Very 10th Grade

jumping jack
n.
1. A toy figure with jointed limbs that can be made to dance by pulling an attached string.

2. Sports. A physical exercise performed by jumping to a position with the legs spread wide and the hands touching overhead and then returning to a position with the feet together and the arms at the sides.


“This is going to be the coldest ten seconds of my life,” someone has told us today, before running out of doors with no jacket. We thought of that statement, the hyperbole implicit in the passing sentiment. We’ve known colder days, we thought. But it is late now, the night air permeates the room, and we here at the blogspot feel that now. The heat here at the B-rist is turned to low, and we are cold. We think, even, about doing some jumping jacks and appreciate the peculiar name of that exercise. Jumping jacks, we say out loud, wondering where that comes from. It is, I imagine, some derivative of something else which is totally divorced from its original meaning now. The guy who came up with that exercise was named Jack, maybe. He had a strange proclivity for this behavior. Hey, what the hell are you doing, his friends would ask. What is that? Who could say where that comes from. We google jumping jacks and inexplicably get a porno site for women doing this exercise, pointing out that the name is now synonomous with naked women jumping up and down.




We are bored here tonight at the B-rist. And we are thinking things through to their logical conclusions. When the bass lines have left from our head, and the crunchy guitar parts, we are left with little to block out the passing thoughts. And we do gravitate towards the larger implications, let us tell you. Very 10th grade, we know. Thinking of things. That is the level we operate on here at the B-rist. 10th grade-style. And do we ever need some distraction from all this. We are so cold now that we are actually doing the archaic exercise. Just like gym class: arms akimbo, legs apart, and hands touching overhead again. You can almost feel the cold leaving, and the blood flow. It feels alright.