Whoops...

I've always thought I was good at math. So either for that reason, or because I had a P.E. teacher who liked to delegate, I was in charge of calculating a mile for the annual mile run at my elementary school.

Why?

The Presidential Challenge, that’s why!

You remember those tests.

Pull-ups, sit-ups, the mile run, the shuttle run, and the sit-and-reach. You reach one plateau, that's Presidential; a lesser plateau, that's National. You miss both plateaus, you appear on Dateline NBC as the "anonymous stomach" in the story on trans fat or the next diet craze from Dr. Atkins or his (living) surrogate.

I have six National patches in my house somewhere. Why? Because I couldn't reach my arms past my toes. This is not something that should haunt me, right?

But it does. Or it did, once, for a minute or two.

When? When during the only time in your life I had a one-on-one session with a personal trainer, I was told, "Gabe, you are the least flexible 23-year-old I have ever met!"

That was odd because, one, how many 23-year-olds does this 35-year-old personal trainer know? Is he the one taking out the girls my age? Or was he talking about the past? Didn’t people in the past have shorter legs, so that meant, they’d be better sit-and-reachers?

Back to the mile run in fifth grade.

At my elementary school in Nashville, we had four orange cones and the use of one huge park. I had to figure out how far apart to put the cones so that if we ran around them four times, we'd make a mile.

I added, multiplied and divided, and came up with answer.

Then I finished the course in 5 minutes and 49 seconds.

Whoops.

A 5:49 mile meant two things. Either I was the fastest fifth-grader in the state, or I made a math error.

I pushed my glasses up closer to my face, and thought: the latter.

But that meant 50 uncoordinated Jewish kids had to run around cones in the park...again. I was not so popular that day.

In my defense, my P.E. teacher’s method of cone-placement was based on the fact that she could stride exactly a yard 110 times in a row to place one cone, and then based on that cone, she’d figure out where to put the others.

Though I've come close, I have never to this day run a real mile in 5 minutes and 49 seconds.


(This blog is for Merav. What bettern day to give someone a shout out than his or her birthday. Happy 22, kid. I miss the way you like I miss Pedro Martinez. If you had baseball in your country, you'd understand just how much that is.)

Back to Country Living

It's the first new post in five months.

Since I last posted, I've done a lot.

But now that I'm back in the South, let's burn some bridges.

I have a real problem with rednecks. Though they're all white, you could say I'm racist against them. (You could say that, but don't.)

I don't like their accents, their tattoos, their smoking habits.

They're not a difficult bunch to figure out. But sometimes, they'll surprise you.

I've gotten a lot of calls at work from rednecks. The calls weren't for me in particular; I just sit close enough to the assignment desk that I end up answering a lot of phone calls. (But I don't get coffee!)

Anyway, during the primaries last week, I got a barrage of calls from the Southern Man who was mad we cut in to a new episode of Leno to bring him coverage of a concession speech.

Fine.

Then later that week, another bunch of calls because we interrupted afternoon soaps to talk about a tornado warning that the National Weather Service had put up.

Okay.

On Thursday night I once again got calls from people with accents so thick they made me wish I was back to talking to those girls in India who give me my bank info (which, by the way, is ridiculous considering my bank is across the street and not, say, in New Delhi). This time, these hicks were really pissed.

Why? Because the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions had been preempted for a special on the upcoming NFL season.

That completely threw me off. Don't the Southern folk like the physical pursuits more than the cerebral? Wouldn't you think Alex Trebek and his three know-it-all contestants would make the average Southern Man want to (ran)sack the whole Jeopardy studio?

And this wasn't Jeopardy Teen Tournament or even the college version where they dumb it down. This was the real deal--the hardest match played all year.

What did I do? I gave the callers a treatise on the importance of this season for the Jaguars, and for football in general, while I downplayed the game show. If they were such Jeopardy fans, they would have watched the tournament when it first aired, in the spring, and would know who won.

Maybe they did watch the shows back in the spring but forgot the outcome. If there's one thing I've learned while spending most of life in this part of the country, it's that Southerners have a horribly short-term memory. (Now, who won the Civil War again?)

So I tried to be polite as I told the callers to stay calm, as they just had to wait one more day to find out the results. The tournament would be back on Friday night. (I failed to add, "You can watch as you pack up your pickup for the next day's hunt." That would have been sweet.)

Maybe they were so antsy because they got a preview and knew one of the categories would be "Civil War Generals."

That would have generated loads of interest among Jeopardy-loving locals and football-loving yokels alike.

After all, it's still the South.