Panty Thief, Trainer Redeux, Sunflower Metaphor

I needed a good laugh this week, and I was blessed with one. I was both horrified and delighted to come across an article about a gentleman in Las Vegas who cooked up an ingenious scheme to meet the ladies by stealing their underpants from their hotel rooms and holding said panties hostage in exchange for their cell phone numbers. He was caught and arrested, and I do not know what fate awaits him, but I have chuckled numerous times recalling the story. I think it’s funny that this person is apparently unaware that women’s panties are renewable resource. It’s as though he thought that all women are issued seven pairs of underwear at the age of 18, and that is it. That’s our lifetime supply, and should they get stolen and held for ransom, well, we have no other option but to give in to the demands of the kidnapper. It’s not like there’s a Victoria’s Secret at every mall in the US. I have to give the guy credit for being enterprising, if not smart. And bonus points for including a hand-drawn heart on his ransom notes.

Argh. I am now on my third trainer at the gym. My second trainer departed just when I was starting to bond with her, and I was once again left bereft. I get close to these folks and I have abandonment issues as it is, and I do not like having these trainers vanish on me willy-nilly. I never got over the departure of my first original trainer who I adored, and now I have to go through the five stages of grief all over again. But this new chick is cool. I was a little bit worried at first because she is new to personal training and she is a Yoga instructor, and I detest Yoga. No offense to any of my readers who do it; I know it’s wonderful and has enormous health benefits and blah, blah, blah, but I’ve tried it on more than one occasion and my body just doesn’t take to it. I don’t like being lectured by instructors about my food choices, I don’t like sitting still, and my body just does not want to do Yoga things. I’m long-limbed and I don’t stretch easily. But what I thought were going to be disadvantages have turned out to be assets. Being relatively new to personal training, she is very gung-ho and has “beginner’s mind”, she showed me some great post-work out cool-down stretches, and she’s hip and cheerful. My other two trainers were great, but they both had a bit of a dark streak. This new person is light-hearted and fun. I hope it works out and that she sticks around.

Being a person who both finds social gatherings mortifying and dislikes being the center of attention, oddly, I find myself deeply missing the Big Stressy Event I have referred to here before that I put on each year for our hospital volunteers. It was nixed last year, obviously, and the possibility of holding it in the Spring of this year is not looking good. The space we normally have it in packs us in like sardines so social distancing is not possible, and family-style communal eating is not returning any time soon, vaccine or not. It’s too bad, because I had a really beautiful vision of a sunflower theme, and I had all my scientific sunflower metaphors worked out in my speech, and now it looks like there will be no sunflowers and no speech. I am going to tentatively re-plan the event for October, but a sunflower-themed event doesn’t make sense for that time of year, so I will have to come up with something else. But just so you know, sunflowers engage in heliotropism, meaning they follow the sun. A sunflower faces east at dawn and greets the sun, then slowly turns west as the sun moves across the sky. During the night, it turns back east to begin the cycle again. Sunflowers embody hope and renewal, rebirth and optimism. These are not qualities native to my personality, but I find them comforting nonetheless. Enjoy these sunflowers in action and maybe get some optimism out of it if that’s your thing.

 

--Kristen McHenry