Let Me Hear Your Body Talk (Mine Says "Ow")

First the bad news: Once again Nintendo has failed to reliably stock its products in an amount even vaguely on par with demand. Now the good: This time I didn't have to personally commit to sleeping on the sidewalk or breaking and entering since I can just mooch off of my boyfriend's Wii Fit. I love relationships!

I was originally a little apprehensive about using the Fit primarily because I feared that the device would announce my weight each time I stepped on it (likely in a mocking tone while someone makes pig snort noises and/or moos in the background) and my weight is something I am only prepared to acknowledge once a week on Friday morning after a night of no liquids and a morning of peeing as much as I can. This is how I avoid going crazy over the theoretically insignificant fluctuations of a pound or two which might otherwise cause me to curl up into a little ball to watch an infinite loop of my imagined future 300lb self creating shock waves as she wobbles down the sidewalk. Luckily, the system allows you to easily skip the little step where you get weighed and have to spend years in therapy. Hallelujah.

Early on in the Wii Fit registration process (after cringing at your BMI but before you shed even one measly calorie) the game lets you pick a trainer. Your only choices are "girl trainer" or "boy trainer" which I thought would be highly disappointing -- how could the designers at Nintendo hope to create the dream trainer look for ever girl in the world with just one avatar? By making that avatar look exactly like my Olympics boyfriend Ryan Lochte, that's how! There is evidence that Ryan may be a bit of a douche (what is it with these swimmer dudes?) but as a trainer he's perfect. He constantly tells me how great my balance is, looks smoking hot (you know, for a digital representation of a hot dude) and encourages me by lying about how impressively strong my abs are. Still, a nice expansion to the standard Wii Ft might be a program that ups the trainer encouragement so that I can hear Ryan tell me over and over again how skinny and irresistible I am (a SUPER nice expansion might be him telling me exactly what he'd like to do with my well toned body...).

Though I'm sure I usually seem like a polite demure young thing I play video games the way my dad watches baseball. I jump off of the couch. I scream. I curse at the screen. Someday I will have kids who find Mommy a little scary when the console is on just as years ago Lil' Brianna felt like Daddy was replaced with an angry beast every time the Dodgers took the field. Save the joy of ogling Ryan it is fair to say that my first date with Wii Fit was a little rocky. It is possible that there was even more yelling than usual. The words "stupid fucking machine" may have been bandied about. My boyfriend, G, may have used the term hissy fit. I am, however, proud to say that I did not cry (G is likely proud to say that he did not laugh out loud at all of my pouting and thus avoided a fat lip/bloody nose/detachable penis). While I was able to stop the machine from announcing my weight to the entire room I could not stop it from picking up on how much I hate being bad at things. And lord was I bad at hitting soccer balls with my head, and running in place, and hula hooping. Especially hula hooping which I failed at despite wearing the national uniform of girls hula hooping on Wii Fit: panties and a tank top. I can only hope G has the self restraint to resist making me one more of the legions of girls swinging their scantily clad hips on youtube.

The Fit is a surprisingly good work out. At first most of the exercises (save the wailing and complaining) seemed unnaturally obsessed with my center of balance. Scoring for yoga, strength training and balance activities were calculated based on my ability to distribute my weight in a way that keeps a red dot in the correct area. The only sport that I can fairly claim even intermediate knowledge of is yoga and I was shocked to find that this method forced me to do the poses more accurately than I would have in a class or if I were to ever get off my lazy ass and do yoga on my own at home.

Due to the possibility that I might throw the wiimote at my boyfriend's head I eventually had to quit my workout in favor of brunch and dress shopping. An afternoon of stress-free bliss far away from obsessing over my center of gravity and Ryan tsk-tsking my uncontrolled attempts at slalom skiing was just what I needed to chill the fuck out and accept that Wii fit is only a game and no matter how often Ryan frowns at my pathetic attempts at athleticism I will not suddenly balloon to a size where TLC will make an hour long documentary about me trying to get out of bed in route to gobble down a 5lb bag of M&Ms (mmmm chocolate-y!). I rushed home to a gin and tonic and the most time devoted to hula hooping outside of 1958. I woke up early the next morning jonesing for some more hula action even though my lats were killing me(look at that! I just used a sporty sounding shortened name for a muscle group! I blame the Fit for that! Soon I'll be flexing in the mirror, willingly eating "goo" and telling everyone about how much I can bench).

Let's momentarily pretend that this real review of the game and not just me pontificating on my nerdy reaction to physical activity so that I might make some suggestions about how Wii Fit could be improved (you know, in addition to the brilliant Trainer Compliment Mode that I recommend above). Firstly, I know this has been mentioned all over the internet but I would really like it if the software included some sort of training routine. Moving from one exercise to another requires a lot of back and forth with the wiimote and the software which unnecessarily interrupts your workout. The need for a mode that walks you through a good 30mins of continuous exercise seems so obvious that I'm shocked that the smart folks down at Nintendo HQ failed to include this in the first release. Barring an update that allows me to work out without the wiimote ever present in my right hand I could use some sort of wiimote holster, in addition to freeing up my hands for balancing, grasping and wiping my brow this would also make a smashing addition to my panties and tank top work out look. A holster always adds that certain spark to an outfit -- I'm shocked we don't see more of them on the red carpet.

Brianna Vs. Some Huge Rocks

I know that way too many of my recent post have followed to formula of "software developers + athletic activity = explosion of tomfoolery" so before I begin this post in which my coworkers and I go white water rafting I want to say that only 2 of the 5 people who accompanied me on this little adventure have any geek cred -- the other 3 have no knowledge of programming languages, probably don't understand 75% of the xkcd comics and rarely, if ever, bring up how much the love math and/or graphs. Shockingly I like them anyway.

This trip was organized by, Zogsports, the same people that brought you blogs posts on Dodgeball and Kickball. Zog is a nice little organization that managed to turn activities usually associated with intramurals and recess into profitable charity endeavors. They are also obsessed with drinking. Ever single sports game is followed by the ref pleading with the players to hang out at the bar afterwards, they give "best drinking team" awards right after MVP. So I wasn't super surprised to receive the following information in my pretrip email:

There is absolutely no drinking of alcoholic beverages permitted before or during rafting. If you’d like to drink on the return trip home, please bring along your beverage of choice and we can keep them on or under the bus while you’re rafting.

Translation? Look, the losers at the rafting place won't let us turn rapids into a drinking game but we know that most of our customers have such a serious drinking problem that there is no way they'll ever make it 12 hours without ingesting two or three bottles of Everclear so we managed to bribe the bus driver to allow y'all to party it up. Don't forget to bring the flip cup.

While the Hudson and the East rivers offer many treacherous challenges (sewage, bloated bodies, oil slicks, etc) they have yet to develop rapids so our white water rafting took place in Pennsylvania on the Lehigh river. When we arrived after a 2 hours bus ride our leader, a guy last seen playing his tummy like a drum at a local dive bar, was a little crazed about our need for wet suits. "THE WATER WILL BE 60 DEGREES, THAT IS SUPER COLD." he bellowed over and over again as we stood around the dusty parking lot sweating in the 85 degree humidity. All but three or four people resisted the call of a personal rubber sauna. We waiting around for at least 1.5 hours before being shuttled 7 by 7 into red plastic rafts. During the wait we received very minimal instruction on how not to end up as the human equivalent of ground beef -- there was something about how fast the water was going (an analogy to 800 cases of beer flying past us each second) and how if we got caught on a rock we should bounce around like idiots in hopes of knocking ourselves free, they spent the remaining 80 minutes explaining the acceptable ways to splash other boats.

Let me describe how the first 20 minutes of rafting went. "Ok guys, paddle right! I mean left side of the boat paddle! I mean go LEFT! FUCK." But somehow by the first set of rapids we had it together enough to cruise through as if the river were a particularly vigorous massage chair (and with my toes resting in 5 inches of water at the bottom of the boat if I closed my eyes I could almost convince myself that I'd spent $100+ on a very nice pedicure.). One of our new friends that we adopted to fill our boat was suddenly so confident in our abilities that she asked if we could paddle more quickly so that we'd be going faster when we hit the rapids -- God would soon smite her for being so cocksure. As we approached the second rapid set we saw another red boat thrashing against a large rock as its occupants bounced up and down trying to dislodge themselves, it was almost comical until we realized that our feeble urban arms were never going to paddle fast enough (never mind in sync enough) to avoid crashing into the boat, the people and the rock. After a comfortable little rubber on rubber bounce I thought for a moment that everything would be fine, and then I saw the opposite edge of the boat lift over my head. The good news: the water wasn't that cold.

In retrospect we choose the best place on the river for a short swim. The water was deep and mostly free of jagged man hunting rock. I lifted my feet and leaned back in my life jacket and was soon rolling on the river sans boat. Eventually the guide most likely to join a roaming band of skin heads got my friend Jeremy and I to hang from the front of his kayak so he could steer us over to another boat while giving us a lengthy lecture entitled "You Retards Should Not Have Tipped Your Boat Over, I Hope You've Learned Your Lesson." He dropped me off next to a boat filled with fresh faced Midwesterners whose 20 year old son easily plucked me (and, even more impressively, Jeremy) from the river. Our new family were vacationing from Iowa (where, presumably they hadn't had their fill of water ) and was made up of a mom, a dad, a set of 20ish twin boys and an older (25ish) brother. Not more than 10 minutes after being adopted Jeremy and I's bad rafting karma had mom and son #1 tumbling from the boat, arms flailing while Dad yelled instructions along the lines of "don't die!" I'm sure Mom and the older brother were super nice people but as far as Jeremy and I were concerned their departure freed up a couple of nice spaces in the Wayne family that we were happy to fill. Riding in their boat was like a luxury cruise -- twin son #1 stood in the back acting as a rutter that steered us safely away from evil rocks while twin #2 and dad used their farm built muscles to navigate us quickly down the river. The only painful part was my constant fear that I would accidentally curse or exclaim my love for high taxes and abortions and that (like any good Midwestern family) they'd tossed me back into the Lehigh where liberal scum belongs (One less Obama voter to worry about!).

Zog promised that the Rafting organization would provide us with lunch on the river and since I also (correctly) suspected that any food I had on my person would quickly become too soggy to eat I didn't have any way of feeding the fast growing hole in my tummy until we stopped on the shore at 3:30pm -- it had been 6.5 hours and 7.5 miles of paddling/fearing for my life since I'd eaten anything and I was fast considering how tasty riverweed spiced plastic oar might be. I had ordered a PB&J for lunch on the theory that they are the best food ever and also because I knew that this sandwich was meant for the under 10 set which meant there was an 80% chance that it would involve Wonder Bread and Jiffy -- two things I secretly love but would never allow myself to purchase in the store because I am a snobby hippie/foodie. Some might think that a $100+ rafting trip should include a fancier meal but I actually think that this was a smart cost saving measure on the part of the rafting company -- by the time lunch rolled around I was so hungry that a raw pack of ramen noodles would have been greeted with lip smacking so there is no reason to waste money on truly tasty food.

Post lunch we decided to let the Iowans get back to their family vacation so we were once again banished to the retard boat for the remaining 7.5 miles of rafting. It was hell and I quickly found myself thinking that I needed to birth 3 strapping young boys to row me around as soon as possible.

Somewhat unsurprisingly the most well organized portion of the trip was the beer distribution on the bus ride home. On a trip where head counts were estimated, novices were tossed into rock filled rivers and no one could be bothered to bring enough water for rehydration at lunch our leader had devised a system for signaling your need for a beer, designating your beer type of choice and notifying your need to dispose of an empty can all without speaking.

I arrived home exhausted, starving and reeking of river. As I stripped down at the door I told the boyfriend to make me some food and not even think about starting the sex because seriously I JUST PADDLED 13 MILES. Then I passed out on the couch.

Taking my sports participation from The school yard to The X Games was partially inspired by the huge cash influx from this blog. A small chunk of riches remain, look for this being frittered away on gambling in the coming weeks.

Update: Jeremy (the geekiest of all attendees by far) found the rock that God threw down into the river to smite us for the evil sin of pride on Google Maps.

The Only Thing I'm Good at Kicking is Ass

Ever the glutton for punishment (and more than ever in need of something to write about) on Wednesday I (and my software development compatriots) kicked off sports league number 2: Kickball. I wasn't actually considering blogging about this experience since I already wrote a sports themed post a couple of months ago and unlike topics such as trashy tv and bad dates I didn't see any need to revisit the topic lest people get the wrong impression about the priorities of this site. But then during our first game one of opposing players (a gigantic man with a red bandana tied around his massive skull) started doing a bull imitation at home plate. As he pawed at the ground and held horns over his ears while zerberting the air to make a sort of growling bull-like noise I yelled across the outfield to my friend Jeremy, "GREAT. Now I have to blog this."

Despite my membership over the past few month on two different sports teams I am no Sporty Spice. When Lisa and I joke about being the same person I almost always say, "except you like sports" in a tone of voice usually reserved for inefficiency and the scent of summer in the subway. As a kid I despised sports primarily because I wasn't good at them (also because I was lazy) and in an effort to preserve my fragile sense of superiority I religiously avoided anything that I might not excel at. I was forced through the cruel Physical Education requirement at my high school to join the tennis team which resulting in me getting hit in the eye with a ball at 75miles per hour which I might have been more upsetting if it hadn't gotten me out of at least 2 days of onerous practice. I've since gotten much better at being bad at things. I'm perfectly comfortable listing huge numbers of things that I suck at (like remembering to put on deodorant in the morning so I don't have to sneak it onto my armpits while sitting at my desk) of which "sports" is a nice little category. But I no longer equate poor performance with hatred -- I can have fun and suck AT THE SAME TIME! Kickball was likely in the top three most fun things I did this week (number 1 being "watched R. Kelly's Rap Opera Trapped in the Closet)

Pregame on Wednesday when the subject of positions came up I quickly regressed back to junior high PE and immediately jumped on the oft coveted by 12 year old members of the math team far far far left field. This was a mistake. In junior high one could be relatively assured that no player would exert enough effort to drive a big rubber ball more than 15 feet from home plate but in the uber competitive world of casual kickball for 30 year old real estate traders and software developers the balls were much more likely to come hurling into the outfield at 300 miles per hour. When this happens people will expect you to try to catch the ball or at least run after it while simultaneously suppressing your urges to do a couple of cartwheels and make crowns and jewelry out of clover flower chains. Since I cannot catch or run or even effectively gauge where a ball is apt to land even when I am STARING RIGHT AT IT this position was a lot of hard work.

One of the things I love most about working in Software is that developers and their QA and PM brethren are shockingly socialist. Everyone gets a turn regardless of ability. Everyone is encouraged to try new things. We all wait in line together for bread. All of these values follow us to the field where I was twice offered a position guarding a base despite the fact that I kept calling "runs" "points". When a teammate ran all the way to third base before figuring out that he'd kicked a foul ball we all encouraged him with cheers of "good practice run!" The competition at Kickball was much more serious about winning. As we stood around the field pregame one of my teammates assessed the surrounding teams thusly: "They seem good. They have like wrist guards and shit." Our opening night opponents were not software developers. In addition to their literal bullying (see paragraph 1) they did everything short of organizing an elaborate all dude naked spankfest while simultaneously chugging Keystones to prove that the organization that brought them together was fraternal in origin. They challenged us to a post game round of flip cup. They affectionately and without irony called each other bro. They beat us 14-6.

The Post in Which I Manage to Dodge Every Ball Joke in the Book

When you've been blogging for a certain period of time you hit a the No More Ideas wall. It's kind of like when you go on date number five with someone you really like and realize that you burned through all of your good stories on dates one through four and that you better distract him with your boobs before he realizes that deep down you're painfully boring. If, like me, your best writing seems to come from the "personal tragedy" trunk you'll occasionally find yourself almost wishing for tragedy to befall you in hopes of wringing out a good blog entry. In desperation you might even sign up for ridiculously bad ideas for the writing potential alone -- this is the blog version of showing 'em your tits. This is also how I came to sign up for a sports team at work. Well... "sport" is probably not the most accurate description of this particular activity. It's dodgeball. But there are rules and I'll probably accelerate my heart rate and I am half considering wearing sweat bands so really this is as close as I've gotten to a sport since the computer programming contest I entered during my sophmore year in college. I am so sure that dodgeball will be tragic enough to warrant an at least semi-successful blog entry that I've started writing three days before my first game.

On the day of our first game my team leader scheduled a "strategy session" during lunch. Honestly I had not even considered the possibility of dodgeball strategy until the Outlook reminder popped up 15 minutes before the meeting but apparently other team members had plans for the game beyond "try not to die" and "write a hilariously self deprecating blog post." Curious. We met in the a conference room and wrote things on the white board and got answers to questions like, "Seriosuly it's in Brooklyn? at 9pm? WTF?" It was at this meeting that I learned that dodgeball has a lot of rules. Frankly, I am shocked that we expect children to master such a complicated game. You can't throw balls at peoples heads. There are special small white balls that can only be thrown by girls. And apparently the point of the game is to hit people with balls or, in my case, try very very hard to avoid getting hit by balls (and, not to spoil the surprise, fail).

I arrived at the elementary school gym where the game/opportunity to sacrifice my self worth for the sake of this blog was being held at 8:45 at night after some personal strategizing over beer and fish and chips. Our team shirts were black which I consider especially fortuitous: match-y and slimming! I paired mine with black leggings (the scourge, I know but it was cold and I don't own any work out pants that fit because i don't play sports. or work out.) and the cutest bright green short shorts. My second reason for joining dodgeball (after blog related needs) was to have an excuse to wear these extremely ass flattering shorts in public (this is also one of the main reasons why i am considering buying a bike). As you can see I was focused on the most important aspect of any sporting event: Outfit Choice.

We had a brief chance to warm up pregame which is when I discovered that any dreams that I may have been harboring about latent savant-like dodgeball abilities would remain only in my head because in reality I can neither throw nor catch nor, most disappointingly, dodge. Even more depressing -- my cohorts, despite all of their big strategizing talk, were not much better off. A little about my teammates. We work in software development. I think it's safe to assume that everyone on my team was picked last during PE on a pretty regular basis.

And our opponents? These people seemed rather... committed. There was growling and seriousness all around. I am positive that everyone on this team owns at least 5 pairs of work out pants and I suspect they were all outraged that the Dodgeball movie was a comedy and not a documentary along the lines of Murderball. They obviously wished that killing wimpy software developers with the red balls of death was not against the league rules. To make matters worse none of the guys were particularly hot.

I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that my team sucks but I was a bit shocked at the level of awful we managed to attain. Each round of dodging and balling theoretically lasts for 7 minutes. unless your entire team gets eliminated in say the first 2 minutes. Which, I assure you, can happen. But on a court full of young adults raised on a steady diet of after school specials where the underdog surges ahead to win it all/get the girl/say no to drugs during the first minute of play everyone almost believed that the software people could bring it home -- maybe we had secret untapped reservoirs of dodgeball talent! Even our fierce opponents seemed a little skeptical that nerdy runs all the way to the bone. At one point early in the game as I held a squishy red ball in my hand, poised to throw, the guy across the court from me looked a little afraid, I quickly shook my head and assured him not to worry as there was next to no chance of me hitting him. He may have momentarily thought this a reverse psychology ploy but I quickly provided evidence of my honesty by throwing as hard as I could resulting in the ball hitting the ground about 1 foot in front of me and bouncing up to nearly smack me in the face. Take that!

At half time I was forced to submit to a huddle where the following advice was meted out:

1. Stop sucking
2. Maybe we should spit on the other team members to distract them.

And so we continued round after round of defeat (thankfully there were no loogies hacked)-- I would have been demoralized but it's hard to take dodgeball seriously enough to be truly upset at my lack of skill. Late in the game an opponent approached me to apologize for something he said about my shirt (which, I admit might have had the bottom pulled through the collar for that sexy shirt/bra hybrid look). I guess he thought I heard his mocking and might have been offended. "Hey, I'm sorry, i didn't mean to make fun of you." I responded to this by assuring him that making fun of me was totally encouraged. "Oh, feel free, I suck A LOT. You can make fun of me over on your side, or here to my face or tomorrow at the water cooler -- on Monday I'll be posting a blog entry with some suggestions for other possible ways to mock me that you may have missed so make sure to check that out."

So. We lost. Sort of.. see it turns out we were supposed to play a second team of (one assumes) burly guys and lithe women. Except they never showed up, and so, despite the math we did post game (I try to contain my cool but it's so hard...) that proves that my team lost an average of five players per minute whenever we were on the court, technically we're 2 and 2! Provided we can find a way to continue taking out teams before they arrive at the games (hacking into the subway system?) I have high hopes for our season.

This entry is cross-posted on Burt Reynolds' Mustache