WasabiJane | The blog and portfolio of Lisa Eldred » personal stories

My Life in Symbolism: The Roses (Part 1)

Lisa — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:54:10 +0000

One of the side effects of having a lit degree is that I see symbolism in everything. Much of my jewelry has taken on a symbolic nature. Or there’s the fact that I literally did not see a rainbow for four years until just after starting my new job. I could rattle off a ton of examples; instead, the best way to explain it is that a friend of mine once described me as the most superstitious person she knows, “but not in a bad way.” It’s one of those side effects of believing in a divine creator who takes supreme interest in the minutiae.

The story of my last few weeks can be illustrated through my roses. I have a few rose bushes growing right next to my apartment door. Note that I had nothing to do with their existence; in fact, as they weren’t in bloom when I looked at the apartment, I didn’t even realize they existed. Over the last month, they’ve become one of my favorite things about this apartment. At least part of that is because of what I’ve learned from them. Since there’s a surprisingly long list, I plan to write several entries.

Today’s story is tied up with my fridge. I started my lease a week before I was due to move in. The first day of the lease, I did three things. The first was to unpack a very small number of items I had brought with me. The second was to start the inspection process (during which I discovered a major leak in the downstairs bathroom sink). The third was to buy groceries, since I was coming from renting a basement and had very few refrigerated or frozen supplies. With these things done, I left and didn’t return again until Thursday.

My friend Ellen came with me that time. “Ooh, you have roses!” she said. I still hadn’t noticed, though they were probably starting to bud at this point. I gave her a quick tour and, in the process of this, opened the fridge door to reveal that the fridge (which, I could tell, was brand new) had stopped running, ruining everything that was in there. A call to maintenance had me pressing the reset button on the outlet. Fridge running, I left.

I stopped by on Friday again, mostly to drop off sandwich materials for the move the next day. I then discovered that the fridge was no longer working and I couldn’t reset the outlet.

There was a rumble of thunder as I called maintenance. (His solution, for the record, was to run an extension cord to the living room.)

Saturday was the move, followed by the discovery that the pilot light on my gas had burned out, meaning no hot water. Monday I lost water pressure in the kitchen sink. The fridge saga lasted until the following Thursday, when they finally brought me a new fridge. A month and a half later, this one still works, but there are a ton of other minor maintenance issues that I’m just avoiding for the time being.

What does this have to do with my roses?

On Saturday, as I escorted my parents out of the apartment, I happened to look at my rose bushes and discovered a little toad, hiding from the heat among the thorns. I think I sat and watched him do absolutely nothing for a good five minutes. It may have been just a brief pause for him; I haven’t seen him since.

But object lesson 1 is this: There is shelter, even among the thorns.

Provision

Lisa — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:48:02 +0000

It was the second verse that caught my attention.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I’ve sung this song dozens of times over the last decade or so. In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge fan. Repetitive, very little theological depth – but then, I was raised on a steady diet of hymns and Rich Mullins and Degarmo and Key. So I don’t actually know why it made me choke up a little today. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling blessed, surrounded by friends, working at a job I love. And every apartment hurdle has been overcome slowly but surely.

This joy lasted until I walked out to my car and discovered it wouldn’t start.

My immediate thought was that it was the battery, since it had died once a few months before. Mercifully, two friends (Alan and Tina) walked out of the church only a few moments after I did, and with their help and the assistance of one of the facilities managers at church, we spent the next 45 minutes determining that, actually, the battery was fine and it was probably the starter.

“Do you have a remote starter?” asked Alan. Well, yes, though I never use it; I had actually taken it off my keychain several months ago.

I called a tow truck and had them take me to Sears Auto, which is mercifully open on Sundays. “It’s probably the starter,” they said. All signs pointed to being able to drive home.

After about half an hour, they came back. “Do you have a remote starter?”

It turns out that something in the remote starter had gone bad and burned something or other out. And because of how the remote starter was wired in, they didn’t feel comfortable doing the maintenance themselves.

Well, then.

If you ever want to hit me where it hurts, take away my car. You’d think I’d be used to it by now; this car is car #3, the first car having died a sudden, painful death, and the second having died an extended, possibly more painful death. I got to be on a first-name basis with my mechanics back in suburban Detroit. This car, remarkably, had largely escaped major problems; it’s needed maintenance, of course (including one memorable repair that spent all but six pennies of my federal tax return), but I don’t think it’s ever left me functionally stranded before.

It hurts. It hurts to have to rely on friends, however willing they may be. It hurts to not have the flexibility to go where I want to go whenever I want to go. Being without Internet was frustrating, but I could still go to work or Panera to go online. But with the exception of Panera, pretty much anywhere else I’d like to go is outside of walking range, and my job is out in the boonies, far beyond the range that I could reasonably ask anyone to drive me.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I cleaned my car while I waited for the tow truck to arrive. Basically, this involved throwing random bits of rubbish into bags to throw in the trash later. On the floor under the steering wheel I found a single penny.

The story of the pennies is a long one. In brief, it involves me working through some of my debt issues and prayerfully trusting God with my finances. Within a week of making some very important decisions (including the decision to start tithing again) I took my car to the repair shop. I had been planning on using my income tax return for these repairs; though the repairs wound up being much larger than I was expecting, the refund covered it almost exactly. With six cents to spare, in fact. These six pennies got returned to God in that I sent one each to various people who were either involved (directly or indirectly) or needed the encouragement. I think I had planned on keeping one myself – taping it to the steering wheel or something.

It’s doubtful that the penny I found today was one of THE pennies, insomuch as they were ever tangible objects, but still.

God hasn’t let me down yet.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

Review: Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye?

Lisa — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 15:12:01 +0000

There was, it turned out, at least one advantage to being without Internet. On Thursday I had to leave work early, as my Internet provider was finally going to send a technician out between 4:00 and 8:00 P.M. In my mailbox when I got home was a package from Amazon; I tore into it eagerly and spent the next two hours buried in one of my new books.

The book in question is Carolyn McCulley’s Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? Noel had mentioned it in church this weekend – had actually asked single people to go out and read it and let him know if it was worth recommending.

The short answer is that it absolutely is. I expect this book to be a treasured resource for me in the years to come, and one that I pass along to all my single female friends.

There are three main reasons that I love this book. The first one is that it actually, heaven forbid, looks to more than just the book of Ruth or 1 Corinthians 7 to explore Biblical singleness. I mean, any book that actually seriously references the book of Leviticus gets major bonus points from me.

The second is that McCulley goes for breadth, not depth, in offering strategies for living as a Proverbs 31 woman. Things like whether or not to buy a house (if you’re financially stable and able, her answer is to go for it). Or ways to strategically develop relationships with the families in your life, and to be an influencer among kids outside of, say, Sunday School. She touches on so many things that it’s easy to find several specific tips that I can actually apply to my own life.

The last point requires an explanation of me as a single person. I am a self-described perpetual bachelor, having adopted this term for myself as early as 2002. I’m 28 and have had one boyfriend. One. And I really shouldn’t have been with him in the first place, since there were glaringly obvious religious differences. We dated for a month, then I got a grip on myself and called it off while we could still remain friends. (There is, of course, a much longer story behind this.) But other than that one weird little blip in 2003, I’ve never been in a relationship. And, to be quite honest, the only times I’m unhappy with being single are those times I have an active crush on someone. If I never get married, I think I’d be content. But the problem is that I keep meeting Nice Boys, thus disrupting my contentment. I’ve prayed during my last four crushes that the guy in question would be the last, and that whether nothing happened or we got married, I’d never have to go through another crush again.

I needn’t state how that turned out.

So that’s one of the ways this book was refreshingly honest and strangely encouraging: McCulley actually talks about the fact that the desire for a husband never really goes away. The last chapter starts with a conversation with a 50-year-old woman named Lisa (go figure) who mentions that she still wishes she could be cuddled up on the couch watching football with her husband.

Like I said, bizarrely encouraging. Those who talk about the gift of singleness as if it were something handed out like the gift of serving or the gift of speaking in tongues probably don’t get it. They’re probably married and quite possibly assume that single people are single because something’s wrong with them or they’re between relationships or have some sort of supernaturally-given lack of desire for a spouse. The latter may be true in a handful of extremely rare cases, but there *is* no magic switch that says, Okay, you’re now a card-carrying member of the Society of Perpetual Bachelors, and as such you’ll never fall in love again.

It’s a simple, stupid realization, but honestly, I needed that jolt. Because of course life doesn’t work that way, but I keep waiting for that moment to arrive – the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. But the reality is, even if I never get married, and if I die an old maid at 90 in a nursing home, I’ll probably still have a crush on the nice 87-year-old down the hall who still has most of his teeth.

Weird, right? That this would be encouraging? But it actually is. Like, I’m not doing singleness wrong if I *do* like a guy. That doesn’t give me liberty to obsess, of course, but when in the course of time I inevitably do, it’s because I’m a single human female who may one day yet get married, and not one who absolutely never will. It’s because both singleness and marriage are temporary states, both of which could end at functionally any moment for any number of reasons.

The thing about this fact is that it’s so patently obvious that nobody ever addresses it. Even this book only addresses it incidentally. Most seem to ignore it entirely, instead focusing on the whole “don’t be the aggressor in the relationship” thing. These books always feel like they operate under the assumption that (1) women choose when they fall in love and (2) single women are by default desperate enough for marriage to initiate a relationship. Okay, talk about that, but (1) initiating a relationship as a female does not guarantee its failure, and (2) some of us have long since learned that knowledge and can we please move on to something else. So it’s also really nice to have a book that helps you live like a single in spite of your emotions toward any particular man.

So those are my two cents. This book did raise one other interesting question to me, though: are there books written to single men? Every book on singleness that I’ve read has been written to the ladies. Since in the general Christian culture the man is supposed to be the initiator, though, I’d think that in some ways a book on singleness would be highly important to them. Like, a brief bit on what men should look for in wives, but also how to handle rejection and whether or not they should make the concrete decision to never get married.

So: do books for single men exist? And are there any books in particular that have helped you out?

Scapegoats and Vampire Sporks

Lisa — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 23:16:06 +0000

I have to admit, I kind of feel bad for akoimeexx. He’s had a rough week. Like, seriously rough. Like, caught himself on fire and got chased by killer bees rough. Like, that wasn’t a hyperbolic statement rough. These things literally happened to him.

And having coworkers like me and Alaina, whose souls have been revealed to be the color of “dark, dark evil,” is never easy.

Alaina has, of course, written up a full report of our shenanigans. In brief, it involves erasing his penguin artwork and stabbing things with a vampire spork.

Again, I kind of feel bad for him. I know what it’s like to be the office scapegoat. (I’m actually surprised I haven’t fallen into that role…yet). And really, I should probably try to minimize the torment of the guy who’s doing much of the coding for the new website at work.

If only he wouldn’t make himself such a darn easy target…

On Customer Service

Lisa — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:05:08 +0000

I’m sitting at a Panera two blocks from my apartment to write this blog post. Partially, this is because I love their frozen lemonade. Mostly it’s because my Internet is out at home.

I moved into my apartment less than a month ago – May 22, to be specific, though my lease technically started on the 15th. Right now, the only things I actually love about it are the fact that it’s mine, it’s big, and I have rose bushes right next to my front door. The rest of my experience there has been educational, to say the least. In this last month I have dealt with:

a leaky bathroom sink
a highly problematic fridge
a burnt-out pilot light, resulting in no hot water
no water pressure in the kitchen sink
the wrong mailbox key
an…old toilet (that problem is kind of hard to explain)
an Internet outage

The last two actually haven’t been fixed yet. I haven’t reported the former; it’s either not actually a problem or will require possibly two new toilets. As for the Internet, well, that went out on Tuesday. The DSL light started blinking, indicating no connecton.That night’s response was to sigh, unplug the modem, and go read instead of write a blog post. When it wasn’t back by Wednesday, I called my provider, who claimed that there weren’t any outages for my area and since I was using an off-brand modem, they’d have to connect me to the department that would charge me $130 to fix it.

Thanks, ISP! I totally want to pay you $130 to tell me my modem’s broken!

So I unplugged it again, borrowed some other modems from my friends (none of which worked at my place), and took mine over to a friend’s house, where I verified that the modem was indeed working. A second call to my ISP finally got them to check the line and discover that the problem was indeed their fault. If I’m lucky, it’ll be back tomorrow by the time I’m home from work. If not, I get to call and yell at tech support again.

The long and short of this is that I get to learn how to actually have and handle conflict. I’m horrible at that. I avoid it like the plague. Like, I wouldn’t even tell a restaurant that they got my order wrong because I didn’t want to risk the wait staff getting mad at me. And having worked in customer service for a number of years, I’ve never wanted to be the problem customer, making a fuss because something wasn’t absolutely perfect. This, coincidentally, seems to run in the family; when I told my dad about this yesterday, he mentioned that he and mom had told my brother that they should get their toilet fixed in their (rented) duplex when he moved in a year ago; supposedly, he hasn’t done so yet because he “doesn’t want to be a bother.” (A theory: working customer service for any period of time will forever ruin your opinion of your own rights as a customer.)

So, mostly for my own benefit, here’s what I’ve learned.

The Internet (or hot water, or whatever) is not an inherent right. Believe it or not, I do not take it for granted that I live in a country where I can go to the restaurant down the road whenever my home Internet is out. And yes, I can survive a 24-hour period without checking Twitter.
The Internet is a service. It’s becoming a vital one in the U.S. My livelihood literally depends on it right now.
I have the right as a customer to get the service I pay for. This one is surprisingly key for me. See also: I don’t want to be a problem customer. But I pay for my DSL, and part of the rent I pay goes to the salaries of the maintenance workers at my apartment complex. So if my Internet is out and it’s the fault of the company, then I’m not being a problem customer if I call them up politely and work with them to solve my problem. Nor am I a problem resident if I ask maintenance to fix a problem in my apartment.A case in point is the saga of my refrigerator. The short version is that there was a brand new fridge in my apartment when I started the lease. This fridge had electrical problems. It took maintenance a week to finally figure out that the fridge itself was the problem and give me a different one. And I truly felt bad for bothering them every single day for several days in a row to tell them, hey, guess what, the fridge is out again. But the thing is, I know they were just as frustrated with it continually not working as I was. And they didn’t blame me for my problems, just as I didn’t blame them for not getting things fixed the first time. I let them know, hey, nope, sorry, for whatever reason the fridge is out again, and we’d try again. This isn’t like me, say, nagging them because my rose bushes aren’t properly pruned or because there’s a scratch in my paint. If something is actually broken, I have a right to get it fixed.
Good customer support is vital to any company. Seriously. In fact, they and the UX team should probably be the best-paid employees of any company, since a bad experience is likely to turn a customer away.In a perfect world, of course, there would be no need for customer service. Products would always be usable and functional. Our world not being perfect, good usability will solve a number of problems, but will never solve them all. And that’s where your customer support team is crucial.
Case in point 1: I was significantly happier with my ISP after the second phone call to tech support, wherein the nice lady on the other end actually listened to what I had to say, ran a simple test, apologized for putting me on hold during the test, and then nicely explained what exactly was going to happen after she submitted a trouble ticket to the Line department (including, coincidentally, the fact that they’re closed on Sundays and they might not get to my problem that same day, as indeed they did not). If I had been forced into paying the $130 they wanted to charge me to fix something that wound up being their fault after all, I probably would have canceled my service with them. (As an aside, while I actually had surprisingly “good” experiences with their automated support line both times I called, the fact that their core assumption as stated in this system was that the problem was with my technology, not theirs, definitely counts as a negative.)

Case in point 2: We recently made the decision to use Constant Contact for our newsletter at work. On Friday, I discovered a major usability failure in their image editing technology (in short, I couldn’t resize a logo I had uploaded despite them claiming I could). A quick gripe on Twitter got noticed by their customer support team; while this particular problem is, I suspect, only solvable through a major redesign, they get major bonus points for noticing and caring. Even if it turns out that the Twitter response was just an automated reply established through Google Alerts, they still took the initiative to reach out to a customer who was having problems. Wait, let me reiterate that point: I was having a problem with their service and wasn’t going to bother the company, but they still stepped up to help me out.

If you can get a customer support team together that is friendly, knowledgeable, and proactive, you’ve got yourself a strong backbone to your company. And if my ISP can continue to listen to my problems and explain reasonably why it may take a few more days, well, I’ll be okay with using Panera’s wifi in the meantime.

Coffee Cup Shenanigans: An Epilogue

Lisa — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:11:13 +0000

On Friday, our UX Lead having been out sick for three days straight and us being, well, bored and left to our own devices over lunch, Alaina and I decided to kidnap his coffee mug and take pictures of it in random locations throughout the building. These were e-mailed to him sporadically throughout the afternoon. (I will admit a bit of disappointment that his only reaction thus far has been a brief e-mail saying “Funny. Have a great weekend!” I fully expect revenge when he returns, though.)

Alaina wrote up a full post about it (warning: contains me), so I’ll just direct you there for pictures. I would, however, like to add my own little postscript to the adventure.

You know you have a good job when your shenanigans are executively sanctioned. Our VP wandered through while Alaina and I were in the conceptual stage and gave approval to it. He even offered use of his iPhone to take photos if we needed it.
Our bathrooms are scary, scary places and would be fascinating case studies of material rhetoric. The picture with the cherubs was taken in the ladies’ room. Put it this way: the cherub is but one example of the accoutrements. Flowers and statuettes everywhere. Definitely not my tastes. Though the awesome thing is, in showing these photos to a few people around the office, I learned that the men’s room is decorated like a hunting outpost (camouflage and all). Personally, I’d rather have the camo. But at least we now know where to go for weapons when the zombies attack.

I love my job.

Pastor Dan

Lisa — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:27:01 +0000

CUMMINGS, DANIEL SCOTT; age 48; died February 5, 2009, of complications from cancer. Dan was born September 16, 1960, in Athens, GA, to Bradley and Patricia Cummings and was the older of two children. Dan was a minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and faithfully served Five Points Community Church as its senior pastor since 1997. He had previously pastored in Hudsonville, MI, for ten years. Dan is survived by his wife, Lonette; a daughter, Sara; and two sons, Benjamin and Bradan; he is further survived by his father, Bradley; brother, Peter; and grandmother, Esther Bouman. Viewing will be held on Sunday, February 8, 2009, at Five Points Community Church, 2 to 5 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m. The Funeral Service will be held 11 a.m. Monday at Five Points Community Church, 3411 E. Walton Blvd., Auburn Hills, MI 48326 248-373-1381. Funeral arrangements entrusted to Pixley Funeral Home-Davis Chapel, 3530 Auburn Road in Auburn Hills. Memorials may be made to Five Points Community Church: Dan Cummings Memorial Fund.

Time: February 4, 2009. Noel posts a blog entry asking for our responses on prayer. I post the following:

The church I attended as a kid got a very strongly Calvinist pastor when I was in high school (very long story there). He basically believed that humans don’t have free will at all. One of the things I remember him saying was that he was struggling with understanding the purpose of prayer–that if God already knows our needs (and, for that matter, has ordained what we’re going to ask for), why bother asking for it at all? We’d get it either way.

Of course, on the other extreme are the Charismatics who believe that you’re not saved if you don’t speak in tongues. So there you have it: under- and over-spiritualization from someone who has some minor scars from denominational backlash.

Time: May 1997. A Sunday. I show up at church after a friend’s pool party. I am 15 years old. I show up in the church’s library wearing ratty shorts and a t-shirt, carrying a yellow balloon. I am told that Pastor Norton has just announced his upcoming resignation. July 27 is his last day. I listen to The Newsboys’ “When You Called My Name” on repeat.

Time: September 28, 1997. I write the following in my diary:

We had our first (and possibly last) pastoral candidate speak to us today in church. His name is Rev. Dan Cummings, and he’s pretty interesting. He’s got the cutest little kids! I want to know his opinion on Contemporary Christian Music. And I can’t stop thinking of his old church who will probably become pastorless if we decide to take him. Man, I miss the Nortons so much.

Time: October 19, 1997. Dan Cummings is nearly unanimously voted in as pastor. I am one of the few who voted against him. This decision was likely motivated mostly by the lack of cute sons my age.

Time: November 12, 1998. My parents announce their decision to leave Five Points. They will hand in the letter of resignation in the next few weeks, and our last Sunday there will be the last service of December.

Over the course of the previous year, many changes had come to Five Points. To the outside eye, these changes were good. The church was growing. We moved services from the sanctuary to the gym to accomodate everyone. But at the same time, the church was splitting more than the standard losses that naturally come when a new pastor comes in. Literally half the church left. And not just people who had been coming for Pastor Norton’s preaching and disliked Pastor Cummings’ sermons. These were people who had grown up in the church, who had been plugged into the church, who, like my family, were active in church ministry and leadership roles.

To me, a teenager, the biggest thing I noticed was the change in theology. Pastor Dan was a hardcore Calvinist. He quoted Jonathan Edwards as much as he quoted the Bible. He preached once, as a decade later I commented on Noel’s blog, that he struggled with understanding the need for prayer because of his understanding of the sovereignty of God. Why pray when God knows all our needs and will provide regardless? He also preached that Jesus died to save the elect.

What really got to me, though, was when one of the people running the youth ministry led us through a series on TULIP–the five points of Calvinism. And he told us that this was where Five Points got its name. Which, to be blatently honest, was a lie. Five Points got its name because of the way five particular borders of land met together. I remembered learning that in my church membership class, some five years before that. And this wasn’t some outsider teaching this. The guy leading the youth group at the time was one of us. He had grown up in the church. His parents were pretty deep into the church leadership. And, as may be apparent, they were supporters of Pastor Dan.

There were other things going on, of course. I’m sure I don’t know all of them. But on December 27, we attended Five Points for the last time. I was 16 years old and bitter for leaving what was functionally the only church I had known.

Time: March 14, 1999. I write the following in my diary:

We went to Marimont today. [...] The sermon was okay, but I think [Pastor Elliott] agrees with Pastor Dan’s preachings–Mom and Dad say he quoted from “the church down the street”–both Marimont and Five Points are on Walton–and used a Dan-formula for joy. I heard the “church-down-the-street” line,but didn’t recognize it as a Dan-ism, partly because I didn’t realize they were both on Walton, and partly because I never paid attention to the sermons at Five Points. Oh, and another thing–he mentioned Jonathan Edwards. Not a quote, but he mentioned Jonathan Edwards.

Time: June 1999. We return to Marimont after looking around some more and eventually settle there. I am introduced to Word of Life and eventually go on a missions trip with them. At some point, Mom speculates that God may have used the experience to get a lot of us who were deeply entrenched in Five Points to leave and go be salt and light in other areas of the community. I realize that I am strengthened by being forced to question my theology. What is Calvinism? Or Armenianism? What is the role of baptism, or prayer?

Time: October 15, 2003. I am doing a Bible study with my InterVarsity staff worker at Grand Valley. I write the following in my diary:

I came to the realization that I haven’t forgiven Pastor Dan for what happened to Five Points. Jessica and I have been going through a Bible Study on Martin Luther and yesterday in our one-on-one we talked about predestination. Which, of course, is a sensitive issue–kind of like a scar that never healed. And Jessica brought up the whole forgiveness issue. I honestly thought that I was over it, but I found myself crying.

We decide to go through a study on Jonathan Edwards next.

Time: April 27, 2008. Pastor Dan announces to Five Points that he has incurable cancer. He tells the church that he prays “that we not waste my cancer” as a chance to reflect God’s glory. My parents inform me that Pastor Elliott, pastor at Marimont, is likewise suffering from cancer. He asks for prayers for healing. Pastor Elliott recovers.

Thursday, February 5, 2009. Pastor Dan passes away.

Time: This morning. Get up. Put on Calvinism shirt, rather distinctly by choice. This morning, Noel is preaching on prayer. The band opens with “Be Thou My Vision” and “Come Thou Fount,” two of my favorite hymns, and closes with, among other songs, “Where I’ll Be” (first line: “When I go, don’t cry for me; in my Father’s arms I’ll be”) and “I’ll Fly Away.” I spend most of the worship time in tears.

The Outward Appearance

Lisa — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:25:21 +0000

In high school, I had an obese teacher who claimed to have once been the cheerleading coach for Madonna, who had graduated from my high school some 20 years previously. For years I wrote her off as a compulsive liar–it wasn’t the only hardly-believable claim she made. In retrospect, it would have been very easy to either verify or repudiate her claim, as the school no doubt would have had records, but at the time it never crossed my mind to do so, and now it would require more effort than I really feel like putting into it (that is to say, it requires any effort at all, which is by default too much).

I bring this up because Yi noted that Michael Phelps consumes between 10,000-12,000 calories each day, but burns so many off that he has trouble gaining weight. Like Yi, my first reaction was that it would be nice to have that problem. I definitely eat more than I burn each day. But it got me thinking: Phelps’ stomach is undoubtedly enlarged. When one day he stops working out nearly as much, will he also think to stop eating so much? Will he be able to retrain his body to desire less food? Or will he one day become one of the millions of Americans who suffers from weight issues because he failed to adapt? I’d love to see a study of former athletes to know if there’s some sort of major weight gain trend among them.

It also makes me wonder about my old teacher. If athletes require that many calories a day, it’s entirely possible that she legitimately was a cheerleading coach once, but didn’t decrease her caloric intake as she stopped exercising heavily. If that was the case–what a horrible fate! It’s bad enough being overweight in a Photoshop world. It would be even worse for one who used to be thin–who had a legitimate claim to fame–but gets discredited just for being the product of a consumer environment.