I’m taking part in a 30-day writing experiment. See Kale & Cigarettes for details and the Facebook Group to read stories by other 500-words-ers.
Yesterday was one of those days when it took me until 6pm to get a glass of water. My kidneys were smoking, and still I could not find the 30 seconds it takes to pour and gulp down a glass of water.
I would like to “get my body back” as they say, but finding time to exercise feels impossible. A friend was raving about this app she found called “Seven” that leads you through a quick 7-minute workout that you can do anywhere, anytime. I thought, of course I can find seven minutes a day. I downloaded the app. I did the workout that first day, when we got back from a stroller walk and the girls were both miraculously and briefly asleep at the same time. I left them in the stroller and did the 7-minute workout on the dirty garage floor.
I bet you can guess what happened next. I never did it again. I never found another seven minutes. But every evening around 7pm, in some genius stroke of marketing, the app sends me a threatening alert that it’s time. This is what it says:
Got 7 minutes?
It’s really starting to irritate me. If I’m having a good day, I can ignore it and laugh, “Good one, app.” If it’s a bad day, though, I’ve been known to yell “No, I don’t have seven minutes, you jerk!”
I need to uninstall the app, because it’s starting to really wear on me, psychologically. It’s starting to make me feel bad about myself, and even worse about the app.
I picture the dudes who invented this app (they have to be dudes) sitting around a conference room table in a sleek modern office building in SOMA, eating energy bars for lunch and buoyantly discussing how to make their app utterly successful. “What if…” one guileless tech nerd expounds, “We create an exercise routine they can do in just seven minutes?!” “It’s genius!” effervesces another, “Who doesn’t have seven minutes?!”
A mom of twins, that’s who, you dicks.
And if I did have seven minutes, you can be sure I wouldn’t spend it working out on my dirty garage floor. I’d spend it pouring myself a tall glass of water—maybe even with ice!—and slowly sipping on it.
This is why I haven’t gotten my body back yet. But I’ll be honest; as much as I would love for my collection of Seven jeans to fit (whoa, that’s weird), I don’t really care enough about getting skinny again to find seven minutes a day. Sorry, Seven.
