We’ve compiled a few reasons you might want to take up your gym up on the free tour, and read the safety manual on your treadmill. With the amount of injuries that occur at the gym every year, it's safe to say that fitness can be a very daunting and dangerous task. I don't know who thought that it would be a good idea for her to try and jump on a medicine ball. If I don’t wear socks that come up high enough, my crazy sensitive skin FREAKS OUT AT ME, and leaves me red, sore, and itchy wherever my shoes hit.
So, this week, as I sit here with painfully itchy legs, trying my best not to make my stupid rash even worse, I have finally learned my lesson. Then she sort of shooed me along with her hands, the adult version of patting a child on their bum to get them to walk away. I love, love, love cathedrals and churches for their history and architecture, but I have never been a religious person. That was the day I learned that even when you’re not religious, religion can make you feel guilty.
Like, I’m not one of those girls who has been planning their wedding since they were five. I would talk about all of the gorgeous weddings in between, but I’d run out of room here, so now we need to fast forward to the end of 2011, when my brother told my family and I that he and his beautiful girlfriend Laura (my now sister-in-law!) were engaged. And not only did I cry when she asked me, but I’ve turned into a bit of a SUPERNERD about this wedding. My mom came to visit me for Christmas 2009 when I was living in Scotland, and since she had had a teenage dream of living in Antwerp, we decided to do something extra fun and spend New Year’s Eve in Belgium. In the week or so leading up to my mom’s arrival, my kitchen fire alarm started to beep.
Now, you have to know that fanning my alarm was a task in itself, because my beautiful flat had high ceilings – between 10-13 feet, I would say. Being the truly awesome daughter that I am, I made my tiny mom climb the ladder my landlords had left in my closet to remove the battery from the alarm. So, once again with the awesome daughter thing, I got my mom onto the ladder to examine the situation. At this point, we had maybe three hours left to sleep before we had to get up to rush to the airport. You know how when you have to be up stupid early, you think you’ll function at a normal human pace, but then when the time comes you’re all groggy and slow and complain-y, so things take a million times longer until you realize you should have actually given yourself like, an hour extra? I started to have visions (see: nightmare thoughts) of my stupid fire alarm going off while I was in Belgium and my neighbours like, calling the police or something, and then breaking into my flat to make the sound disturbance stop, and then of me coming home to Glasgow to find that all my shit had been stolen, or I had been fined an obscene amount of money or something. My mom did what any normal person would do in the situation: she yanked at the fire alarm until it ripped off the ceiling. That way, the only thing I had to be worried about while we were gone was my flat burning down and no one knowing. A tiny metal coil, from the fire alarm she had ripped off my ceiling and broken less than an hour earlier. After I finished my master’s degree in Glasgow, I took advantage of my proximity to, well, to a lot of places, and I did as much travelling as I could afford. After a long, long time, I started to wonder if somehow we had driven all the way through Geneva and I was going to relive my wonderful (see: frustrating as hell) bus misadventure in Glasgow. Another assumption I made about Geneva is that because it’s in Switzerland, which is insanely expensive, it would be beautiful and impeccable and clean like Sweden, which is also insanely expensive.
But it’s also an old European city, so it has a lot of areas that have that old, gritty European feel.
On that trip, I got more assistance in Italian and Portuguese (thank goodness for Brazilians, who seem to be all over the world!) than I did in English or French. When I lived on my own in Glasgow, I obviously ended up doing a lot of things I never really thought about before. And since my leasing agency sure as hell wasn’t going to help me (the useless bastards), I decided to at least try to take matters into my own hands. I could see exactly where the main leak was: one corner of my bathtub had no caulking left on it, so water was going directly into the wall.
First of all, I had to take the bus into Anniesland, which is a mildly sketchy neighbourhood whose streets are mostly lined with bookies.
I was fine with that, because in all honesty, I didn’t really want to tell this guy I was looking for caulking. When I got back to the Nightmare Flat, however, and started trying to caulk the bathtub, I realized that I had forgotten something crucial: a caulking gun.
I got a good chunk of the corner of the tub caulked, but as I neared the end of my project, it became harder and harder to squeeze the caulking out of the tube.
The bottom of the caulking tube burst open and caulking exploded all over my shirt, arms, and hands. I grabbed a hand towel I knew I would have to sacrifice and tried to rub as much off as possible.
After much panic, some rage-tears, and a minor mental breakdown, I managed to use an entire bottle of nail polish remover to get the caulking off my hands.
And of course, I would later discover that while I stopped most of the leaking water, the damage had been done. Anyway, we were stuck in this random, very old building on campus for some reason, rather than having a class in the fine arts building, and to say it was drama UNfriendly is a bit of an understatement. I got up on my left leg no problem, but because I couldn’t feel my right leg at all, I put it down funny, rolled my ankle, and WENT DOWN.
Obviously, I was mortified about falling over in front of everyone, so I scrambled to get up as quickly as possible. The tattoo parlour where I got all my work done used to be a block away from my bus stop, and my good friend Brian worked the front desk there, so I would often stop by to say hi and hang out. After staring at it in horror for a few minutes, I put my sock back on, changed my clothes, and went to work a typically crazy shift at the bookstore. I considered the logistical challenges of riding the bus and the subway and navigating campus on crutches. Would it have been less if I hadn’t spent an extra three days putting unnecessary pressure on my foot? So I was at the gym last night for a Zumba class, and afterward, my friend and I sat down for a quick chat. The girl who had fallen staggered to her feet and walked to the end of the line, where another treadmill had become available. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. On days I don't feel like wearing makeup, pretty much nothing can convince me to put makeup on.
They might even motivate you to hire a personal trainer–for health and safety in the gym, not motivation.
Use of the web site constitues acceptance of the Defy Media Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. I scratch in my sleep so badly that when I get a new tattoo, I have to sleep in mittens to keep myself from scratching while the tattoo is in its itchy healing phase. I rushed in, looking over my shoulder more times than necessary for my clingy friend stalker. All I knew is that I was juggling a ton of stuff when I got to the cathedral, so I threw the candle into the front pocket of my messenger bag while I wrestled my camera out and tried not to drop anything. I was lucky enough to be able to attend her wedding literally four days before I moved to Scotland.
All of a sudden, I want to ask her a bajillion questions about colour schemes, decorations, venues, and dresses.
My other BFF Mandelle is also getting married next year and I am ridiculously excited to attend.
It was one of those is-that-sound-in-my-dream-or-in-real-life situations until it got annoying enough that I got up and realized it was my stupid kitchen fire alarm. My mom and I had a lovely Christmas together, including a week or so of puppysitting my canine BFF, Audrey.
She couldn’t figure out how to remove this one from the ceiling, so she jiggled it around a bit. My mom and I almost missed our flight because we were in such an insane rush to get to the airport, and then we got a little bit held up at airport security. My BFF Mags, her boyfriend Tim and I went to Paris together, and then we split up and did some travel on our own before meeting up again in Lisbon, where I spent a good chunk of time with family.
Having done enough solo travel, I found my way to the bus that supposedly went into town, but with absolutely no knowledge of the city or its layout, I had no idea when to get off the bus.
I have a pretty extensive French vocabulary just from living in Canada ad absorbing words here and there, but I only took French in school until halfway through grade four when I switched schools, because my new school didn’t offer a second language at the time. Which I totally dig, but when I’m lost and worried, old and gritty also makes me nervous. No one I encountered spoke even a word of English, and my poor French was getting me nowhere. And it was lacking things like an extractor fan in the bathroom, which the contractors told me was essential if anyone wanted to keep living there healthily.
I had seen my dad do tons of caulking during numerous home renovations, so I figured I could at least pretend that I knew what I was doing well enough to patch the problem temporarily. It must have been a really serious, manly chat, because as soon as I stepped into the store, the entire place went completely silent. I managed to clean up the globs of caulking, but there was a horrendously sticky film all over my hands.
Not only did I fall, I fell over onto the ancient rolling chalkboard I was standing next to, hitting my side on its wooden frame.
But my leg was still completely numb, so every time I tried to put it down, I would roll my ankle again, stagger, roll my ankle again, etc.
I limped around campus, went to class, then limped all the way to the subway station to catch the subway downtown, where I would switch to a bus that took me close to home.
I think that on that particular day, I went to say hi mostly just so I could sit down for a minute, and also so that I could bitch about my stupid drama class. I mean, I ended up with a giant Ziploc bag full of candy and gum – how could I not be happy with that? I know that sounds minor, but for someone as neurotic as him, I know that having a slightly incomplete set of cutlery would be rage-inducing. This girl walks in and picks the treadmill right in front of yours out of the hundred machines there are to use.
If I remember correctly, admission was by donation, so I handed five euros or so to the lady at the door. And brides on TV shows terrify me (but I still watch some of the shows because they scare me), and so does the idea of a Disney wedding. At the time, we were still relatively new friends, but let me tell you, I could not stop crying.
I’m honestly shocked that there are ANY nice photos of me, because I felt like I was ugly sobbing the whole time.
I speak Portuguese and Spanish, and a little bit of Italian, so I understand a lot of French, but I can’t speak much back. But I also discovered that the bathtub was leaking, which is why the one wall in my living room (which shared a wall with the bathroom) was so mouldy. I looked around and smiled at the man behind the counter, hoping no one would stab me for having breasts and daring to set foot in there. However your exercise regimen is going, it's probably better than the people in these GIFs.
The flight was leaving EARLY, and we were departing from a regional airport outside of Glasgow, so we had to get up even earlier to allow for commuting time, etc., etc.
Well, my mom set off the metal detectors, and while she was getting a pat down, the security officer found something stuck in the collar of her sweater. Sometimes I called my BFF Margaret and her boyfriend Tim to help me, because Tim is good at like, everything. It’s like an exciting field trip, only then you have to haul everything back on public transit and walk multiple blocks with a full-length mirror under one arm and a laundry drying rack under the other.
My friend and I had the same immediate response, especially since the girl looked like she couldn’t get up right away. The woman who had gotten off her treadmill for water and left it running at an insanely high speed got closer and repeated herself.
I learned everything I know about bible stories during my English degree, because professors would talk about religious allusions in the books we read and I’d have to look them all up so that I could sort of sound like I knew what they were talking about.
