Right Now

So, enough is enough. The company I have been working for is a body shop, a place infamous for bringing in tons of bodies, working them like slaves until they are exhausted, and then, when they slow down from fatigue or make a mistake (just a single one is enough), they throw them out again. It's a company with a well-deserved bad reputation and I will be moving on as fast as possible. I'm burned to a crisp. My mind and my body have had it. All around me I have listened to stressed out coworkers whispering about being called into their bosses offices to be screamed at for a mistake or not going fast enough or something, always something. This is a toxic environment. Having said that, I have worked with some great people. I think the problem in this place is high up, somewhere near the top, if not at the very top.

In anticipation of leaving I cancelled my brand new gym membership. I only joined because it is close to the office where I work. But if I don't plan to be working there anymore then I don't need a membership to a gym that probably won't be anywhere near my new job. Nashville keeps calling and calling. The city I'm currently in, oddly enough, does not. They don't seem to have anything going on. Its like a morgue here.

As for my workouts, I still have a race to prepare for. My last workout I needed to run, but I was going crazy from lack of weight lifting. So I did some chest and tricep exercises just to stop the atrophy that was causing me pain. Then I got on the treadmill and walked until my knee seemed ready to run. Then I ran like a mofo, faster and faster, dropping below the race-pace I plan to run for the Cotton Row Run and trying to hold it as long as I could. I didn't go the full distance because I had already done chest and triceps and have a limit on my time during lunch hour that I can exercise, shower and still get back to work. So I ran 2.1 miles as fast as I could. It wasn't fast by anyone else's standards, I'm sure, but it was faster than I have run my last few races and I felt good as I did it, which surprised me.

One thing I should mention, since I seem to tell EVERYTHING here, is that when I went to the doctor for blood tests, all I was asking about was my thyroid. But he tested other things and decided that my testosterone was too low. This would explain why my workouts seemed to have poor results, my race times keep getting slower and slower, and I keep getting injured. So my doctor put me on testosterone. Its nasty and it stinks and it makes me smell funky. But I sure am running faster all of a sudden. I'm not running at the pace I used to run, by any means, but I'm slowly moving back in the right direction, towards where I was before everything just seemed to fall apart. It makes me wonder if my testosterone levels just dropped off a cliff and this is why I am always injured and slowing down race after race. It might also explain why my naked body looks like a sack of potatoes with arms and legs instead of looking like me.

So, on top of giving me the teeniest dose of Synthroid for my thyroid problem, the doctor gave me the big T. Actually, he didn't give me the Synthroid. It was the nurse practitioner that I saw when I went back to talk about my test results at my own request. He put me on T, she put me on S.

Yes, yes, I know its annoying for me to shorten Testosterone to T and Synthroid to S, but all the stupid TV commercials are doing it and people aren't rioting in the streets about it, even though it drives most of us crazy. I figure I can do it for these two things since if you've read this far you surely know what I'm talking about. And also, I'm basically done talking about it now.

So Spring is officially here. I know this because my car is green today. Officially the car is blue. It says so on the title. But looking at it today there is no denying that it is currently green. Even the windows are green. It's so covered with pollen that you can only barely see the car beneath. And my sinuses are completely clogged with pollen. If I had a Nettie Pot I'd be trying to wash out my sinuses right this second to see if I could get some of this pollen out of there. Honestly, my nose is running like Niagara Falls and I have a trash can filled with used Kleenex sitting on front of me. I've gotten pretty good at balling it up and shooting it across the room into the trash can. It's my personal little allergy basketball game. I'm winning, by the way.

So, I'm leaving my job and potentially moving to Nashville, I'm taking testosterone and Synthroid, and my face is pouring snot out my nostrils. What other extremely personal and private information can I divulge on my very public blog against all wisdom? How about my steady plans to one day visit Australia? If I ever get to visit Australia, as I intend to do, I would like to meet up with the handful of Aussie bloggers who don't dislike me. You guys have been my friends for a long time, longer than this blog has existed, and I appreciate that. I want to see your fabulous country, get drunk in a pub, and throw pickles onto the ceiling in McDonald's, are "Maccas," like a proper Aussie.

So anyway, that's really all that's been going on. Lots of work, work, work, exercise, drugs, mucous, and emails. Pretty much catches you all up to this point. So what have you been up to lately?

Off With Their Heads!

A lot has been going on, but not a lot has been going on that I can blog about.

I've been going to the gym. I've run the treadmill a few times, which bores me to death. But the treadmill allows me to focus on things that need work, like old injuries and bad form and various weaknesses. It's mind-numbing, but if I am to avoid an injury like I had to deal with last year at this time I think it is necessary.

I've been focusing mostly on legs lately, because of the coming race. I hadn't intended to join a gym just to prepare for a race, but that's only because I had forgotten that the race was coming up so soon. So far a big problem I've uncovered is my knee. It doesn't seem to be very happy. It's been several days since my last run, but it still hurts. It's a cranky bastard.

I found ... I don't know the official word for it .. a jump box? Many gyms these days are reacting to the rediscovery of the value of old-fashioned ideas like kettle bells and medicine balls and dynamic exercises like jumping. So they're equipping their gyms with stands for people to jump onto and off of. My new gym has 2, one very small and one larger stand. It looks like a stool that you'd drag around a library to reach higher shelves, but in fact it is for jumping on. I've been using it. It's easy to get because no one else uses it. I jump and jump and jump. And my knee doesn't much like it.

I also did a few sets of negatives with the leg extension machine, focusing heavily on my weaker and most frequently injured knee. I make it do extra sets. I go heavier and lift the weight with both legs and then force my weaker knee to slowly lower it. I do this over and over until my leg feels like it is going to fall off. I suspect this has something to do with my knee still hurting me all through the weekend. But I don't know that for sure. Hopefully its just soreness and complaining from the exercise and not an actual injury. With this particular knee there is just no telling.

"Off with their heads!"

Things at the office are starting to get ugly. This has nothing to do with Drama Queen or my coffee cup. It relates more to an attitude much higher up that filters down and affects all the rest of us. It's a bit like Alice and Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts' - "off with their heads!" No mistakes or its your head. Ah, but go fast, fast, fast and no mistakes. Faster, dammit, but NO mistakes. Go blindingly fast, don't slow down to think, but don't make even a perceived mistake that isn't a mistake or else its off with your head. Did you ever see the episode of "I Love Lucy" where she worked in a chocolate factory and the assembly line kept going faster and faster and faster? Yeah, its a lot like that.

So anyway, I have to stop here. I'd like to say more, but so much can't be said openly until I change my current situation.




.

The New Gym is Haunted

So I've finally found and joined a new gym. I wrote about that last week. But there's something about this gym in particular that bothers me.

It's just so .... old.

Don't misunderstand. I don't mean the building itself or the equipment is old. No, it's the people.

A coworker of mine had told me about this gym and encouraged me to join and to come work out when she does. It took me several months to finally go by and sign up, but I did it. I did my first lunch hour workout last week, as I said I would.

I'm not joking when I say that I was the youngest person there. And I'm not especially young.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to focus on my workout and not gawk around at all the other people. But then this old man, so stiff that he walked like he couldn't move anything above the waist at all, walked right up to me as I was doing some dumbbell presses. He almost seemed not to see me as he stumbled a bit and then went around me. He was hunched over a bit and his hair was as white as snow.

I asked my coworker about it after I got back to the office. I thought maybe it was just an off day. "Is everyone there super old? I mean, are there ever any younger people there, like even in their 30s? Any at all?"

She laughed and said that she hadn't seen anyone there who wasn't old. She's younger than me so technically when she's there that makes her the youngest person and me the second youngest person. But I have to say, this is sort of depressing.

First of all, even old people mostly prefer to be around young people. Young people are alive and exciting. A world filled with white haired, gray skinned, wrinkly people is depressing. And who wants to be depressed while working out?

Second of all, researchers conclusively proved that for men, being around attractive young females literally makes us stronger. It makes us happier. It makes us feel better in every way. The primary reason is because their presence causes our bodies to produce more testosterone. More testosterone makes us healthier, stronger, faster, in a better mood and have a better workout. Everything about the reason we're at the gym in the first place is improved by working out around attractive young females because of the way our bodies respond to them.

Inspiring

Whereas, the lack of them is just sort of sterile. And the lack of them combined with a whole gym filled with elderly people is just downright depressing.

Depressing

Finding a New Gym

Old injury forces me to take up cycling

So, in case I haven't mentioned it already, and I can't recall if I have or not, I have moved from the city I was living in when I started this blog to a new city. I gave up my job and my awesome gym with the Bodypump classes and college girls to move to a city I don't care for where I took a higher paying and much more demanding job. I joined a gym near my house, but I rarely went to it after sustaining a calf injury that seemed to just hang around bothering me forever. That calf injury led to me digging my old road bike out of the shed and cleaning it up to ride. I rode until winter when the darkness would overtake my neighborhood before I had even arrived home from work. There are few street lights where I live, so riding at night is not an option. 

I have not run or trained at all since my last race in September or October. I can't remember which month it was. I did manage to injure my back during that time, though. So awesome.

So, I joined a new gym last week. From the outside and looking at their website it looks very similar to my old gym at the University. But walking around I see a significant difference or two.

Old city's average citizen

In my previous city, the average citizen there has at least an undergraduate degree. There are a high number of people with masters degrees. Doctorates are also fairly common. Almost everyone either works for the defense department or NASA in some capacity, whether they are employed directly by them or through a contracted company.

New city's average citizen (skin color may vary)

In this city, the average citizen here has at least one arrest for a criminal offense of some sort. There are a high number of gang members. Drug dealers are also fairly common. A lot of people here don't work at all and simply draw welfare.

Old gym's average female client

At my old gym, being on a college campus, most of the females were college girls and somewhat pretty. I'm not saying I gawked at them or anything. I was there to work out, after all. Observing the female population wasn't really the purpose of being there. But attractive females weren't rare.

New gym's average female client

At my new gym, being in this city where beauty is harder to find than crack cocaine, I didn't see a single attractive female anywhere in the gym at all. To be fair, I just got there and haven't even worked out there yet. I just took the tour and looked around. Fairly empty gym, except for the treadmills, etc. No attractive females at all. Not one.

Old gym's pool

At my old gym, the swimming pool was enormous and always filled with people swimming laps. I never got a chance to use it.

New gym's pool

At my new gym, the swimming pool is large enough for doing laps. It was filled with old white guys, all of whom had beards, one of whom was oddly splashing over and over and over, like a mentally ill person or a child might do. Only 2 men were swimming laps.

Old gym during lunch hour

At my old gym, during lunch every single day there were workout classes with a lead trainer to guide you, including bodypump and spin classes. There were also plenty of classes early in the morning and after work, running from 5 to 7 each night.

New gym during lunch hour

At my new gym, there are absolutely no classes of any kind during lunch. None. There are 2 classes offered at 5 am and again after work at 5:30 pm. 2 classes.

At my old gym, the entire building was shiny and new, even if the equipment wasn't necessarily all that new. Most of it was, but not all of it, and it didn't really matter. The main thing was that it worked. The free weight area had a steady stream of dedicate athletes, many of whom were college students, and sometimes it could get crowded despite the enormous floor space available for the free weights.

At my new gym, the entire building looks damp inside, somehow. I don't know how to explain it. I think it has been there awhile. The equipment looks perfectly fine. There was absolutely no one working out in the free weight area. Not a single person. The person showing me around said that was unusual, but couldn't explain why it was completely vacant.

Old city - I have friends

In my old city, I had a large group of friends, all of whom worked out and some of whom compete in triathlons. They had me considering attempting to compete in a triathlon myself.

New city - I am alone

In this new city, I don't have a lot of friends. Some of them work out, but I don't know which ones. None of them are into triathlons at all. If I do train for a triathlon, chances are I'll enter one in my old city and go there to race, perhaps hooking up with some of my old friends for support.

Today at lunch I was planning to go to this new gym and give it a try. I haven't worked out in months, as I said. I know it won't be epic. I packed my gym back with all my old stuff in preparation, but I can't find my lock for the lockers. I have a pack of 3 combination locks, all with the same combination for in case I lose one and need another and don't want to have to learn a new combination. But now I can't find any of them. They're all together somewhere. So instead of going to the gym, today during lunch I'll be going to the store to buy new locks.

Yeah, I'm off to a roaring start, and not terribly motivated.

Update after St Patrick's Day

I have tried three times to join a local gym. Believe it or not, my three attempts have been unsuccessful. you wouldn't think it would be so hard, but apparently this gym owner doesn't care much about adding members. I plan to try again this week.

I spent St Patrick's Day evening in a bar listening to a friend's band play while I drank beer and pretended not to have a migraine. They were way loud and had lots of flashing lights set up which periodically hit me dead in the eyes and set off a migraine that didnt quit until well into the following day.

Since I mentioned my troubles updating a PC with Windows Service Pack 3, I thought I'd update that with the latest. I managed to download the whole service pack file for burning to CD. Or at least Windows seemed to insist that it was a CD burner file. That frustrated me for awhile until finally I opned the file using Notepad. This caused it to run, finally, and update the operating system to service pack 3. It took all freakin' night, but now it's done.

I'm trying to adjust to my new surroundings and situation. I'm trying to learn to blog using my cell phone, too. This is my first attempt at it.

I hope you had a good St Patrick's Day.

Fatty McFattenfat

OK, so something weird is happening. Or maybe I'm just a moron?

I've reduced the amount of milk in my diet. I now mix my protein and creatine with water instead of milk. And the only other sports drink I'm taking in is something called Essential AmiN.O. Energy, which is an energy and recovery drink mix.

Other than that, I'm taking my usual vitamins, massive doses of steroids and human growth hormone .... no, wait, I'm thinking of Madonna. I'm not taking any steroids or human growth hormone. Not that I wouldn't if some nice person were to offer to give me some. Lord knows I need it.

Anyway, since dropping milk almost entirely I've noticed that my stomach seems to have swelled up like a Hoppity Hop.

For those of you in places like the UK or Australia, I'm going to just assume you had Hoppity Hops and simply called them something else, because you guys always do that, so I'm providing a photo:

I don't know exactly what is causing me to feel and look this way, but I'm looking pregnant. I swear I could pop out a little alien baby at any moment. It'd have to tear through my stomach, though, because I'm a man and thus lack a vagina.

Pink - seriously, its just for girls

Speaking of men with vaginas, as I was leaving the gym I passed a man wearing a pink shirt and tie coming in. I looked at his shirt and then up at his face. He looked away in shame rather than make eye contact. Dude, I have to ask, if you know how pathetic that is, why are you wearing it in the first place? Did you lose a bet or something?

Feels like this guy hit me

Anyway, I did legs today. Every machine in this gym is new to me, so it was a bit of an experience. After the weights I went upstairs and ran a mile on the treadmill in hopes of moving some of the lactic acid from Wednesday's chest workout and today's leg workout out of the muscles. I'm in agony from Wednesday. My chest feels like someone took a giant plank and whopped me across the chest with it. I can barely move my arms and shoulders. This, of course, caused me to run funny while on the treadmill. I'm sure all the college girls surrounding me noticed that and were likely thinking to themselves, "that man with the hoppity hop belly sure does run funny."

Don't hate

Thank you. I don't need your criticisms. Don't hate.

Dear Mr Gym Bag

Dear Mr Gym Bag,

the benches running the length of each aisle, surrounded by lockers, are not there for people to use for storage. They are there for people to use for changing clothes, especially sitting down to change their shoes and socks.

If you place your gym bag and equipment on the bench and leave, either to work out or go shower, anyone needing to use the bench for its intended purpose will take your bag off the bench and place it in the floor, especially when the locker room is crowded and the bench is completely full due to people using it while dressing.

If you do not wish to have your bag removed from the bench and placed on the floor, it is recommended that you put it inside a locker like everyone else. This is what the lockers are there for. This is why there are so many of them, at least half of which were empty at the time that you chose to simply leave your stuff in everyone's way on the bench instead of using one.

Even though this is a fairly crime-free city, compared to many others I won't mention by name, it is not inconceivable that some poor starving college student might see your wide open gym bag as an opportunity for free stuff and relieve you off it. I myself could easily have picked it up and walked out without anyone suspecting that it wasn't mine. Anyone could have simply searched the open bag for a wallet or car keys and taken them. As pissed off as you were to return and find your gym bag in the floor and underneath the bench, try to imagine how much more angry you would be were you to open the bag and discover that your wallet and car keys were missing, and possibly days later to find that your entire identity had been stolen, with resulting charges and headaches now coming home to you. Imagine how angry you would have been to return and find the bag not there at all.

In short, put your damn gym bag in a damn locker and don't give me attitude about putting it on the floor so I could sit down and put my shoes on. The bench is not a locker. Don't use it like one.

Sincerely,

E.F.

"Dude, totally NOT cool!"

And finally, Nicholas Cage is a vampire ...

Augh

So I've been trying to run and get ready for this race. I don't want to run, though. I don't feel the urge at all. Right this second I'm supposed to be getting ready to go to the gym and I just don't feel like it.

Whee!

 OK, I wrote the above several hours ago. That's how awesome of a day I'm having. I write one paragraph and then I can't even find the time to finish the thought. I did end up going to the gym. I skipped BodyPump class and ran on the treadmill instead. Boy howdy, it was SO exciting, let me tell you. I just love treadmills. They make me all tingly and orgasmic from the fabulous boredom. There's nothing like the thrill of staring at a muted TV while trying to increase your running pace to something less embarrassing than your current pace.

You're so slow!

While I was stumbling rapidly along, because that's what it felt like I was doing, some relatively attractive college girl in short shorts and a tank top came along and got on the machine behind me. I'm sure she did this so I couldn't ogle her, but to me it created the illusion that she was looking over my shoulder, noticing how fast (slow) I was running and mocking me for being slower than her.

So, of course I sped up.

How do you like me now?

I don't know why I do this. It isn't as if this girl is going to give a flying fart about me even if I were running 4 minute miles like some Olympic superstar. In fact, if I were on a treadmill running that fast, all the banging and rocking and noise would most likely cause her to get off the machine behind me and move all the way to the opposite end of the gym to get the hell away from my crazy ass. Still, logic went out the window and I sped up just because some girl who will never look twice at me except to make sure I am a safe distance away from her or to aim her pepper spray came in and got on a machine in the vicinity of me. I am a moron, I freely admit it.

I didn't do my usual distance. I've been trying to psyche myself up for this race by running a distance shorter than the actual race if only because it makes me feel less pathetic and slow. I can haul ass, relatively speaking, for 2 miles and tell myself that I'm still in shape, but if I try to do that for 3 miles then I end up sore and tired and likely to skip the next workout. I should know how to train better than this, but somehow I seem to have forgotten everything I think I once knew about how to train for a race. Or maybe I just always got away with showing up and running without much effort because I used to be really fast and really young. Whatever the truth is, it isn't true of me anymore.

So I'm trying to run every single day, about 2 miles, or even a mile and a half. I just want to make sure that I run something instead of deciding to run 3 to 5 miles and then making some excuse to skip. It isn't as if the Warrior Dash is a race that people worry about their time on. That's not the point. It's obstacles and mud and fire and you have as much fun as you can without having a heart attack. That's the goal. At least it is the goal for me. I just don't want to be in such lousy shape that I stagger up to the obstacles and can't get over them because I'm so exhausted and weak.

Alana runs the Warrior Dash

After I finished my 2 mile stumble, I got off the treadmill and went down to the leg machines to work on my quads. I was a competitive runner for years and years and as a result I have a muscle imbalance that will probably stay with me until I die. They call it "runner's knee" but all it is is just an overly developed outer thigh muscle relative to the rest of your leg muscles. It pulls the kneecap outward and causes knee pain when you run.

I sat down on the leg extension machine. Some guy was on the machine to my right and some girl in a pink shirt and black pants with long hair to my left. I didn't even look at the girl. I just assumed from what little I saw that she was good-looking and would not want me to make eye contact with her because I was all sweaty and nasty and a guy. As I was doing my leg extensions, the girl got up and walked by in front of me. She wasn't good looking at all and I suddenly wondered why I just assumed that she was too good for me and wouldn't want anything to do with me. What kind of defeated person assumes they aren't good enough without even looking at the competition?

I really need to change my outlook on things, especially concerning my own self worth.

Workout Fail

For one month I have been out of the gym. For one blessed, restful, lazy month they had torn apart the men's locker room and disabled the showers. No showers means no workout for me. I took the month off.

Oh sure, I could have gone to the workout class after work, the one at 6:30. Truth be told, I did go to that one once. That was the one where I hurt my back. Then my car wouldn't start. Then the people at AAA kept bouncing my calls between 2 different cities and never sent my tow truck. At nearly 10 pm I got a ride home and wrote a nasty letter to AAA telling them that they'd better come up with some compelling explanation for why I should continue to use their services since they have failed me so horribly. The next several days I dealt with the pain of the injured back, plus taking a day off work to fix my stranded car.

How not to impress women

There is nothing like the indignity of working on your car in the parking lot of a gym connected with a University where beautiful 20-something girls in shorts and tank tops pass by all day long. It makes you want to say, "hey girl, don't look at me like that. I have a much cooler car at home in the garage that would make you think more highly of me if you ever saw it." And of course they would assume I was lying.

For the record, I'm not lying.

So, one month of no exercise coupled with eating out with friends during lunch or going home to sleep, plus the week of being sick as a dog, has ended. Its back to the pump and grind, to the carefully selected rhythm of cardio music, which I almost totally ignore. Except today, that is, where the voice of a girl saying "I like it with my feet back and my face down low" over and over again somehow caught my attention. I tried to Google the lyrics, but I can't find the song. One of the problems with pump class music is that they aren't exactly real songs. They take other people's music and redo it with different artists, sometimes combining several songs together. Oh well, it's not my style of music anyway. I was just curious.

I have no idea who today's instructor was. I had never seen her before. She said something about having recently had a baby. I couldn't tell anything about a baby. She said he is 4 months old. All I knew was she had a super tight set of abs and some huge breasts. I'm assuming the huge breasts are because she's still breast feeding. But I honestly have no idea. Either way, her entire body was in super tight shape, as compared to mine, which is most definitely not.


Example of distracting instructor

We did lots and lots of squats and lunges and jumps. And some deltoids. I tried to give it all I had, doing every rep with my best form and keeping up as best as I could. I did alright at first. And then my energy tank started to run low and the sweat began to pour out of me almost as fast as the US economy is leaking jobs.

And then, just as we reached the point where I was ready to fall over, we started doing push-ups. I should have rocked the push-ups, being a guy and all. But by that point I was totally out of gas. My chest and arms were willing, but my abs were not. They began to cave on me as I was straining out my reps. I started to look like the bow in a bow and arrow set. I tried and tried, but finally had to either drop to my knees or stop and breath. I chose to stop and breath. The black girl next to me kept on going.

I hated her for that.

I went back at it and tried to keep my body straight, but it didn't last long. Finally I gave in and let my knees touch the floor. Even then I wasn't lasting much longer. I was relieved to note that the black girl next to me also had her knees on the floor.

Yeah, you wimp!


Perfect Lunge

I try my best to do my squats and lunges with the best possible form despite my not having any apparent sense of balance at all. When I do lunges you really don't want to be the person next to me because I may fall over and take you out. I'm truly that bad. They say no balance is related to having no core muscles, but I think my ineptness goes beyond that. I mean, I definitely have no core muscles. There's no denying that. It's been months of me doing this class and still my abs show no sign of having improved at all. And I'm not even talking about when I look in the mirror. Screw the mirror. There's nothing to see there. I just mean when I'm doing the exercises and I look up I see my stomach muscles forming the upper arch of the Sydney harbour bridge. It looks ridiculous. And I've never noticed anyone else looking like that. It's just me with the horrifically useless stomach muscles.

My abs look like this, minus the opera house

I have honest to God thought about buying some of those muscle-stimulating electrodes and electrifying my stomach muscles while I work my abs just to see if I can force them to push down instead of forming the Appalachian mountains like they do. If I had a yellow t-shirt I could be the McDonald's golden arch. I really should contact them and see if they'd hire me. Give me a Ronald McDonald mask and a tight yellow shirt and I'm a human ad for their brand. I could be the McDonald's equivalent of Subway's Jarod.

Desperate Measures

Anyway, I started to die. At first I wasn't too concerned. I thought we were about done with class anyway. But then I looked at the clock. We were only 30 minutes into it. There was still 30 minutes more to go. And I was covered in sweat, wheezing like Mrs Jefferson, and about ready to collapse onto the floor.

YOU are totally wimping out

Meanwhile, the big-boobed, tight bodied instructor kept glancing my way. She did it all class long. I realize it has nothing to do with her being in any way attracted to me. They all have to make sure their students aren't passed out on the floor with a heart attack. But with the shape of her very female figure coupled with her flying ponytail acting as some kind of waving flag, it was constantly triggering some deep reproductive instinct in my brain somewhere and telling me "ALERT! ALERT! She's reproduction material!" Her steady glances were a real distraction. You would think that as exhausted as my body was, my genitals would be completely out of the equation here. Apparently not, though. I guess God considers the importance of reproduction to be too vital to ever fully let a man have a break from those instincts. Either that or I'm just really lonely.

Marisa Miller - clearly out of my league

I seem to have a problem with determining where I stand with women. There are women that make me feel that they are totally out of my league because they are so hugely attractive. But there are other women that I just have no idea where I stand with them. If they make me nervous at all then I seem to assume that I couldn't possibly make them nervous in return. I guess I assume that if they have impressed me that much then they must be out of my league and couldn't possibly be attracted to me. I believe this comes from my upbringing. My father used to say things to me like "what do you care if someone sees you naked? No one cares what you look like anyway" and lovely, helpful things like that as he held the bathroom door open. This did wonders for my self-image, as you might imagine. He wasn't what you'd call the most caring man. Actually, he always hated me. Both of my parents were big believers in putting their own children down as much as possible. They thought that parents who praised their own kids were big pretentious morons who were going to raise weak, useless brats. Ironically, our neighbors from across the street raised their daughters with the exact opposite view and all three of them are today very successful and happy, not to mention very beautiful, which I'm sure has helped with their success and happiness to some extent.


My neighbors daughters looked a lot like this

So anyway, after class I asked the instructor if she was signed up for the Warrior Dash later this month. It's a 5K race with endless obstacles, including climbing a wall, crawling through mud and leaping over fire. She said she was considering it. She has a friend who signed up and isn't going to be able to make it, so she offered her spot to her. She didn't sound like she was going to do it, though. While this conversation was going on, a beautiful blonde woman came in and began talking to her about a triathlon she had placed third in recently. And she encouraged me to enter one that is coming up. I am thinking about it. I know I will do terrible, and I might even drown in the attempt, but I'm bored with running and more running and I think I'd like to try something new for a change. A triathlon sounds like a good idea. The worst that it could do, I'm assuming, is kill me. I'm a lousy swimmer.

Warrior Dash - pit of fire obstacle

It's Monday, Except That It's Not

It's ironic that I posted what I did just before this, because this weekend, which started off so nice, ended with a bang. I'm not sure that there is any hope of a future at my house. And I'm not sure that I want to be a part of whatever the future there is. There are a lot of things that I'm not sure of. One thing that I am sure of, though, is that I can put up with almost anything as long as I believe that the person loves me. But once I stop believing that, I am done.

Meanwhile, the northeastern coast of the US was flooded by hurricane Irene, a big storm that got weaker, but not smaller, as it slammed inland. It was all over the news, on every channel and in every paper and all over the internet. And yet, despite this 'flood' of coverage I found myself totally disinterested. There is only so much that one person can care about, and only so many disasters or distant events that we can worry over. After awhile, I believe, a person can get fatigued of caring for the whole world's problems and just start to shut down and close the door to outside concerns.

In other words, I have enough to worry about without stressing over a storm that probably won't even touch me, especially after the tornadoes that shredded Alabama earlier this year.

I haven't been to the gym in 2 or 3 weeks. They've been working on the locker rooms and disabled the showers, plus I've been sick, plus I've somehow injured my shoulder while not working out. I honestly have no idea how I did that.

Anyway, this month is nearly over and the gym showers should be operational again soon. And then I'm going to have to get myself back into the gym and get back to working out. And embarrassing myself.

In the meantime, I've bought a John Deere riding mower. I thought I got a real bargain on this thing. I paid $400. The seller was asking $650, but I talked him down. Little did I realize that I got no bargain.

I had my local John Deere dealer pick up the mower and tune it up. It needed one or two things, but seemingly nothing major. Once they got it and began to look it over, the trouble began.

"Yes, your deck won't go down, but we fixed that. But we noticed that your electrical system isn't charging. The whole wiring harness has been cut and spliced to hell. Somebody took a good mower and just tore up the wiring for some reason. We really need to replace the entire wiring harness. Your muffler is the original factory muffler. It's totally rusted out. It needs to be replaced because it is leaking and the intake is sucking hot exhaust straight back into the engine. $$$"

$1000 plus later, my mower is purring like a kitten. Or like a big-ass John Deere king of riding mowers. Or lawn tractors, as they say. Damn, this got expensive fast.