The locker rooms at the Y are separated by gender, but they are also separated by age. Anyone under the age of 13 is supposed to be using the Family Locker Room. I had always assumed that this was so little kids weren’t running around annoying the single adults, but maybe it’s also to keep kids out of an area where said adults might be walking around naked. Mainly, this rule translates to one thing: the adult locker room is a strange world of forbidden fascination. I imagine this is why 3 little girls, all clad in blue karate gis, were running around me as I gathered up my bag, boots and cloak after an hour on the elliptical machine. Then they weren’t running. They were just standing there, staring at me. The brave one spoke up.

“You have TWO earrings in your ear,” marveled the freckled, curly-haired 8ish year old.

“Oh no,” I answered, pulling back my hair, “there are SIX.”

Awed gasps all around. In adult land, I’m the most white bread goth chick alive. To these kids, I was Fakir Musafar.

I am interrogated until these girls know exactly how long cartilage takes to heal, how to pierce an ear, how much it will hurt and to “not walk around with a safety pin in your ear because it’s not very classy.”

“When did you get your first one?”

“When I was four. The second one, I did a long time ago, when I was sixteen.”

“How old are you now?”

“Thirty-four.”

(This time, the awed gasps translate to “holy crap, that’s older than MOM, and she’s OLD.”)

“Wow…that WAS a long time ago. What about that? Did that hurt?” She motions toward my tattoo, a black bow just above my wrist.

“Yes, especially on the tender meat on the inside, but it only took an hour and a half.”

“Did it hurt a lot?”

“Have you ever been stung by a bee? It’s like that, but it takes so long that you just get used to it after a while. Then you go home and take a nap.”

“I could never have a bow on me. That’s going to be there until YOU DIE.”

“I wondered that, but after a week, I couldn’t imagine my arm without it.”

“You can get it removed with surgery.”

(She also asked if my earring holes would hear all the way. This little girl remaking me in the image of Martha Stewart with a tone of “it’s not too late for you.”)

“But I don’t want to have it removed. I want more of them. I want to do my whole arm, but I keep having to spend money on other things, things around the house.”

“What color is your house?”

“Gray, but next summer it’s going to change to light green.”

They pause. I could fairly see the gears turning in the brave one’s mind.

Tick…
tock…
tick…

“Amy?”

She has read my name from the ID tag on my gym bag and said my name with a certain brand of solid, deadpan, “let’s get serious” tone. I’m startled, momentarily thinking that this little girl has, in fact, been hired by my mother to remake me in the image of Martha Stewart.

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Engaged??”

“No.”

“Do you have a boyfriend???”

Her tone gets more and more strained with each question, as though she’s begging me to throw her a bone. To make the world make sense. To explain how someone can be OLDER THAN MOM and still be single.

“We just broke up, actually.”

“How long were you together?”

“Almost a year.”

Again, her world is making no sense. A year is FOREVER.

“It’s fine, really. Sometimes people just can’t get things to work and you have to realize that maybe you should just be friends instead.”

This is me, putting on my happy, independent face. I’m single! I have freedom! Wheeeeeee! Everything will be wonderful and everybody will be friends and bluebirds will my onto my finger if I put my hand out the window in the morning. I most certainly was not drunk for two weeks, I didn’t do jigsaw puzzles and cry and I certainly haven’t been freebasing sappy Gavin DeGraw songs. No, sir. Everybody’s wonderful and there are frickin bluebirds and–

“But do you have a boyfriend NOW?”

(God, are we still on this? Look, I told you, HAPPY INDEPENDENT FACE.)

“No. It’s a little too soon. I’m just having fun doing my thing and hanging out with friends.” (Also, bluebirds!)
Her face is calling bullshit on me. I am being CALLED BULLSHIT ON by an 8 year old in a karate outfit. This, readers, is why I have a hard time taking myself seriously. I’m standing there, trying to explain the complexities of relationships and moving on to someone who (statistically) does not yet fully grasp abstract nouns. Also, I am sweaty and would like a shower.

I excuse myself and leave the three confused girls standing there in the locker room. I’m still not sure who the Y is trying to protect with that “adults only” locker room rule.

I was more than happy to tell the guy at the bank about how well my mom’s stuffing went over. We all miss grandma, but (all due respect) alzheimer’s will seriously screw up your cooking skills. I also abided the rules of courtesy and left out the part about how I came home, drank a 40 and cried out a recent breakup. These things happen.

I ran into “when in doubt, ask questions” while signing up at the local YMCA.

“So, what do you do?”
(Web design, moving into development.)

“Oh, so you type fast?”
(Yes, but mainly cause I typed a lot of letters in high school and play the piano.)

“Piano? Do you also sing?”
(Not in public.)

With that, I paid my money and had done something I’d wanted to do for a long time but had never had time or money. I joined the local Y. So, how’s it going?

The Y is the land of happy, skinny people. All of the women are toned, all of the guys are good-looking, and everybody’s rosy-cheeked and nice. I suspect that the Y is a lot like Sweden. I would feel terribly awkward and out of place, except that all of the employees are super nice and the other patrons seem to be too involved in whatever they’re doing to notice what I giant n00b I am.

You’d think by now that I would know that the locker room is pretty much ALWAYS right next to the pool. You’d think the Y would give new people some kind of tour or a map. You’d be wrong on all counts. However, once I just ASKED somebody to point me toward the locker room, I found the one at the Margaret Maddox Y (Inglewood) to be pretty nice. The one downtown is, hands down, the nicest locker room I have ever seen in my limited experience of locker rooms. In square footage, it might be bigger than my house, and the shower steam is kept separate, avoiding having the whole room turn into a nasty sauna.

Learn from my mistakes: if you just START USING the machine, whether it be elliptical, bike, or whatever, the thing will turn on and instruct you. Please do not ask me how I learned this. Please also do not tell any tv producers that they should follow me around with a tv camera for a show called “Adventures of Smart Girls with No Common Sense.”

If the class says “Advanced Step Aerobics,” this is not a descriptor of how much cardio will be done. This is a descriptor of how familiar you will need to be with WHAT THE HELL has happened to step aerobics since I took it in college. Those women were doing a full-out improv dance routine, apparently based solely on whatever the instructor was yelling. It was like really fast square dancing. I was positioned behind two leggy amazons from Planet Pilates who would literally do ballet jumps while the rest of us were marching in place. This leaves me with the following conclusion:

Assuming I did not unknowingly drop acid before class, I should hit a beginner class until I know what the hell “bus stop,” “rhumba left,” and “revolving door” are.

I also went to a sculpting class and learned that I am a total wuss. Judging from the feel of my arms 6 hours after class, I may not be able to move my arms tomorrow. Just FYI in case you need any air traffic control or baseball umpiring.

All in all, it’s been a really good experience so far. After a month of not being able to work out because of school and work, it feels really good and productive to be back at it, and to be doing something more interesting than walking the same 6 mile neighborhood loop that I always walk. Granted, this means I will no longer get cat calls from the NADC dorms, but you know: everything’s a trade off.

I’m being the crotch of my underwear.

My friend informs me that some magazine says that a lady ought to replace her underwear every three years. I’m willing to bet that said magazine was Cosmo. Then again, Cosmo also recently claimed that a good way to spice up one’s sex life was to wear one’s thong as a scrunchie.

PS: That’s sort of gross.
PPS: WHY ARE YOU WEARING A SCRUNCHIE?

Things like that make me picture some poor writer, fresh out of Yale, getting her first job in writing. Her editor, who looks like Devil Wears Prada Meryl Streep, plops down a stack of back issues, has her read all of the “____ ways to spice up your sex life” articles, and then demands she think of something new.

She feels her face flush with anger at the injustice of the job market and then sarcastically suggests thong scrunchies. She expects to be fired for her insolence. Instead, she is promoted.

Anyway. The underwear.

Guys get a bad rap for wearing their underwear until it falls apart, but I’m here to tell you that women are just as bad. The underwear life cycle goes a little something like this:

1. “Whee! Look at my sexy new underwear! Hey, boyfriend, check out my butt!”

2. “The elastic’s starting to give up on life. I guess these should go into the ‘period drawers’ category.”

3. “Oh, who am I kidding? These don’t even have enough life to properly position feminine hygiene products.”

4. “Fine. But only when I’m sure no one will see.”

Then, one day, you hit step 5. You go to pee and realize that you can see the floor through a tiny hole in the front. The cotton crotch is in bits, dangling separately from the satiny part. There are only two choices at this stage:

1. Throw the underwear away
2. Wear the underwear as a scrunchie

I assume you know what to do. Unless you work at Cosmo.

“Going to BarCamp.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s basically a day of douchebaggery and business card distribution, thinly disguised as a day of informative seminars.”

As you may have guessed, I was less than enthused about the idea of spending my Saturday attempting to mingle with people I’d never met. Three years of working from home has made me weird, and I wasn’t much of a mingler in the first place. Thus, the idea of being thrown into a room of total strangers and expected to mingle is right there with “mow the lawn” and “go to baby shower” on the list of things I would rather not do.

I went because I have finally realized that working by yourself at home is perhaps not the best way to stay on top of what people are talking about. Yes, there’s twitter. There are blogs. But neither of those involve BEER, so I went to BarCamp. If nothing else, I would suck it up and perhaps learn how to mingle. Or at least watch successful minglers (aka “marketing people”) in their natural habitat.

“It’ll be like Big Cat Diary. In your head, you can narrate in a British accent. If all else fails, you can do what all other socially awkward people do: you can mess around with your phone and pretend to be TOTALLY into it.”

I ended up being pleasantly surprised. While not all of the panels I went to ended up being super exciting, I did actually end up meeting a few cool people. I had some very pleasant and non-fake-feeling conversations. Yes, I gave out my business card to a few people, but all but one of those people asked for said card. I tend to get into a conversation and completely forget to even OFFER the card, being too distracted by whatever’s being said and the general sensory overload of being in a room full of people.

I ran into a couple of people I know from the coffee shop, one guy I dated for a while and a couple of people I know from Twitter. The surprisingly pleasant day was topped off at the after party, held in a karaoke bar. When one fellow got on stage to sing “Purple Rain,” the crowd response was, “hey, he’s actually pretty good.” By the time the guy on stage was hitting the super-high notes at the end, the reaction had grown into “stunned, awed silence.”

“That’s the guy who played guitar for Prince in the 80s!”

“That’s Dez Dickerson?!”

(Of COURSE I knew the guy’s name. Are you new here?)

After he was done singing, I went over and showed him the pictures inside the locket I always wear. Purple Rain-era Prince on the right, Morris Day on the left.

I survived mingling, and I’m glad I didn’t peace out early. I believe this BarCamp thing will have to happen again.

It seemed like a fine idea at the time. The year was 2006, there was no recession and, if memory serves, birthday cake had no calories.

My portfolio, web site and business cards were all done up the same way: pink and lilac stripes, a spray of black flowers and some clean yet childlike uses of Century Gothic. The surface reason was that Century Gothic was easy to read and its large x-height made it seem childlike. The secret reason was that using a sans serif font with “gothic” in the name made me chuckle a little.

Years passed and I kept right on, handing out those pink, striped business cards. I started moving away from design and into development. I continued on with the pink cards. I couldn’t understand why people had trouble taking me seriously.

Then a friend cleaned out her closet and I inherited one of her old suits. It was a very serious, ballbustery suit in black with thin gray pinstripes. I had a moment of clarity.

She owned that suit for the same reason that I needed that suit: to compensate for looking like a refugee from the lollipop guild. Sure, a 6 foot four man might be able to show up in khakis and a polo and get taken seriously. As for us, we had to throw down. You could have the cure for cancer in your portfolio and, if everything is pink and flowery, you get dismissed by everyone but women who want you to design invites for doggie birthday parties.

“Sniffles cordially invites you to celebrate her 2nd (14th in dog years) birthday!!”

I had long fought off the idea of owning a suit. Of taking out my nose ring. Of cutting my hair into a bob. I was out there, waving the flag of “but this should be about my WORK, not about my nose ring!” and while I was out waving my little flag, a recession came.

In a recession, nobody cares what a unique little snowflake you are. Furthermore, one day that kind of flag waving begins to seem impractical and childlike. One day, you get tired of being poor and realize that your nose ring isn’t doing anything but calling attention to your least favorite feature, you really could use a haircut, and maybe you shouldn’t wear dominatrix boots to an interview.

After being called for a second interview for an internship, I went to school for a resume review. As I started explaining how I’d used all lower-case letters because they make the typography so much neater, the woman across the desk from me just looked at me like I was yelling “barga larga looo!!” in her face. So began the argument with myself.

“If my wardrobe needs to be serious to counteract ME, maybe my resume does too,” I thought.

“Really? Are you seriously going to sell out and use Times New Goddamn Roman on your resume? Why don’t you just use a fucking Word template while you’re at it? Go kill yourself.”

“But we’re moving into development. We have become a serif font, and that’s ok. There are some really nice serif fonts out there.”

So, I called an old friend.
Baskerville.

He’s less corporate than Times New Roman, less girly than Mrs. Eaves (which, by the way, is becoming almost as over-used as Papyrus), and less pretentious than Helvetica. He just walks in and says, “I’m gonna tell you some stuff in slightly flowery but still accessible language.” He says this with a faint but not obnoxious accent.

He sounds like Sean Connery.

He and I sat down together and we came up with a new resume. A sketch for a new site. We talked about business cards. I didn’t feel like I’d sold out. I felt like I’d grown up.

As I initially spoke with Suzie about her site, I thought two things:

1. This would be good opportunity to get into WordPress
2. Oh, God. I hope I’m not full of fail on this.

As it turned out, the drama level was actually pretty low and the educational value was incredibly high. I got familiar with the all-important WordPress “loop,” and learned about modifying themes (this one started out like this). We went with an “atomic retro” look, along with a cartoon Suzie drawn just for the header of the site (the flower in her hair is her signature). Suzie ended up being really happy with the site, and I was happy with myself for finally finding the time and courage to get into WordPress. Check it out here.

This is a site build of a design thought up by “Nashville” Dave Harper. He and his architect buddies had a lot of ideas about remote rollovers (the kind that can’t just be done with CSS) and very exact measurements, right down to the pixel. The result of those exacting specs was a pixel-perfect design that pleased both client and builder. Check it out on their site.

For this quick & dirty portfolio site for photographer, collage artist and all-around cool dude Nashville Dave, I used a ready-made Flash movie that pulls in images via XML. If you’ve never met Nashville Dave, you probably don’t live in East Nashville. If you have met Nashville Dave, tell him I say hi the next time you’re at Ugly Mugs.

This is a build out of a design by Wendy Spence as part of a collaboration with Constructive 9. It features a Lightbox gallery and dynamic text menus. Should you find your self at East Nashville’s Rosepepper, I would suggest the Enchiladas Del Mar and the giant blue margarita. Do I get to eat there free because I built their site? No, but that’s better for everybody, as I would have eaten them into bankruptcy by now. Om nom nom.

**Long ago and far away, people used tables in their web builds. They would later realize the folly of their actions. Let us never speak of this again.

This is another build of a site designed by one of the homies from art school. This particular friend mainly does wedding invites and birth announcements…but not site building. Enter Amy, stage left, doing what she does best: taking a Photoshop file and building the heck out of it. See the site here.