. I’m pretty sure that was somewhere in the marriage vows.

And as I’m writing this my husband who I was just complaining about comes down and takes my boots off for me because he knows I can’t bend over without bringing down the roof with my screams of pain.

(ouch)

Hot Yoga

Her breath smells of onions and she’s breathing in my face. Which makes it hard to find enlightenment or even breath through my nose.

“Breath in!” she shouts at me, “LIKE THIS!”

She snorts in through her nose and raises her elbows, her hands clasped below her chin, and I mimic her.  If I do it right, she’ll go back to the front of the class and leave me alone. I hope.

“Now OUT! Through your mouth!”

It’s New Year’s Day, and I’m trying Hot Yoga. Also known as Bikram, which always makes me think of Vikram, which is Pheobe’s made-up boyfriend in that one episode of Friends.

But it’s not Vikram, it’s Bikram, and it’s serious. Seriously HOT. Bikram yoga is done in a studio heated up well over 100 degrees.

I bend myself into a sandwich and huff through my nose, fighting down the urge to run screaming from the room.

When you heat up a room to unreasonable temperatures a funny thing happens to the time-space continuum. Time stretches out like a shimmering heat wave with no clear middle or end. It slows and stretches and goes on forever. I check the clock. What feels like an hour has only been fifteen minutes.  Can I make it? I’m running out of air!

I can breath. I CAN. I am not going to suffocate. Everyone else is doing it. It’s just HEAT.

While hot yoga does give you a good whole body workout, it’s even MORE rigorous as a mental workout. If you can make it 90 minutes you come out the other end a stronger person.

A dripping-wet-with-sweat stronger person.

The truth is I have never sweated so much in my life. There’s hot and then there’s HOT and then there’s HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO STAND ON ONE LEG WHEN MY FEET ARE SLIPPERY SLITHERY COVERED WITH SWEAT- hot.

I hear the fans come on and with them a fluttering of hope. But no, these are a different kind of fan. These fans circulate the freshly heated air to make sure that no one in the room is cooling off NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.

Finally a woman in the back stumbles out. The cool draft from the door makes me shiver with pleasure.

“It’s normal to feel nauseated! Dizzy! Light headed!” the instructor is saying, “Just stick with it!”

I know she’s a trained professional but I also know that THERE IS NOTHING NORMAL ABOUT ANY OF THIS.

I tuck my elbow under my arm pit, press my foot into my stomach and breath in through my nose.

Only 70 minutes to go.