If you follow this blog, you know that something I do from time to time is participate in something Whitney and I call “collective blogging.”  We come up with a topic from to write about, and then we both write our own versions of a post on the chosen topic.  To check out past collective blogs, please click here.

Today’s Topic: The C25K Challenge

To read Whitney’s post on The C25K Challenge, please click here.

Last week, Whitney and I wrote about New Year’s Resolutions.  One resolution we both happened to have involved physical fitness.  Big shocker, right?  Who doesn’t make a New Year’s Resolution about getting into shape every year?  But this year is different.  Really, it is!!  This year, I’m getting married in June and then going on a honeymoon to Hawaii.  Getting in shape is not an option – it HAS TO HAPPEN.

I’ve made valiant attempts over the last few months to find a fitness routine and stick to it.  I was doing pretty well around October-November with a combination of yoga/pilates/weight training, using my DVDs and hand weights in the living room to start toning up.  But then December came and it all went to crap.  I felt guilty… but not that guilty, because I was rather enjoying sitting curled up on the couch watching TV and knitting.  And as much as I like my Women’s Health: The Wedding Workout DVD, it just isn’t all that motivating once you’ve done the workout for a week.  It gets boring.

Then I happened to see someone tweet about something called C25K.  What was this?  I wondered.  So I googled it, and discovered that C25K is a running program/schedule designed to get you off the couch and running a 5K in nine weeks.  I’ve dabbled in running here and there, but I tend to give up because it’s either too much of a time-suck for me, or I get discouraged by my asthma.  So I thought about it and realized the C25K program might be just the thing to get me to run on a regular basis without… well, wanting to DIE.  Since running is one of the best ways to get in shape quickly, it seemed to solve my problem as far as looking my best for the wedding.

So I did what any good twitterer does: I tweeted about it, asking the twitterverse how they felt about C25K.  I got a few responses, all saying to try it because they were doing it and it was pretty good.  Then I got a tweet from Whitney, saying if I do it, she’ll do it with me.  AH!  PERFECT! A buddy to keep me motivated!

And so it was that Whitney and I decided to start the C25K program together… on March 1.  You’re probably wondering why March 1, and not now.  Seems like procrastination, right?  But there is a good reason, I promise!  I CANNOT run in my current physical state in the cold.  I absolutely will have an asthma attack – it’s happened before, more than once.  And because money is a little tight because of the wedding, I can’t go join a gym to get started on a treadmill now.  So I figured out that by March it should be a little warmer than it is now on a regular basis, and that gives me around 12 weeks to be up to a 5K by the wedding.  Perfect! (As a sidenote, I have this pipe dream about running on the beach while we’re on our honeymoon, I think it sounds very cool.  I don’t really know why.)  We’re going to be keeping tabs on each other using MapMyRun, which should help since Whitney and I don’t exactly live down the road from each other!  I’m also considering purchasing the C25K iPhone/iPod Touch app, which is supposed to tell you when to run and when to walk, without interrupting your music.  Anything to help me along!

I have made a vow to be on a healthy-stuff only diet, and to do my yoga and weights at least 3 times a week – starting… now! – so my body isn’t completely shocked come March.  Wish me luck, please!  I will need it!

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© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I call ‘collective blogging.’  This means that we have each written a blog post on the same topic – but we wrote our posts separately.  Her take may not be the same as mine, and that’s the fun of it!  If you’re interested in reading past collective blogs, please click here.

Today’s Topic:  A Day in the Life of a Geeky Kid (and her mom)

To read Whitney’s post about her experience as a geeky kid, please visit her blog, My New Chimerical Kit.

This won’t surprise those of you who know me personally, but for those of you who don’t, when I was a kid I was a bit of a geek.  A nerd.  A goody-two-shoes, if you will.  I NEVER did anything to make a teacher call home, or get sent to the principal’s office, or get detention.  Technically I did have a teacher tell my mom that I wasn’t prepared for class once during parent-teacher conferences, but that was my AP English class and that teacher hated me because she once asked me what I thought about the book TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES (PL 25) and I told her I didn’t care very much about the book.  That might be a separate blog post at some point, because that class was horrible and I hated it and someone could probably write a sitcom about it if they wanted to (right, Jen?!).

Anyhoo, there is only one time that I am aware of where a teacher actually sought my mom out to let her know I had done something rather… geeky.  The teacher’s name was Mrs. Gorman, and she was my preschool teacher (age 3 and 4).  Ah… preschool.  It’s such a wonderful time.  You get to play, make messes, and take naps.  There’s snack time.  Your biggest concern is whether or not you’re going to get a good seat in the “music time” circle, and the day you got to make a new letter picture (and by letter I mean A, B,C) was more exciting than anything else you’d ever known.

There was this one time when the whole preschool class was finger-painting for the afternoon.  This was, in retrospect, probably not a great call on the part of Mrs. Gorman.  Twenty-five 3-year-olds with paint on their fingers and no sense of the consequences of putting those fingers places other than the paper?  Probably not the best idea.  She must have realized this halfway through the activity, because she called out to all us little kids,

“Don’t get the paint on your clothes, your moms won’t be happy!”

I’m going to overlook the fact that she suggested only moms can do laundry.  That didn’t bother me too much at age 3.  Besides, I knew MY mom would be just fine if I got finger paint all over my cute little outfit (did I mention that I ALWAYS had to wear a cute little outfit when I was in preschool?  And that it absolutely HAD to match, or else I would pout and be upset all day over my mismatched garments?).  To little, geeky, 3-year-old me, it seemed that my mom could get dirt and paint and food out of all clothing.  So, being the darling child that I was, I stood up and told Mrs. Gorman,

“Don’t worry!  My mom will do everyone’s laundry if they get paint on it!”

I’m not sure what exactly happened after that – Mrs. Gorman may have had to leave the room so-as to not laugh in my face.  Years later I found out from my mom that when she came to pick me up from preschool that day, Mrs. Gorman had pulled her aside and told her that her daughter had volunteered her to do the entire class’s laundry for the day.  I think my mom said they had a good laugh over the whole thing.

Something tells me a child less geeky then myself would have kept the bragging about her mother’s laundry-doing abilities to herself.  Bragging about having the coolest new Barbie, yes, bragging about laundry, no.  But to me, this was information everyone needed to have – it was COOL.

And yes, to this day I am still convinced my mother has a laundry secret she has not yet shared with me.  I’m thinking perhaps she’s saving it for my wedding night.

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Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I call ‘collective blogging.’  This means that we have each written a blog post on the same topic – but we wrote our posts separately.  Her take may not be the same as mine, and that’s the fun of it!  We got this idea from Melissa and Amy, who have also written collective blogs from time to time.  If you’re interested in reading my past collective blogs, please click here.

Today’s Topic:  New Year’s Resolutions

To read Whitney’s post about New Year’s Resolutions, please visit her blog, My New Chimerical Kit.

I’ll be honest, when Whitney and I first discussed writing about our New Year’s resolutions, I wasn’t sure what I’d write.  It’s been a few years since I truly made a New Year’s Resolution, because I don’t see the point.  I don’t think I know anyone who has kept a resolution like the ones you typically hear about around this time of year.  And I think there’s a reason for that.  New Year’s resolutions are notoriously high-reaching and unrealistic.  “This year I will climb a mountain.”  “This year I will lose 50 pounds.”  “This year I will find love.”  All nice goals, to be sure, but I think most people become overwhelmed by goals like these once the initial anticipation-high wears off.

So I was initially going to write: I have no New Year’s resolutions.  End of post.

But then I started thinking a bit about the coming year, 2010.  I’ve got one VERY big thing happening, with some small things that could happen mixed in.  Perhaps this, I thought, is the kind of year when a person should make New Year’s resolutions.  So, here they are, in no particular order:

Resolution 1: Quit whining and complaining and playing my tiny violin about being unhappy with my body and go do something about it.  Preferably well before June.

Resolution 2: I’m already pretty good about money and saving, but if Alex and I want to buy a house within a year of getting married, I need to become even better about it than I am now.  To that end, I will cook at home more and wait at least 2 days before buying something I don’t actually NEED.

Resolution 3: Relax about the little things more often.  (This one is for you, Alex!)

Resolution 4: Finish my NaNovel.  I mean really finish it.  I haven’t written anything about the Collective NaNovel since NaNoWriMo ended, and there is a reason for that.  My Collective NaNovel sort of turned into a spin-off story from my first NaNovel (written in 2008).  What I’d like to do is put the 2 novels together into 1 story, which I think actually has a lot of potential!

Will I stick to these things?  I hope so.  We are at Day 8 in 2010 and so far I’m doing OK… so stayed tuned!

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When I got engaged back in July, I was determined to understand, as much as you can ever really hope to understand, what I was getting myself into.  I don’t mean what I was getting myself into as far as my fiance goes and who he is.  No, I’m referring to my own emotional state, what getting married truly entails and means.  I wanted to be prepared and realistic for what was coming, and how I could expect it all to feel.  So I did what I always do.  I bought books on the topic and read them.  There were 2 that were particularly good: What No One Tells the Bride: Surviving the Wedding, Sex After the Honeymoon, Second Thoughts, Wedding Cake Freezer Burn, Becoming Your Mother, Screaming about Money, Screaming about In-Laws, etc. and Emotionally Engaged: A Bride’s Guide to Surviving the “Happiest” Time of Her Life . They were both helpful in different ways, and I truly believe all brides-to-be should read at least one!

One of the pieces of advice that resonated with me the most was a mention of the kooky paranoia that can often plague engaged/newlywed women.  WHAT?!? I thought when I read that part.  You mean the psychotic bouts of momentarily paralyzing paranoia I’ve been experiencing are NORMAL??!! Then I thought, why has not one of my married friends warned me about this?  After some consideration, I realized it’s probably because it’s not something anyone wants to admit, because when it happens it does not FEEL normal.  So no one talks about it.

I decided I was going to talk about the paranoia I was feeling.  I spoke with Tiffany, and discovered she has been experiencing the same thing ever since she got married.  She bought a house and got pregnant and now she is uber-paranoid for no good reason, too!  We decided a good way to get this out of our systems would be to blog about it: hence this post.  Tiffany has written a post about her problems with being paranoid lately as well, which you can check out by clicking here. {EDIT: Tiffany’s blog has suffered a tragic blow, from which we are not sure it will recover.}

So, what do I mean when I say I am crazy-paranoid these last few months?  I mean that sometimes, out of nowhere, I find myself gripped with an all-consuming fear that an awful, terrible, no-good, very-bad SOMETHING is going to happen, and then the fear passes as quickly as it came.  The result is me sitting around, scratching my head, wondering what the heck is wrong with me lately.

A few examples of this would be:

• I am utterly terrified that something bad is going to happen to Alex.  It’s a pretty non-descript fear, it can manifest itself many ways.  One time it reared its ugly head when I was waiting for him to get home from work, and resulted in me calling him every 5 minutes for about 45 minutes until he finally got near his phone and picked up, to find me nearly in tears because I truly thought he must be in a gutter somewhere.  Each time I get paranoid like that, the irrational fear involves something tragic and dramatic occurring that prevents our wedding from happening.
• I am worried much more often than I ever have been in my life that something is going to happen to one or both of my parents.  This particular irrational thought always involves something that makes one of them miss my wedding, and it is always for a tragic and dramatic reason.  For example, my dad recently had to go on a business trip to Texas.  I was SO SCARED something was going to happen to that plane.  And I’m never worried about things happening to planes, I’m one of those people who insists loudly that the chances of something going horrifically wrong in the air are much lower than something going horrifically wrong with a car on the ground.
• I’m also pretty paranoid something is going to happen to the WORLD, and that it will prevent me from being able to marry Alex.  I mean big things, like gravity will cease to exist and we will all go flying off into space, or a black hole will lumber into the solar system and disrupt planetary orbits, sending Earth hurling into the vacuum of interstellar space.

Obviously these are all doom-and-gloom, ridiculously improbable scenarios.  I’ve had this newfound paranoia manifest itself on smaller scales, though.  The biggest place I’ve noticed it is when it comes to driving.  It used to be that driving didn’t phase me at all.  I did it all the time, over long distances.  Now I dread being behind the wheel, because I have gotten cautious to the point of OVER cautious when it comes to driving.  I have gotten overwhelmingly nervous more times than I can count that someone was about to hit me.

Now, this may all sound like I need professional help.  But I think what’s important to realize is that NONE of these little instances of paranoia lasted for more than fifteen or twenty seconds – well, none except that time I got really freaked out and couldn’t stop calling Alex.  I always get a grip on myself and realize everything is fine, and that there is no point getting worked up over things that MIGHT happen, and that would happen regardless of anything I could do to stop them.  If a black hole is heading our way, I don’t think me sweating bullets over it is going to make a difference!

According to my books, this paranoia thing is actually normal.  I think the psychology behind it says something like this: newly engaged/wed women are so happy and everything feels like such a fairy tale to them, that sometimes it can get scary when you realize how perfect everything feels.  The result?  Being terrified that something bad will happen to take your happiness away, because after all, you’ve never gotten to experience a happy ending before now, have you?

It really made me feel better to realize that a) my mini-episodes of paranoia don’t necessarily mean something is wrong with me, and b) other people have experienced this issue.  So I’m curious, if Tiffany and I have both noticed this, has anyone else?  If you’re willing to share, please do!

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Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every Friday as a sort-of exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Topic: LENT

Ah, Lent.

To quote a friend, “Catholics really got the short end of the stick on that one.”

I can say that, because I was raised in a fully Catholic household, and can say unequivocally that Catholics really do get the short end of whatever stick we’re talking about when it comes to Lent.

I will back up.  Lent begins on Ash Wednesday (which is today) and continues for approximately 40 days until Easter Sunday.  The point of Lent is to, a) remind us of Jesus’ sacrifice for 40 days and nights in the desert and b) to have each of us learn self-sacrifice.  I’m over-simplifying, but I think that gives the gist of what Lent is about.  The self-sacrifice bit is primarily accomplished through a combination of fasting, (I know everyone has heard, “No meat on Fridays!”) and giving up something important to you, something that is difficult to give up.

I was an active participant in the whole Lenten observation thing for all of my childhood and part of my adolescence.  One year, around the age of ten, I gave up chocolate for Lent.  That’s hard for a little kid.  Do you have any idea how many cookies and candies and cakes and drinks involve chocolate?  A lot.  Especially when you’re ten.  That was a glorious Easter morning – I probably ate three Cadbury Creme Eggs before breakfast.  My parents, especially my mom, always made a point of encouraging the whole giving-something-up-for-Lent extravaganza.  But when I hit the middle of high school and started thinking a bit more for myself about religion and religious customs, I began to feel like Lent was a bit… dumb.

I still feel that way.  So I don’t do Lent.  To be honest, I don’t buy into organized religion in general, which is probably a separate blog, but I especially don’t buy into Lent.  To me, there is no reason given in the Bible for giving things like meat and chocolate up.  That is something the Church imposed on us, probably for economic reasons, a thousand years ago.  And I never once felt anything remotely spiritual as a result of sacrificing for Lent.  I felt exactly the opposite.  The teachers and priests and my parents could explain it all they wanted, but I always felt like it was just mean and… well, dumb.  The short end of the stick, if you will.

The only value I see in the season of Lent is that it gives people a reason to celebrate Mardi Gras, and it makes McDonald’s drop the price on Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.   So while Lent is not for me, I do hope the people who feel there is value to Lenten sacrifice continue to do what they are doing.  I am always looking for a good reason to pig out on spicy foods, or on delicious greasy fried fish.

Whitney wrote a blog about her take on Lent.  You can check it out here.

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© 2009 – 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every Friday as a sort-of exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

To Regret, Or Not To Regret? That Is the Question.

I’m sorry to make an immediate Harry Potter reference, but I feel it’s necessary.  In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Dumbledore tells Harry the following:

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Dumbledore is very wise.

Occasionally I have moments of profound introspection about my life.  This in and of itself is not profound or unusual - the more I talk to my friends, the more I realize we all seem to do this from time to time.  I always smile to myself after I’ve had one of these moments, because the cliche really is true: hindsight is 20/20.  There are loads of things I’ve done or choices I’ve made that if I had known then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have done things the same way.  Again, not really a profound conclusion to reach.

But do I regret anything?

My answer to that question historically has been ‘no.’  I think what we do with our lives ,and the experiences we have as the result of our decisions, make us who we are.  I would not be me if I hadn’t made mistakes and learned from them, or not learned from them.  And I think the same is true for everyone.

So imagine my surprise over this past weekend when I found myself admitting that I regret something.  I will not bore you with the details of the thought process that led to this particular revelation – suffice it to say, I was thinking about college and courses and why I took what I took.  And it hit me: I went to an amazing college, and it took me until my final year or so there to truly take advantage of the opportunities that afforded me.

So here it is: I truly regret not having pushed myself harder to try some of everything while I was at William and Mary.

I could have learned multiple languages – when I was there they offered about ten.  Instead, I took one semester of Russian and then wussed out and switched to Spanish so I could be done with my foreign language requirement.  I am kicking myself for that now.  I could have taken physics and therefore been eligible to apply to graduate programs in astrophysics, but instead I chose to only take biology and chemistry because that was the bare minimum required for my major.  Williamsburg is in a fantastic spot for really digging into (haha – Whitney, do you appreciate my play on words?) America’s past, but I avoided all courses that involved any type of work outside the classroom.  And if I hadn’t been so busy messing around, I would have switched majors much earlier and I would have been able to go on a major Alvin cruise with my eventual advisor – who took her entire lab with her on that cruise and made sure every student got to go down in Alvin to the hydrothermal vent sites at least once.  I missed that by only a year.

So, while I know I did what I did for a reason, and that dwelling on the past is never good, I have to say I regret the way I handled my undergraduate experience.  I can never get it back, and that makes me sad.

If you want to read Whitney’s take on regret, check out her blog here.

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© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

It’s Friday! Collective blogging day!

In case you don’t remember, this is an experiment my good friend Whitney and I are doing. Each week we come up with a topic to blog about, and then we write separate blogs on the topic. It’s a test to see how different our takes on certain things really are, and if we’d be successful writing a novel in this way for NaNoWriMo 2009.

This week’s topic: What Type of Patronus Would You Have?

OK. I realize I may have just lost a bunch of people. What exactly is this patronus thing you speak of, you might be wondering. To that I say this: you really need to read the Harry Potter series. It’s wonderful, and you are missing out by not reading it. But this post is not about the merits of Harry Potter, and I don’t want to digress too much.

Patronus: the result of the charm Expecto Patronum, a conjured protector that takes on the silvery, ethereal, semi-transparent form of an animal. The animal always has special significance to the conjurer (examples: Harry’s Patronus is a stag, which is the same as his deceased father’s; Dumbledore’s Patronus is a phoenix, which is symbolic of his pet phoenix, Fawkes.) These are especially useful for getting rid of dementors.

Did I lose you? Damn.

Dementors: soul-sucking bad guys in the wizarding world. They are initially presented as the guardians of the wizarding prison Azkaban, but as the books progress they join the evil Lord Voldemort and attack witches and wizards who are against their cause.  Dementors feed on happiness and good feelings, forcing their victims to relive their worst memories.  A Patronus cannot feel the devastating effects of a dementor and is therefore the ideal shield against a dementor attack.

The form your Patronus takes is incredibly symbolic. It is a direct reflection of y0u, your life, and your feelings – in some ways your Patronus is the very essence of who you are. It can reflect your true love (as in the case of Snape), your family (like Harry), and/or many other aspects of your personality. As such, a whole bunch of quizzes exist to try to help you determine what your Patronus would look like if you were a witch or a wizard.

When Whitney and I decided to write about this topic, I took a bunch of those quizzes. I was left completely dissatisfied. They told me I’d have things like a wolf, or a bear, or a deer, or an otter. I didn’t agree with any of them. Then I noticed that some of the quizzes are actually links to websites that talk about animal spirits and other new age, spiritual items.

I’m not really so much with the animal spirits and totems, if I’m being honest. I have trouble with the concept of animal energy and vortex power and crystal healing. Not for me.  This created a problem for me, because I still had not come up with anything I felt comfortable embracing as my Patronus.

Then, on a whim, I looked up what these websites have to say about flamingos. I have thought flamingos were the greatest thing since sliced bread my entire life. My parents tell me it probably has something to do with the teething ring I had as a baby – it was in the shape of a bird with one stubby little foot, and it was pink.  I don’t know if there’s anything to that, but I can tell you that flamingos have always been my favorite thing to see at the zoo.  And I took my fascination seriously – I posed for pictures in front of the flamingo exhibit on one leg proudly anytime I could.  Everyone in my life has at some point given me a gift that involves flamingos.  And the icing on the flamingo cake: my one tatoo is of a flamingo, standing on one leg in a small pool of water.  It was with high hopes that I read the description of what a flamingo animal spirit/totem means.  It would make so much sense if my Patronus were a flamingo.

Flamingo Spirit: is colorful, wild, and gives light.  The word itself is from the Latin word flame.  Flamingos have the ability to change colors and have a shape-shifter association. The Egyptians believed these creatures to be the living embodiment of their Sun God, Ra.  If you have a flamingo spirit, you are likely to mate and breed for life (like a flamingo), and you are likely to be dedicated to your choices and reach further than most are willing to go in order to achieve your goals.

Now, I’m not sure I fit ALL of that.  But I think I fit a good deal!  And given that a Patronus is supposed to reflect the inner you and/or the superficial animal you tend to gravitate towards, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable conclusion to reach - that if I were to wave my wand and utter “Expecto Patronum!” (with the proper concentration and focus on a happy and powerful memory, of course) from the tip of my wand would burst a beautiful, silvery flamingo, which would protect me while standing serenely on one leg.

If you want to read about Whitney’s quest to discover her Patronus, you can read about it here!

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© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to the fourth installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every Friday as a sort-of exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

This week’s topic: Worst Public Humiliation Moment

I have to say it took a great deal of soul-searching to come up with my worst moment of public humiliation. I feel quite certain that this was not a problem of a lack of humiliating experiences; rather, a lack of resounding memories about them. Because I was such a geek growing up (see last week’s blog for full details) I developed a pretty thick skin about certain things and it now takes a lot to embarrass me to the point where I would remember it forever.

But that was not always the case, and there is one event in particular that I believe was not only my worst moment of public humiliation, but also shaped a big chunk of my personality in social situations.

The year: circa 1985. I was about 4 years old, and we were having a bunch of people over to our house. It was a family gathering – it might have been my brother’s second birthday, or it might have been Easter. I was in a cute little dress, complete with matching tights and hair barrettes. My hair was curled, and I was wearing white patent leather shoes. I was always a bit anal about everything matching and looking “just-so,” and this occasion was no exception. I remember prancing around like I owned the joint at that party because I knew I looked fantastic. My grandmother (my dad’s mom) arrived with her usual odd assortment of gifts for her grandchildren. Sometimes she brought us bags upon bags of sour cream and onion Lays potato chips. This day, though, she brought hideously ugly, brightly-colored plastic sunglasses. They were much too big for any child to wear, and the lenses were a bizarre grey color and popped out of the sunglasses if you so much as touched them.

Being the princess I was at the age of 4, I was less than thrilled when I was presented with my pair of bright red plastic sunglasses with lenses in the shape of hearts. They were awful. I hated them. – - – - As a side note, I do see the irony in my attitude towards these ugly sunglasses at the tender age of 4, knowing as I do now that I was destined to work as an optician for 9 years and develop a true disdain for cheap sunglasses. – - – - Despite my loathing of the heart-shaped horrors, I had some sense of propriety at age 4, and I knew that if my grandma was giving me a present I better use it in front of her. So I put them on and put on a grand show of prancing around in my fancy dress with my fancy shoes and my new sunglasses.

And that is when my whole family started laughing at me.

To be clear, a family gathering in my family at this time did not mean my parents, my brother, and my grandparents. They were there, but they were not the only people there. My aunts and uncles and cousins were there. So were my parents’ second cousins and their kids. So were our next door neighbors and their kids. And not to be left out, my mom’s best friends from college and their spouses and kids were there, too. And they were all laughing at me.

For the life of me I could not figure out WHY they were laughing. I was just dancing around the steps to the basement, singing and wearing my sunglasses. It wasn’t THAT funny. But people were laughing. Laughing hard. That’s when I reached up and felt the sunglasses on my face. The sunglasses I had put on upside down.

That’s right, perfectly put-together 4-year-old me had put her ugly humongous plastic sunglasses on her face upside down, and didn’t realize it, and proceeded to prance around like the queen of everything. My family found this quite humorous, hence the loud and long laughter. They were still laughing when I took off the sunglasses, turned around, and ran up the stairs crying. I was more embarrassed in that moment than I have ever been in my life. I went in my room, closed the door, and would not come out until my mom came in and told me it was OK and no one was going to remember that I had put them on upside down. But I remembered, and from that moment on I refused to be outgoing or silly or anything that would draw attention to myself in groups – because I never wanted to be the center of attention and therefore subject to ridicule ever again.

If you want to read about Whitney’s most humiliating moment, you can read about it on her blog here.

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© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

As part of an ongoing project my good friend Whitney and I are working on, I will now present you with collective blogging entry #3: The First Time I Realized I Am a Geek.

First I think we need to establish what is meant by “geek.” The general definition of a geek according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary is: “a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, gaming, etc.” And here’s something you may not know (I didn’t): the term geek used to refer to a carnival performer billed as a wild man whose act usually included biting the head off a live chicken, bat, snake or bugs.

I don’t think being a geek is bad. Being a geek myself, I suppose I am probably biased, but that’s OK. However, when I was younger – grade school age – being called a geek was horrible. The only thing worse was probably being called a nerd. There is a fine distinction between the two, I think it has a lot to do with whether or not you are capable of socializing with others. Nerdiness is definitely worse than geekiness though. It didn’t take much to get called a geek or a nerd in grade school. Kids are mean. So if you got a better grade on a test than they did, or you answered a question right in class, or if the teacher always called on you to read aloud because you wouldn’t stutter and make the four-sentence paragraph take twenty minutes to get through, there was a good chance someone was going to point at you and call you a geek at recess. And that would mean it was the end of the world.

Unfortunately for me, I always did get the highest grade in the class, and I always answered questions right when called on, and the teachers picked me a lot to read aloud. But I also played sports and was moderately funny and had the dubious distinction of being called the “prettiest girl in class” by Seamus in fifth grade. So I was not cast off as a geek for most of grade school. I think it’s because it took the other kids so long to realize my geeky nature that it took me so long to realize it myself. So it’s difficult for me to point to one particular moment in time and say that was the moment I knew I was a geek. It was more of a gradual awakening to the geekiness that is now an integral part of who I am, that I would never, ever seek to eliminate from my personality. And so now I will now attempt to chronicle the realization of the inevitable: I am a geek.

• Second grade, June: It’s the end of the year. The entire student body of St. Peter’s School and their families are gathered in the parish hall of the church to watch the principal (Sister Marita Daniel – a terrifying, old-school nun) hand out end-of-the-year academic achievement awards. The highest honor is General Excellence, which is a fancy way of saying “smartest kid in the class.” It was the last award to be given out for each grade, and when they got to the second grade awards whose name should get called out for General Excellence but mine! I went up and took my plaque from Sister and sat back down. I didn’t even really understand what the award meant. I did understand that the nasty looks I was getting from some of my classmates meant it probably wasn’t a very cool award to have won. My parents assured me it was very cool, and then my friends came over to play and I was fine.
• Fourth grade: one of my best friends is now Tommy (also my first boyfriend and second crush). Our favorite pasttime? Talking about outer space, and planning how we would both one day join NASA and be astronauts together. When we had to make model solar systems, mine was extra-accurate and detailed, as was his. We got teased a lot for our love of astronomy. I believe this was probably the first time anyone referred to me as a geek.
• Eighth grade: by this time most of the kids in my class had worked out that I was a geek. I didn’t have very many friends. Everyone hated that I was so good at school. I was starting to hate that I was so good at school, too, to be honest. But I couldn’t stop being geeky. In eighth grade my school science fair project was good enough to make it to the finals of Science Horizons, a major science competition in the area, where you got some huge prizes (I think one was a trip to space camp) if you won. When I stood on the stage at the finals, looking out at the crowd and around at the people also on stage, I realized that a) I had no friends there, and b) everyone on the stage was a certifiable geek. My project (a math-based probability project) did not win, by the way.
• Junior year of high school: I get put into the Advanced Biology class and it becomes my favorite class immediately. Not art, or study hall, or even Spanish with the most popular teacher in school. Nope, my favorite class was Advanced Biology. This confirmed my mounting suspicions that I may be a geek.
• 2004: My friend Jessica (college roommate and fellow science geek) comes to visit me from Virginia. We go to Borders and spend a good two hours wandering around, picking up books we think look interesting. Then we sit in the cafe with lattes and look through the books, choosing the ones we like enough to buy. I ultimately choose to buy The Coming Plague, by Laurie Garrett. It about four inches thick and about emerging pathogens the author believes are likely to cause major epidemics worldwide in the next decade or so. I go up to the register and hand my purchase to the teenage boy working the counter. He looks at the book. He looks at me. Then he says, “Are you buying this for school?” I tell him no. He says, “Then why are you buying it?” I tell him that I want to read it, then I pay him and hurry away. I had just confirmed that I am a huge, huge geek. But instead of being upset and feeling like my world was coming apart, I relayed the story to Jessica and had a good laugh. I had no qualms with my geekiness. I didn’t even care if the cashier-boy called me a geek, or even a dork, when I left.

I am a geek. And I like it.

If you want to read Whitney’s blog about the first time she realized she was a geek, go here!

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© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

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© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.