Before this week, I hadn't been to the gym in almost two months. Between trips and work and family illnesses I had been too busy, too sick, or too far away to go. Finally, though, I managed to get healthy and rested, and finished a big project at the office, and picked up my exercise routine where I left off. In a lot of ways it has felt like I'm starting all over again; the routines and people feel unfamiliar, and, of course, I've lost a lot of stamina during my hiatus. But it's good to be back, if for no other reason than for being reintroduced to a phenomenon that had managed to slip my mind over the course of my absence.

It all came back to me Wednesday morning, when I reintroduced myself to spin class. By about the twenty-minute mark (in an hour-long class) I was really starting to labor. My thighs were burning, sweat was pouring down my face and stinging my eyes, and my breath was coming in ragged gasps. I found myself repeating that familiar mantra in my mind: "Just two more songs. Two more songs and I'll have been here a respectable amount of time. Two more songs and I can quit for the day."

I was almost ready to quit when something strange happened, something that I had forgotten in the past two months. Completely unprompted by anything going on around me, images of Jason suddenly popped into my mind. In my mind I could see the way he holds up his arms when he wants you to pick him up out of bed, hear the gleeful sound of his shrieks when you tickle him. And with those images, this incredible feeling of peace came over me, and I found the corner of my mouth turning up in a smile.

I don't know if this is what people mean when they talk about "runner's high" or if it's just a weird trick of my consciousness, but this imagery and the Zen-like calm that comes with it is something happens to me a lot during that spin class, but rarely seems to happen elsewhere, if ever. Just when I'm feeling like I'm about to hit the wall, I'll think of the weight of Jason's head on my shoulder when he's tired, and the softness of his hair on my cheek, and I'll be recharged. It's a fleeting thing, too, something that I can never quite seem to summon on my own, or hold onto once it's there. It's usually not long before the instructor decides to kick it up to the next level, and then there's no room left in my head for anything other than the exertion.

But, man, it's worth it. If this is what marathonners experience when they run their races, I can really see the appeal.

Juliette and I have a nice little system for figuring out our nightly chores. When Juliette cooks, I do the dishes. When I cook, I do the dishes. It works out perfectly because Juliette gets some time to relax in the evening and I get the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the dishwasher has been loaded properly and the dishes have been cleaned to my standards. There is one thing I hate about doing the dishes, though. I hate the utensil caddy.

You may be thinking, "But Mike, why would you hate your utensil caddy? All it does is sit in your silverware drawer and make sure that your salad forks and dinner forks stay separate. Surely you don't hate your utensil caddy. After all, what could it possibly have done to you to inspire such strong emotion?" I do hate it, though. And I'll tell you why: it's because I'm a crazy person.

I hate that my utensil caddy is made out of widely-spaced wire mesh, because it means that every time I open the silverware drawer, the butter knives slide through the spaces in the mesh grid and stick there. I end up either having to unstick them before taking them out to use them or remembering to open the drawer very slowly every single time. Or deal with bent butter knives. People, this is not a choice I should have to make.

As annoying as that is, it's not such a huge problem. After all, I could just go get a new utensil caddy, one with smaller gaps, or which lacks gaps entirely. (I shouldn't have to do this, but it's still an easy enough solution.) What really drives me up the wall about my utensil caddy is something common to every caddy I've ever seen. It is an inherent design flaw.

Imagine that you have finished washing and drying your dishes, and now must set about putting your utensils back where they belong. If your house is anything like my house, you've probably got two or three forks to put away, maybe four, and perhaps six or eight clean ones already in the drawer. So you drop your nice, freshly cleaned forks back into their neat little caddy spaces and go on about your business.

Some time in the not too distant future, you will need a fork again, of course, so back to the caddy you'll go. And most likely you'll take the fork from the top of the little pile in the fork space. But, people, that is one of the forks that you just put back in there. What about those six or eight forks sitting on the bottom of the pile? Odds are, you won't get down to them at all unless you have company over, which at my house, anyway, happens no more than twice a week and usually a lot less. This means that a small minority of your forks is being used at least 2.5 times more than the rest, and is thus accumulating that much more wear than the rest.

Of course I recognize that you can easily avoid this problem by either always taking the fork from the bottom or by always putting away the clean forks on the bottom of the pile. But that is completely unsatisfying, because either way it means you have to take out all of the forks to get to the spot you want and then put them all back every single time. And that's just unacceptably inefficient.

Look, I already told you that I'm a crazy person.

Like most crazy people, I'd like to blame it on my parents. I know that's kind of a cliché, but in my case I think it's probably true, since this particular sort of crazy seems to run in my family. Trust me, if you've ever seen the look on my aunt's face when someone says that they may have accidentally spilled a drop of spaghetti sauce into the crack between her stove and counter, you'll know that I'm not making this up.

I'm convinced, though, that it's not just me and my mom's family who are crazy like this. Somebody else out there has gotten worked up about stuff just as ridiculous as a utensil caddy. So tell me: what's your bit of crazy?

Juliette, Jason, and I were in Virginia this past week, visiting my mom and stepdad. Now, I could go ahead and tell you all the details of what we did, where we went, and what we ate. (I swear I gained five pounds on this trip.) I'm told, though, that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that this one nicely sums up the whole experience:

What I love about this photo is the unbridled joy on Jason's face. It's a sight that I got to see a lot over the past week, which was a wonderful thing. But as I look at it now, I can't help but feel a little sad as well.

I had been a bit anxious leading up to this trip about how Jason would react to his grandparents. After all, he'd only met my mom a few times, and my stepdad only once, when he was just a few weeks old. Of course, he's a pretty outgoing little guy and very adaptible, and Juliette and I would be there to give him an anchor, but still, we were going to be in a strange place, seeing people that he mostly didn't know. I wondered what I'd do if he couldn't sleep at their house, or if he decided he didn't like being there, never really coming up with any answers.

It turns out I needn't have worried. Jason took to my parents and their house right away. He fussed, of course, but mostly because we wouldn't let him climb up and down the stairs as much as he wanted. By the third night, he was asking for "Gamma" to read him his bedtime story, something he normally wants Juliette to do. And on the plane ride home, he repeated over and over, "Gappa, Ay-go. Gappa, Ay-go." (For those of you who don't speak toddler, that's "Grandpa, San Diego.")

And that gets to the reason for my present bittersweet feelings. It's always nice to come home and to resume the familiar routines of my life. I know that Jason will respond well to being back on his regular schedule. But it broke my heart a little to hear Juliette trying to explain to him that, no, Grandma and Grandpa live in Virginia, not San Diego. He never seemed to quite grasp the idea that they'd be far away, but I'm not sure whether that makes it better or worse. Jason is, like all small children, a creature of the moment, and things don't have to be out of sight for long for him to be onto the next.

This is something I've struggled with a lot over the past couple of years. San Diego is where our life is now. Our careers and wonderful friends are here, and we've begun to put down some real roots. But the closest of Jason's grandparents, aunts, and uncles lives 450 miles away—the ones we just left are on the other side of the country. It's important to me that he have a relationship with his family, but with everyone so far away, it's hard to see how that can happen, at least not in the same way that I had when I was young. Juliette keeps reassuring me that the distance might make things different, but not necessarily worse—after all, she grew up 3000 miles away from her grandparents and still managed to have a very close relationship with them. I still can't help but feel sad, not so much for Jason, but for the rest of the family for not being able to see him as often as we'd like. In the end, he'll hardly remember this part of his life, if at all, and what will stay with him will be times that come later. But I know that now is a time that will always be special in my memories, and I'm sorry that so many of the people that are important to me won't get the same time with him as I do.

While I was visiting, I helped my mom pick out and set up a new computer, and got her a Skype account while I was at it. I'm hoping that regular video chat sessions will help keep Gamma and Gappa fresh in Jason's mind. It's not the same as a trip to see them, but it's what I can do for now. My question for you is this: if you've raised kids far from your family, or if you grew up far from your parents' families, how did you deal with it? Were you able to overcome the distance?

I hope to hear from you.

I mentioned before that I've been going to a spin class at my gym. I'm enjoying it pretty well, or, rather, I enjoy having done it but think it's akin to torture while actually doing it. I've come to terms with wearing bike shorts and having special shoes, and I think I'm even relatively comfortable with the fact that I'm sure I make ridiculous faces when I'm working hard. There's still one thing that's weird, though, and that's that I don't know where to point my eyes.

This class, like most group exercise classes, is mostly women. Most of whom don't wear a lot, and most of what they do wear is either tight-fitting or revealing, or both. Which, when you're working and sweating as hard as you do in that class only makes sense—sometimes I wish I could wear that little. But the upshot of all this is that there are very few places I can look where I won't be staring at someone's butt or cleavage. I'm not actually ogling anyone, and, actually, I couldn't even if I wanted to because I can't conveniently wear my glasses during that class. And without my glasses I can really only make out vaguely human-shaped forms around me, with little in the way of detail.

I try to get to class a few minutes early, wearing my glasses as I walk in. And I keep my glasses on while I warm up, only taking them off when we really get going. The idea is to let everyone see that I'm nearsighted so hopefully they won't think I'm a pervert if I accidentally stare at them. I know this is a ridiculous thing to think about, but it seriously does go through my head every time. I even make a show of squinting when I look up at the instructor.

I often wonder if I'm the only person at my gym who has these kinds of anxieties. It seems like there must be someone else thinking about it, but to all outward appearances everyone is just completely nonchalant about everything. I mean, take the locker room for example. I'm used to there being nudity in a locker room. I mean, this is the place specially sectioned off for people to change and shower in. Of course people are going to be naked in there. But for whatever reason, guys aren't just incidentally naked in this locker room. It's like a little miniature nudist colony in there. There are guys just relaxing, sitting around naked. Guys watch TV in there, totally naked—at any given time there will be two to five guys standing and sitting around the TV in the buff. No more than one of them will even be holding a towel, much less have it wrapped around himself. And guys will be standing around having long naked conversations, standing closer than I'm comfortable standing near people even when all parties are clothed. There's one guy that seems to be on a similar schedule to me, who every day has something like a ten-minute conversation with his friends, one foot up on a table while he rubs lotion on his legs and groin area.

Now, again, I know that there's going to be some amount of nudity in a locker room. I just don't know how it happens that people are so completely casual about it. Like, do you just get to a certain age or something and completely stop caring? I mean, if I'm naked there is no person on this Earth, male or female, old or young, familiar or a total stranger, who I could talk to while standing within arm's reach without being painfully aware of my nudity the entire time. And it has nothing to do with sexuality, either—when I don't have any clothes on, I feel... well, I feel naked. Isn't that where that expression comes from, "feeling naked"?

The thing I want to know is if people really are that nonchalant or if it's just that no one wants to be the only one to admit that he's not. I certainly try to act like it's all completely normal for me, just so I'm not the one to make it weird. Maybe everybody else is secretly thinking "I'mnakedi'mnakedi'mnakedi'mnaked" while they're talking about stocks or worrying about not accidentally ogling some woman during spin class. I have this sneaking suspicion, though, that it's really just me.

What do you think?

Sunday night, as is our annual tradition, Juliette and I watched the Academy Awards. There were a number of moments that caught my attention for being nice or interesting, heartwarming or funny or cringe-worthy. Sandra Bullock’s acceptance speech, for example, which was simultaneously heartfelt and funny. Or Gabourey Sidibe’s tears after being introduced by Oprah. Or Jeff Bridges finally winning. The one that I’ve been thinking about the most over the past couple of days, though, was Kathryn Bigelow’s win of Best Director. It turns out that Bigelow was the first woman to win that award, something that was pointed out a lot leading up to the ceremony, and even several times during it. What I can't stop wondering, though, is just how important her win is.

Before I go any further I should say that I'm sure that it was well-deserved. Although I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, I have only heard excellent things about it. Literally every person I've heard speak about it, whether a friend or a reviewer, has said it was a great movie. And I also thought that Bigelow's acceptance speech was nice. True, she may have made some small political statement, but she presented herself with respect and humility, and what seemed to be genuine gratitude.

It was actually the speech itself that really got me to thinking, because I couldn't help comparing it to Halle Berry's acceptance speech when she won for Monster's Ball. That speech really rubbed me the wrong way, and it's stayed in my mind over the years. The part I always come back to is this:

This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.

Now, to be sure, it is important that a woman of color finally won Best Actress, just as it's important that a woman won Best Director. But I just can't help but feel that neither is quite the same as, for example, Hattie McDaniel's Best Supporting Actress win in 1939. I don't even really think it's the same as Dorothy Dandridge's nomination for Best Actress in 1954.

Don't mistake me as saying that Berry's and Bigelow's wins don't matter, and especially don't mistake me as saying that we're past racism and sexism these days. Race and gender inequalities are real and serious problems. They are problems that, while we certainly have made gains on them over the past 50 years, we are not through with. I doubt we'll be through with them in my lifetime. Sometimes I doubt we ever will be. So, yes, it is important that a black woman can be Best Actress and that a woman can be Best Director. It's something that we should be proud of, that we live and participate in a society where things like that can happen.

Why, then, am I so set on Berry being different from McDaniel or Dandridge? The main thing is that I'm not sure that Berry's win really did open any doors. How much more of a chance does an unknown young woman of color have at becoming a Hollywood star now than she did before 2002? And now that Bigelow has won Best Director, does that really mean that women will have an easier time becoming movie directors?

Even before Halle Berry won her Oscar, I don't think it can really be said that minorities are underrepresented in acting. Just off the top of my head I can think of a number of well-respected black actors and actresses: Angela Bassett, Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Sidney Poitier, to name a few. And while it does seem that more directors are men than women, I don't know that I think that's due to some sort of institutional bias against women as directors. In fact, one of the earliest directors of a narrative film was a woman (Alice Guy-Blaché), and women have been making hugely successful films since at least the 80's (Big, directed by Penny Marshall, made over $100 million in 1988).

I can't help feeling that what I'm saying is going to bother people, but I really don't mean to denigrate Halle Berry or Kathryn Bigelow or their accomplishments. (And, to be fair, Bigelow doesn't seem to be trying to make her award into something more than that.) And I know that there's a natural tendency to make a big deal out of firsts. I just can't help feeling that Kathryn Bigelow's and Halle Berry's awards don't mean much more than that they did a good job in their work.

What do you think?

Dear Substitute Spin Instructor,

We need to have a little talk, OK? Look, I know it's your job to tell me what to do, how much gear to add, when to stand, when to sit, when to speed up, when to slow down. That's fine. I know that you're supposed to push me, to get results out of me. What you're doing, though? That's not it.

OK, so you want to throw a heavy hill climb at me? No problem. You want to keep me at a level 9 for 3 minutes? Sure. You want to pull a little bait and switch at the end of the 3 minutes and tell me to keep at it for another whole minute? OK, I can go with that. Tell me to push it? OK. And when I'm straining and I have sweat stinging my eyes and I'm panting so hard that I can't even make myself slow my breathing down, you can even shout "Are you having a good time!?" at that ridiculous moment. But, seriously? When I don't answer, don't give me that "I can't hear you!" crap. That does not inspire me. It just makes me angry.

OK, so maybe I'm stubborn enough that when you say things like "Hey if I don't hear you, I'm not letting you down!" I'm more likely to set my jaw and grimly press on rather than give you the satisfaction of hearing my voice. (As if speaking were even an option for me at that point.) Yeah, I guess that's a form of motivation. If I'm thinking to myself "I would rather puke and pass out than answer you" because of something you said, then I guess you are getting me to work. Except that ultimately what you're motivating me to do is figure out what your class schedule is so that I can avoid you completely from now on.

Oh, and another thing. If you know that you're going to be a hard ass later on, own up to it from the get-go. Don't start off the class like some kind of yoga teacher with all that "listen to your body, don't push yourself further than you can go" stuff if you know that you're going to shout "Dont you dare touch that dial!" at people when they actually do decide that they can't keep up.

Lead instead of pushing. Don't make threats. Don't be a jerk. It might work for Jillian on the Biggest Loser, but you're not dangling a big pile of money in front of me. Is all that clear?

I can't hear you!

I joined a new gym a few weeks ago. I'm enjoying it so far and am excited to lose weight and improve my cardiovascular health, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about underwear.

I normally wear boxers and have been doing so for quite some time now. However, it became apparent shortly after I started going to a morning spin class that I was going to need something more supportive in the undergarment department. I won't go into all the gory details—suffice it to say that bike seats can be uncomfortable. So, last week I found myself at Target shopping for briefs for the first time in over a decade.

Now, I know that necklines and hems and what have you have a tendency to move around, but I wouldn't have guessed that this sort of thing would happen with briefs. As it turns out, I would have guessed incorrectly, since what I found immediately after putting on a pair of my new tighty-whiteys is that the waistband actually came up over my navel. Now, I admit that it's been a while since I've had any intimate experience with this kind of underwear, but I don't recall my underpants extending two inches above the top of my jeans when I was back in high school. I bought some boxer briefs in the hope that they might be a little better, but they actually went up even higher.

It seems to me quite strange to wear my underwear so high, but if I put the waistband where I think is comfortable, the support is lost. It leads me to wonder whether perhaps the boxer mentality—you might call it "freedom-loving"—has become so pervasive that underwear manufacturers have started making briefs that cater to that desire. But that just makes no sense because if briefs aren't supportive then what's the point of wearing them in the first place? Aside from which, I would think that the people that find briefs unappealing to look at would be even more put off by saggy briefs.

For myself, I don't appear to have many options. I could roll the top down but that just looks dumb. Or I suppose I could try to find a pair that's cut shorter, but I have the sneaking suspicion that that road leads to bikini briefs and I'm not sure that I'm ready to go there. So I guess I'm stuck with some really high-waisted underwear for the time-being.

And just in case you were going to ask: no, there will be no pictures. Whether that's a relief or a disappointment is your own business.

There's a little dent in my forehead just about the size of the corner of a 5/8" wrench. And, as it happens, I have a 5/8" wrench in my toolkit.  This would probably be a more interesting story if the two were unrelated, but unfortunately you get to read a relatively mundane story of frustration.

Let me back up a bit. This morning I was going about my usual morning business—feeding Jason, emptying the dishwasher, and so on. I had just given his high chair tray a quick rinse and when I went to shut off the faucet, the handle came off in my hand. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just pop over to Home Depot on my lunch break and pick up a new fixture." After all, how hard could it be? A couple of turns of a wrench, take the old one off, throw the new one on, and voila.

You can see where this is going already, can't you?

First off, I ended up having to go to three different stores to find a faucet I liked, which took almost two hours. And even then, I couldn't find anything exactly right so I ended up buying three with the intention of returning two of them. At that point I was annoyed, but relieved that it was mostly over. Which it wasn't, but I didn't know that at the time.

See, the boxes that the fixtures came each had a list of the required tools—a short list, all of which I owned. (It would have to be a short list for that to be true, but that's another story.) For some reason, though, I wasn't bargaining on it being quite so cramped under the sink. Nor was I expecting the retaining nut to be rusted tight. I struggled with different wrenches and drivers and levers for almost an hour, pulling with my fingertips, scraping my knuckles, and, of course, cursing. I cursed at great length and with a great number of obscenities. I was like the dad from A Christmas Story—and when that occurred to me I very nearly called that nut a "mundane noodle," just to complete the effect.

I kept at it for a good ten minutes after I dropped the wrench on my face before I gave up. When I came out, Juliette gasped "You're bleeding!" Sure enough, when I went into the bathroom to look in the mirror, there was a line of blood running across my forehead. It was a pretty small wound, though, once I got it cleaned up. Just a little dent now.  I still can't believe I dropped a wrench on my face, though. It was like I was in a cartoon or something.

Tomorrow I'm headed back to the Home Depot to see if I can find a metal driver to get that nut loose. (The driver included in the box was plastic and no match for that rust.) Maybe I'll manage to drop a hammer on my face in the afternoon.

I won.

You know, in case you were interested.

On the drive back from Sonoma county this past weekend—Juliette and I went to a friend's wedding—I noticed a bunch of roadside signs on I-5. The whole stretch of road between the East Bay and the Grapevine is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to anything that will attract your attention, so the odd signs really stand out. A bunch of them are little micro-political tracts, which gets extra interesting when you see a series of them on two sides of an issue. It's kind of like watching an old married couple engaging in a very passive-aggressive argument. The sign that really sparked my curiosity, though, was just south of the Highway 46 junction, and it proclaimed "Tom McLeod slept here."

I had no idea who this Tom McLeod was, but I figured there must be some story there so I had Juliette jot down a quick note so I could remember to look it up when I got home. As it turns out, this is one area where the Internet is unfortunately inadequate to the task—Googling the phrase just turns up a handful of blogs pondering the same question as me: "Who is Tom McLeod and why should I care that he slept there?"

It seems like anyone going to the trouble of putting up a sign for such an event must be showing a certain sense of pride. I mean, as far as I know, nobody goes around at the motels I've stopped at and put up a sign about my visit. And we're not even talking about the man's birthplace, or the site of his most famous accomplishment. No, this is just a place he slept once. So my first guess was that Mr. McLeod must have been some old celebrity, possibly an early Western film star like Gene Autry or Tom Mix. Of course, it would have had to have been someone a little less famous—a second-string star, if you will—as I've clearly heard of those men but am quite clueless about Mr. McLeod. Which sort of makes the sign pathetic, even a little tragic. Here's a place whose only claim to fame, what they've decided to proudly display to the world, is that some B-lister that we've all long since forgotten once decided that he couldn't make it all the way to San Francisco or Los Angeles that day and tucked in there instead.

Of course, if there were some famous Tom McLeod like that, that's surely a person that some site somewhere would have taken note of. As far as I can tell, that's not the case here. Oh, I turned up a few names, but a Texas museum curator and a New Zealand composer don't seem quite the types to inspire such a monument.

My best guess right now is this guy, the CEO of McLeod Software, which makes and distributes trucking logistics software. I-5 is, as most Californians know, one of the major trucking arteries in the state, so it's possible that the man behind these truckers' dispatching software is a big name in those circles. Maybe he's the Bill Gates of truckers, I don't know. Except, I don't know that Bill would rate a sign if he stayed in some motel out in the middle of nowhere, so either I just don't understand celebrity in the San Joaquin Valley, or this isn't the guy.

I'm left with a mystery. So, if anyone out there knows which Tom McLeod slept there, please do get in touch and let me know.