cinnamon angst

so here's the deal - now that i'm older, i am beginning to feel older, and quite possibly look older.

sure, i've got my woman body and i'm very comfortable with that, and yes, i have earned every laugh line i have (i think i had laugh lines at age 10 but seriously, isn't it better to have them than not?), but i have an aging thing that is quite unique, i think, to the strawberry contingent on the planet.

i think my hair is getting lighter and a little bit less red which is TERRIFYING. here's the history - i once met a friend of my grandma's who had pink hair. as in "i used to have red hair and now i don't because i'm old and it's pink". no shit. and she was really lovely and i really liked her, but she also served as the totem of the horrors of crimson fire aging.

so, with that image burned in my mind - it didn't help that she was in florida and wore outrageous sweatsuits all the time - we come to this fall where i am posting all of my pics of my travels and i notice in the self-portrait of me in front of a mountain in the kootenays that my hair looks a little less red. maybe it's the light, i think.

but then i hang out with my friend adam who is also a redhead, who now is strawberry blond since he's just past the big 4- 0. this is a man who had deep red hair, who is now strawberry (he likes to call it cinnamon sugar instead of strawberry). and then i go back to the picture, and think, "those ain't my highlights talking".

and then to top it all off, nicole kidman has to go and get a lot of press and ends up looking like this. look at it closely - she is GREY. with strawberry at the bottom.

is THIS what's waiting for me (without the botox freeze face and an effed up marriage to xenu himself and then another weird marriage to a fellow aussie who always has his shirt open and has more highlights than me)????

anyhoo - take note. get pics of the red because it's going down soon.

do the math

yesterday was such a great day.

i woke up to a phone call from my family and chatted with my bro and mom. then i surfed the internet which i finally have again at home and then decided to go for a walk as a pre-emptive strike before going completely insane. so i walked to the end of my street and discovered the international triathlon. i watched women zoom by on their bikes and then walked down to the seawall and watched them run by. and they were fast. and they were brick shithouses. seriously - these women were HUGE, but lean in their hugeness. most of all, they were and still probably are, fit - very fit.

i heard that the men were starting at 3 so i walked along the seawall, got a coffee and walked far enough to get to the end of their swim so i could see them transition to their bikes. i plunked my ass down on a log and watched this line of extremely fast arms splashing through the water out in the bay and then watched them run out of the water. if the women were brick shithouses, the men were brick shitmansions. seriously, they were HUGE and lean and pretty much amazing specimens of manhood, at least from an aesthetic point of view. then i walked along the seawall back towards the city and watched them do 8 laps on their bikes. they were so fast - and i had just finished "it's not about the bike" by lance armstrong earlier in the week so was totally transfixed by what i will call "le peloton" or the pack of really fast dudes and then the other "peloton" which was a larger pack of not-as-fast dudes. and then they ran 4 loops and simon whitfield - the canadian triathlete god - won the race. yyyyyesssssss.

which brings me to math and today.
i was feeling so inspired that i looked up "my first triathlon" websites all morning and then decided that i would go up to north van and ride my bike and be all "lancita armstrong" and shit. but i'm not that good at math which had a deleterious effect on my ride. i threw my bike in the car (which always makes me feel kinda dumb - i mean, why not just ride there?) and drove over to the mountains.

so first miscalculation - leave the city which is threatening to have some serious sunshine for the grey grey mountains in the distance.
then on the way out the door, throw on your velour jacket since you don't need no stinkin' goretex cuz you're HARDCORE.
then drive and sing your heart out in the car, and choke your heart down as it rises into your throat as you put the wipers on full throttle going over the bridge into the land of mordor (sorry, north van).
then go for a ride which is distinctly uphill.
then try to ignore the fact that your hands are bright red, as are your ankles cuz you wore capris and shoes with no socks cuz it's summer, right?
then grind by two elderly cyclists who are coasting downhill the other way in matching bike jackets who tell you "it's cold up there!".

this is where my calculator started to work:
"it's cold". yes - hands frozen and ankles.
"up there". wha? am i not "up" enough? there's more "up" "up there"??
and finally the large equation "it's cold up there" which meant it was even colder up at the top of the stupidly long hill i was on and had been for the past 2.5 k.

so was i lancita armstrong? hell no, because lancita armstrong is a freak of nature who wins hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money not to mention the endorsement cash that comes after winning epic races which necessitate training of this sort.
i am not lancita armstrong, although i would like to think i am. i instead, am jess who really wants to go to a yoga class tonight and doesn't feel the need to die of hypothermia before then.

so i graciously turned around, coasted downhill and threw ye olde bike in the car and drove home to the hot hot city.

i'll become a brick shithouse tomorrow. maybe. if there are cupcakes at the end.