The Wallpaper Is Not That Bad

The wallpaper is not that bad.

This in my new philosophy, and it will stand firm, no matter how bad the wallpaper may be.  The wallpaper could be hideous . . . it could be streams and fishing poles, and you are an ardent PETA granola eating fruitcake which means that you find the wallpaper offensive.  Even so, the wallpaper is not that bad.  It could be too dark, some sort of nearly black faux wood paneling wallpaper, and it gives your house the ambience of a cave, and makes you feel lethargic and depressed and suicidal every morning when you wake up, so that you don’t even get out of bed, you lose your job, you gain 400 pounds,  and your family abandons you.  Even so, the wallpaper is not that bad.  It could be more of a mural, something Rubenesque that vaguely reminds you of Leda and the Swan, and causes you to feel liscentious and a tad bit loose with your morals.  Even so . . . the wallpaper is not that bad.

Our wallpaper situation involved grapes, inoffensive grape vines curling about in festive ways all over our kitchen walls.  I kind of liked the grapes.  They seemed wholesome and appropriate, so that a sense of bounty and goodness surrounded me while I cooked.  They would have been horribly inappropriate in the childrens’ playroom, for obvious reasons, but it was the kitchen.  The grapes were okay.

Ashlei hated the grapes.

So, I went out and bought paint, and set about to take the wallpaper off of the walls.  I had not yet learned my lesson, that the wallpaper is not that bad.

It took me perhaps five hours to peel the grapes off of our walls.  Some of the wallpaper came off in long sheets, and this was the easiest.  But too much of it came off in 1 square inch sections.  I used a razor blade to peel up the corners of the wallpaper, and I worked very carefully so as to not gouge the wall behind the grapes.  In working very carefully to avoiding gouging the wall, I found it impossible to simultaneously work very carefully to avoid slicing my fingers.  So I bled frequently on the grapes.  This was no great loss;  Ashlei reminded me that they were headed to the trash, so whether or not they got blood stained was not much of an issue. 

But even so, it vexed me to be continuously bleeding.

After the wallpaper was all off, and after I was no longer dripping, I realized that wallpaper is not all that goes onto the wall when wallpaper goes onto the wall.  There is another layer.  It looks like paper, and it has a lot of glue in it. 

Steve . . . remember Steve the contractor?  Steve is not my friend . . . Steve gave me very bad advice . . . Steve lied to me.  He told me to sand it off. 

I have a vibrating sander.  I hate my vibrating sander.  First of all, the sander is loud, and you have to hold it while it runs, right there in front of you.  You can’t sand from another room.  Also, the sander vibrates.  That means that it turns your nerves, skin, muscles, tendons, bones, and internal organs into jelly.  And finally,  the sander is not well designed, as far as keeping the sandpaper attached.  I averaged about 60 seconds of sanding for every 60 seconds of reattaching the sandpaper.  Actually, it was worse than that . . . it went like this:

1. Sand!  (1 minute)

2. Sandpaper falls off of the vibrating sander! (1 minute)

3. I yell vague threats and imprecations! (1 minute)

4. I reattach sandpaper onto vibrating sander! (1 minute)

repeat these steps 17,400 times.

You might notice that, for every 4 minutes spent on this process, only 1 minute is spent actually sanding.

Another bad thing about sanding: while it won’t work to do what you are wanting it to do, which is get rid of that underlayment glue paper, it does manage to spew several gallons of dust into the air.  So, if you want to breathe while you are sanding, you will have to time your breaths between your sneezes.

The vibrating sander did no good at all.  I sanded for many many hours, and the underlayment glue paper was still there.  it was very smooth underlayment glue paper, but it was not gone at all.  Also, every single piece of furniture in the entire house was now covered with dust.  Also, I was sneezing so hard that I was dislodging my eyeballs right out of my head.  Also, all of the body that I have above my sternum was vibrated into a shivering bag of jelly.

Ashlei encouraged me to “keep on keepin on.” 

Inspired by her stellar see-it-to-the-end attitude (which she transmitted to me from Oklahoma, where she was hiding while I did these things), I decided to see if I could just paint right over the underlayment glue paper.

This turns out not to be a good idea.  The underlayment glue paper, while impervious to a vibrating sander, does not do well with the moisture in paint.  What they need to do down there at Lowes, instead of dithering around and trying to sell dead tree pieces and caulk, is invent a dry paint. 

Because wet paint doesn’t work at all.  The minute I put it on, it started causing that underlayment glue paper to bubble up.

So, I stopped painting, and then my natural brilliance realized something.  The vibrating sander can’t get the underlayment glue paper to separate from the wall, even if you sand it for several dozens of hours.  But put some liquid on it, and it starts separating.  So I decided to put more liquid on it.  I checked out our collection of sprayers, and we had a variety.  I started out with the Raid.  I sprayed all of it, and it worked!  All I had to do was spray each section of underlayment glue paper until it dripped, wait about 3 minutes, spray it again until it dripped, and then the underlayment glue paper scraped right off with a trowel!  Unfortunately, I quickly ran out of Raid.  But we had a spray bottle of turpentine, which also worked nicely.  When that ran out, I found a bottle of Kerosene.  It wasn’t in a spray bottle, so I just sloshed it up there on the walls.  That underlayment glue paper peeled right off.  Then, I used paint thinner, and carbolic acid, and oxyethylene, and diesel, and at the end, I was using a mixture of hydrogenated chlorine and sodium pentothal. 

This took 46.9 hours.  I lost all of the skin on my hands and arms, suffered uncontrollable shakings, and frothed at the mouth. 

The underlayment glue paper, being glue paper, fell onto the floor of my kitchen, where it promptly dried out and turned into a congealed mass that was permanently bonded to the floor.  Having run out of chemicals, I am at a loss on how to get it off.

At this point on the process, I have scraped, square inch at a time, the grapes out of my kitchen.  I have poured a gallon of my blood out upon these grapes. I have vibrated my body into a moaning mass of miserable flesh.  I have filled my house with the dust of a thousand deserts.  I have saturated the sheetrock that still stands in my kitchen with a cornucopia of toxic fumes.  I have turned into a near dead shadow of my formerly healthy self.

The wall needs to be textured.  I have spent, now, around 6,943 hours working in my kitchen.  I have not yet begun to paint.

I cried.

Driving with fruitcakes

We all drive with fruitcakes.

They surround us.  They cause wrecks.  They talk on their cellphones, they text their friends, they apply makeup, they read newspapers, they fumble around on the passenger side’s floor looking for nail polish, they become deeply involved with all sorts of things while they use about 3% of their brain on the fact that they are driving a vehicle 70 miles an hour down a highway.

I do not like fruitcake drivers.

But I have to drive with them, so I have done a longitudinal study that considers the different factors that go into driving and fruitcakeness, specifically related to speed.

First, background:  I drive from Springfield, MO to Branson MO, several times a week, because I live in the one and work in the other.  For the purpose of this study, I focused on the strip of highway that stretches from the highway 65/60 interchange at the southeast corner of Springfield to the highway 65/248 interchange in Branson.  This is a 33.8 mile drive, and I have made it hundreds of times.

For this study, I drove a 2008 Toyota Tacoma with a4 cylinder engine and a 5 speed manual transmission.  The air conditioner was not deployed at any time during the test.  I chose this vehicle because it was readily available at the beginning of the study.  I was going to do the study with a BMW, but there was none available.

Originally, I just wanted to find out how much different speeds affected my gas mileage, but the study became much more comprehensive than that.  In addition to MPG, I kept records of how often I was passed at different speeds and how often I passed other people.  I also kept careful track of how many times I had to adjust my driving to accommodate a fruitcake; either somebody trapped me behind a truck and I had to slow down, or I had to speed up to avoid getting trapped, or I had to change the route entirely because a particular fruitcake was shooting at me.  I referred in my notes to “being caught” if I had to alter my speed significantly.  Finally, I paid attention to how I felt as I drove at different speeds-I gave a subjective stress rating (1-5, 1 being unstressed, 5 being quite stressed) to each drive as soon as the drive was over.

I drove at 3 different speeds, each for three weeks.  I could not keep a constant speed, because the Tacoma doesn’t have cruise control.  Instead, I focused on keeping my speed in a five MPH range.  I do not know whether these speeds were accurate or not; for my purposes, this did not matter.  For the record, I suspect that my speedometer reads slightly high; if the gauge says I am going 70 MPH, I think that I’m actually going about 67.

The first speed that I drove was 75 MPH, fluctuating between 73 and 78.   Objective results:  At 75 MPH, I passed other drivers significantly more often than I was passed.  I passed an average of 42 cars at this speed, and the most that I was passed was 4 times on one drive, and the least was once, which happened three different times.  Two of the cars that passed me I later saw pulled over by the police.  I can only assume that they were pulled over for speed.

At this speed, I averaged 23.07 MPG in the Tacoma. 

 As earlier mentioned, I did not know my actual speed, but I am quite sure that I was going over the limit.  I was never pulled over, so receiving a ticket did not factor into stress or finances.  However, I was aware that I was “speeding,” for whatever that is worth.  Any time I saw a patrol car going in either direction, I slowed down and worried that I had been caught.  I did not feel any moral guilt whatsoever, but I did feel a slight twinge of fear that I was going to get caught. 

I also had to shift to fourth gear to maintain my speed going up two long hills.  For some reason, this slightly raises my stress level.

My stress ratings for these three weeks were 3/5, except for one 4/5, on the trip where I got caught and had to slow down 4 different times. 

Two different times, I wrote (1 bad) behind the number of times that I was caught, to signify being caught for more than a minute. 

The second speed that I drove was 65, fluctuating below.  I tried to never go over 65.  Objectively, I was passed over 60 times on average.  I passed 4 semis one trip, 2 little old ladies one trip, and a bus.

I never had to change lanes; I just sat in the right lane and tootled along.  In fact, I am now formally introducing the word “tootle” into the lexicon of academic language:

Tootle  Verb.  [tood-l]  1.  To meander slowly without stress.  2. To not worry about whether or not you’ll be on time.  Tootled, tootling, tootles.  Ex: Jeb and Eliza certainly tootled stresslessly across Kansas in their Conestoga wagon druing the great expansion of 1885! 

I found that tootling to work had several advantages.  First of all, my gas mileage rocketed up from 23.07 at 75mph to 26.06 at 65 MPH  That may not seem like much, but you just have to do the math to see what long-term savings you can obtain: 

Assume that you drive 100 miles a day (very close to what I drive)

Assume that gas costs $3.00 a gallon (a bit low right now, but times change, and this is just for our estimation)

You can save $54,458.22 if you average 26.06 MPG instead of 23.07!  That’s the price of a BMW 5 speed, or a Porsche Boxster!  (It will take you 100 years to amass this amount)  Start today!

So, back to the study.  In addition to saving over $50 grand, I also found that my stress level plummeted.  I got passed by everybody, I never got stuck having to slow down or move over, and when I went up the hill, I just left the truck in fifth gear.  At the top of the hill, I was only going 55 or so, but I just didn’t care. 

How much longer did it take me to tootle?  Amazingly, it took me an average of 4 minutes longer.  I averaged 28 minutes while driving 75 MPH, and I averaged 32 minutes while driving 65 MPH.  So the difference in time is negligible. 

Now, here’s the interesting part.  When I tried to drive with traffic, everything was in between the two extremes.  At 65-70 MPH, my gas mileage was 24.39.  It took me right at 30 minutes, average, to make the drive.  But my stress level was highest.  This was caused by going with the flow of the traffic.  It means that I was passing and being passed about equally, which is stressful.  I was caught repeatedly, over 4 times a drive, on average, and so I had to either speed up a bit or slow down a bit.  It takes a long time to pass somebody when going 65-70, because the other person is only going slightly slower.  So traffic builds up behind me while I’m passing.  Then, people will cut around and pass me on the right if I don’t get over quickly enough.  This is stressful.  Sometimes, they will make hand gestures to indicate their feelings about me.  This is stressful.  Sometimes, they will also shout orders to me, telling me to do certain impossible and immoral things to myself.  This also is stressful.  I regularly came up on a semi, and wanted to pass, but was unable, because other cars were passing, so I had to slow down and wait.  This is stressful.  Waiting behind a semi also means that the semi will occasionally spray rocks or small dead birds at my windshield.  This is stressful.  On highway 65, the common speed is between 65 and 70 MPH.  I was going with the traffic here, and it was the worst. 

So, if you’ve been told that you should just drive with the traffic, you’ve been told wrong.  What you really should do is either drive significantly faster or slower than most of the traffic.  If I wasn’t worried about attracting the attention of the local gendarmes, I would drive 90, I would pass everybody, and I would and be completely stress free.  It would take me 23 minutes to make the drive.  It would be more fun.  If I had my Porsche, I’d do it in 120, and get there and it would take 17 minutes.  It would be lots of fun. 

The police have ruined everything.

I am sure that they will not allow me to drive at this significantly safer and stress free velocity, so I am instead choosing to drive even slower.  I am currently driving only 60 MPH, and seeing what that’s like.  I don’t have enough information to make any sure judgements, but I can tell you that the stress level is quite low.  60 MPH, when everybody else is going 65-70, is the essence of tootling.  I never pass anybody.  Semis pass me.  Semis pass me going uphill.  Old ladies in mid eighties Cadillacs pass me.  Old ladies with walkers by the side of the road pass me.  I’m amassing a large pile of cash from my improved gas mileage.  I don’t know what kind of gas mileage I’m getting, but it has to be good.  Perhaps I’ll slow down to 45 or so, and amass a million or so dollars.  If I slow down to 30, I can amass a billion.  If I slow down to 20, I can amass a trillion.  I am seriously considering slowling down to zero, and then I will amass an infinite number of dollars.  I already did the math, you don’t need to.  And when I amass an infinite number of dollars, you will come begging me for a loan, and I’ll say no.  First of all, I don’t want to run out, and second of all, slow down and amass your own infinite money. 

It’s all good.

apartment living, toilets, and beating people up.

Anna has shown an independent streak, just lately.

She has turned her bedroom into an apartment.

When I was about 11 years old, my Dad seriously thought about putting a toilet in my closet, just for me.  I liked the idea.  Why, you ask?  Well, I was showing an unusual affection for the toilet.  I was going in there and sitting on the thing for up to an hour at a time.  And there was only one bathroom in our house.

When I was 11, my sister and brother were both entering their maximum-irritating years, which they both have just recently started to come out of.  She was maybe 5, and he was maybe 3, and I was maybe wanting to spend long periods of time away from them, so I would go into the bathroom with a book, a long book, and I would do my job, but when I was done, I would just keep right on reading.  Eventually, Dad would beat on the door and shout, “It’s been over an hour!  hurry up and get out!”

It was a wonderful place, because I shared my bedroom with both of the irritants, and I couldn’t drive, and my brother could climb as high into the tree as I could, even when he was 3.  The bathroom had a lock, and a fan (good for shutting out the sounds), and it was my friend.

I so wanted that toilet in my bedroom.  With a toilet, I could come out of my bedroom every 3 weeks or so, stock up on food, and go back in there, lock my door, and never bother any of the family.  I could have become a hermit, or agoraphobic, or a semi-anti-social type of guy, instead of the well-rounded healthy individual that I ‘ve actually become.  It would have been a lot better.

But Anna has gone way, way beyond a private toilet:

She no longer sleeps in her bed.  She likes it to look nice, so she carefully arranges the blankets in aesthetically pleasing and balanced and well-folded patterns.  She won’t sleep under the covers, because that would ruin the bed. 

She really doesn’t like to sleep on top of the bed, either, because it makes wrinkles.  Instead, she has cleared a space in her closet, and put some extra blankets down, and she asks every night if she can sleep in there. 

Sometimes I say yes. 

She also has a dining room table.  In her room.  It has a nice tablecloth, a couple of chairs, and a decoration on top.  She asks if she and Abbey can eat at her table. 

So . . . Anna has a bedroom in her closet, a bed that she won’t sleep on, so it’s turned into a large piece of decorative whatever, and a dining room in the corner, next to her dresser, which she uses to hang random decorative decorations in decorative fashion.  All she needs is a toilet in the closet.

Abbey, meanwhile, is learning to beat people up.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a karate demonstration at her school, and she came home and said that she liked it.  Good enough for me; I signed her up the next day.

It was either that or some sort of dancing. 

I won’t be having any dancing.  I am a fair athlete; I play basketball, and people who are awful think I’m not bad.  I can hit tennis balls, sometimes all the way over the fence.  I do the P90X without causing damage to the house.  I’m not a muffin of studliness, but athletically, I could be a lot worse.  And I can’t dance, at all.

Anything I can’t do is suspect.  Dancing often involves shaking your booty at members of the opposite sex, which is absolutely no good.  Dancing is supposed to look graceful, but frankly, it mostly makes me uncomfortable, even when it is not I , personally, who is doing it.  Watching other people dance makes me slightly uncomfortable. 

This goes for all dancing:

Ballroom dancing?  Slightly uncomfortable. 

Salsa?  Slightly uncomfortable. 

Country down-home hoe-down boot scootin’ line boogying?  Slightly uncomfortable. 

Ballet?  Slightly uncomfortable. 

the funky chicken?  Slightly uncomfortable. 

Ghetto thumpy-beat dancing? Slightly uncomfortable. 

Cheerleading?  Slightly uncomfortable. 

Interpretative dancing?  Slightly uncomfortable. 

Modern dance, with non-musical noise as accompaniment, that sort of back-to-our-primal-roots stomping about that seems to be filling our modern art schools?   Slightly very uncomfortable. 

Really, all dancing is uncomfortable for me, no matter who is doing it.  Frankly, gymnastics is uncomfortably close to dancing, which is enough discomfort for me, thank you very much.

Abbey is not learning to dance at all, though, which is what her mother wanted her to do.  But I was against it, because of the whole comfort thing, and also because Abbey has never shown a shred of interest in physical coordination.  However, she has shown interest in beating her sister up, and good parents are always looking to encourage their children’s natural proclivities, so we are helping her to learn to beat people up at a higher level of effectiveness.

She has a gi (Pronounced gi), which is the karate uniform, and it comes with a little white belt . . . she looks awesome in her outfit.  She’s not actually allowed to do any beating up until she progresses to her black belt, so I told her if she tries hard, we’ll just spray paint it for her in a couple of weeks.

Rough draft

I have finished the rough draft.

This is, for me, a major accomplishment.

It seems that there are many different processes by which one may write a book.

Some people can just outline it all out, and then write a book that fits the outline, sort of the way that a builder will take a blueprint and build a house from the plans.  If the builder is any good, the house ends up looking a lot like what the blueprints say it should look like.

Some people just start writing, and see where it goes.  They just keep going and going, and then the rough draft is finished, and they might develop some changes after that.   This is a more organic plan for writing.

I don’t do either.  My special style of writing involves:

1.  Start writing a story and go for between 100 and 150 pages.  (1-3 months)

2.  Realize that the direction that I’ve established in these first 100 to 150 pages is incorrect.  (2-3 months)

3.  Dump a large chunk, and start over with all that stuff.  (1 minute)

4.  Finish (a year or so)

When you look at it like that, it seems a pretty straightforward method; apparently, I need that process of starting it to really discover a direction, and then I cut whatever wasn’t going in that direction.  But the problem is that this process is both time-consuming and emotionally draining.  That first 150 pages is hard to get out.  It often begins to feel wrong, and then, when I feel stuck, and start looking over it and realize that it’s not what I want or need, I really don’t want to throw any of it away.  Step 3, which takes 1 minute?  Step 3 is very hard.  Very very hard.

I wish I could skip both steps 2 and 3.  However, I’ve had to do step 3 three different times now; once for each book.  It does not grow easy.

Then, when I’ve started going again, and this time in the right direction, it begins to get heavy in my brain.

The feeling is strange.  I’ve got my normal life, with my wife, my two daughters,  my friends and my job, and then I’ve got this whole different world that I am living in every day.  A whole different set of people, and they are living through trying times, and I feel a great responsibility to these other people.  I cannot take them lightly.  So I go to work, talk to my family, play basketball, and all the time, I have the insistent whisper of nonexistent people in my head, always asking me to finish their story.

The main character in my latest is named Pug.  I grew, over 2 years, to love him.  I didn’t want to let him down.  I didn’t want to disappoint him.   He sucked a lot of life out of me, especially there at the end.  I didn’t write anything else, just focused on him, and now . . .

I’ve finished the rough draft.  The book is not finished, but it’s started, well started, and the hardest work is over.  It’s a good feeling, and I’m happy.

 

Random thoughts

1.   Nobody has even tried to answer the logic puzzle, the one that caused Ashlei to punch me in the arm and accuse pretty much everything in the entire universe of being stupid.  But I didn’t just make it up; there is a real answer, and the clues are enough to figure out the answer.   

2.  In the interest of helping you figure out your taxes, I have prepared a full financial report concerning the Sam Woelk BMW Acquisition Fund With Occasional Token Gifts for Poor People:

Beginning balance, Jan 1, 2010:     $0.00

Total Revenue for 2010:       $0.00

Gross Profit for 2010:   -$250.00

Capitalization distribution:  $0.00

Disbursements from Stocks:       $0.00

Cash infusions From Fund Director’s personal bank account to meet negative equity demands:  $250.00

Ending balance:     $0.00

Your tax-deductible giving:  $0.00

See?  Wouldn’t it be nice if you saw a big fat number there at the bottom, something like $5,000.00?  Wouldn’t it be nice to plug that number into your taxes and watch the money you get back just skyrocket, wouldn’t you rather be giving money to a worthy cause than paying for the Federal government to be subsidizing studies on how bumblebees have sex? 

Well, I have dissolved the Sam Woelk BMW Acquisition Fund With Occasional Token Gifts for Poor People due to my bad experience with the actual acquisition of a BMW. 

But lucky for your April 2012 tax filing, I am now formally announcing the: 

Sam Woelk Porsche Acquisition Fund With Occasional Token Gifts for Poor People

Don’t hesitate to give to this worthy benevolent organization with the full knowledge that all donations are completely tax deductible in the likely event that you are not audited by the IRS.

3.  We are back to work, and I am happy.  I am one of those rare people who really enjoys his job.  I wake up, go to work, do my thing, and am at peace.

It doesn’t pay like a lot of professions, but I like it, and I feel so so blessed that this is so.

One thing about my job is that we regularly have rather large breaks.  Our Christmas break was 4 weeks this year, and that’s too much, when you want to go to work.

4.  We are looking for something for Abbey.  As you know, Anna does gymnastics, and she really likes that a lot.  Momma takes her to the gym two or three times a week.  Abbey doesn’t go, and she notices this.  She asks, occasionally, if she can do gymnastics again.  This is a difficult question to answer.  I’d be happy to say yes, except for how obvious it was that she wasn’t good at all last time.  I don’t want her to feel the separation of watching her sister excel, while she flounders.  So I am trying to figure out something else that she might enjoy, because it bothers her a little that Anna has gymnastics, and she just has to take walks with me.

Of course, they both do piano, but she doesn’t enjoy that.  I am pretty sure that she will enjoy it eventually–she loves music–but it hasn’t happened just yet.

So, what else could she do?  I’m not sure, and I’m still trying to figure it out.  I’d be happy for any suggestions.  Nobody told me how complicated parenthood would be.

P90X: Is it for me?

Since I’ve been doing P90X, I’ve received plenty of questions from concerned people.

Many want to know how hard it is.  Many want to know if I’m crazy.  But mostly, they want to know whether P90X works.

So I am here to answer all the questions. 

Question #1:  How hard is it?

P90X is hosted by a man named Tony.  Tony has been visiting me in my basement for months now.  He has the kind of muscles that I would like to have, by which I mean they are visible.  He is upbeat, friendly, relentlessly encouraging, and sadistic.  People have different reactions to Tony: Anna likes Tony, Abbey likes Tony, Ashlei doesn’t like Tony.  At times, it looks as if Tony is wearing make-up, which is creepy, but other than that, I like him okay.

 The very first workout that you do is called chest and back.  In this workout, you switch back and forth between push-ups and pull-ups, 24 times, and Tony cheerfully expects you to suffer.  In my zeal, pre-first workout, I bought a contraption to help me do pull-ups, rather than just using that part of the workout to lie on my back.  (Come to think of it, I could use the push-up part of the workout to lie on my back as well)  The pull-up contraption fits nicely into an open door space, and it hangs from the trim at the top. It has multiple handles to facilitate a wide variety of pull-up motions.

What it doesn’t do is actually help me do the pull-ups.

If you paid attention in high school biology, you will recall that there are different types of bodies.  If you have a endomorphic body, you are what we politely call “big-boned,” which means that your doctor will spend a lot of time making you feel guilty about your diet, and then you will get diabetes and die.  If you have an ectomorphic body, then you have visible bones stretching out of random places in your skin, and you do not do well in high winds, and you will get scurvy and die.  And if you have a mesomorphic body, then you look like Tony on P90X, with nice muscles bulging in a proper and aesthetically pleasing way, and you will not die. Endomorphs and ectomorphs hate mesomorphs, but they also envy them.

Endomorphs cannot do pull-ups, because they have too much weight.  Ectomorphs cannot do pull-ups because they have too little muscle.  Mesomorphs can do pull-ups until the cows come home.  It’s just like Goldilocks . . . this body is too big, this body is too small, this body is just right. 

God, in his infinite wisdom, gave you one of these three bodies.  He gave me the ectomorphic body, which means that I step carefully over sewer grates in the road so that I don’t fall in.  A large portion of my body weight can be attributed to hair.  I will never have nice muscles bulging in a proper and aesthetically pleasing way, the way that Tony has his muscles.  Mostly, I have one muscle, and I store it under my bed at home so that it doesn’t get damaged.

Back to P90X.  Tony starts out by doing 70 pull-ups in about 50 seconds, and while he is doing these pull-ups he is talking continuously, encouraging me to keep up.  Instead of keeping up, I do three pull-ups in the same 50 seconds, all while emitting grunting howls.  My third pull-up doesn’t really count, because I try, and make  several more grunting noises, but my body doesn’t actually move upward, not at all.  Then I fall to the ground.  As I lay there, quivering, Tony is giving me some pop psychology encouragement about no-pain-no-gain, and do-your-best-forget-the-rest, and losers-eat-cheesecake, and I can feel my bicep trying to exit my body through my armpit, because it knows that Tony is just getting warmed up.  It wants to go hide back under the bed.  But it can’t, because Tony is already doing push-ups so fast that his body is creating a breeze, and he is again encouraging me to keep up. 

So I roll over and do a push-up. 

Yes, P90X is hard. 

Question #2:  Are you crazy?

No.

Question #3:  Do you see results?

Well, I have to be honest here.  In addition to telling you to do these gobs of exercises, one after another, Tony also advocates a rather strict diet.  His guidelines are as follows:  No dairy.  No carbs.  No red meat.  No pork or chicken or seafood.  No sugars.  No MSG.  No salt. No caffeine.  No butter, margarine, grease, vegetable oil, corn oil, unsaturated fats, or lard.  No desserts.  This eliminates pretty much everything in the traditional food pyramid, and so you are left with manmade food products, such as Meth or Twinkies or hard liquor. 

 I’ve been continuing on with my regular diet instead, so my results are not typical.  Here are my results:

I can get all the way through the chest and back video without throwing up.  I can get all the way through the cardio video without throwing up.  I can get all the way through the leg video without throwing up.  I can get all the way through the yoga video without throwing up.  I can get all the way through the arm video without throwing up. 

I’m not saying that I actually do any of the different things that Tony and his friends do when I watch the videos, but I do not throw up.

Bonus question #4:  IS P90X good for family togetherness?

Yes.  Anna can now do 5 pull-ups, all by herself.  Abbey stands by me and offers encouragement and pats me on the back when I am doing push-ups.  Ashlei gets alone time.  It’s good all the way around.

So, a ringing endorsement for Tony and his video workouts from hell! 

Public service announcement:  If you choose, after reading this non-advertisement, to purchase and use the P90X workouts, I (firstly) do not receive any monetary benefit from said purchase, and (secondly) am not liable for the injury that you will incur.

Of Logic and Beyond

Some of you will remember that last week, I was determined to teach my wife logic.  This was part of a concerted effort to help her to understand the male mind, which would foster harmony and balance in the relationship, and as other people observed the perfect communication between us, they would seek out the secrets of our enlightened rapport, which would cause a slow but inevitable chain reaction, sweeping across the globe and bringing world peace.

Well, the first logic lesson went poorly.  I started out with a simple little question, a riddle, to expose Ashlei to some of the simple powers of a logical mind, to begin to understand things that to an illogic mind will always seem shrouded in mystery, to whet her appetite for the cold and spartan (yet somehow fulfilling) beauty of always being right about stuff.

Here is the riddle:

A man goes into a bar, has a beer, and says to the bartender, “I bet you can’t guess the ages of my three daughters.”

The bartender says, “Give me a few clues, and I’ll figure it out.”

The man says, “The sum of their ages is eighteen.”

“That’s not enough information.”

“Well, the age of one of them is the number out on the front of your bar.”

The bartender goes out and looks at the front of his bar, and comes back in and says, “Still not enough information.”

The man says, “Okay, my youngest daughter loves chocolate ice cream.”

The bartender says, “Aha,” and tells him the ages of all three daughters.

What are the their ages?

 

We never got past this small introductory riddle.  Ashlei first of all said it was impossible, and then, she said it was stupid, and then she said the drunk guy was stupid, and then she said I was stupid.  After that, logic was not a prominent part of our conversation, and I decided that the second logic lesson would never take place.  All in all, she spent half the time trying to understand me than I spent last year trying to understand her, which makes my position (logically) twice as righteous as hers.

But who’s keeping track?  I want to talk about something else, which is taking walks.

You see, I have two daughters.  They are very different.  Anna is doing the gymnastics thing, twice a week.  She is constantly climbing trees.  Sometimes, when I am doing P90X, she will do it with me.  She is very active.  Abbey is not so much any of that.  She doesn’t do the gymnastics thing.  She doesn’t climb trees.  She sits and watches while I do P90X, but she doesn’t ever like to do active anything.

So last fall, Tuesday and Thursday, when Anna started going to gymnastics, I told Abbey that we were going to take walks.  She was not for the idea.  She wanted to sit around, read a book, watch something on TV, eat some candy, play Sorry, something like that.  But I said no, we were going to take a walk.  I told her why, too.  I told her that she didn’t get enough exercise, and she was going to get some while Anna was at gymnastics.

Finally she said okay, got her shoes on, and off we went.  We live in a pleasant neighborhood.  There are sidewalks, and lots of grass and trees, not many cars, and it’s a great neighborhood for a walk.  She held my hand the entire time.  She asked me to carry her several times, but I said no.

And she talked the entire time.  I didn’t have to respond very often, although occasionally she asked me a question.  No, mostly, she was talking.

Four months have passed. We’ve taken walks when it was eighty degrees and sunny at 5:30 in the evening, and then in December, we’ve taken walks when it was twenty degrees and the stars were out at 5:30 in the evening.  We’ve stared at certain trees, we’ve gone down into a certain little gully full of autumn leaves and thrown them into the air.  We’ve talked to people; Abbey talks to everybody.  We’ve tasted the grass because that’s what cows eat.  We’ve jumped over the cracks in the sidewalk.  We’ve laughed and laughed about things that weren’t so very funny.  We’ve watched the fog of our breath.  We’ve blown dandelion seed heads and watched the seeds float on the wind, and we’ve eaten yellow dandelion flowers.  We’ve looked at bunnies, and we’ve watched them run away from us.  We’ve stopped at certain houses and stared at Christmas decorations.  We’ve stomped on mole tunnels.  We’ve counted bird’s nests in the bare trees.  I’ve gone many miles while she patters along beside me, talking almost the entire time.

There is one house with a statue of a girl in the front yard.  It’s about four feet high, one of those stylized Greek looking things with flowing robes.  It is made out of concrete.  Abbey loves this statue, and we always stop so that she can give the girl a hug.  “I love you, statue,” she says, every time.

The new year comes.  We come back from visiting Ashlei’s family, and settle back into our routines.  Anna goes off to gymnastics, and Abbey goes and gets dressed and off we go.  She still doesn’t like walks–she tells me this before we go–but what I notice most is that she submits, and her attitude brightens, and the world is thus a pleasant place for her.

We will come back to the house, and she’ll stand close to me while I make dinner, or she’ll sit next to me while I read, or I’ll go outside and sit on the back deck, and she’ll come out and say, “Daddy, I want to sit on your lap.”

I’ll say okay, and she flops onto me–Abbey is never graceful–and then she grabs my hands and pulls them across and over until I am holding her, and the weight of her body rises as I breathe.  She will then, occasionally, fall silent.

But not for long.

New Year’s Resolutions

It’s time to talk about new year’s resolutions.

Some of you may recall that last year, my resolutions were related on trying to understand women.  I am happy to report that I have mastered this subject, and am now searching for another subject to master.

Actually, that’s not quite correct.  I originally wanted to understand them, but after trying for a solid ten or so minutes, I gave up on that resolved myself to just put up with them, not understand them.  This really means the exact same thing.  For example, lets imagine that the wife says that she needs to go to some store and pay some woman $40.00 to put paint on her fingernails.  The obvious logical response for a man, when his wife says something like that, would be to laugh uproariously and then ground the wife and take away her credit cards.  This type of response will severely curtail his opportunities to propagate the species.

But:  consider if the man understands the woman.  He will know how important this idiocy is to the feminine mind, and so he will say fine, and he’ll watch violent movies on TV while she’s gone.  And if the man doesn’t understand her but is resolved to put up with her then he’ll say fine, and he’ll watch violent movies on TV while she’s gone.

Or, lets say that you are going to visit the in-laws.  You men know how many shoes you will bring: two.  One for each foot.  Now, ask me how many shoes my wife has here in Norman, while we visit her parents.  How many?  Twelve.  She has twelve shoes.  She doesn’t have twelve feet, now, does she?  And we’re not going to any parties.  We’re not going to any weddings, or funerals, or anywhere.  Why does she need twelve shoes here in Norman Oklahoma?  If I could understand, I would be at peace.  And I can’t understand, but I am still at peace concerning this shoe profusion, because I have accepted the irrationality of the feminine.

So men, you don’t have to understand them.  Stop trying; it’s impossible.  I did, and all to no avail.  No, all you have to do relax, breathe, take your Prozac, and have some more Prozac, and say fine, and if you still feel negative emotions, then . . .  more Prozac.

However, for 2011, I have  a much better new year’s resolution.

See, men can’t understand women because they (women) are illogical and irrational.  By definition, it is impossible to understand something that is ununderstandable.

However, with therapy and lessons in logic, I think we can overcome their shortcomings, and my resolution this year is to help women understand men.  I am primarily discussing my wife here, although other women are free to ask me for help if they would like to improve themselves.

I really don’t think this will be all that difficult of a project.  Ashlei is eager to get started, so my first order of business is a 17-lesson logic class, complete with lectures, homework, power point presentations, and tests.  After that, we’ll have classes in other important logical and reasoning topics:

Cars with overlarge engines that can go much faster than is legal

Violent movies without acting or romantic intrigue

Bodily noises/scratching

Really, that’s about it.  If you women can manage to wrap your estrogen warped minds around logic, cars, violence, and farts, then you should have no problem at all understanding men.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that if you women can’t understand men, it’s entirely your fault.

So come on, ladies, let’s quit worrying about what color our fingernails should be, and let’s start dealing with some more important issues!

And with that, happy new year.

Gymnastics part 2

Now that I’ve given you a quick bit of historical background on gymnastics, I have to explain our own family’s participation in this august and ancient sport. 

When you go to watch a gymnastics meet, you get bad seats.  It doesn’t matter whether you go early, or late, or whatever, you will always get bad seats.  There are no good seats. 

This is different from, say, baseball, which is very clearly a spectator sport.  The whole game of baseball is designed to lull you into a sense of relaxed good cheer, with all of the boring time between innings, and the fact that even when all the players are actually out there, they aren’t doing anything, ever.  They are just standing around, and every two minutes or so, the guy on the little tiny mountain will throw the ball, and nobody else will move, except the guy in the black outfit, and all he does is say a word.  Then, the ball goes back to the guy on the mountain, and you wait two more minutes for the guy on the mountain to throw the ball again.  This is all that happens for hours, and then you go home.  Baseball is designed so that you just sit there and relax.  The field where they play is aesthetically pleasing, and you just sit there and watch nothing, and perhaps you drink a beverage that is designed to slow your heart rate, and when you go home, your blood pressure is lower, and you’ve eaten some comfort food, and you feel better . . . it’s just like visiting your therapist, except you don’t have to talk about your feelings or your childhood. 

Basketball and football are just the opposite; there is lots and lots going on, all the time.  When you leave a basketball/football game you feel slightly worn out from trying to keep up with all the action.  Watching live golf is more like baseball . . . pretty fields, nothing ever happening with the added benefit that the ball might kill you (this is also true in baseball).  Nascar is boring and you will suffer hearing loss and a car wreck might kill you.  Soccer is a mix of baseball and basketball; there’s lots of action, but it’s boring action, and the fans might kill you.  Tennis is mostly boring, except that it is culturally important to be quiet while watching a tennis game, so that you might get to hear the players curse.  This is not good for your soul.  

So . . . watching sports is a mix of deadly, boring, exhausting, and morally decadent.  Therefore, we have recently invented new sports, and called them extreme.  The whole point of extreme sports is  to have a sport where spectators are relatively safe, but the participants are the ones who might die.  One of these extreme sports involves motorcycles.  

Motorcycles are terrifying machines in and of themselves.  They have only half of the requisite number of wheels, and they have an engine that you place between your legs while you ride your motorcycle.  Just not hurting yourself at all should be cause for celebration whilst riding a motorcycle.  Other extreme sports involve boats, snowmobiles, hang gliders, and chain saws.

Back to gymnastics.  Gymnastics are not like watching other sports.  Recall; baseball=boring, basketball=tiring, golf=death.  All of these are great ways to enjoy an afternoon.  But gymnastics tries to mix two opposing emotions.  Most of the time, gymnastics is boring.  There are hundreds of girls, all doing the same routines, one after another.  So you get to see, say, 1,349 little girls all do the exact same series of moves on the bar, one after another.  This is boring.  However, suddenly, your own daughter is standing there, and then she is on the bar, and the boring is replaced by abject, stultifying terror. 

Your heart is pounding, almost painfully, and you are gripping your legs so hard that you are leaving bruises.  You realize that if she falls off that bar in the wrong way, she could break any variety of bones, including her neck.  Your daughter, the one that sometimes trips over air, is spinning around that little bar.  You realize, suddenly, that she is right now doing something on that bar that you could not do, not even if somebody offered you a BMW.  She goes around and around, and then she stops, and goes around a couple more times, and then she sort of flies in the air, and she lands on her feet. 

The terror subsides, but only for awhile, only while the 1,349 other little girls do their routines.  They all look safe and under control, and you realize that the adults are standing there, about 2 feet away,  there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all.   Then, she is doing her balance beam routine, and you aren’t breathing again.  That beam is FOUR FEET IN THE AIR!  If she falls, she will undoubtedly break some bones, perhaps her neck.  Then she jumps lightly off, and the terror subsides, but it comes twice more, for the vault and the floor exercise.

We’ve been to two gymnastics meets.  Both times, Anna competed against three other girls.  The first time, Anna scored poorly–she came in last in everything, except the beam, where she came in third.  The terror was awful, and was mixed with disappointment and sadness.  The second time, Anna scored well–two firsts, a second, and a fourth.  She got first overall.   The pride at her success did not ameliorate the terror, not at all. 

These two gymnastics meets lasted about 3-4 hours apiece, and it was 3-4 hours of boredom, punctuated by 4 separate minutes of absolute, hideous, overwhelming terror.

And, from watching the olympics, I know that the terror does not get better.  I’ve watched the olympics.  They always show the parents of those little pixie girls, and I can see it on their faces, faces that have aged 30 years in the single decade that their daughter has been doing this thing.

How I wished she got into something that doesn’t bring so much terror, something like skydiving, or the Marines.

Anyway, Happy Christmas, and may your children not fill you with terror.

gymnastics

Most Americans think about gymnastics about once every 4 years, because of the summer olympics.  During the summer olympics, we all gather around to watch Amateur American Athletes (also known as AARP) be feel-good ambassadors to the rest of the countries by winning more medals than any of them. 

There are lots of different ways to compete in the olympics.  There is field and track, and there is soccer.  There is basketball, and  baseball, and golf, and tennis.   There are a variety of unarmed combat events, such as wrestling, Judo, Sumo, boxing, kickboxing, shadowboxing, MMA, WWF, and KICKBOOTY.  There is shooting, curling, swimming, diving, snorkeling, weightlifting, there is rowing, racing, polo, bicycle riding, eating, and belching.  However, if you watch on TV, you will never get to watch any of these fascinating and unique sporting events, because about 85% of the olympic coverage is focused on 16-year-old girls who are all 4 feet tall and due to genetic rarities (and, in the case of Germany and China, male hormone therapy) can do flips and the splits while they dance around to music.

You have never seen many of the events that I am discussing, and some of you did not even know that weight-lifting and swimming were a part of the olympics.  You will never get to see them, I am sorry, because you will be shown a steady diet of the 16-year-old pixie girls dancing and doing their flips. 

Would you like to watch some wrestling?  Some belching, or rowing?  TOUGH BEANS, LOSER!  WATCH SOME GYMNASTICS INSTEAD!

As you can see, I am less than sanguine about the whole olympics=pixie flipping dancing-girls situation. 

Back in the olden days, olympics competitors were all male, and they actually didn’t wear clothes while they competed, and the only two things the naked males did were race and wrestle.  However, NBC did a poll on this issue, and determined that most people did not want to watch naked males fighting or running, and so they branched out: naked males shooting bows and arrows, naked males ice skating, naked males playing volleyball, but ratings continued to be flat.  So, NBC made the males start wearing clothes in 1977, and then, in the 1983 olympics, NBC had females (clothed) competing for the first time. 

However, the females were unable to compete with the males in most of the events.  In weightlifting, the women would hoist 200 pounds over their head, and then the males (back then steroids were a regular aspect of the olympics) would come out and hoist Peterbilts over their heads, and so the women were not winning any medals.  Ratings remained flat.  Guys wanted to watch nascar, and women did not want to watch other women lose.  Then came feminism, and in 1989, Gloria Steinem burned a bust of Arnold Schwarzenegger using her bra as kindling on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  Then came Title 9, which is a law that says that women, if they can’t compete with men, should have the option to just make up their own stupid sports, where men won’t be able to compete at all.

Thus, in 1991, gymnastics were debuted in the Pyongyang Olympics, and we’ve never looked back.  American women, who don’t care one tiny bit about real sports like football, will all tune in en mass, 190 million strong, to the olympics while the pixie flipping dancing is happening, and then, if the announcers even mention field hockey, all 190 million will change channels instantly.  Of course, NBC knows when you’re watching their channel, because they have little devices in your TVs, so they give the women what they want.  Men can’t keep up with the tidal wave of estrogen, so they just give up and switch back to nascar. 

Sometimes a clear perspective, complete with accurate facts, can give us a sense of how to interpret the world around us, which is why I gave you an abbreviated historical backdrop to bring you to where we are today, which is the current American idea that the olympics=gymnastics, and gymnastics=pixie girls dancing and flipping to music, and I think we can blame Gloria Steinem.

You might feel that I am exagerating, but I am not.  Last time the olympics were on, I watched for a while, and all I saw was pixie girls dancing and flipping to mucus.  I mean music. 

I wanted Anna to play a sport that involved, at minimum, some sort of ball.  Shoot, I would have bought her a Peterbilt, if she’d have shown any interest in weightlifting . . . get her started young, and she’d have been fine.

What does Ashlei do?  She waits until I am out of the house, and then she goes sneaking off to some gymnastics facility, and signs both girls up.

Immediately, before the first class, it was obvious that Abbey is not genetically wired for gymnastics.  Even I could see this.  However, after only a couple of weeks, the head of the gymnastics facility came up to Ashlei and told her that they wanted to put Anna in an advanced class.  The advanced class, of course, costs more money.  Everything about gymnastics costs money.  And takes time, lots of time.

Months passed.

Now, we go to meets, which will be the topic of my next blog, sometime later this week.  Probably Friday.