Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Too Late for Her Dumb Ass to Learn Why Froot Loops Are Not for Dinner (16 page)

I figure the test will more or less reflect my forty-two years. Which it does.

Before adding thirty, thus bringing my Wii Fit age to seventy-two.

Seventy-freaking-two.

That’s when I suspect there could be trouble.

I create a Mii avatar and I start playing. I’m totally fine when the other smug Miis gloat every time I go out of bounds and I’m not disheartened when YOU LOSE flashes across the screen in nine-hundred-point font. Frankly, I’m glad there’s someone out there today going all Tiger Mother because kids need to learn that not everyone gets a medal. Life is unfair and there are winners and losers, regardless of how much overprotective parents attempt to shield their offspring from reality.

One of my friends is an executive at a large corporation and he had to go through sensitivity training in regard to working with Millennials. Basically he spent three days learning that he was required to heap them with praise and give them plenty of respect, whether or not they earned it. To me? This is unreal.

And yet I begin to struggle with reality myself when using the supplemental balance board. Upon determining my BMI, my adorable avatar in her cute dress with her pink cheeks looks as shocked as I do when she swells Violet Beauregarde–style, turning all lumpy and potato-headed, enthusiastically exclaiming, “You’re obese!”

Um… thank you?

The first games I try involve the slalom and ski jumping. I believe my spectacular failures here are less a product of shoddy balance and more an issue of a board resting on a thick carpet. My results are consistently worse on every run, to the point that
my Mii drops to her knees and begins pounding her head against the ground. Such is her shame I’m surprised she doesn’t whip out a Hanwei sword and off herself Samurai-style.

So, fine. I’m not making the cut for the 2014 Sochi games anytime soon. I can live with that.

I switch to the balance fitness test and that’s when the machine goes all Regina George. In getting a feel for the sensitive calibration, I biff so many exercises that the Wii notes “balance isn’t my thing” and that maybe I’d “enjoy some nice memory games.”

Argh.

While I have an amazing memory, [
Seriously, ask me anything. First grade teacher? Mrs. White. She wore a wig and smelled like denture cream. Next?
] I still can’t quite master the Wii controller, which gives the impression of being full of a raw, wobbly egg or blobs of mercury. The device is disconcerting and I hate how it feels. Were I born ten years later, I could operate a joystick like it were one of my fingers, but I wasn’t so I can’t. [
See also: Why I don’t text. (Autocorrect can do only so much.)
] That’s why, despite having razor-sharp recall, I keep selecting the wrong answers. Failing at these tests prompts responses like “Are you usually forgetful?” and “Do you normally have trouble concentrating?”

Too bad the Wii Fit doesn’t measure how hard I can kick a TV stand.

The final insult comes when I try Lotus Focus. The goal of this game is to sit still. That’s it, just sit. Judging from my four gold stars—the Wii’s highest honor—I’m an Olympic medalist in Not Moving.

And
that’s
when I realize that “Wii Fit” is actually Japanese for “We fit; you fat.”

Japan, if you want to win us back, it’ll take more than reengineered acceleration systems. Unless the Wii Fit stops behaving like it’s starring in
Mean Girls II, This Time It’s Asian
, it’s over between us forever.

And P.S.? I hear Paul Hogan’s been itching for a comeback.

March 10, 2011

Aw, Japan, I take it all back. I’m sending you the biggest donation I can afford and I’m urging everyone I know to do the same.

I hope that Americans give generously enough to help rebuild your infrastructure… even the bits of it that produce insulting games.

I
f you want me to buy something, include four magic words on the packaging.

I’m not talking about “age-defying,” “pore-minimizing,” or “lose ten pounds instantly,” even though these are all fine qualities.

For me, the only words that matter are
As Seen on TV.

That moniker alone turns me from a savvy consumer to zealous convert in the time it takes to slap-chop an onion.
“But I’ve seen this advertised on television!”
I’ll say to myself, inspecting the ShamWow or Snuggie on that one weird endcap at Target.
“It must be good!”

Despite the rational part of my frontal lobe that reminds me,
“Almost everything that’s sold in stores can be seen on TV, yet you didn’t start squealing and throwing Tide in your cart,”
my brain stem cannot resist anything that’s hawked by a pitchman, that
ends in ninety-nine cents, or has an operator standing by to double my order if I act now.

I assume this is because what
As Seen on TV
means is there’s an infomercial about the product and I could not love infomercials more. When I used to roll home after the bars closed in college, I’d watch them until dawn because I was powerless to turn them off. A special paintbrush that reaches those hard-to-reach corners? A fruit dehydrator? A buzz-cut Susan Powter urging me to
Stop the Insanity
? A tonic used to straighten African-American women’s hair that is so nontoxic you can actually eat it?
The Principal Secret?
Yeah, I was in a college apartment that I wasn’t allowed to paint, I didn’t like dried fruit, I was thin, smooth, and Caucasian, but OMG, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes! I shall take them all!!

I imagine that because I was young, drunk, and more than a tad stupid, I was the target market for these infomercial makers. They probably lured college students into market research centers disguised as Irish pubs and with banners advertising half-priced drinks. I’m guessing researchers pumped them full of Jameson shots and then monitored exactly which products caused them to lose impulse control first. [
I bet no one could resist the Roly Kit storage containers. They’re storage containers! That roll!!
]

Of course, as much as I adore infomercials, Fletch hates them. Between the terrible acting and the exaggerated incompetence, he believes infomercials are an insult to his intelligence. This makes me love them even more because watching Fletch get mad is always funny.

“Who can’t crack an egg?” he’ll fume.

“Blankets aren’t that complicated! And it’s just a backwards robe, you idiot!”

“Seriously? They can’t peel a simple cucumber without stabbing themselves? Seriously?”

“Oh, noes! I can’t work this Saran Wrap! Look at my butterfingers! Somebody help me because I’m too stupid to work a strip of plastic!”

We’re at the dinner table eating flank steaks wrapped with spinach, prosciutto, and provolone cheese when an infomercial for the Chef Basket comes on. We’re both instantly mesmerized for entirely different reasons.

“What kind of half-witted moron can’t boil a potato without incident?” he barks.

Ooh, imagine all the potatoes I could cook without incident,
I think, immediately kicking into lizard-brain mode.

“Goes right from the pot to the plate… dripping boiling hot water across the kitchen the entire time.”

I’d never have to wash a colander again!

“From draining to straining! There’s no difference! Using two words to say the same thing doesn’t speak to multiple functionalities! That just means the intern who wrote this commercial had a thesaurus.”

It strains
and
drains? Is magic device!!

“And the bonus RoboStir? Please.”

And the bonus RoboStir! Please!

So enrapt are we with the commercial that neither one of us notices when our eighteen-year-old cat, Jordan, climbs onto the dinner table. As I watch, I hear a quiet
om-nom-nom
in the near vicinity, but it doesn’t really register because the dogs are eating
dinner behind us and my, God! The Chef Basket handles stay cool to the touch! Finally I’ll stop burning my hands whenever I go near the stove!

It’s not until the commercial ends that we realize that the cat’s not only on the table, but she also just ingested the nine-inch loop of butcher’s twine that had held my flank steak together while cooking.

Son of a bitch.

“Did she…” I gasp, lifting my plate to find evidence of the string. “She couldn’t…”

But she had and she did and she’s currently smacking her smug, self-satisfied feline chops as apparently I prepare a particularly appetizing string.

I can’t believe this just happened. I’ve spent the past eighteen years trying to keep this stupid cat away from all things dangling, knowing the havoc it would play on her delicate digestive system. I’m so careful that Christmas ribbon is strictly forbidden in this house, as is tinsel and Easter grass. I won’t even toss used dental floss in the trash. I wait until I’m ready to take out the garbage and then I collect the used bits I’d safely stashed in my nightstand. [
I almost always forget to do this on Garbage Day and Fletch won’t go near my nightstand because it’s a huge tangled knot of old floss, headbands, uncapped lip balms, free-range antacids, and those tiny silica packets found in shoe boxes for some odd reason. Fletch calls it my Drawer of Shame.
]

Fletch thinks more quickly than I do in a crisis, so while I pace and try to convince the cat to barf (by describing the oysterlike substance I once saw on a subway platform) he consults both the emergency vet and the Internet.

“Good news,” he tells me, hanging up the phone. “This isn’t such a big deal. We don’t have to bring her to the ER. All we need is a tablespoon of Vaseline.”

I run to the medicine cabinet to locate the tub I use for my scaly elbows. I scoop up a handful of goo and return to the kitchen. “Okay, what end do I put this in?”

Fletch gives me a Ped Egg–worthy scowl while I wrestle Jordan into position. “Her
mouth
, you ninny. You put it in her mouth!”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I scoff. “I’ve never lubed a cat before.”

“You think I have?”
[
Noted.
]

Jordan has always been fairly mellow. She’s been a cranky old lady her whole life, but in a passive, sitting-on-the-front-porch-and-exclaiming-into-her-handkerchief-that-those-hippies-need-a-haircut sort of way, rather than an aggressive, get-back-here-Bobby-Dylan-and-taste-the-blue-steel-of-my-clippers manner. But the minute I grasp her about the midsection and try to insert a petroleum product in her mouth, oh… here go hell come.

There is screaming and there is slashing and there is crying and I believe the bulk of it is coming from Fletch. I quickly witness that two hundred pounds of husband is no match for six pounds of ancient, irate kitty.

My entreaties that I’m trying to save her fool life are for naught and we continue to struggle with her but I can’t get the Vaseline anywhere near her mouth. I do, however, get it in my mouth, as well as my hair and my ear and all over the counter, which blends nicely with all the blood gushing from fresh claw marks.

“Now what?” I wail. The last thing I want to do is take her to the emergency vet because trying to shove her in a cat carrier is the same exercise in futility as attempting to force petroleum into her piehole.

“The doc says if we can’t get it into her mouth, we put tiny dabs on her paws and she’ll ingest it when she cleans her feet.”

I slather handfuls on her front legs. She bolts away from us, but not before spraying every cabinet, appliance, and window with tiny blobs of Vaseline before escaping to the laundry room where every piece of lint we’ve ever generated clings to her tacky limbs like tiny leg warmers.

“That didn’t work!” I shout.

“What part of ‘dabs’ did you not understand?”

At this point, poor little Jordie’s beyond upset and were she capable of registering her discontent online, we’d be unfriended, unfollowed, and in social media jail. She’d be begging Khloé Kardashian to “retweet if you think cat lubers are douche bags” and pinging Angelina and Brad to adopt her because clearly she’s being raised by savages.

Despite her anger, we have to get this stuff into her. So I rub down her whole front with Vaseline and, to make it more appetizing, follow it with a smear of creamy Danish butter. Then, for good measure, I apply some of the pan drippings from our dinner. She smells like a fine steak house and her fur stands up in glistening chunks and spikes, turning her into the smaller, more cantankerous feline version of Pauly D. before an evening of fist pumping at Karma. All she’s missing is a wee set of Beats by Dr. Dre cans strapped to her melon.

But Jordan, unlike the rest of the
Jersey Shore
crew, is not up for GTL nor is she DTF. Instead she takes off to my closet and
spends the rest of the night RAMCLS (Rubbing Against My Clean Lacoste Shirts.)

Fletch takes her into the vet for an X-ray and bath the next morning and the vet tech swears she has to leave the room and laugh for an entirely different circumstance. Right.