Fun with Paramecia, Gym Fail, Appeasing the Coffee God

Recently Mr. Typist bought a microscope, and it took me back to a strangely happy memory of when I was in grade school and we would go out into the woods behind the school, gather pond water in baby food jars, then look at it under a microscope. The first time I saw a paramecium, it filled me with elation and a deep sense of spiritual comfort. It felt like such a miracle that there could be an entire unseen universe of tiny busy life forms carrying on their functions, breathing, excreting and pulsating deep under the surface. I loved looking at the paramecia, and if I had a better brain for science and math, it would have inspired me to become a biologist. When it warms up a bit and we get through a fairly daunting apartment-improvement project, Mr. Typist and I are going to go gather up some water samples from our local parks and shorelines and see what we find under the lens. I’m super-excited about it.

My trainer recently advanced me to the big girl stuff: hip thrusts and the squat rack--the real squat rack, not the safe and contained Smith machine that does all of the stabilization for you. Both have had mixed results. I’d always see these women at the gym doing this mysterious exercise where they lean their backs against a weight bench with a loaded deadlifting bar across their hips and lift their butts and up and down. It looks very cool and next-level, but I didn’t understand the purpose. My trainer explained that it’s the most effective glut-building exercise and took me through how to do it. I’ve tried it a few times on my own and so far I’ve found it horribly awkward and uncomfortable. It’s a feat of dexterity just to wrestle the 45-pound bar onto to my hips and at the same get myself positioned onto the bench with my back in the right place. And damn—those thrusts do indeed work the gluts like crazy, but each time after I do them my hips are vaguely achy for days. I think hip thrusts are best left to those who are going for the Kim Kardashian look, which I do not want and will never achieve anyway. My butt has always been relatively flat no matter what weight I’m at. I just comfort myself by looking at ads from the 70’s when flat butts were all the rage. There was a similar situation with the squat rack—lifting the bar out of the rack was laborious and awkward, I flailed around trying to balance it on my shoulders, and this morning I woke up with fiery nerve pain shooting from my right knee into the top of my quads. I’m guessing this is from squatting with an unbalanced bar yesterday. I hope to God this just means that I need better technique and not that I’m simply too old to be doing athlete-level moves in the gym.

As part of the aforementioned apartment improvement project, Mr. Typist and I bought a new, fancy, stainless steel coffee maker. It looks nice and it’s very high tech and all, but the first morning it brewed coffee, we discovered a quirk: Just as it’s about to finish brewing a pot, it emits a tremendous, ear-shattering, volcanic roar akin to the sound the Blue Angels make during their practice runs. It’s only once, and it’s only at the end of the brew cycle, but it’s so loud it wakes me up every single morning. Mr. Typist and have speculated that perhaps it is demanding a virgin sacrifice. We don’t know how to appease the coffee pot god and as such, this seems to be a permanent condition. I’m just considering it a pre-alarm and calling it a feature.

Enjoy this aquatic romp through the mysteries of the deep with our friend Zefrank1. Warning: corny dad jokes and sac talk abound. 

 --Kirsten McHenry