Pay No Attention

Gym Etiquette

Sure, I could rant about John Edwards' philandering, but what is there, really, to say?  Except that it doesn't get much lower than cheating on your cancer-stricken wife.  Unless maybe it's justifying the cheating by noting that your wife's cancer was in remission at the time.

But let's face it -- how many of us are really surprised about the whole Edwards thing?  I think most politicians cheat on their wives, and anyone who spends as much time as Edwards getting pretty is almost certainly not going to be an exception.  So color me thoroughly disgusted, but not surprised.

Oh, and I'm perversely pleased to read all kinds of editorials lately coming to the same conclusions about Obama that I came to months ago.  I always like to be ahead of the curve.  Hillary's irritating me lately, too.  And Howard Dean.  Especially Howard Dean.  And Pelosi.  God, how I hate Pelosi.   With this many annoying Democrats, who needs Republicans?  I'm sick of the whole lot of them, and lately, I've found it too damn depressing even to rant about it.  Sometime before November I shall set off with a lantern in my hand, looking for an honest politician, right before I go windmill-tilting.  In the meantime, lemme alone already.

That rant out of the way, on to the actual topic of this post:  gym etiquette.  (You knew I'd get there sooner or later.)

I've been on a get-into-kick-ass-shape kick lately, which means that I've not only upped my running mileage, but have added some regular weight training.  I love weights because they seem to show results faster than anything else -- after less than a month, I'm already noticeably stronger and can see new curves and muscles in my arms, legs and abs.  Hurray!  But I hate weights because they mean I have to go to the gym. 

I hate the gym for two reasons.  First, I hate being cooped up for an hour in a windowless room.  Second, the gym is filled with annoying people.  Oh, sure, I'M not annoying, and YOU'RE not annoying, but look at those other assholes. 

There are the dudes who attempt to pick up every half-way attractive woman in the place.  There are the dudes who try to look up the shorts of the women using the adductor machine.   (Seriously, watch out on those machines, ladies.  If you want to use them, pick your shorts wisely.)  There are the dudes who condescendingly try to give you unasked-for advice on how to work out.  (One of the trainers at my gym overheard one of these interactions recently and informed the guy that in fact I was doing it right, and he was doing it wrong.  Hah!)  There are the people who hurl weights noisily to the ground, causing everyone around them to jump a mile.  (Yeah, we're really freaking impressed with how much weight you just lifted.  Now learn some goddamn form.)  And there are the people who hog equipment and get hostile when you want to cut into their endless succession of sets.

Then there are the grunters, screamers and singers.  You know them -- the ones who can't seem to work out without verbalizing or singing along with their Ipods.  God, I hate these people.  An occasional quiet grunt is OK, but I feel relatively certain that most of the loud grunters are just showing off (some of them are lifting less than I am, but their grunts can be heard for a block).  And there's no excuse for the singers and screamers ("Yeah!  Go!  Feel the burn!").   I don't know about you, but I cheered when I read the story about the guy who knocked a verbalizer off his exercise bike after the dude refused to keep it down.   By the way, the verbalizer sued, but the guy was acquitted, so I guess I'm not the only one who thinks there should be a special circle in hell for incessant gym verbalizers.

But my all-time favorite asshole at my gym is the woman who brings a pillow and a novel.  She puts her pillow on the machine, gets nice and comfy, does a set using the lightest possible setting, and then settles back to read a few pages.  A good five minutes later, she'll do a second set.  She's typically there for well over an hour, but she does maybe 10 minutes of actual exercise.  And she gets really ornery if you ask her to cut in and do a set when she's been hogging a machine for 15 minutes while she finishes a chapter.  Not surprisingly, she's immense, ill-proportioned and flabby.  Although she's been coming to my gym at least as long as I have, and seems to be there fairly regularly, there has been no visible improvement to her physique.  One of my trainer buddies said he tried to talk to her about her technique once, telling her she could get a much more effective and efficient workout and then go home to read, but she evidently got quite hostile, and now he leaves her alone unless she refuses to let someone cut in on a machine during one of her "rests".

One of these days, when she gives me a hard time about working in a set, I'm going to dump her off her machine, pillow and all.  I'm just hoping I get a sympathetic jury.

* * * * *

No, there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between my opening comments about Edwards et al. and my gym rant.  Freaking shoot me.

Family Reunion

As regular readers of this blog might recall, a couple of months ago,  I stumbled across a cousin on the internet whom I'd never met.  He and I exchanged a few emails, and a week or so later, I received an email from another cousin (Lorrie) whom I'd never met.  She was the daughter of my great-aunt Helen, who is the last living sibling of my grandmother (my mother's mother).  Lorrie and I exchanged a few emails, spoke on the phone, and decided to get at least some of the family together for a mini-reunion on Saturday.  Unfortunately, there was a blizzard on Saturday that dropped two feet of snow on Western New York, so we had to reschedule for Monday.

Yesterday, at last, a smaller group of us -- Great-aunt Helen, her daughters Lorrie and Arlene, her son Terry, Arlene's husband Fred, another cousin, Florence, who is the daughter of my great-aunt Celia (my grandmother's sister), my mother, father and I -- managed to get together for a mini-reunion at cousin Lorrie's house, and it was really great.  Unfortunately, since it was a Monday, the others who planned to attend (including my brother's family) couldn't come.  However, I'm heading back to Manhattan today, so yesterday was our only option.

I really liked all my "new" relatives, and feel like I missed out by not knowing them sooner.  They're a lively, fun, interesting bunch. Lorrie and great-aunt Helen gave me a bunch of photos of my great-grandparents, grandparents and other relatives (I may post a photo or two once I get them downloaded), and the conversation never lagged. 

I never really knew my grandmother very well, and had never met my great-aunt Helen.  I'm not going to go into details here (it would make a great book, though . . .), but apparently my grandmother was the family rebel, and her sister Helen was the only one in the family she remained close to.  My mother knew her aunt Helen as a child and young woman, but hadn't seen her in many years.  However, my mother told me how wonderful great aunt Helen was to her and her siblings when they were growing up. 

Great-aunt Helen is 90 years old, and I can just say that I hope I'm as elegant and articulate as she is when I'm 90.  Seriously, she's just fantastic, has a great sense of humor and she looks terrific.  She made us some waffle cookies -- I have no idea what they're called, but they're deep-fried and dusted with powdered sugar, and I ate about 400 of them, which could endanger my chances of having a slim figure like hers when I'm 90.  And there's an excellent chance I will be around and kicking at 90, by the way -- I have great blood.  Helen's sister Celia died 17 days short of her 100th birthday.  At least two or three of her siblings lived well into their 90s, as did both my great-grandparents.  Actually, the only one of that rather huge family who didn't live into her 80s was my own grandmother, and that wasn't for genetic reasons.

We're going to schedule a larger reunion this summer.  There's a whole gang of cousins I've never met, and they sound great.

Roots

I am descended entirely from immigrants who came to this country in the early 20th century, and like many people with such a background, I don't know much about my family.  To top it off, my family for the most part didn't stay in touch with their relatives either here or in Europe.  My paternal grandfather was an exception to that rule, but unfortunately when he died, so did the family connections. As a result, my branch of the family is largely marooned off from the other branches. 

I must be some kind of throwback freak because I have a ravenous curiosity about where my ancestors came from and what they were like.  Therefore, I've been spending a lot of time researching my family tree, collecting documents, and as you will have seen from my previous post, even testing my DNA for information about my deep genetic ancestry.  I've done about as much as I can do at the moment on Ancestry.com, so I have been plugging family names into the internet just to see what comes up.  I hit pay dirt with this method on one or two occasions.  For example, I discovered that one of my grandfathers had been in Haller's Army, a group of Polish American soldiers who returned to Poland to fight in World War I.  http://www.hallersarmy.com/   None of his children knew about this, and I wouldn't know it either if I hadn't stumbled across his name on a list of Haller's Army veterans.  I sent away for his army records, and sure enough, it was my grandfather.  Those records enabled me to add quite a bit of unexpected information for my grandfather.

Anyway, yesterday I was doing a search for one of my great-grandfathers, just for the heck of it, and stumbled across a website for some really cool artistic postcards.  http://wojoart.com/default.htm  On the welcome page, there was a photo of my great-grandfather (he was quite distinctive-looking and I recognized him immediately from a family photograph one of my aunts had given me), along with a mosaic gravestone he'd created.  I knew that my great-grandfather and his family had been artisans and craftspeople, but to my lasting regret, I never knew them or knew much about them.  However, as I looked at the website, it was clear to me that whoever had created this website must also be descended from my great-grandfather. 

Although I've occasionally stumbled across names of probable unknown cousins before, I haven't really felt compelled to contact them, but something about this website inspired me.  I contacted the owner of the website, and sure enough, he's my second cousin.  He seems like a really interesting guy too -- in addition to being an artist, he spent more than twenty years in the FBI, is now a private investigator, and apparently also has a brewery where he made a commemorative ale named after our great-grandfather.  We've exchanged a few emails, and I'm really hoping I'll meet him and his family at some point.

Don't blame me for Genghis Khan or Marie Antoinette

Go ahead and call me a geek.   It won't be the first or the last time.  I had my mitochondrial DNA tested and my father's Y chromosome DNA tested to learn more about my deep genetic background, and I think it is the coolest thing ever.  If you can afford $100 for a kit, and are as geeky as I am, I highly recommend that you do it.  https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html

I really don't care if I'm related to Marie Antoinette, and I'm a little dubious about the companies that test DNA with that in mind.  I went with National Geographic's Genographic Project because, first, I trust National Geographic is conducting a genuine operation rather than a scam, and second, because my DNA (and the cost of testing it) will go into a global project that is exploring the human journey across the world over the last 60,000 years.  So rather than learning about my relationship to Genghis Khan, I'm finding out where my most distant ancestors originated, when they emerged from Africa and where they dispersed after that, up until about 10,000 years ago, and I'm helping scientists learn more about the human race. 

My father's father's father's father's etc. is from haplogroup I1b1b, which is a fairly uncommon haplogroup that many experts believe is associated with the spread of the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Megalith culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalith in Western Europe.  My father's people emerged from Africa around 50,000 years ago, and then chilled out in the Middle East for a while before spreading out and building Stonehenge-y things in places like north-western Iberia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_I1b_(Y-DNA)#I1b1b  My mother's mother's mother's mother's mother is from haplogroup W, a fairly rare haplogroup that emerged from the very first group of humans to leave Africa some 60,000 years ago, then hung out in the Near East for a while, and eventually made their way up to Northern Europe and Western Eurasia (although weirdly, there are a few stray members of this haplogroup in pockets of Thailand and India).   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_W_(mtDNA)   How cool is that?  And can I admit that I'm rather pleased that both parents emerged from rather unusual haplogroups?

If you're interested, you can get a kit at the link in the first paragraph of my post.  You get your results online about six weeks after you complete your DNA kit and send it in.  You get a nifty map showing your ancestors' path out of Africa, a certificate with your haplogroup and some specific information about your DNA, and a little history of your haplogroup's migrations.  By the way, once you know your haplogroup and the genetic mutations, you can figure out whether you are related to Genghis Khan or Marie Antoinette.  I'm not.