A Dyke A Broad #110 The Sniffly Edition
On my romance with the step app on my phone. Plus dancing grandmas.
My phone is disappointed in me. “So far this month, you’re averaging fewer steps than last month,” it says. “On average, last week’s steps were fewer than the week before.” I want to explain that I’ve had a cold, nothing life-threatening, but enough to keep me in the house reading lethargically during the day, and in the evening watching World Cup Soccer.
The only bad time is night when my horizontal status means my drippy nose goes post-nasal and creates a little tickle in the back of my throat which, even though the feeling is tiny and ridiculous, somehow inspires coughing fits so violent that I convulse, jerk around demonically, and start to gag. So of course I get up, and run to the toilet, weeping and hacking and heaving all the way. I don’t actually puke. Just cough and moan like a cat that can’t quite expel her accumulation of fur.
I’d have a lot more steps if I carried my phone with me back and forth to the john, but it stays safely on the little red table next to the bed, sweetly cocooned between the Kleenex box and an old Fred Vargas mystery. For that matter, it stayed planted in place Sunday while I vacuumed and cooked, which meant that even though I wore myself out, it looked like I’d done nothing, registering a mere 21 steps.
It’s too bad really. I’d been having such fun with my phone, going for longer and longer walks. I’ve found the perfect route with a nice long uphill just challenging enough to work my lungs without being so steep it’s discouraging. I pass a neighborhood called La Campagne à Paris laid out like a tiny village from the countryside (campagne). Lately, instead of gawping at the houses, I stare down at the sidewalk, at the leaves which have accumulated. For a while, it’s sycamore, then what might be poplar, then something else entirely, elm I think. It smells good. Late autumn. Nearly winter.
Until I got sick, I was doing this walk four or five times a week. Mostly because I enjoy it, and it makes me feel good, but also because that app congratulated my effort, kept me company, made me feel so seen. So surveilled. Now, I just feel betrayed.
I try to reason with it. “But look how clean the floor is,” I say. “You know it took a lot of steps to do that. Plus I made crepes with Emmental and mushrooms sautéed with plenty of shallots and rosemary. That counts for something surely. I’ve been on my feet all day.” But no, my phone is implacable, insists on proof, seeing my effort with its own digital, motion-sensitive eyes. And because it was just sitting idly on the counter, it didn’t.
I think of my father who’d come home from a week working on the road, and ask my mother, grey with keeping her three girls fed and clean and clothed and out of trouble, why she said she was exhausted. “What are you complaining about? I’m the one who travels, goes to meetings, works. You have a dishwasher. You have a washer and dryer. What do you even do all day?”
Interesting Reads
Free to be, you and me. Or Not.
Forgetting the lessons of a children’s classic.
I had literally forgotten about this—how groundbreaking it was then. How sadly groundbreaking it would be now.
The secret, vibrant life of Paris's famed Père Lachaise cemetery
Père Lachaise is world-famous as the resting place of writers, musicians, artists and thinkers. But Benoît Gallot, curator of the storied cemetery, has been sharing pictures of the wildlife that thrives among the tombs and giving a glimpse of another side to the Parisian landmark.
Bonus Photo: Grandma dancing with the wolf
That’s it for this time.
xoxo K