It Always Devolves into a Grumpy Rant Anyway
I think the technical name for this is "irony".
I sat down just now to write and found myself composing a list — not an interesting or fun list, just a list — of stuff I don’t like. I didn’t get too deep before I stopped myself, but still. I suppose it’s a sign of a grumpy mood that I was already down to “vocab-shaming on Reddit”, maybe six items deep, before I thought, Hey, this isn’t a recipe for a good afternoon.
I think I’m in a grumpy mood because I’ve overtaxed myself with exercise. I know this comes close to that most heinous of complaints, the humblebrag, but it really is what’s going on in my life lately, so it’s what’s on my mind. I ran 11 miles on Saturday. It was terrible. I mean, really, much more terrible than that kind of distance usually is; by the end I was, for all intents and purposes, walking, taking close to twelve minutes to push through mile after painful mile, and when I finished I found I hurt in all kinds of unexpected places: my armpits had chafed, as had my thighs; when I slumped dejectedly into the shower afterwards a searing pain went shooting up my buttcrack. Ah, the joys of endurance athletics.
I think this is happening because I’m fatter than I was the last time I did this sort of thing. My first year of graduate school (just four years ago), I was tipping the scales anywhere from 159-165 pounds, and a men’s medium shirt billowed out around my midsection and flapped like a sail in the wind. I’m not going to tell you what I weigh now, but it’s a lot more than that. A lot. And that’s even after I managed to peel off about fifteen pounds in the last few months.
The upshot is that I feel like I’m running around hauling a backpack full of bowling balls sometimes, as I did on Saturday. It’s a conundrum, because the only way I have ever been able to lose weight and keep it off has been sustained, massive amounts of exercise. I know people who would take a diet every day of the week and twice on Sunday over exercise, but that’s not how it works for me, for whatever reason. It’s not as though I have no will — I wouldn’t be able to haul my fat ass eleven miles, even at a slow clip, if I didn’t — but that will doesn’t extend to abstemiousness. I can manage a diet for a week or two, but it always falls apart. For a long time this meant that I was just doomed to obesity. Then I discovered exercise.
Most of the time, massive amounts of exercise also have the perhipheral benefit of improving my mood massively, keeping me out of the black doldrums and cycles of self-recrimination and doubt that sometimes prevent me from moving forward with my life. Or is that the primary benefit? Maybe it is. Anyway, the point is — sometimes you can overdo it. I took a day off after the long run, but I tried to go out on a leisurely, very short bike ride this morning, and it instead turned into a grim, grueling slog over low hills that felt like mountains, into a light breeze that might as well have been a hurricane-force gale. I got home and promptly went to sleep — for two hours. I didn’t really have two hours to spare; I have two radio projects and a novel to finish. But then there I was, waking up with half the day gone and composing a mental list of things I don’t like.
Including: The radical misapproproation of adjectives in Oregon’s food culture (I’m sorry, food doesn’t have “integrity”, it’s just not possible); people who don’t leash their dogs in urban settings and then act as though you’re weird when said dogs come tearing after you hell-for-leather and this upsets you; people who assume you agree with them politically and talk as though you do, making it too awkward to vocally disagree; Orphan Black and Dr Who, which are both awful shows for different reasons but which it sometimes feels like you’re not allowed to criticize without being called an old stuffed shirt; superheroes, which, ditto; people who say “thank you” when you agree with them, as though this were some sort of personal service to them and their identity that you have performed for their benefit; golf on television; vets who refer to me as my cat’s “dad” (gross); people under 40 who listen exclusively to classic rock; most classic rock; acquisitive hippies; people who stand outside the 7-11 smoking and mean-mugging everybody who walks by; big families including many children too young for school who come to brewpubs and treat them like their rumpus room; assholes in big trucks — it’s always assholes in big trucks — who don’t make any room at all for cyclists even on completely open highway; people who define themselves by their hobbies; clueless liberals who believe that Bernie Sanders is going to be anything other than another far-left stalking horse who gets sloughed off like a bad haircut when the general election comes around; clueless conservatives who think Ted Cruz is anything other than a crazytown bananapants nobody; Donald Trump; people who bitch about immigrants; people who reflexively rally to the side of cops who shoot black people; the MLB All Star Game; people who think golf visors make acceptable everyday headwear; people who run sprinklers that mostly water the sidewalk; climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, gluten fearers, and other people who mistake being stupid for “thinking outside the box”; and, of course, giraffes.