So today was to be the big day, the first day of my all-new super-motivated post-vacation fitness regime.
After work, I rode down to the gym at the Marriot, a gym known for being largely unknown and non-intimidating, perfect for newbie me.
The first sign of wrongness was the giant banner in the hotel foyer: “Welcome Atlantic 10 Conference!” Now, as a western Canadian non-jock, I should have no idea what this means, except that it sounds somehow eastern American jockish.
And yep, instead of the usual nearly-abandoned gym and pool complex, I found myself swarmed by lycra-clad name-branded college athletes and their coaches. Running drills in the parking lot, stretching en masse in the foyer, packing gym… Getting changed, I was sure a spontaneous frat-boy towel-fight was was bound to break out in the locker room.
I tried my best to block it out, and staked out a space in the quietest corner of the gym. At this point I really have no idea what I’m ding, just trying to recall old workouts from long ago; upper back and shoulders, rotator cuff; high reps, low weight, literally squeezing my eyes shut to try and block out the horde of elite gym-monkeys around me.
Three sets in, and I was asked to leave; “inappropriate footwear”, but I’m fairly certain the staff was simply embarrassed to have a clearly un-fit person in their midst.
I want to be fitter, and work towards it, I really do. I just don’t know if my motivation is strong enough to get through this ridiculous shit.
February 19, 2009
Perhaps fatness is best after all
December 31, 2008
Golden Spatulas and borrowed shrimp cocktail
New Year’s Eve blog
Remembering the most memorable New Year’s Eve I can recall
The neighbors upstairs are counting down
But back then, Cory and I played Zelda right through the midnight hour
Listened to a different upstairs commotion
Wondered what the fuss was all about
And kept on collecting Spatulas
Yeah
That was a good Eve
December 16, 2008
tired of the piss and moan
The world is starting to flame. The economy is in the tank. “Nothing will ever be the same”. Say it, think it, feel it, express it all or not at all; okay, I get it. But why the negativity?
I’m getting so tired of the same old piss and moan. It flirts around the edges of every coffee-shop conversation these days, or boldly proclaims, and in every form still feels to me like the worst self-fulfilling prophesy of recent memory.
Lately I’ve been given to reminding people that it’s not as if “they” took all the money out of the vaults by the wheelbarrow and burnt it in the streets, or dumped the global gold supply into the sea… Okay, okay, they DID dump most of the above into China somehow, but it’s not like all the money/energy in the world is actually gone.
As far as I understand it, economies are not built upon having money/energy, but are built upon moving it. But get this: far far far too much of the global economy has so far been built not upon the movement of money, but upon the movement of debt. Money may be a portable, transferable medium for human energy, but debt, if anything, is the inverse.
Now, finally, there seems to be more debt than energy in the system, and it should be completely unsurprising that the economy is going to shit. Hell, it went to shit a long time ago, on that long-past day when somebody started to equate credit with cash.
But the piss and moan! The fucking piss and moan! We all get it! Now stop whining, get out there, and produce some energy! Then move it! And in the meantime, try to remember:
When the rent money is tight, that you’re still alive, that air, water, and sunshine are free.
When you’re actually brewing your own coffee, that you’re not a kid in Starbucks-less African warzone.
When you’re walking down the street not actually being maimed/raped/shot at, that at very, very least you’re not floating in the middle of the ocean on a crippled boat wondering what the fuck just happened.
Oh, does that last one bias me a little? Maybe, but please forgive me. It’s been a rough year. This spring I’ve already lost everything I own, lost all my savings, lost the product of 4 years of labour, and, oh yeah, watched my last great impossible-yet-just-barely-within-my-grasp dream bobbing off and away, broken and behind me, into the sea.
Don’t coyly cough and smirk into your coffee, pretend at cynicism, and try to hide your fears for this unrecognizable economic future behind a stuttered parody of hope. C’mon folks; it’s every bit as bad as “they” say -probably worse-, and yet simultaneously not that bad. I call out fear as the flipside of hope; let us now take a lovely deep breath of free air and cast out both.
I know you’re afraid, but there’s fear and then there’s The Fear. How can you tell the difference? I wouldn’t have known the difference myself before this year.
All I can tell you now is that fear is what you feel when you’re afraid; The Fear is what crawls up your spine when you try to remember how you felt before, that time you should have been afraid, but weren’t.
And now? Economic implosion? Fear? The Fear? Nuh-uh; I’m still breathing free air and movin’ my energy…
