Office Rump is the defining plague of our time, a sickness whose spread is matched only by its pure insidiousness and relentless nature. You think you’re exerting yourself eight, nine, ten hours a day, and while the grind may, in fact, be giving your brain a real workout, your ass is rooted firmly to your chair. I fully expect to fuse with my seat one day–the human tailbone, it turns out, isn’t vestigial so much as a connector–and the prospect isn’t entirely bad, because then I wouldn’t have to walk at all.
But this won’t happen anytime soon, courtesy of a bet I made with a work buddy. The challenge: decrease body mass by 10%, come August 31, or cough up twenty-five dollars and suffer shame eternal. The first few days have been productive, with our nation’s independence commemorated with tons of tennis in humid weather, but as sure as our forefathers once wore stockings and wigs in a dignified manner, so too has laziness reared its inevitable head.
I must not lose the bet, though, and to this end I’ve woven a plan involving strategic parking and tilapia filets. That’s all I can tell you for now. Coming up next: the secret to completing any self-betterment plan! Stay tuned for tomorrow, or perhaps next month.
This self-betterment program may appear to have expanded, over the past three weeks, to encompass a regular inability to log into Blogger, but don’t be fooled. That’s actually been custom for the better part of a year or two now, having outlived several self-betterment plans, and I’m certain it’ll outlast several more. You should know, though, I renewed hosting with GoDaddy recently, so you can be damn sure those forty bucks will go the distance.
There were four things enumerated last time–tennis, chess, cooking, and violin–and although I’ve gathered the instruments and tools needed for each one, it’s the guitar that’s been winning lately. I’ll get around to the original plan eventually, when waking at a godawful hour to exercise becomes godawesome, or when paying other people to cook loses its appeal.
But for now, it’s the guitar. Wouldn’t you know it, the one pursuit that requires virtually no setup ends up taking hours and hours of time. There’s a kind of physical, instant feedback too in the calluses and learned chords, where you wake up the following morning and have something to show for the road traveled.
Since no discussion is complete without a cursory look at the hottest media, I’ll tell you this: in my weaker moments, before I reacquired my human guitar, the Internet spoke to me in hushed tones.
“In place of a guitar I shall make you a poor man’s guitar hero,” it whispered.
It pointed the way. I drank and was ashamed.
I’m not so ashamed, though, to declare it really is a poor man’s Guitar Hero. Give it a try, if dignity permits, but for heaven’s sake keep it to yourself. Some things just aren’t meant for the public forum.
The menu at Chipotle always seemed straightforward to me, certainly digestible without a second glance, but to the locals here it is literature dense with subtext, a positively epic work requiring a trained critical eye and careful deliberation. During one visit, the party behind me loudly despaired at the sheer difficulty of ordering, while the older couple up at bat–garbed in the very fishing vests and baseball caps you’re picturing right now–simply surrendered and proceeded to parse out every conceivable configuration of ingredients.
It took nearly 20 minutes to construct what ultimately weren’t even burritos, and it was done in the slow, easygoing manner that is the pace du jour here. The rhythm to which I’m acculturated basically tells me to select the meat, choose the vegetables, add some hurry the fuck up, and pick a salsa. But the problem, you see, is really my problem, because I need to adhere to the customs of this zip code in this timeframe. This isn’t New York. This isn’t Chicago two years ago.
I’ve finished outlining a comprehensive self-betterment program, and I’m cramming it into a year. My resolve is strong at this point, but waves of sloth are already chipping away at it, even as we speak. Step one: get fit via tennis. At 7 AM weekday mornings. Step two: join a quartet or orchestra and not drop out until maybe the third rehearsal. Step three: produce a delicious one-page menu. This extends beyond just printing the menu to actual cooking. Step four: play more chess. Three of these steps are bound for failure. And the fourth one? Probably won’t even start.