Miss Piggy, Athletic Trainer
It's the middle of the day, and I should be out looking for a job right now. But I never learned to write when I have time; I have to do it when I feel like it. That's why it takes me so long to write these blessed posts. But this time I sat down ready, so this shall be the incredible thirty-minute post.
I am living with my mother. My mother is afflicted with something like fourteen incurable debilitating non-fatal illnesses, and has been since I was ten. She and my father divorced when I was about nine; she got sick shortly thereafter and I've been bouncing between the two ever since. It's sickeningly shameful to me that I'm still doing this when I'll be twenty-two in nine days. But I've yet to learn anything like self-sufficiency.
My mom's life is difficult to describe without the details; she spent two years in bed at one time. For the past five years she has been slowly improving. She still isn't financially independent either, though. Her plan, when she divorced, was to build a group home for children. I'm in that same accursed building now. I have to give it to Mother: in every thing she's done in her life, she's had bad luck, misinformation, no help, regular abuse, and been taken by anyone who so much as sold her produce. She is the poster girl for American victimhood. She built the school, against all odds, got sick, and then had to shut it down. She didn't lose it when she couldn't pay the mortgage; she rented half the building out and lived one room. The building- it's a house actually- she chose to put it in is a driftwood shanty. It's a piece of shit in every way. But it was cheap, as it had just been foreclosed, and the previous owner had done his best to devalue it on the way out, using his boots and a hammer. Hereafter it will be referred to as
The Accursed Schoolhouse.
My mother will remind me of all of this at least once a day. The positive parts, anyway. But more about her later.
There's a dog who lives on this property named Miss Piggy. We just call her Piggy, though. Yes, she is in fact named after the muppet; that, and she bears a striking resemblance to a pig. She is a Chow Chow-Golden Retriever mix; this gives her a stout frame, a short snout, triangular ears, and a curly tail. She also makes grunting noises when she's excited. She's not very big underneath it, but she has a lot of chestnut fur that makes her look chubby. She has the absolute mildest disposition I have ever seen in any dog, and I've seen a lot. The downside is that she doesn't play; she loves attention, she loves new people, she loves other animals- but she will not chase anything you throw unless it's made of liver. But she has NO bad habits. She's never had even ONE. And we've had her since birth. She was born housebroken.
My mother always feels it is necessary to state that Piggy is *my* dog, and not *our*dog. This creates a lot of stupid petty fights between the two of us, where I display the maturity of a seven-year-old by failing to take care of the dog just to spite my mother. Mom originally got Piggy for me; but she has lived with my mother for eight years, during all the time I was with my dad. This is primarily because The Accursed Schoolhouse has an acre fenced-in yard. Piggy undoubtedly believes that my mother is her owner.
Not that a dog with an acre yard is in desperate need of walking; but my mother honest-to-god has trouble walking more than two-hundred meters in one go, so Piggy's never been walked with anything approaching regularity. Can you see where this is going?
I spent the summer living with my father. Sometime in early August, while I was there, the shift happened that led to me starting a blog. I decided shortly thereafter that I was going to try and get fit again. What utterly unsettled me at the time was that when I told myself this, I believed me; which was, to say the least, weird. One of the first things I tried was driving to a local public track and walking two miles; I did this every day for two weeks. Then I got caught up in helping mother, ended up moving in, and couldn't manage to drive that far.
Another reason mother doesn't walk the dog is that The Accursed Schoolhouse is on a four-lane highway. The road we're cornered on is only a hundred meters long and dead-ends into a creek. So in order to walk anywhere, you have to either cross the highway or walk along it a ways. She's always been afraid that if she did this with Piggy, and then Piggy got out of the yard, she'd run right into the street to get to her usual stomping grounds. I've always thought this was overcautious because Piggy doesn't even *try* to get out of the yard.
So, to get to the point, I started taking the dog on long walks. Across the highway. God help me (and the dog) if mother was right. I've been doing it for a month, virtually every day, and the amazing thing about it is that Piggy is actually starting to pay some attention to me because of it, instead of ignoring me all the time.
As far as exercise, walking the dog is actually not very good because dogs need to sniff everything. That's why they're on the walk, for goodness sake. If they just wanted to walk, they could run in circles in the yard. So the constant stopping meant I wasn't actually getting anywhere near the intensity I needed. Until the day before yesterday, when, like a bolt of lightening, it occurred to me that I could just march in place when Piggy stood still. Which I did. And so I broke a sweat.
So now I have a very limited, but structured exercise program. For further reference, according to an old and not-very-trustworthy scale, I weight two-hundred-fifty pounds. I know enough about health to know how bad a measure of fitness that is, though, so I offer you my own highly suspect self-measured waist size: forty-seven inches. This bothers me because I'm wearing size forty-four pants. Oh well.
Anyway, the incredible thirty-minute post has now taken me an incredible one-hundred-twenty minutes to write, and I have to go look for a job. So all you people out there in internet land, have yourself a bright shiny day.
