Bad Movie Liveblogging: Dante's Peak

It's a cassic, and I haven't seen it yet.

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Fitness for Fat Nerds: A Run a Day Keeps the Wibbling Away

Ever try to go to bed without brushing your teeth? I just can't do it. Some kind of awful little plaque alarm in the back of my head starts going off and refuses to stop until I've done something, even if it's just smearing some toothpaste around in my mouth with one finger. Part of this could be because I'm absolutely terrified of the dentist and will do anything it takes, up to and including ritual animal sacrifice (no, not really) to guarantee that I will never have a cavity again.

The bigger root of my tooth brushing obsession is probably just the fact that it's been a nightly routine almost as long as I can remember. Routine plus desperate desire to fight tooth decay wins, apparently.

I bring this up because we're animals, and animals like routines. I'd like to think I'm slightly less neurotic than my cats when I miss giving them their morning treat and idiot talk, but I'm still a slave to my daily habits. This is a fact I've tried to turn to my advantage for exercise.

I also admit that I had a lot of help getting it going, in the form of severe jetlag.

I was in Germany for almost three weeks. My first night there I managed (somehow) to stay awake until about 9 PM, at which point I collapsed like a badly made souffle. The next morning, I woke up at 5 AM entirely on my own. I'd already discovered that there was no gym in the hotel I could use, so running was my only option. And I also realized that I probably wasn't going to feel like running after working for ten hours. So I warmed up, put on my running shoes, and went for a 30 minute run along the banks of the Weser in the pre-dawn dark.

Same thing the next day. And the next. And at that point, I was on a real streak and it seemed a shame to break that, so the next and the next day...

For those three weeks, I was able to break out of my habitual pattern of staying up late, and I got used to getting up every morning and going for a run before breakfast. There were a couple of days when it was too cold to run outside, but I still got up, stretched, and did the few exercises I could do in my hotel room.

By the time I got back home, I couldn't not get up and do something. Despite the fact that the return to high altitude just screwed my lungs for the first week.

Because this is the thing. For all I talked about finding some sport/fitness activity/game/etc to do that you think is fun and awesome, almost nothing is fun and awesome 100% of the time. There are always, always going to be times when you just don't feel like it, and you need to be able to make yourself do it anyway. Making the exercise routine really helps in that fight against your own inertia. If you get up at x time and do y every day, you've got one more weapon to fight your own excuses: "Yeah, I'm tired, but it's 8AM and that's when I run."

Trying to get into a routine sucks, I'm not going to lie. If you're me, about five days in you'll be questioning your own sanity and wondering why you wanted to do this so badly anyway. After the first two weeks, it starts getting easier. But this is your brain trying to lull you into a false sense of security, to convince you that it's okay, just take a day off and sleep late. Don't trust it. Unless you are physically incapable of doing your routine, do it. After three weeks, you've built the foundation for severe psychological discomfort if you stop doing your routine. But don't even give yourself a break then. The whole point is that you keep pushing yourself until every time you think, "Don't wanna," the thought is immediately followed by, "But that's what I do. So... yeah."

How exactly you want to build your routine is really up to you. I used to just do evenings. This getting up in the morning and exercising is a very new thing for me, and I don't think I could have managed it without a healthy helping of jetlag to get me going. But this is what you do:
- Pick your exercise.
- Do it every day at approximately the same time. Even on weekends.
- Don't stop.
- I mean it.
- I don't care if the bed is warm and your cat is purring.

I will add a caution, though, to the every day plan. Particularly when you're starting out, trying to go hell bent for leather every day is honestly not a good idea. It's rough on your body. You will need to take a day off from your activity of choice every few days to let your muscles recover. That's perfectly okay, and there's nothing wrong with it. But taking a day off shouldn't mean sleeping through your exercise time or using it to watch reruns of Castle. It's still your exercise time, so do something with it. Take a walk. Play Dance Central. Or at least stretch while you're watching your Castle reruns.

Because there will be times when you genuinely cannot exercise, for a multitude of reasons, and possibly even for an extended period of time. Etching this routine into your brain so that it can never be removed will help you pick things back up afterward.

I also understand that for a variety of reasons, you may not be able to do an every day at the same time routine. Maybe you have a weird work schedule, or classes screw with you, or whatever. Routine building still works when it's not every day.

I had a routine before Germany as well. I went to kung fu on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday (and I ran on Thursday and Saturday). Even when I didn't feel like it, I made myself go to kung fu because I knew I would broil alive in my own neurotic wibbling if I didn't. Unfortunately, that particular routine got destroyed by a shoulder injury in November. I was struggling to keep going with exercise, and then Germany came along and that put me back on track.

I will say one thing, comparing the two routines. It's easier to stick with one that is every day as opposed to just on set days of the week. But sometimes it doesn't work out that way and you have to do what you can.

If your schedule is so random and awful that you can't put together any kind of routine at all, you've got it the toughest out of anyone. That means that when you are fighting your own inertia to try to exercise, all you've got is 'do it' without the added push of habit. It can be done, though. I believe in you.

But if you're in the latter situation - and please, don't think I'm judging you because I have no idea what your life is like - before you tell yourself that you just can't have a routine at all, take a good hard look at things. If you want to do this exercise thing, you need to carve the time out of your life to do it, because it's important. You don't exercise when you have time, you have to make time to exercise.

If you think about it that way, maybe you can carve out time to create a routine after all.

Exercise being fun helps you get through that first month of building the routine. After that first month, then it reminds you why that was a good idea.

Hi, I'm Rachael. I'm a fat nerd. I also run 3-4 miles a day and have done kung fu for eight years. I'm not writing this because I want to be some kind of fitness guru. Hell no, that would be ridiculous. I'm writing this because I've got a lot of friends that struggle with the [metaphorical] Fitness Demon and I'm hoping my experience might make things a little easier for them. I'm also writing this because it's a lot of stuff I wish someone had told me, back when I was making attempt after unsuccessful attempt to get into this exercise thing. If it helps you out, great.

Everyone's a Hero

Everyone's a hero in their own way
You and you and mostly me and you.

-- Captain Hammer

Stephen Marche wrote a column about the utter meaninglessness of the word 'hero' as currently used in America: We Are All Heroes. The stinger at the end sums the whole thing up nicely: If people living up to their basic obligations are heroes, then we're all failing disastrously.

Ouch.

As I read the column, though, I found myself thinking "Yes, but..." a lot. I think there's a lot more to the issue. Which is not to say Mr. Marche doesn't, because goodness knows it's hard if not flat impossible to boil down a complex issue into a snappy column that comes in at the appropriate word count.

However, since this is the internet, where oceans of text are spilled daily to expound on matters of no consequence that no one's paying attention to anyway, I might as well say what I'm thinking. So, my buts. Let me show you them.

I've got kind of a knee-jerk defensiveness that kicks in every time mentions the self-esteem generation, participant ribbons, all that. Depending on who you ask, I'm either at the tail-end of Generation X or the very front of Generation Y (or whatever it's fashionable to call them these days), but I always get this paranoid feeling that it's me in the cross hairs. I don't know when the self-esteem raising craze really hit, but I definitely churned through the public education system when it was in full swing. It just seems a little too easy to take a shot at the self-esteem bullshit we got fed in school.

I obviously only speak for myself and my limited group of friends that are close to my age, all of whom are intelligent, snarky nerds. But by about third or fourth grade, I'd copped to the fact that not only were participant ribbons meaningless, they were actually kind of insulting. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that when everyone's getting the same award, it's not much of an award. Particularly when you're awarded for participation in something that's mandatory.

Perhaps I was remarkably cynical as a child. I also had amazing parents, who took pains to drive two important facts into my skull:
1) You are smart, and don't ever take shit off of anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
2) It's pathetically easy for even very smart people to do embarrassingly stupid things.

Hell, it could even be because my parents let me watch things like Life of Brian at an age that would probably cause some severe pearl clutching among the squadron of adults that think children are delicate hot house flowers as opposed to tiny, developing humans. There is a certain impression that gets made on you when you're young and seeing the "Yes, we're all individuals," scene for the first time.

Whatever the reason, I want to give my peers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to participant ribbons and self-esteem raising. There's an awful little part of me that would just like to think I had it all sussed out because I wasn't one of the little sheeple (god I hate that word) but that smells way too much like hubris for my comfort.

At worst, the scourge of participant ribbons are a symptom. We didn't turn into a country of selfish beasts because of the orange ribbon that got pinned to our shirts in sixth grade. The most toxic parts of selfish American culture that encourage an abdication of duty - emphasis on consumerism, lack of empathy for those on a lower social rung, the idea that we shouldn't have to pay for anything - are not sourced from people in my age group. Sure, assholish thirty-somethings are now rallying around the idea that all taxes are too high and screw the safety net anyway, but the self-esteem generation isn't leading the charge.

I'm pretty sure no one ever gave Senator Mitch McConnell a ribbon for just showing up. (Other than the invisible ribbons lovingly bestowed by privilege, but I digress.)

Maybe a message of selfishness is happily accepted by people who have had their egos artificially inflated. But I also think it is just that the lesser nature of the human animal is to be, well, kind of lazy and selfish. So anyone whispering sweet nothings about how we can have everything we ever wanted (Oh boy! A war in the Middle East!) and never have to pay a cent is going to have a lot of receptive ears.

This is a general failure on all our parts to reject the poisonous idea that selfishness is somehow an acceptable ground state, if not a virtue. Because if you've accepted that idea, even the smallest of selfless actions become noteworthy.

We like calling soldiers¹, firefighters, and paramedics heroes - police as well, though that's a bit more fraught. Some of it's because, let's be honest, most ordinary people would not want to run into a burning building or get shot at by hostile men armed with assault rifles, even if they were being paid to do so. People doing those things willingly, whether its their job or no, does seem a little fantastic.

There's something else all of those heroic professions have in common, however: the pay is generally shit.

I volunteered as an EMT for several years. I never seriously considered making it a career because the pay was so ridiculously low, my mortgage would have swallowed up nearly half of my gross salary. (I do not live in a mansion with a pool.)

At a time when we have soldiers on food stamps and public safety workers looking down the barrel of severe budget cuts while simultaneously one party would love to slash social programs like food stamps, maybe calling these people heroes is also hollow compensation and pathetic excuse. You can't feed your kids, but you're a hero. You can barely scrape by, but you are some sort of superhuman paragon of virtue that should be above such mortal concerns anyway. We threw you a fancy party, what more do you want - more funding for suicide prevention? Mama needs a new tax cut.

Of course, it's not just soldiers and public service workers that are struggling financially these days, though their struggle is all the poignant because it comes at such immense personal risk. But I think it's this struggle that's contributed to another change in how we view heroes. Mr. Marche mentions Peter Parker, and he's a perfect example in this case. When you're constantly having to decide if you're going to have electricity or food this week, being a superhero does seem like it should be the easier half of life. Beating the ever-living shit out of a masked bad guy that's threatening a little old lady is an easy, black and white call. When it's a choice between heart medication and new shoes for your kid, it's a hell of a lot harder.

This is not to say I disagree with Mr. Marche's thesis. The utter cynicism which which the term hero is being wielded has everything to do with manipulation and political expediency. If we shy from our obligations as a nation, it's because as a nation we have allowed our expectations to be so pathetically lowered, and without much of a fight.

But does that mean heroes are dead?

No.

Mr. Marche retweeted this (so I have no idea if he agrees with it or just found it an interesting point), and it makes me sad:

@arcadiaego: not sure *anyone* is a hero outside myths. (Which may be your point, Steven.) But interesting article.

Maybe this is me clapping because I believe in fairies. If that's the case, so be it. But no matter how meaningless the word becomes in public discourse, heroes still exist.

The presentation of heroes even in mythology isn't so simple as all that, but for the sake of argument let's grant that they're paragons, that they're presented as what we should aspire to be. There are still people - ordinary, flawed, beautiful, mortal people - that have that same quality. There are people who far exceed expectations, and in so doing encourage others to aspire to do the same. Mr. Marche brings up the example of Sal Giunta, who says he doesn't feel like a hero at all.

But that's kind of the point, I think. People who truly have that quality we should laud as heroic have expectations of themselves that far exceed those of society. When they meet their own expectations, they don't necessarily find it out of the ordinary. But it should encourage the rest of us to examine our own expectations of ourselves, society's expectations, and find them wanting.

When I was in Germany, one of the ladies I worked with told me that she'd recently found out her grandmother sheltered Jewish people from the Nazis during World War II. She said, "I'd like to think that if I were in that situation, I would be that strong. But you never know."

That is what heroes do.

They make you look deep within yourself and say, if I were in that situation, facing that kind of danger, could I be that strong? If that were me, would I have that kind of fortitude? I don't know.

But I will strive to be that person.




Notes:
1 - I think with soldiers there's also a whole other level of American neurosis at play, starting from the beginning of the Afghanistan War. People were reminded, and rightly so, about the abhorrent treatment some Vietnam War veterans received at the hands of civilians. No one wanted to see a repeat of that, particularly when it became clear that anti-war protests would be ongoing. We overcompensated, big and grand and loud, because damnit, that's the American way. That desire to compensate then became a very useful political club to aim at anyone objecting to the wars, particularly in their early days.

Fitness for Fat Nerds: Enough With the Mental Bullshit

Stop me if this is a nightmare you still have: You're wearing those tiny, humiliating shorts. You're faced with the climbing rope, or sometimes it's the chin up bar. Whatever task it is, you struggle to pull yourself up with arms that seem terribly flabby and inadequate, and you get nowhere. And then your classmates, a bunch of shithead kids in equally ridiculous shorts, laugh at you.

I don't know what it is about physical education in school. If you're a fat nerd (or a thin nerd, no need to exclude) the classes felt like they were tailor made to drive home the point that physical activity is the most miserable experience a human being can have inflicted upon them. And then there were the jocks. You know, the people who spent all their time being utterly mean to us, and then running effortlessly up and down the field, and you know what? Fuck those guys. They're jerks. If that's what it takes to be good at sports, you didn't want to be one of them anyway.

When I was in junior high - this is a true story, just ask my mom - the first time they dragged us outside and made us run on the track, I was in the middle of a twenty teenager pile up and broke my leg. And I was relieved. Happy even. Because it meant that while everyone else had to run on the track - where I knew that I'd be puffing along at the back of the pack, if I could even keep running at all - instead, I got to sit on the bleachers and soak in all the sympathy you can earn for having a cast on your leg.

What the hell is wrong with this picture, that I'd feel happy I broke a bone?

This attitude follows us out of school, I've noticed. Just listen to how most people talk about physical fitness: I had a piece of cake, I need to punish myself on the elliptical trainer tomorrow. We've all heard things like that before. Exercise is presented as something you inflict upon yourself in retribution for enjoying good food, or playing too many video games, or just having the poor taste to be chunky. Maybe it's just something that appeals to the weird, creepy inner puritan of the American psyche. Chocolate cake is something you like, so it's a sin. Exercise is good for you, so that means it's got to be unpleasant because it's bad to enjoy things okay?

Because we all know, exercise isn't supposed to be fun.

Yeah, screw that.

This is the problem, with treating exercise like a punishment: unless you're a hard core masochist, you're not going to want to be literally inflicting something horrible and unpleasant on yourself, day after day. It's just not in human nature. There's a lot of evolutionary programming in us that says unpleasant things are bad and that we should avoid them. Eventually, the urge to not suffer is probably going to win over your willpower. I think even more importantly, there's the fact that life is short. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Why the hell do you want to spend a significant portion of your day doing something that you absolutely hate if you don't have to do it to survive?

I struggled for a really long time trying to come up with an exercise regimen I could stick with, because I knew I was out of shape and I didn't want to be. (Here, I mean out of shape as in "oh god don't make me climb a flight of stairs" as opposed to "judgmental jerks call me fat.") The problem was, after a while I'd find myself making excuses to not do it, because day after day, running on an elliptical trainer was slowly driving me insane. It wasn't fun. If I had my choice between doing that and playing video games, the video games were eventually going to win because I'm only human.

And that's okay.

This is the secret: exercise is supposed to be fun. The people who we all hated in school because they were stupidly, effortlessly fit? That was mostly because it was fun for them. When doing something is fun, that makes it really, really easy.

The first inkling I ever had that exercise could be fun was thanks to a game called Dance Dance Revolution. I could play that thing for hours at a time, until my muscles were just burning and screaming out for mercy, and I'd still be ready to keep going because it was fun. Working up a sweat and dancing until I thought my heart was going to explode was fun. Fitness was fun? It was fun!

I really believe that the first step you have to take is getting rid of that mental bullshit about exercise being punishment. Exercise shouldn't be a thing you inflict upon yourself because you're overweight or lack definition in your muscles or want to fit back into your old jeans. It needs to be a thing you do for yourself. It needs to be joyful and something that makes you feel alive.

And it can be anything that is joyful and makes you feel alive. I run and do kung fu. But I'm not the archetypal fat nerd. That's a thing that doesn't exist. My experience is not going to hold true for everyone, and I don't expect you to like the same things that I like because I'm not a jerk.

So what to do? Do you like taking walks? Dancing? Water polo? Weightlifting? Do some exploring and see what you enjoy. Figuring that out is the first step, and we can always talk about that more later. The point is: whatever gets your heart going and helps you work up a sweat is a-okay as long as you like it, and anyone that tells you otherwise can go hang.

There aren't many of these - I think that a lot about fitness is individual. But this, I'll lay out there as a universal fat nerd truth: You need to have fun.

Because if you're not having fun, why the hell are you doing it?

Hi, I'm Rachael. I'm a fat nerd. I also run 3-4 miles a day and have done kung fu for eight years. I'm not writing this because I want to be some kind of fitness guru. Hell no, that would be ridiculous. I'm writing this because I've got a lot of friends that struggle with the [metaphorical] Fitness Demon and I'm hoping my experience might make things a little easier for them. I'm also writing this because it's a lot of stuff I wish someone had told me, back when I was making attempt after unsuccessful attempt to get into this exercise thing. If it helps you out, great.