The Gym

I just bought myself a gym membership.

By no means am I new to exercise, I'm not, but I feel a profound difference in my workouts these days.

I'm big into strength training. Lifting heavy things off the ground and into the air appeals very much to the man-child in me who's still in love with Arnold the Action Star. No lie, action stars of the 80's and 90's and pro-wrestlers were my idols growing up. In many respects, I still want to be just like them, and like Stallone said (I'm paraphrasing) "that requires work in the gym."

I have a good amount of weights at home. I've been using them to get stronger and I've been having a lot of fun doing it. I try and read everything that Mark Rippetoe has to say on the subject of strength (he's big into being manly, google it) and put his ideas into practice for myself. I've had a good amount of success too, it's been great.

But it's nothing like having a real gym to go to. At home, instead of doing a bench press I have to perform a dumbbell floor press, which is a real bitch to set up at higher weights. At home I can only perform defecit deadlifts and the max amount of weight I can put on the bar is 200lbs, at the gym, on my first day, I lifted 225.

So the strength part is there. Oh, god, just having a squat rack is amazing to me. I love squatting heavy.

And, and, they have cardio machines. Now don't get me wrong, I might like to feel like a real man when it comes to lifting heavy shit in the air, but you ask me to run a mile and I'll turn into a baby. However, I love the elliptical machine. So I get to make my heart stronger, awesome!

Oh, and there are tons of weight machines to play with, guilty pleasure.

They call it a rest day for a reason!

I have a nice strength maintenance routine going on whilst I try to lose some extra fat. It's fun, I enjoy my workouts and I've left a little bit of room for flexibility in there, which is nice if I'm feeling any kind of whimsy at the time, or I just feel like I want to do some more. It's nice, but, dieting means that I don't quite recover like I used to.

Today I was just lounging around the house, not with any real direction to my day, and I decided I wanted to do something active. Specifically, I thought I'd try my hand at EA Active again, since it provides a nice structure wherein I don't really need to motivate myself to do anything. Sounds like a fantastic idea!

But I couldn't do it.

I turned on one of my old boxing routines in the machine and my arms didn't want to throw jabs and crosses at air. It hurt a little bit. So I stopped, I'm not into feeling pain like that.

This dieting thing needs to stop! It's getting in the way of mindless fun! But, really, I should actually get serious and accomplish my goals first, shouldn't I? Dieting isn't hard, not really. So I should just get back to it while I still have some good free time in my life.

Work hard so you can play hard, it's the American way!

This means I should really throw cardio on the end of my weight training, huh? Fuck.

Musings about the body and being sick

I am not at all sure why I'm awake right now. It's 6am on a Saturday and I think I just got 7 hours of sleep, roughly. It was pretty amazing sleep, and, considering I hadn't had a good night's sleep in in three days it may have just rejuvenated the heck out of my body. That's what I'm going with, after having some kind of super flu ala The Stand (I'm actually calling it the Atlantean Flu, thanks to a fever dream I had where Namor the Submariner revealed to me that I was indeed part Atlantean, which certainly explains my webbed toes) for the past few days, I suppose any kind of sleep longer than 2 hours would be a blessing.

I find the body just fascinating. After finally figuring out how to get stronger quickly, by which I mean following Mark Rippetoes Starting Strength program faithfully (seriously, you would not believe how long it took me to just follow the program, stubborn!) I decided to figure out how to lose some body fat (a considerable amount of body fat, he admits, sadly) which I think I've been doing a pretty strong job of. It's like the body will do whatever you want it to do so long as you know how to tell it what to do. Fascinating!

With just a little bit of discipline and know how you can achieve whatever you want for your hot bod. Unless you're sick of course. Goddamn being sick. I really wish there was a better way to deal with being ill other than letting it run it's course. I bet it's just something to do with finding the right pills. I mean, if the body is being shut down and invaded by an outside force it only makes sense to attack the virus with outside forces.

Sunburnt

Clearly I was half delirious with pain when I wrote that last bit. Still am as a matter of fact. Being sunburnt is awful, especially when I have the manly tolerance of pouting child.

I already have what I believe to be the best system for gaming: the Nintendo Wii. There's just something lovingly old school about it and it's games. Platformers will never go out of style as far as I'm concerned and are the absolute pinnacle of game-play.

However, after playing Dead Space on my PC, I've seen that video games are undergoing a creative renaissance as far as being a storytelling medium. This fascinates me, as I don't believe that there is anything quite as immersive as a good video game. A good video game with a stellar, interactive story? I'm there. From what I can tell, the Wii isn't going to be involved in this joyous bit of creativity.

(Maybe I'm wrong on that, the makers did release Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii, and while it wasn't the same storytelling power that Dead Space was, it came close, especially considering that it was limited in design [rail shooter v. 3rd person action adventure])

It sounds like the big games to experience are Dead Space (which I have, which I love), Mass Effect, and Half Life 2. I'm not talking about simple use of cut scenes to tell a story, that's been done. I wouldn't say it's been done to great effect, since I find cutscenes to be a bit... lacking, when it comes to game-play. It's not that I don't enjoy the effort put into a cut scene, and what it does to help improve the atmosphere of a game, it's that those cut scenes take the player out of the game, they offer a break, a rest from the action, and I feel like that should never happen, unless it serves some greater purpose. What these games offer are in game story elements triggered by players entering certain areas. Think of it as an interactive cut scene. Yes, it's triggered by something in game, and yes, you can't really interfere with what's going on, but it doesn't take you out of the game.

That is the experience I'm after.

Importance

I am not doing anything important right now.

No, really, I am not adding any value to anything. Or at least I wasn't a minute ago, maybe I am now. There's really no way to tell whether or not this rambling jumble of words is going to help anyone with anything. I'm all right with that, of course. I do this for me. I do this so I feel like I'm not wasting time. It's not like this is hard, not at all, and it makes me feel like I'm contributing something to the world. Even if all I'm doing is storing data on a server somewhere. A server that will, at some point, be wiped of all of it's data.

Or will it?

I wonder how old parts of the internet are. Does Google (I believe Google owns blogger) really care about how much space is being used in the real world for it's virtual works? I imagine no, no it doesn't. Google is huge. Google doesn't care about such small things.

Or maybe it does?

Maybe Google is running lite on space. Maybe Google is cringing at the thought of one blogger using up one more kilobyte of space. That would be a shame. This would never be published. Nobody would ever run into this piece and think... I don't know what they would think. Maybe they wouldn't (certainly they should at this point, but that's the problem with the writing I do sometimes) and maybe they would just see the words and move on, content with having consumed something but unable to digest it. Food metaphor is awesome. I was about to move on and say some crap about nutrients and such. Maybe I should point out that it's probably the job of the author to act as a filter, the kidney maybe? Whatever organ it is that processes shit? I forget, it's been so long since Freshman year of High School when I learned of such things.

So what's the point?

Maybe I conjured up something. That would make it worth it.

I beleive in nothink

I do not believe that I was put on the Earth for any great purpose.

I don't see how I could. Even in my conceit, which is great, I do not believe that I was placed here by a caring hand that felt I had the capacity for greatness.

I do believe that I can achieve greatness. I do believe in great purposes.

I'm not sure that I have found mine. Yet. I'm not sure what it is in this life that will bring me unparalleled joy. In my head I think it may have something to do with addiction. I'm willing to believe I've made this connection because I blame addiction on so many things. Maybe blame isn't the correct word, switch it up to a phrase, I use addiction to explain so many things. And it's true. I do. That is what I would like to feel like when I do something. I want to feel like I can't pull away from a thing, like I need it, hunger for it. I want to be kept awake at night with the next day's work gnawing on my heart and soul.

I have to wonder if that's what true motivation feels like. I can't say that I'm sure. If it is, I believe that I have yet to experience it. Perhaps I'm just describing a feeling that doesn't exist for me, an ideal state that I may never achieve. I'm comfortable with that.

Perhaps I will give your little documentary a shot Paul.