RimaRama

In Which I Pick a Fight with my Personal Trainer

Posted by Rima at 9:12 pm

Sep 012010

I joined a new gym earlier this week and got suckered into a personalized fitness assessment.

“So, what are you going to make me do?” I asked the consultant after we made our introductions. “I better not puke.”

He led me to his office and we started with an interview.

“What are your fitness goals?”

“Goals? I guess I’d like to lose ten pounds and stop being afraid of the resistance training machines.”

Next he wanted to know what my current exercise regimen was.

“I don’t have one.”

“Are you sure? Bike riding? Swimming? Walking the dog?”

“Nope.”

He made a few notes and then asked me to tell him what I eat in any given day from daybreak to sunset. I couldn’t believe my luck. There is nothing I love more than itemizing my food intake, but rarely do I come across anyone willing to listen with genuine interest. For example, when the P-Dawg comes home from work and I say, “Do you want to know what I ate today?” he always says, “No.”

I began to happily recount everything I’d put in my stomach since Monday. At first J.B. (that’s my fitness consultant) thought I might not be eating enough, but then I owned up to the occasional ice cream cone or glass of wine with dinner.

“How often do you have a glass of wine?”

“I don’t know, a couple times a week maybe? What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?”"

“That’s bad” J.B. said. “Real bad. Did you know that a glass of wine is no better than a slice of cheesecake?”

“Are you kidding me? No it isn’t.”

“Yep, it is.”

“No it isn’t.”

“It’s true. I read it in a mens’ health magazine.”

“But how do you figure? Wine has no fat, and less calories per serving than a Coke!”

J.B. was relentless. “It’s converted into fat once it’s in your system. It’s like a sugar surge your body doesn’t know what to do with.”

“There is no way it can be as bad as cheesecake.”

“Well, it is.”

“That’s the most ridonkulous thing I’ve ever heard in my life and I refuse to accept it.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as J.B. and I stared each other down across the table, and then I said, “I’m just sayin.”

Next we walked over to the physical assessment area, where I had to stand on a scale.

“Can I take my shoes off?” I asked J.B.

“No,” he said, “I’ll subtract a pound.”

“I’m pretty sure my shoes weigh two pounds.”

J.B. gave me a stern sidelong glance, and I got on the scale, which showed a different reading from the one I’d gotten at home that morning.

“I know you probably hear this all the time, but I think your scale is slightly off” I said to J.B.

After that, he measured my BMI, strength, flexibility, and endurance. I had to pull on some weights with all of my might and this is just between you and me, but they didn’t budge. I did pretty well on the treadmill, but I bombed the flexibility test, which was clearly rigged because I can do a cartwheel.

Afterwards, J.B. showed me a big fancy printout which said I was 39, and not 37 like I always thought. But if I signed up for more P.T. sessions, J.B. felt sure he could whittle me back down to 27 in three to five months. He also said I reminded him of his sixth grade teacher and he figures my kids will be taller than me in two to three years.

Depite all of that and the cheescake debacle, he was a pretty nice guy and I signed up for a month of sessions. I start Friday, wish me luck!

Where "U.S.A." means "English"

Posted by Rima at 10:21 pm

Aug 292010

“Mama,” my four-year-old son said to me recently as I repeated his English words back to him in Lithuanian, “In da U.S.A., you speak U.S.A. You no speak da Li-too-way-nee-yun.”

Never mind the fact that he made it with an Eastern European accent, he did have a point.

“Well, that’s absolutely true,” I answered him. “In the U.S.A., we do speak English, and that is very, very important. But we are lucky that in the U.S.A., we are free to speak other languages, as well. I want you to speak Lithuanian with me when we are at home so you don’t forget it. If you forget it, I think one day you’ll be sad.”

“Ne! Man nebus liūdna,” he answered me in Lithuanian, “Cuz in da U.S.A., you speak da U.S.A.”

I admit that in the past few months, I’ve been slacking off in the language enforcement department. It takes so much energy to constantly go against the grain, and sometimes it seems so futile. No, it seems insane. So even though I continue to speak with Jonas and V-meister exclusively in Lithuanian, I haven’t been on their case to answer me in kind.

But recently I learned a piece of information that’s enough to keep me going for at least a few more years – there is research to suggest that if a child not only understands, but also speaks a second language fluently until he is ten years old, there is a very high probability that even if the second language is not “enforced” after this point, the child is much more likely to understand and speak it for the rest of his life. If a child stops speaking in the second language before the age of ten, he will likely understand it, but will not be able to speak it.

So I decided not to let my kids off the hook just yet. And now, when Jonas answers me in English, I repeat his words back to him in Lithuanian and ask him to do the same. Sometimes (and of this I’m not proud) I’ll pretend I didn’t hear him until he does.

I am the language police.

Interestingly enough, exerting just a little more effort on my part has made a huge difference in my son’s willingness to speak Lithuanian with me. It’s a hard language, and I don’t blame the poor kid for trying to avoid it. As an informal rule, there are two syllables in a Lithuanian word to every one syllable in its English counterpart. The word for “truck” is “sunkvežimis.” Admittedly, English rolls off the tongue much more easily and is more efficient. But Lithuanian . . . it’s haunting, rhythmic, lilting. You just can’t see that when you’re four.

Earlier this week, Jonas dragged his Richard Scarry’s English-Lithuanian picture book out of the blue and presented it to his sister.

“Vee-ya? Can you weed dis book to me in Li-too-waaay-nee-un?” he asked her.

And so they did.

(Seven more years, and I’m home free!)

Note: I have not forgotten about Part Two of my Study Abroad Saga. It’s coming! Soonish.

Age of Ignorance - Part One

Posted by Rima at 4:55 pm

Aug 192010

It was fun and games on the flight from Detroit to Paris. In the early nineties, you couldn’t get lung cancer or give other people emphysema on a Trans Atlantic flight, so as soon as our plane took off, Beck and I whipped out our heretofore illicit pack of Camel lights and ordered adult beverages. Then we donned our Sony Walkmen and began scribbling furiously in our respective diaries. Important, sophisticated things were about to happen to us, and it was imperative that we write them down in progress.

We were twenty years old, best friends, and on our way to study abroad in France. We were going to fall in love with devastatingly handsome men, spend our days reading Camus in sidewalk cafes, and become all-around glamorous. I was planning on staying there for life and raising Gallic children in a chateau on the banks of the Loire, but I hadn’t yet broken it to my parents. They were footing the bill.

When we exited the passenger walkway at Charles de Gaulle in our Doc Martens and black turtlenecks, France knocked the air out of our lungs and then proceeded to ignore us. I noticed immediately that the travel outfit I had carefully selected from The Gap was no match for Paris street fashion and scrambled to unroll my pegged jeans. How could I make my hair look worldly in that sloppy French way? Why was everyone wearing the same ugly plaid scarf, and where could I get one?* Why didn’t I look less like Punky Brewster, more like Julie Binoche?

After locating our luggage, Becky and I stood in the terminal like deer in headlights. Ou est la gare de train? Suddenly it struck us with perfect clarity that we were two dowdy specks with Berlitz accents standing in a sea of indifferent humanity, and that knowing how to say, “The weather pleases me today” with perfect diction wasn’t going to get us to our youth hostel in one piece.

Becky was the first to brave the SNCF counter, where she accidentally bought two train tickets instead of just one. I stepped up to the window next, and after complementing the maleficent government employee on her beautiful blue eggs, managed to buy two tickets of my own. It was only through dumb luck and the grace of God that Becky and I made it, three hours later, to our hostel in the Latin Quarter.

After only a few days of living our dream, we were depressed. We had the wrong shoes and even Pepe Le Pew spoke better French than us. The rest of our study abroad group, who had arrived several weeks before, had already closed their circle and sealed it shut. We spent a lot of time writing in our diaries.

One afternoon as we were despairing in the fifth floor loft bedroom of our host family’s home, Becky picked up a station playing Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. on her Walkman. At home, we wouldn’t have touched the Boss with a ten foot pole. We were tortured souls who preferred Morrissey’s self-absorbed navel gazing over a bumpkin like Bruce. But all of a sudden, Bruce Springsteen was speaking directly to our hearts. By God, we were born in the U.S.A.! We liked malls and Big Gulps with ice, dammit! Why had we ever thought living in a country where people ate frog legs and horsemeat would be fun? We cranked up the volume and danced on our beds.

France was exactly the way I had always pictured it: sophisticated, slightly rude, and grungy with a glossy veneer. The problem was that it I was less of an adventurer than I’d previously thought. I happened to notice also that I was the the same person across the pond as I had been in America. I wasn’t smarter, more glamorous, more fashionable or more interesting. Living abroad, I suddenly realized, wasn’t going to magically transform me into a bohemian swan. If anything, it had stripped me down to my very essence, and all of my personality traits – both good and bad – were having an unauthorized dance party dangerously close to the surface. Standing unmoored in the middle of Europe was making me more myself than ever, and I had plenty of time to contemplate it.

(to be continued . . . )

* Burberry.

It was Lithuanian family camp, 2010.

I have a sweat mustache and my son is using a case of Corona as a stool, but at least our room is pimped out with a knock-off cut crystal accent lamp.

Heat? Check.

Humidity? Check.

Rain? Check.

Mosquitoes? Check.

Lice? Check.

Short tempers? Check, check, check.

And yet . . .

Home cooked meals? Check.

Childhood friends? Check.

Lithuanian ballads? Check.

Starry nights? Check.

Cool evening breezes? Check.

Coronas with lime? Check.

Nobody complaining of being bored? Check, check, check.

You can see more photos from our trip on my Flickr page, here.

UPDATE! The P-Dawg wants me to clarify that no one in our family got lice! There was lice at camp. It was quarantined. No lice here! We can still share a hairbrush and play light as a feather, stiff as a board. Thank you.