Hey There, Delilah

I have the strength of ten thousand men.

OK, that was a complete lie. Anyone that has done any service project with me (that's actually a lot of people, because I'm a good person with an award to prove it) knows that I do not lift well. I was not blessed with great biceps. I even need help starting lawn mowers (and thus always made my junior highers do it for me at BP). Just this past Wednesday, I watched for an hour and a half as our family friends helped load a new bed and mattress Mother ordered and some car seats into our van and then later, into someone's basement. I was wearing a skirt then, and I think the family friends took that to mean 'incapable of lifting,' a misconception I was happy to live with.

But today, I faced the task of installing the third row seat of our van all by myself. Father had taken it out so we could move all my Bo' junk home. But Father left for Taiwan last week and didn't put the seat back. And Mother has a bad back. She suggested calling our neighbors to help. Horrified by the idea of asking strangers for help, I took it upon myself to move the monstrosity back into the van. This involved much straining and dragging and strategizing. I had to rest half of the seat onto a bucket of sand first (the bucket of sand wasn't very light either), then lift the other half onto the van. There was also lots of pushing and dragging. Once the seat was lifted to car level, Mother helped a little in nudging the seat a little farther into the van, but once inside, I had to actually install the seats myself. When I opened the van manual to figure out how exactly to lock the seats in, I saw warning labels that suggested that at least two people were necessary to move the seats, lest someone gets injured. Beat that, Average American Male.

When the ordeal was all over, I told Mother not to tell anyone about this. I like to keep my superhuman feats under wraps because exploiting the damsel in distress image gets me out of lots of heavy lifting.

Mother: What am I stupid? Of course, I won't tell anyone about this. If I did we'd never get any help again.