Better Him Than Me.

I walked into the gym today and the first thing I saw was a guy wincing in pain – a lot of pain. He couldn’t sit still. He was up. He was down. A trainer brought him a bag of ice and tried to calm him down. Then he called an ambulance. Dude had torn his pec. Ow! He was thirty-six. He was younger than me. I talked to his buddy and found out that the guy was going heavy at the end of his workout, which is the conventional wisdom or at least the traditional. I do the exact opposite. I warm up and go heavy while my muscles are fresh. My whole goal these days is not to get hurt, even at the expense of performance. I don’t improve the way I used to, but I’m not injuring myself either. My worst nightmare is to seriously injure myself at the gym. I’d rather get hit by a car, if I’m going to get injured. At least then I can sue somebody. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to tear a muscle, and I have zero interest in finding out. Today was back day, and I’ve been more and more careful with my back routine since the last time I pulled a muscle. I ramped up the safety to levels previously unheard of after seeing this guy writhing in pain. I can’t remember the last time I was this conscious of my form and technique. It wound up being a really good session. I did change the order of some things. I started with abs, which made the planks, crunches, and leg raises much less agonizing. I normally do abs dead friggin’ last, on my way out of the gym. Strangely enough the fatigued stomach muscles didn’t bother me until the second half hour of my cardio. I had no idea how much my core stabilizes me on the elliptical machine. Considering that I drove myself home without any need for surgery, I’m going to call this a good day.

All I Need Are Some Tasty Waves, A Cool Buzz, and I'm Fine

We started today celebrating CG’s birthday with blueberry pancakes and turkey sausage. What’s funny is that I’m the only one who won’t buy turkey sausage, but I’m also the only one that will eat it. After breakfast we went to the Towne Center for the, bar none, most unsuccessful shopping trip ever. MJ needed some school supplies, some new clothes, and some new shoes. We went to Target, Staples, JoAnn’s, DSW, and Talbot’s. Nothing was bought. No commerce took place. However, we did have family fun time for just the cost of gas so it was worth it. We got home, LMJ had some lunch, and then it was nap time – at least for two of us. MJ took the opportunity to go to Starbucks to grade some papers. She was required to give her students a timed writing this first week of school and she doesn’t want to get behind. I can totally understand that. Unfortunately for my parents, LMJ and I slept through their phone call, and they were stuck at European Street drinking beer. Oh the horror. Fortunately, I woke up before they headed back to Orange Park, and they were able to come hang out with their granddaughter and get introduced to the wonder that is the Backyardigans. After the visit, we headed east. I’m starting to dread when it gets too cold and too dark too early to make an afternoon trip to the beach practical. The fact that EJG and JSG are starting to catch the bug isn’t making it any easier. We stayed late tonight, well after sunset, and enjoyed every moment of it. I really did not want to leave. My mom wondered if living at the beach would take away a lot of the joy of being at the beach. If it would just become something we would take for granted. She wondered this because we were talking about living at the beach while she was visiting this afternoon. I think this is starting to become an obsession with me, but I know that if I had a place at the beach I would not have a job – at least not the job I have now. I could see myself becoming Jeff Spicoli and being fine with it.

Sexy Motherpucker

I saw this in Target this morning and had a couple of thoughts. As a proud father of a far into the future but not really that far into the future teenage daughter I laughed at first and then I asked a Targeter, or whatever Target employees call themselves, where I could find some chains and padlocks so I could chain all the exits shut and set the building on fire. I’m having a really weird experience with this. I laugh every time I think about “Sexy Motherpucker” because dirty puns are funny, but then I’m immediately haunted by thoughts of my daughter and sympathy for dads of current teenaged girls. If the makers of this lip balm were rounded up and tortured to death with pears of anguish I’d have a hard time finding the perpetrators guilty. When and if the victims distant relatives – because all relations up to and including first cousins once removed would have been murdered – asked me how I could have found the defendants not guilty I would answer them with a question of my own, which people really enjoy, “They named their cheap knockoff wannabe Chapstick something I don’t think would get past the Cinemax censors as a movie title and marketed it to teenage girls. What did they think was going to happen?” Just because people don’t anticipate a drastic overreaction doesn’t mean that one won’t happen. It also doesn’t mean that drastic overreactions are wrong by default. Overreaction just illustrates a certain point of view, especially when it comes to loving fathers and their daughters. Right now I’m trying to think of an atrocity that I wouldn’t commit to protect LMJ. Yep, that’s about it, the whole list. I think what offends me most is that I expected to have a few more years being a barking dog sitting on a porch. I didn’t think being a dad would start to trump being a dog this soon. She’s two. I thought I had eight more years before I was at DEFCON 1 about these kinds of things. Now I have to join the NRA to make sure you liberals don’t take away my God given right to rain down lead depleted uranium in a manner consistent with protecting my family and my peace of mind. God bless Samuel Colt.

People

MJ made me read a post from Dooce, who rants about the crappy service she got when her brand new $1300 washer broke. Dooce interspersed the piece with the emails she expected to get from whiny bitches with nothing better to do. Even after the preemptive quit your whiny bitching you whiny bitches, she still got a bunch of comments from that seemingly disaffected group. She had a bad day and wrote about it, and was justified in her anger. What I don’t get, and maybe it’s me, is people who are offended by what they read on a mommy blog, or any other blog for that matter, and feel the need to scold the writer. In the history of the world has screaming at someone that they’re wrong ever changed anyone’s mind? Also, even in this modern instantaneous world, if something is written on a page the writer thought about it and the text reflects how he or she felt at the time. It’s a mommy blog written by a woman with a biting sarcastic sense of humor. How do people take this stuff so seriously? The only reason I’m writing about it now is because I have to write about something tonight and I’m worried that these people vote. I’m also concerned about people that think Dooce’s calling out Maytag on twitter is cyber bullying. A mommy can’t bully a Fortune 500 company, especially one who talks about how she and her husband saved for the brand new washer and the ten year guaranty. I don’t care how “influential” she is. Money talks, BS runs the marathon (Nino Brown). Just because she got her washer fixed doesn’t mean she was a bully. It means Maytag took two months to fix a product under warranty that was purchased less than six months ago. I’m surprised Maytag, of all companies, had bad customer service. Their whole pitch is that their stuff never breaks; therefore their lone repairman never has any work to do. It would be different if she had bought an Eastern European washer off the back of a truck. I just worry about the future of America when large numbers of people both read a mommy blog and side with the corporation.

Proud Papa

We went to My Gym tonight. We moved it to Thursday from Monday because of MJ’s schedule. Mondays would be a little bit too hectic. Tonight was more crowded than it’s been before. I don’t know if there were significantly more children but there were a lot more double parents. I think I get more out the My Gym experience than LMJ does. It’s an hour of me being silly around her in front of other people and letting her learn to be independent. Every single week she amazes me by doing things I didn’t think she was capable of doing. We still have a little bit of a problem with socialization but she’s getting better every week. She’s not afraid of the other kids or shy. I think she really couldn’t give less of a crap about what anyone else is doing, but she’s not treating the other kids like they were zombies or lepers and that’s progress. I think it’s wonderful that those other children are playing on the swings, good for them. Right now I’m climbing on this hot dog thing, and when I’m done I’m going to bounce on the trampoline. She was more comfortable in the ball pit than she’s been before and she stood her ground on the clubhouse/sliding board ladder. Towards the end of the hour tonight the coaches set up an exercise where they would hand a child a ring, and the child was supposed to pretend the ring was a steering wheel and run as fast they could and drop the steering wheel ring on top of an orange traffic cone. The kids ranged in age from about three months younger than LMJ to about six months older, I’m guessing. She was the only one to remember that the ring was supposed to be a steering wheel. And yes, the whole point of that story was to illustrate – once again – that my baby is better than all the other babies.

An Evolution Revolution

I think about human evolution. Sometimes I think that it has ground to a halt because of modern medicine. Natural selection has to do more with who dies than who lives, and thanks to advances in medicine no one dies anymore. Ted Kennedy died this week at seventy-seven years old, and my first thought was that he was so young. Centenarians are the fastest growing segment of the population. LMJ and baby girls born the same year she was have life expectancies of a hundred and twelve. Diseases that used to keep the population strong have been wiped out. There’s a website that chronicles twelve deadly diseases that were cured during the 20th century. People that weren’t supposed to grow up at all are now reproducing and passing on their weak genes, effectively ending natural selection.

At the other end of the evolutionary spectrum, and what prompted this post, is the increase in size of humans. I was looking at Florida State’s football roster and getting frustrated because they have two freshman defensive ends under 270lbs. I’m upset because a 6’5” 255lb. eighteen year old isn’t big enough. That’s insane. The size of football players has gone up almost thirty percent in the last twenty years. That’s 1989. The Redskins had the Hogs. They were by far the largest offensive line in the history of football. Only two of them weighed more than 300lbs. Now, in 2009, you won’t find an offensive lineman in the NFL that weighs less than 320lbs., and they’re a lot more agile than the lineman were twenty years ago. They not only got bigger, they got stronger and faster. Good nutrition is part of it but not all of it. We may be changing the way evolution works. We may be on our way to becoming giants, but giants with managed ailments. A thousand years from now everyone may be eight feet tall and run thirty-five miles an hour, but we’ll all have type 1 diabetes. Damned high fructose corn syrup.

I'm Overthinking This Aren't I?

LMJ has been introduced to The Jungle Book – Disney’s version not Kipling’s. I think we’ll wait until she’s about five or six for the book. She loves the movie even though there a couple parts that scare her. Since she’s watching it, I’m watching it, and even though it’s my favorite Disney movie, I’m starting to pick it apart. I didn’t want to but my brain didn’t ask me. I don’t have a problem with Mowgli being raised by wolves or the whole pack bitching out because one tiger happens to be back in the neighborhood. The problem I have, that gets my mind spinning, is with the ages of everyone involved. They find Mowgli when he’s a baby and skip ahead to when he’s about to hit puberty. I assume he’s about to hit puberty because he’s mesmerized by a girl getting water and completely forgets about how much he loves his jungle life. Man does that hit home? If Mowgli is ten, which is as young as can be plausible, that means Bagheera and Shere Khan are at least ten, and ten year old jungle cats are old. Some other panther and some other tiger would have most likely solved everyone’s problems along the way. It’s the circle of life. His wolf brothers are still puppies, when in reality they reach adulthood in a little over a year. I don’t have a problem with a wolf nursing him, milk is milk, and we’re all one big happy mammalian family, but when the litter moves to solid food he’s going to have to start licking his wolf mother’s face so she’ll vomit meat in his mouth. Also, wolves’ stomachs are filled with battery acid for all intents and purposes. They scavenge as much as they hunt, and I don’t think Mowgli’s digestive system is up for carrion. Rotten meat tends to kill humans. Does Mowgli mark his territory in the traditional canine fashion? Male humans can’t just start and stop, it stings. These thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg. I won’t get into the jungle bugs and his exposed skin. I have to go douse myself in deet just thinking about it.