I simply want to wish you freakish perverts a day of pizza and strippers. A day where V could stand for vagina, Volvo, eviscerate; really any V word that you want. May you find as little pressure as I have to participate in the massively marketed event like so many heart shaped lemmings. Strike out on your own, create new ridiculous holidays and holiday related traditions and then embrace your nonsensical ways because that’s really just like giving your Ego a big hug. Thus endeth my message of good tidings and poorly replicated olde-timey speak! Go yonder and be yourselves!
#11 Easy to get friends/family a guest pass to your home gym.
#12 Flexible hours of operation
#13 That disgusting smell isnt someone else for once
#14 you don’t have to fear anyone hearing your flatulence when lifting heavy weights
#15 Cops won’t be called if you show up nude
#16 No outside embarrassment from being a pansy little girly man when you can only do 3 reps of something at child-like weight…
Inner disappointment, however, cannot be helped.
#17 That sweat. The sweat that’s all over the equipment? That is YOUR sweat and if you don’t want to wipe everything down with sanitizer there will be no disapproving glances from pansies afraid of a few germs. Jesus people. Wash your hands before you put them in your mouth and there won’t be a problem!
#17 Isn’t 17 kind of a reason that the people at your gym want you to go to a home gym?
#17 Oh… um… Oops I mean, Jesus Christ people! Clean up after yourselves already! Sweat is gross!
Sanitizing every touchable surface of the treadmill actually does drive me nuts though. I mean, come on.
#18 When you have the desire to make lewd comments/fondle/tap that ass of the hottie using the equipment over there, she is your wife and could presumably do all three without repercussions…
#19(a). You don’t have to look at those 2 dozen people that spend every waking moment at the gym, effectively sucking all your motivation to work out because you could probably never be as “in shape” as that…
#19(b). You don’t have to look at those 2 dozen people that have never been in a gym in their entire lives, effectively sucking all your motivation to work out because you could probably never look that bad…
#20 – gym selfies are less creepy and you are more likely to make an epic fail “look how cool I am/ what I can do” youtube video.
1. No naked old men. I mean, unless…I don’t even want to know.
2. Oh man, I hope nobody is on my equipment when I get back from the bathroom. Hmmm…I’m the only one home so that would truly be weird.
3. I’m starving, I’m only halfway through my workout and I forgot my protein shake at home. Oh no, now I’ll have to go all the way upstairs in-between sets to make one.
4. I hate letting somebody work into my set.
5. That awesome music they play at the gym. I hate it.
6. What the hell are you supposed to do with an infant when you go to the gym? Childcare? As matter of fact we had that but it was only available during peak hours; so it took two hours to work out. Also spending 15 minutes getting packed up, 15 minutes driving and 15 minutes driving back makes for a total of almost 3 hours every time you work out. Good luck doing that more than once a week.
7. I don’t have any excuses left.
8. Can’t find an open treadmill with a TV? How about now you have one with a home theater.
9. No more gym fees.
10. No more getting jerked around when you try to leave the gym e.g. “Let’s see, well, it’s Tuesday so if you cancel today we won’t be able to stop your payments for 3 months.”
I apologize for not posting last week. Life got in the way of this virtual space I promised to invade on a regular basis. There was a lot of turmoil last week as I put to rest a relationship that has given me considerable heartache. Things started off well enough but sometimes, over time, you begin to recognize a relationship for what it really is; a series of overlapping mistakes. Maybe I just didn’t invest enough time in the relationship and that’s clearly where I’m at fault. On the other hand, if there’s no passion, no real interest, no common ground, how would you expect things to continue. That’s why I had to dump my gym.
From now on I’m working out at home. Here are a few reasons why:
We’ve never been good at going to the gym, even when we had few excuses.
Trying to pack up an 8 month old to go to the gym during peak business hours is…well…ludicrous.
Working out at the gym seems to always end up taking 2 hours. I have a workout that I regularly did at home at one point; it took 30 minutes and I was spent.
Gym memberships
Drive time
Changing in the gym next to ten other naked guys who rarely work out.
Pooping in public
Shower cooties
Yet another reason I have to go outside in the winter.
If you don’t find that convincing, it’s probably because I’m too tired to come up with a proper list. Good day.
So there aren’t a lot of things that I do right when I try to change my diet. Eating salads is probably part of that list. Let’s just say that my ideal salad is basically some lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and dressing. Let’s just say that the the cucumbers are actually pickles and that the “salad” is protected from the cold winter weather by heat generated via all beef patty and melted cheese. It is further shielded through a device I like to call the “bread muff,” which is really just two warm delicious halves of a bun. Since the salad is obviously the main course it requires a side dish from the food group known primarily as “french fries.” Now in order to wash down all this salad I’ll want a large drink, but since I’m watching my calories I’ll make sure it’s healthy for me; probably based out of a liquid that used to be milk and is now closer to butter. So now that I have my salad and my milk-butter drink (let’s call it a “shake” for short), I’ll have to see about scrounging up some dessert…maybe some kind of fruit…a pear…or apple…pie.
If you’re doing something stupid, like actually trying to eat healthy, here’s a trick I like to use to avoid carbs, avoid calories and clean up the fridge. Let’s call it “garbage salad.” It’s called garbage salad because if you don’t eat whatever ingredients it’s made up of soon, they will end up in the garbage.
As I was about to leave for work this morning I noticed that some steak fajita mix that I’d made was still sitting in the fridge. I thought about what our meal plans looked like for the next couple days, the fact that I’d defrosted some fish already, we had leftover stuffed peppers from the night before and we’d discussed grabbing something fun for dinner tonight. That led me to believe that if I didn’t take this to work I’d be holding a service for it on Sunday around noon when I discovered it no longer qualified as lunch. Homemade tacos, burritos or fajitas generally make for a pain in the ass as work lunch fair. My solution? I grabbed some spinach and iceberg lettuce we had chopped up and threw them into a container with a little bit of dressing. The fajita mix stayed in a separate container. When lunch time rolled around, I heated the mix, tossed it in with the salad. I shaved some calories, saved some money and kept my hard work from going in the garbage.
I was thinking today about successful people. I was thinking, how often are they not really who they pretend to be. It has been my experience that most of us play some kind of role, not just around friends and family but especially at work. In the old days (2013) it may have been a little more wild west but now we have to be careful about being PC and not offending anyone. This generally goes against my sensibilities as in my free time, my friends and I almost practically thrive on being offensive. I mean, we live for who can say the most ridiculously offensive thing.
So it is my observation that we are generally expected to not be who we actually are. We are paid by our companies to be who we are not; not who we are. If you can find a job that pays you to be who you are, you could be a very successful person indeed. Provided that they were paying you to be a crude, vile, small minded caveman who mostly operates in grunts and violence. I think there might be a market for that actually.
I wasn’t sure what to say about the future. I mean…we sat down at one point and tried to understand what was important to us. “Us” means my wife and I, not me and the other fat loser, although I guess the two fat losers have also discussed that. So, the future…it really wasn’t anything too insanely creative. It was the usual: financial goals, vacations, time with family. No life altering revelations like, I want to go back to school to be an architect or I want to be a unicycle riding bear. I mean, truthfully I would like to alter my career path but at this stage I’d need a pretty god damn good plan and I don’t have one.
I have to take some kind of action.
I can at least plan for the things I can plan for. I can always change the plan later if I realize I had it wrong but without any plan at all I’m pretty much at the mercy of the universe.
Down two pounds from previous weigh-in. Obviously I will need to continue eating wings and drinking beer in lieu of playing volleyball. I can honestly think of nothing I’ve done right recently that would warrant the fluctuation unless simply planning diet and exercise is enough to cause weight loss.
Anyway…
Ah…the future. What DOES it look like? I’ve asked myself many times, “What do I really want?” People, I’ve decided that there is only one simple answer to that question, one universal answer. The answer is happiness. I just want to be happy. That should pretty much cover everything, right?
I did better than usual. Which in this case is close to pathetic. I normally put on 15 pounds over the holiday season and this time I managed to keep it to 8. I’ve also isolated almost all of the damage to the two week period immediately surrounding our holiday party. It’s the fact that we take Christmas, Christmas Eve, the party, and try to eat all of the leftovers before they go bad. See, I may be a fat-ass at heart but even for me, eating a whole pie in a couple sittings is not normal behavior.
Now that I’m temporarily done crying about my weight like a fat girl who can’t find the cake, I leave you with these words of inspiration.
If you go to the gym you might see girls like the ones below. You probably won’t have a prayer of landing them but you can stare awkwardly while you hide your shame with an undersized locker room towel.
Maybe this year I’ll get my shit together. Now I know that everyone has different levels of “getting their shit together” as my friends have pointed out. I have my own expectations.
I need to be better at this game than I ever was. The clock is ticking, I have dreams unfulfilled, missions incomplete, a wife, a child, responsibilities to myself and others. How do I find the time to do everything that needs to be done when I’m my worst distraction? I need a plan.
Not just a plan, I need “the” plan. I want to be happy. I want to be happy for the long haul. I need to prioritize which pieces are critical and which are background noise. I need to determine which steps have to come first. I have to figure out how to take all of the day to day madness and turn it into an elegant dance.
