The Work Work-Out

Gary U.S. Bonds--"Out Of Work" (mp3)

I am not in tip-top shape. I am not a doctor, nor have I ever played one on TV. Nevertheless, as someone looking to cash in, I am throwing my lot in with the variety of ways that one can lose weight, get in shape, feel better about oneself, and generally live a more fulfilling life.

I wanted to call it The Poor Man's Workout or The Blue Collar Workout, but my agent says that those titles limit my potential demographic. Plus, he says, those are kind of depressing. Nobody wants to know that those classes of people exist. So, I'm calling it The Work Work-Out.

What do you think? Too redundant? Unfortunately, it's kind of complicated as well, so stay with me. Here's the plan: instead of going to a gym, a health club, or a spa, instead of working with a personal trainer or an exercise video, you stay home and work.

That's right, instead of driving across town or out to the levee or to The Sports Barn, you do the whole routine at your house. I know what you're thinking: that sports equipment you buy on TV in three, easy installments is getting moldy in the basement. Well, rest assured, you don't need any of that stuff.

Here's what you will need: a house (preferably at least two stories), a yard, a garden or some bedding plants, and a regular influx of entropy from Sir Isaac Newton and the Universe. Easy, right? Now, here's where it gets kind of novel and frankly kind of weird: within the boundaries of that yard, the walls of that home, the rows of that garden, you work.

That's right. You work.

Instead walking around a track, you get behind that lawnmower and push, step after step all around the yard with resistance from the weight of the mower. You carry the full bags of grass and empty them, probably into a budding mulch pile. You weedeat and pressure wash. You work a handsaw and trim the branches above and haul those to the curb. You bend over and pull weeds, you shovel, you push a wheelbarrow filled with bags of dirt and mulch. When the seasons change, you prune and rake and bag and haul some more.

Inside, instead of a Stair Master, you walk up and down the stairs with baskets of laundry and garbage bags filled with clothing for the Goodwill, books for the used book store, things your husband or wife wants moved as part of the endless repurposing of the house.

Instead of those little weights you use for endless repetitions of motion, you buy groceries at the store--not processed foods, but actual natural items that you can cook with--and stock them on shelves low and high, you peel them, chop and dice them, stir them, mix them, toss them, cook them and carry them to the table. You load and unload the dishwasher meal after meal, scraping first and then lifting into the cupboards. You carry the trash out. You improve your house with paint brushes and hammers and scrubbers and other tools.

You will not get "cut." You will not develop amazing abs or a "six pack." But you will gain honest leg strengh and surprising upper body strength. And purpose. Were our muscles meant to become as developed as they can be or were they meant to serve us as tools for work? What? No, I didn't mean that. I'm sure you can get cut with The Work Workout. The latest studies show that hedge clippers are a mini-Bow Flex...

Hey, somebody grab me a bottled water! I'm doing all of the talking here. Why are you getting up? You've got to get to a Spin Class? Okay, okay, I'll hurry up. Wait. Wait. I know you've got to go pay the landscaper. I'm almost finished. I just want to talk about to you about pushing and pulling on abstract machines built for no purpose but...

What do you mean my workout plan will never catch on? Crap, that's what my agent says, too.

Itching In Transit

That It Moves - Greg Laswell (mp3)
Patricia's Moving Picture - The Go! Team (mp3)

My wife and I agreed, in principal, that we would eventually move into a house with my mother. The first iteration of this discussion occurred about the same time both her grandmother and my father fell seriously ill. Neither would die for several years, but early on in their sicknesses, we agreed that we wanted to be there to take care of my mother when the time came.

There's this saying I find kind of annoying that goes, "We plan; God laughs."

Yeah, I get the saying, but I don't particularly cotton to it. Should we not plan? Should we not have expectation? If I truly obeyed my WWJD bracelet, I wouldn't have a job or a 401k. I probably wouldn't have a family, although that one can be debated. And I sure as shit wouldn't have needed four days to move our household possessions from one location to another.

Much like other major decisions in our lives -- marriage, job change, kids -- we've been pretty lucky in the draw. We wanted two kids close together, and got 'em. We wanted to live and work near at least one of our families, and got it. We both wanted to work in educational settings, and got it.

This plan to move in with my mother seems like another of those fortuitous moments when things work out almost better than we'd hoped. Our new home sits on two acres in a modest middle-class neighborhood. It's two floors and over 5,000 square feet, but it's hidden down in this gulch, and no one would ever think it was so big just casually driving by us. It even has this cool little (unfinished) cottage adjacent to us that will, for the time being, serve as an escape play room for the kids. It will probably inherit my sister's ping pong table. Eventually it could become, like, the penultimate place to host a poker game or a Super Bowl party. But that's many years and a good $10k away.

Mom has the entire bottom floor to herself. Twelve-foot ceilings. A lower-level deck (or back porch?). Two ginormous bedrooms and a two-car garage and a great room big enough to host an entire small-town Baptist revival. (I'm just going through all this description since many of y'all prolly won't get a chance to visit anytime soon...)

Our top floor ain't shabby, either. 4BR 3BA 2CGarage, and all the modern accouterments a foreclosed-before-completed property can provide.

Eventually, I'm sure I'll be happy with this move, with this house, with our long-awaited decision. But right now, here's the things occupying the most space in my mind:

(1) The amount of shit we packed and moved that, in all likelihood, we'll allow to sit and rot in our garage, never once wondering where _(insert whatever)_ is or where we put it.

(2) The degree of my uselessness in matters of home improvement or upkeep. Even if I thought myself capable of installing closets or affixing blinds, I own none of the tools needed to do these things properly, nor do I own the items needed to patch up all my mistakes. Worse, I wouldn't hardly know where to start. A level, maybe? A drill? (But what kind of drill?) You might as well put me in one of those Hurt Locker bomb suits and ask me to dismantle a big one, 'cuz my odds are just as good. Hell, I changed power cords on our dryer, and I was so thrilled you would've thought I just switched out engines on my El Camino.

(3) The MoneyPitoPhobia certainty that more is wrong with this new, never-lived-in house than we could know. Yesterday I closed the door to the garage, and a light fixture in the kitchen slammed into the sink. Upon waking from our first night here, I went to jump in the jet tub ('cuz the shower wasn't yet finished), and enjoyed the coldest friggin' bath I've had since middle school summer camp when my counselor made me drip dry because I wouldn't take a shower without wearing my swim trunks.

Is it my age, or the nature of my generation, or just me? That in a moment when I should really be excited about what we've done, about yet one more plan that worked out like we planned, I'm instead out dancing naked around a fire trying to make it rain?

I figured there was no point in writing anything shy of an extremely self-important, self-involved, narcissistic post after all that hullabaloo from last week.

A Fine Balance

NOW SANITIZED FOR SAFER READING!

The Streets--"Fit But You Know It" (mp3)

Here's the great challenge of adulthood, perhaps of all of life: how do we strike a balance between taking care of ourselves and becoming obsessed with ourselves?

In our image-obsessed culture, rather than seeking some happy medium, we have become a polarized body society, every bit as dramatic as Republican vs. Democrat, Northerner vs. Southerner. For every story I read and confirmation I see of the obesity problem plaguing our country, and perhaps our Southern states in particular, there is a counter story of an actress getting freakish plastic surgery, a study of people who work out obsessively until it becomes a kind of anorexia, a photograph of a friend who used to have breasts, another People magazine photo of Matthew McConaughey being interested only in getting cut and playing Frisbee on the beach.

We know that, at the extremes, how easily the thin or the fit (not necessarily the same groups) make fun of the fat, how the too-thin are mocked as "annie" (for anorexic). But it's the middle group that I'm focusing on here, those who look exactly the way they are supposed to look, but who took a dark turn to get there.

I have a friend who has gotten into _____. To be sure, considered in isolation, his accomplishments are quite impressive--he is most likely _____, has a solid set of _____, and has completely _____. And yet, _____ has become all that he lives for. He has little interest in most aspects of his job, putting in as little time as possible so that he can head to _____.

Perhaps more significantly, he is hard to be around. It isn't the _____ at odd hours of the day. It isn't envy, at least on my part, I don't think. It's how much his world has shrunk down to almost nothing beyond his own _____ and the corners he's now willing to cut to get there. He isn't a "team player" anymore; there isn't anyone else on his team. He isn't a colleague even. He does what he has to do and gets out.

He's certainly not alone. My neighbor leaves the house at 4AM to go work out at the Sports Barn (my other neighbor leaves the house at 5AM to hang out in the school locker room and smoke!). A woman down the street and her husband have both exercised themselves into injury, not knowing when to quit.

Even I, believe it or not, have felt that same pull. I remember during those summers when I was running my ass off how it affected my mind as well. I remember feeling like I had to get in a workout, once the summer ended and obligation kicked in, and how resentful I felt toward anything that stood in the way of me and that workout, whether it be person or job. I remember stepping on the scale daily, checking parts of my body daily, massaging the increased muscle definition in my quads, waiting until I could wear a certain t-shirt to Nightfall.

If you become all about yourself, then you become all about yourself. Right? What I mean is, the decision to put yourself first tends to start perhaps innocently enough, but when you focus on yourself that much, everyone else becomes a very, very distant second. I think it's very easy to get into that mindset and very difficult to shake it. There are people for whom narcissism is a severe personality disorder, and their lives are tragic because everything that happens in every situation must be first, foremost, and only about them, regardless of whether they have husbands, or children, or friends, all because they didn't get what they needed in childhood. They can't help it.

But just like there are two types of diabetes, I would argue that there are two types of narcissism. And the one I'm talking about is the adult-onset version. I can't really even tell at this point how pervasive it is, but I'm guessing that it's pretty pervasive, an easy disease to get. Just spend some time around someone who is starting a diet or a workout routine and watch how quickly almost everything that he or she has to say becomes about that diet or that workout. And that's only the very first stage.

To be fair, it isn't only body image that makes a person this way. The artist, the writer, are arguably among our most self-obsessed citizens. And those who have let themselves go certainly don't merit any kind of badge of honor.

But adult-onset narcissism seems to be a growing phenomenon. I can only speak to the kind that exists in schools, because that's where I work, but the impact there is, I think, particularly instructive. You see it in the coach who was hired to coach _____, but wants to switch to _____ so he can get in his workouts in preparation for his own _____. You see it in teachers who want to create afternoon activities, for example _____, that may serve the students, but weren't suggested by the students, and weren't suggested because of the students. They were proposed in order to meet the needs of the adult.

I suspect that the solution is a simple one: friendship. One of the myriad benefits of good friends is their ability and willingness to call us on what we need to be called on. They will let us know if we need to be spending more time getting in shape and they will let us know if we are spending far too much time on that self-absorbed project. Even better, maybe they're doing it with us, and that will certainly help with the balance.

But hearing them if they're calling us on something, well, that's another thing. Especially when that voice in our own heads is so loud. And seductive. And self-promoting. And complimentary. And caring. And................

The Streets' 2nd CD, A Grand Don't Come For Free, is available at Itunes.