The IPOD Giveth and the IPOD Taketh away!

Owning an iPod may very well net you some cool. However be warned. The iPod giveth cool and the iPod taketh away. Recently, I decided to take advantage of the cool, rain cleaned weather and get out for a little speed walk and also I’ve been avoiding the fitness center after my last treadmill fiasco. So at lunch yesterday I put on my running shoes, clipped my iPod onto my waist-band and I headed out down the jogging trail by Elon’s lake. I had my groove thang on and I was stepping lively to an old Michael Jackson song. Let’s dance! Let’s shout! Shout! Shake your body down to the growwwnd! I was pumping my arms and breathing hard and I might have even worked up a bead of sweat.

I hadn’t gotten too far when in the distance I thought I saw someone I knew, so I raised my hand to wave. And this is where the freaky pagan iPod gods (igods?) decided to mess with me. I caught my hand on the cord and violently yanked one of the earbuds out of my ear. And in a manner that is not only uncanny, but defies science, the earbud went flying out in front of me, don’t ask me how the other earbud stayed CEMENTED to my ear, like I said defied science!!! So I step it up a bit in an effort to catch the runaway earbud. And I’m reaching and grasping and bobbling it back and forth from hand to hand like a hot potato and I’m stepping longer and longer, but the ear bud won’t be caught. And then finally, under the power of gravity, it fell downward and caught between my legs. It wrapped around my thigh with astonishing centrifugal force and then unwrapped and spiraled around the other leg with my next step. So now I have one earbud in my ear and one between my legs. With every excruciatingly long step I take, my head is jerked sharply downward. And for reasons unknown to me, I can’t seem to stop walking like John Cleese from Monty Python. So I continue to speed walk, or I should probably say, speed trip. Like an out of control down hill skier, I’m bent over and lurching forward, tripping and tripping, yet not quite giving into falling. My strides are getting impossibly longer and more awkward as though I’m being yanked along by an invisible string for the amusement of a giant cat. I am poetry in motion — bad, bad coffeehouse poetry at 2am after an evening of cheap wine.

At the same time I was trying with every muscle in my body not to fall, I was also praying that I would. That I could just fall and get it over with, crash to the ground and maybe even black out and not remember any of it. Maybe wake up with a handsome paramedic bent over me checking my vitals. Finally, I give in and decide, what the heck, just fall already and be done with it. But no, I can’t even fall with any measure of cool. Just as I prepared to tuck and roll and my knees were mere inches from the pavement, I run into a spider’s web that was suspended among two small saplings along the pathway. I feel it twist around ensaring me in its invisible strangling strands and I start flailing and swatting and flapping at the invisible sticky because you all know how gross that feeling is to be trapped in a web and feel like Shelob from Lord of the Rings is about to make you her lunch. So as you can imagine, I’m now doing some bizarre dance infusion of the Macarena and the chicken dance.

Now, remember at the beginning how I told you that I waved to someone I thought I knew? And how that unleashed the chain reaction of uncool? Well, then imagine for a moment, if you will, how this whole scene might have appeared from their perspective. Yet she bravely continued to walk towards me.
Finally the iPod gods had had their fun with me and pulled the pins from the Holley voodoo doll. The world stopped spinning and I am finally able to right myself — just in time to see that the person I waved to? I don’t know her. I was giving in to my upbringing of being polite and friendly in ALL situations and attempting to greet someone I had never seen before in my life. And frankly, I’m relived to know that it wasn’t a co-worker who would start a rumor that Holley had been drunk or now suffered from some sort of seizure disorder. This poor woman (that of course is an oxymoron as she was wearing coordinated designer sweats and pristine white sneakers) gives me a quick tight-lipped smile before averting her eyes, no doubt relieved to see that I wasn’t foaming at the mouth and hurries past me.

I am a total spaztard and should not be allowed out in public with or without an iPod. My cool has been revoked. iPod taketh my cool away and has given it someone worthy. Someone who knows how to walk and wave at the same time. There go my dreams of starring in my own Gap commercial, I know totally unrelated.

This leaves me completely baffled because once upon a time, I used to be coordinated. I was athletic, heck I was down right awesome at times on the softball and soccer fields. Something happens to women when their kids become teenagers, its almost as if cosmically you are no longer allowed any nubile grace or finesse. Its kind of like how you get dumber as they get older. I not only got dumber, I got clumsier, go figure!!!