Commuting and Lunch

My drive to work has turned out to be the most draining experience of my life; I can commute five hours a day, and have to pay five dollars in tolls to get home during bad traffic days. My day starts at four in the morning when I get up, shower, eat a quick bite, and then run off to beat the morning traffic going into Orange County. Most days go smoothly enough, and the morning ride can be somewhat decent, not causing me to rip out my hair. Lately, it has been a little bit rougher because of heavy traffic, making my mornings almost as miserable as my afternoons.

The worst of mornings came when I was driving to get to the freeway and I might have run over a possum in the dark. I never ran over a mammal before, and the shock of it all put me into a horrible depression over the poor (possibly smashed) possum. In my despair, I reached for my lunch pail to drown my sorrow in food; obviously, I must be an emotional eater if after killing a possum, I needed to reach for my lunch. When I started reaching over to find my pail, I grabbed nothing but air. I looked over to see that I forgot my lunch at home. My day was then ruined and my thoughts never strayed too far away from my hunger afterwards.

When my lunch break finally came, I tried to ignore my grumbling stomach, but that lasted all of two minutes of my break. I thought that I would cave and buy something at the vending machines, but when I tried to put in my cash, the machine did nothing but twirl and flaunt its selection of lunch items. I tried several times, and then decided that it must be a broken cash slot, so I went out into my truck to grab some quarters from coin stash. Along with my quarters, I grabbed a random piece of paper from my truck and pulled out my cell phone, chatting wildly to nobody, so that it would seem like I had to go out to get some paperwork from my truck.

After coming back to the vending machines, I tried to get my selection from the machine with the coins, but the machine just continued to twirl, laughing at my attempts. Whenever a coworker of mine would walk over by the machines, I would walk away from the machines so that it didn’t look like I was having issues; I would hate to be the new guy who can’t even operate a vending machine. After skulking back and forth past the vending machine, I realized that I should just give up on getting some type of real meal for lunch.

I remembered that I had eaten a pop tart the week previous, but didn’t finish the whole thing, so I left it in my truck under the mountain of empty water bottles on floor. My hunger had made me desperate, and so I went back outside to go find it. Obviously, I broke out my phone and had a fake phone conversation with an apartment manager who needed my license plate number so that I could have an excuse to go back out to my truck (I don’t know why I am so paranoid to think that all of my coworkers are standing at the receiving bay, laughing at my repetitive trips to my truck, but I am).

The tart was smooshed, stale, and a bit dusty, but it was my only form of sustenance that I could muster up, and after eating the chalky tart, my appetite grew. Now I was completely out of food, so I went back to my cubical to drink copious amounts of water, hoping that the pop tart would swell in response, making me feel fuller. After I had gone through three bottles of water, I was still feeling hungry, and now had to pee like a race horse. I had a few minutes left before I had to go back into the lab, so I chewed and swallowed five pieces of gum, my last possible chance of making it through my day without undergoing ketosis. And even if I did develop ketosis, the gum would hopefully cover the acetone breath of starvation.  The large bolus of gum in my stomach somehow made it so I didn’t die.

After work, I race out to my truck and try to make it onto the freeway so that I can experience heavy traffic. If I stay at work for more than five minutes, heavy traffic bumps up to morbidly obese traffic, and I may as well read a book while parked on the 91. I find that I can get through traffic much quicker if I can find an obnoxiously colored mustang and follow it through traffic as it bobs and weaves though the parking lot of cars. I always try to then pass the obnoxiously colored mustang and beat them to my exit. When behind the car, I always imagine the owner to be a bodaciously voluptuous woman, but whenever I catch up to them, the driver usually ends up to be an overweight woman with horrible bangs, or a man with long hair, whose manboobs looks amazingly similar to actual boobs from a tailing angle.

After I get home, I usually lapse comatose on the couch, and then end up in bed for a few hours, only to repeat the whole process again the next day. I guess that is the life of a commuter. And as much as I love sitting in traffic for a fifth of the day, staring mindlessly at racist bumper stickers and listening to random podcasts, I have realized that I am not meant to be a commuter. So I made an impulse buy and signed a lease for an apartment by a lake, and when I move in, I can start being independent again. Unfortunately, I will be poorer than dirt, but thankfully, being poorer than dirt makes the best of stories.  

Moving Back Home and the Activities That Will Follow

I’m moving back to California in two weeks. While I am really excited to be back with my family and be rid of my present roommates, my brother has me scared to death with all the activities he has planned for when I come home. Cameron has always been an active child; he played football and ran track in high school, and I have somewhat always been the sedentary one. If Cameron thinks I will be able to keep up with his activity level, he is to be sore disappointed.

While I did play sports in high school, I don’t ever claim to be an athlete. To be honest, I really hated playing sports, but my siblings were convinced I would be the best football player. So for Christmas one year, I received cleats and a football; I was disappointed at the time because I would have much rather received a magic set or maybe a skewer to gouge my eyes out with. I played football, gawky and awkward, and never really meshed with the team, but after one season, I was no longer required by my family to play a next. This could be because I wasn’t the best player on the field, or maybe they sensed my deep hatred for all things confrontational and let me slide.

Come to think of it, I’ve never really been that big into sporty displays of masculinity: weightlifting, sports, wrestling. It is actually possible that I have only arm wrestled once in the last ten years. This of course was after a family reunion, wherein an uncle had a few beers and decided to challenge every strapping lad he could trap into a corner. I won. But I am twice his size and was sober at the time, so I don’t find winning against him to be any great sign of my strength.

My parents have also gone on an active streak, buying bikes and enrolling in yoga. I can’t even remember the last time I owned a bike, let alone rode one. My dad keeps telling me, “If you can Zumba, you can ride a bike.” I don’t see how me shaking my hips for an hour correlates to biking ability, but we will see when I get home if he is actually right.

 My mother enrolled in yoga, which is exercise I can actually do—stretching was where I excelled in football. But I fear I may embarrass my mother if I attend with her. It’s not that I have horrible form, or pass gas when in downward dog, but the slightest amount of exercise initiates a flood of sweat from my body. This usually goes unnoticed in manly sports, because you must either sweat or die, but there isn’t much excuse in yoga to be drenched in sweat from the first breath. I blame my hyperhydrosis on my recent obesity, but because people can’t imagine me as fat, they usually just think I am a freak of nature. I, myself, think it is a bit freaky that peeling an orange will make me sweat like cheese in a hot room.

Every couple of months, I convince myself that I will start working out and finally obtain the beach bod I have always aspired for. This usually lasts about a day, and ends with me eating an entire pizza on the couch while watching The Match Game. Last time I decided to attempt beach bod status, I started running at the BYU gym. With the first stride on the treadmill, my saliva had become as viscous as glue, and each following stride made me feel as if I was running toward my death at six miles an hour. The other issue I had with the treadmill is that my strides are so long that my feet would go past the conveyer path and send me on a loppy stumble that almost always ended with a sprained ankle.

To avoid more painful sprains, I would find myself on the ellipticals. My problem then stemmed from the fact that I was the only boy in the BYU gym who ever touched the ellipticals, let alone used them. Not only was I the only boy on the ellipticals, but the ellipticals were positioned to face the very manly free-weight floor. Due to the laws of feng shui, the judgemental glares from the manly, weightlifting men were focused, magnified even, directly on me, the pansy on the elliptical.  I promptly left the gym, trying to assert my manliness by hawkin’ a loogie on my way out; this backfired and left a ball of spit dangling from my lower lip.

I could spend the next two weeks becoming more manly and making sure that I am in peak physical condition before I go home so that I can keep up with Cam’s frolicking, but it is much more likely that I will spend my remaining days on the couch, eating deep fried foods and watching TV. It’s a good thing that my brother appreciates deep frying more than any physical activity on earth. So as long as I am armed with vegetable oil, and Cam’s deep fryer doesn’t explode, I may be off the hook.