The Great American Cop-Out

Today was an interesting day for me. If you read yesterday's booooring blog (despite a very un-boring week), you could probably tell that I was worn out or not in a very literary mood. This opinion will only be exacerbated once you learn that I fell asleep at around 7:30, woke up at around 8:30 with just enough time to brush my teeth, get into my PJs, and crash again.

So why the boring blog? I have a theory. My story begins tonight, a cold, dark winter evening at my chiropractor's office. He gave me some stretches to do on my exercise ball at work that were totally awesome and I felt very good going in there. He cracked me up and I thought back to last week's discussion about how when he doesn't go to the gym for a while, he starts going there for 15 minutes, then slowly increases his time to build up. Since I've been pretty set on starting to go to the gym for once, I decided tonight was the night - and picked my favorite gym cop-out: yoga. Yoga is great for my mind and I figured it would feel great after a nice spinal alignment. And I do tend to break a sweat when doing yoga, but let's be real. It's not REALLY working out. My upper body mass probably isn't going to change with yoga.

But, alas, I had my times all mixed up and I arrived 15 minutes after it actually started, and I'm NOT about to walk in while everyone else is doing their Ujai breathing, duh. Damn, I was stuck. My mind immediately thought of the cop-out number two: sauna. I was planning on a session after yoga since it was ass cold outside, so maybe I should just go chill in there for a few hours. I thought back to my sauna days at the West Virginia YMCA (pretty much your only option for wasting time in that desolate state) and talking to a young guy who had just signed up to go the Air Force (pretty much your only option for work in that desolate state) and had just started going to the gym to get ready for boot camp. His preferred method of working out? Going to the sauna.

So I stared at the dreaded exercise machinery in front of me and wondered if I actually had the courage to step onto a treadmill after a long, long hiatus. I cursed myself and then went to the locker room and stripped off the first layer of Adidas outerwear and headed upstairs to do something on the treadmill. I was wearing socks from work (hot!) since you take off shoes and socks in yoga, so the idea of running wasn't too appealing. Plus I didn't have headphones and I didn't want to DIE. So I started being that lame guy on the treadmill who isn't manly enough to sprint for an hour and just walked at a leisurely pace. Feeling pretty much worthless, I decided to give myself a workout and massively increased the incline and increased the speed, determined to carry on for a half hour work out. Baby steps.

My mind started running as I stared at the sweet LCD screen in front of me, reading the headlines from America's worthless mass media stations. As the treadmills around me became occupied, I found it entertaining that the girl next to me was running so hard and fast that she couldn't help but hold onto the front of the machine. Dude, if you can't keep up with the speed, you do know that these things do have adjustable speeds, right? Whatever, who was I to judge since I was walking up a hill while she was at least running.

So after my baby steps workout, which built up quite a sweat, I might add, I headed downstairs and hit the sauna. And my mind started racing down there. It suddenly brought back memories of pretty much every sauna session. I sit in there and pretty much all I can think about are things to blog about. So, I am now declaring that saunas are damn good for the mind and if I ever write boring again, it's probably because I haven't been to the gym for a while. Or maybe I'm just tired.

So, what did I think about? Well, for one, my family is drawing names for Christmas this year since nobody really needs or wants much. Or we're poor. Or cheap. Whatever. I found out later that Summer got stuck with me, so here's what I want from Summer. A subscription to Men's Health (to support my new gym rat lifestyle), a new iPod battery, and/or dryer sheets.

After asking me if I could read (he later apologized, saying he meant if I could physically read without my glasses, which we had earlier discussed), this old guy gave me his NY Times in the sauna and it was the Business section. I realized, as I have noticed lately, that I am more interested in business topics again after rebelling against "The Man" (aka my employers) pretty much since I graduated. This has strangely coincided with me beginning to invest in stocks again for the first time since, again, I graduated. It also coincides with a reduction in the interest of drinking copious amounts of liquor on weekends for the first time since I graduated. And it also coincides with the realization that people my age are starting to send me Christmas cards. Crap, I'm growing up!

Just for the hell of it, I stepped on the scale on the way into the sauna and it measured a tidy 147 pounds. Some of that was probably water weight that I lost while, ahem, "working out", but some of it also probably has to do with the liquid diet earlier last month. Maybe my sister knows if weights tend to lag behind changes in diets. Because I certainly don't know.

J. Riley, Summer, pencil me in for December 21st or 22nd at your gym. You need to teach. And I need to learn.

And the rest of you need to learn how to download Firefox Version 2.0! Susyash will be especially pleased with it because it spell checks while you blog. And we all know she needs help with that.