Working Out Isn't Working Out

I blame my aunt Shawna. She has made me so paranoid about my health by posting a PSA on her Facebook that might as well had said, “Jacob Broderick, you are going to die from malignant melanoma. Sucks that you don’t have health insurance, doesn’t it?” Why do I feel so paranoid about getting malignant melanoma? Well, the PSA listed several things that increase your chances of developing the cancer: have more than fifty moles? Cancer! Been severely sunburned, ever? Cancer! Have you ever gone outside? Cancer!

I have fifty moles on my left leg, let alone my whole body; I usually lose count at about one hundred and forty. And living in California, and being pale, I get burned every time I step out into the sun. So if I calculate it out correctly, my chances of developing skin cancer are at about two hundred and forty percent.  So the only thing that will really battle my anxiety is working out. That or eating, but the latter I have done the past three months and have started to work my way back to being the fat sibling.

So I have started to regularly attend the gym to get my Zumba on three times a week. The problem is, there are so many people that attend the classes that they have to give out tickets to let you in. If you arrive thirty minutes early for the class, you are assured to have a ticket number higher than 60, which banishes you to the very far back of the classroom, or behind one of the gigantic mirrored pillars in the middle of the room. I can’t be pushed to the back of the class, because then how would people admire my dancing? And so I come to class nearly an hour early, which gets me somewhere between ticket 30 and 40.

The most embarrassing part is asking for a Zumba ticket, because the front attendants at the gym look at me like I am confused or something. Is he serious about a Zumba ticket? Maybe if I laugh, he’ll laugh and go away… they laugh, I repeat myself, and they give me a resounding, “Yeah! Work it out, big guy!”

So with my free hour of gym time I usually wander around the cardio room and try to look like I am working out. At first, I started using the elliptical. The problem here is that the elliptical doesn’t allow me to have a good stride with my run, and it makes me look like I am trotting along, gaily through the air. I feel as if I should hold a basket of posies while I am on the elliptical, like that would make me seem more in place.

After I swore off that machine, I decided to start using the stair climber, but yet again, my size has worked against me. This time, it would be my big clodhoppers that I call my feet; they don’t fit on the steps. Three quarters or a half a foot, I could do, but I am essentially using my toes to stay aloft on the machine, which brings me back, looking like a pansy, skipping up an infinite flight of stairs. And from this, I generate an infinite amount of stares that make me feel a little bit too self-conscious.  

I’ve found that my best option comes in the form of the rowing machine. Hardly anyone notices them because they are pushed to the very back of the gym, the outcasts of the machines. So I like to spend a little bit of time, rowing in place while listening to an audio book. But after constant rowing for ten minutes, my muscles start to scream, and I end up just pushing myself forward an back on the seat, accomplishing little to know physical activity.

The only other machine that I really use would be the stationary bike, which is conveniently placed right in front of the televisions. I usually end up in front of the ESPN television, which makes me look and feel more masculine, not that I am actually paying attention the game, but nobody has to know that.

From my biking perch, I start to make judgements about the people around me, mostly the people working with weights. Truly, I wish that I could lift weights, but because I am embarrassingly weak, I would never use a weight machine in front of another human being. Somehow, benching ten pounds is worse than not being able to bench at all. Because that is what gyms are about: extremes. Either you are so incredibly muscled that you can lift a car with ease, or you are a weak little fatty who works out, but will never really accomplish anything.

Even if I could lift more than ten pounds, I don’t really know how to use any of the machines. Sure, I could hop on and start pushing and pulling things until they move, but I am certain that every gym goer there would look at me and pass judgements, just like how I do to the people I watch.

I find myself staring over at the free weights, and start to wonder, I wonder if there is a sure fire way to look at somebody an know they are on steroids? I know that if I had to examine them naked, I could probably figure out who was a steroid user and who was just magnificently buff, but from a distance, I can only assume that most are juicers. The ones that I really target are the men with gigantic chests but tiny little legs. Because they look freakish and disproportionate, they must be using steroids.

I would probably use steroids if I actually had enough drive to actually lift weights. Mostly because I have never really had a great body. I mean, every once and a while, I get really skinny and you can see some ribs, but that usually only happens after I have the flu and haven’t kept any fluids down for a week. I would love to have some sort of definition in my shape, a bicep here, an oblique there, but by myself, I know I will never achieve that kind of figure.

I consider myself somewhat lucky. While being fat has left me with a hooded belly button and stretch marks, I was also blessed with skin that stretched where my manboobs once resided, which now give the illusion that I have the inkling of pecs. I know they aren’t real, but women hardly have real breasts anymore, why can’t I have pecs made from my own sagging skin? It sounds disgusting in theory, but in real life, you’d never really know-- unless, that is, somebody touches them or asks me to lift something heavy.

Instead of steroids, I could cut out all the hard work and heavy lifting, and go in for plastic surgery. My list of operations I would like to get is staggering: butt implants, botox injections, ear pinning, belly button augmentation, liposculpture, tummy tuck, pec implants, veneers, etc. And that is why I can’t ever go in for surgery; I would never come out. Which is frightening to think that if I get just one surgery, I could become addicted and pop out looking like Dolly Parton.

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I’m going to try to start blogging more regularly again. Not that it is my New Year’s resolution or anything, because I don’t make goals, or even have goals for that matter. I am just glad when I haven’t died throughout the day or that I haven’t had to deal with too many used condoms at work. Besides that, I am goalless, which isn’t much of a surprise.

It’s not that I am anti-goal, it’s just that I have learned that when I do have a goal, the universe decides that it will do everything in its power to smite my pathetic goal to the ground: Cooking a goose? Smoted. Having health insurance? Smoted. Finding correctly fitting pants? Smoted, and then laughed at for having highwaters (I know that smoted isn’t the proper conjugation, but I prefer smoted to smote, get off my back).

So instead, I take a more passive role, and let the universe decide where I will end up in life. Which at the moment, would be living alone in a cockroach infested apartment, while I work as a permanent temp, without cable or many friends, and I can be content with that, as long as the universe decides to move me along sometime soon.

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On the topic of my apartment, the bathroom has begun weeping nicotine from its walls. I used to think that I wasn’t using the ventilation long enough, after my morning shower, but my mother told me that yellow seepage is a sign that the past tenant was a smoker. To me, it just looks like my bathroom has syphilis. I was rather fine with this until the bathroom wept nicotine into my eyeball whilst sitting atop the toilet, which temporarily blinded me and made it so difficult to finish my business. There was a lot of groaning, and stomping, and I prayed that the next door neighbor wouldn’t come by to see if I was ok.

Last time she came by, I was cursing the god of bread and she wanted to make sure I was ok. I looked like an idiot for having a tantrum over mold, and then I looked like a bigger idiot when I called her, “Pepper,” because that is what I thought her husband called her. Now that I think of it, many husbands call their wives, “sweet cheeks,” but that doesn’t give me the right to address them as such.

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I have gotten back into the swing of Zumba after being fired from my gym and packing on twelve pounds. To my Asian coworkers, they are amazed that twelve pounds doesn’t show too much on me, but if I was five foot, like them, I am sure I would have to start breaking out my fat clothes again. And while I did like teaching Zumba for three months, the gym I taught at was skuzzy, and I say that in the nicest way possible. The gym owner was crude, looked like he had taken too many steroids at multiple times in his life, and made fun of my class on a regular basis. He wonders why more people didn’t show up.  I wouldn’t show up either if a pervy, juice head made fun of the class while watching from the door. And then I remember I did show up. For three months. Three times a week.

Whatever, I’m not bitter. I hope that that gym flourishes. I hope nothing but the best for the owner whose head is four sizes too small for his body. I hope nothing but the best for the whore of a receptionist, who thinks that undressing in the lobby will make patrons want to lose more weight. I hope nothing but the best for their patrons, who still aren’t losing weight thanks to the tutelage of the “nutritional specialist” who is a good forty pounds overweight.

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I’ve never really had a big craving for meat ever. This could be because my mother was a vegetarian for years, and I am poor and don’t buy meat because it is expensive. I take that back. I’m just cheap. I live off of off brand granola bars, cereal, and sandwiches, which is living rich in comparison to what I ate when I lived in Utah: canned refried beans, rice, and more refried beans. But as of late, I have craved the taste of flesh, and cannot stop thinking about it. This could be from my failed attempt to cook a goose, where I looked for months and then found out that I would have to shell out between ninety and one hundred and thirty dollars just for the bird. I am depressed and desperate enough for a forty dollar bird, sure, but I don’t think that I am anywhere near wallowing in a fatty depression, where I can spend that much money without really caring about the consequences.

This has made it so that I have started buying the cheapest meat I can buy, which is usually one hour from expiring, and the weirdest cut of meat that one could imagine. The most recent of my cooking endeavors happened after working out and I realized that if I did not have flesh of the beast, I would crumple up and die. So going to the store, the cheapest thing I could find was a package with two, “half breasts of chicken with rib and skin.” Along with the skin, was a few feathers, but it was kosher, and I felt like obeying the Law of Moses.

 Because I don’t really have a plethora of cooking tools, nor ingredients, I placed the meat atop a roasting rack formed of eyeballed potatoes, slathered it in as much oil and kosher salt as I could, and then threw on some cayenne pepper with an unenthusiastic, “bam.” With the amount of salt I added, it was as if I was about to pickle the chicken, which reminds me of pickled pig’s feet, which reminds me of preserved parasites in formaldehyde.  I threw the chicken in the oven and then wedged myself into my sardine can tub.

Cooking has a weird effect on feathers. They stand straight up and brown up a little bit so you really can’t ignore them. It actually looked like the chicken decided to shave right before it was slaughtered, and it had developed five o’ clock shadow by the time it made it out of the oven. I looked at the feathers, and then considered my options. I could either pull off the skin and not eat it, or I could stop caring and embrace the inner Native American of my soul. Pass the peace pipe and call me Squanto.

Christmas Meltdown

I am not a big fan of Christmas, and don’t really ever plan on being a big fan of Christmas. Most of the time, I am too busy being a scrooge about people starting the holidays too soon, and the next thing I know, Christmas is two days away and I still have five people to shop for. This completely ruins my holiday, and I usually just give up on shopping, settling with a DVD box set for my father that he will never watch. My general rules for Christmas are simple: don’t play Christmas songs until two weeks before Christmas, don’t ask me to go caroling, and don’t sing Christmas songs at me. I don’t think I am asking too much with these rules, but of course I am labeled “Scrooge” the day after Thanksgiving when I say, “It’s not Christmas yet.”

But this year, I was off to a better start, mostly because I was given an advent calendar. I never had one before, and the daily shot of cheap, molded chocolate made it so that I was less likely to snap at a rule breaker when he or she decided to sing “Jingle Bell Rock” in my general direction. I kept the calendar propped up against the wall on my stove, and each day, I would wake up, open the door on my calendar, eat my crappy chocolate, and leave for work, prepared to face the holidays. 

This went well enough for about ten days, until I got the biggest craving for tater tots I have ever had in my life. Back in Provo, I was lucky enough to have a roommate who was addicted to tater tots and fast food. And so every week or so, we would find ourselves at Sonic, where I could keep my cravings at bay. But since I don’t have roommates anymore, I don’t have an excuse to get fast food, so when I get a craving, it becomes the worst craving I have ever had in my life. So to satisfy my urges, I paced across the street to Target, grabbed the biggest bag of tater tots I could find, and then tromped back across the street to enjoy my bounty. Things were going well enough: I had my tots in the oven, Fargo on DVD, and I hadn’t seen a cockroach in days. But because I can’t have good things going for me for more than two minutes, tragedy struck.

Apparently, when the oven is on, the area surrounding the oven becomes hot as well. Not expecting this, I still had my advent calendar propped up against the wall, where it heated up and then preceded to melt. I didn’t realize what was happening at first, but I could smell something really sweet in the kitchen. My first thought was to blame the neighbors, but then I looked and found chocolate seeping through my cardboard calendar, onto my stove, and streaking down the wall. My first instinct was, “Oh no! I need to eat tomorrow’s chocolate!” So I propped open day eleven and started to lick the remaining droplets of chocolate that were still in the mold.

Few things in life gross me out; I work with sewage and I am a microbiologist, I have been desensitized to most things. But one thing in life that makes me queasy would be the sight of melted chocolate. Obviously, the adrenaline from the initial shock of my whole situation made me forget about my issues with melted chocolate, until, of course, after two licks in. I snapped back into reality and I felt like I should induce vomiting. Finally I gathered my senses and put the calendar in the freezer so that the chocolate could set.

The day after the incident, I went to my freezer to eat my daily chocolate. But lo and behold, when I opened up the cardboard window, I found that all of the chocolate had melted into each other, making a monsterish conglomerate of crappy chocolate. I couldn’t just not eat my daily chocolate, so I decided that the whole frozen, chocolate mess would be my gift for December 11^th , and I ate the whole thing in one sitting.

After eating the remnants of my advent calendar, I realized I had no more daily gifts for the countdown to Christmas, which must mean that Christmas is over and I can finally get regular music back on the radio.  This of course didn’t happen, and so I am back to being a “Scrooge.”

To Kill A Pekingese

It all started out with a sobbing girl: she was fat, she was crying, she was under my balcony, and she was up early in the morning. Every Saturday, I would wake up to the sobs of this small girl, and every Saturday, I would contemplate yelling at the beast of a girl. Apparently, a sane person would have assumed that the child was being beaten and needed to get assistance from CPS. I, on the other hand, assumed she was hungry, due to her girth. 

After a month went by, and the sobbing girl continued to sob, I decided one day that I would go and give her a granola bar, because granola bars make me happy, so maybe it would make her happy. I waited for a week with a granola bar on the ready for her to come by for a good wail, and when she finally did come, I was wrought with anticipation. So much so that I ran out to the balcony, yelled, “Hey little girl!” and then threw the granola bar right at her head. Now that I think back on my actions, I realize that I probably should’ve been a little less excited to throw down a granola bar to a strange child, but I choose to not dwell on the past.

The little girl stared up at me with her big, puffy, eyes; looked down at the granola bar that nearly hit her, with a serene glance; and then started bawling harder than she had ever bawled before. She sprinted away from my balcony and I never saw her again outside of my apartment; although, for a few weeks, I did see her peeking through her blinds into my apartment, where I was nowhere decent enough for a small child to look upon. Soon after, the little girl moved, and a new, childless tenant moved in, much to my relief. Unfortunately for me, he was an owner of a very spirited Pekingese.

The Pekingese went unnoticed until the owner started to put her out on the patio while he went of his morning workout. This usually lasts from about five to ten in the morning, which is plenty of time for a dog to become bored. So by five thirty, the dog is in a full, howling rage. The first incident in which the dog decided to howl all through the morning, I had barely slept the night before, and so going off of four hours of sleep, I decided to go out to the balcony and start screaming, “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! NOBODY LOVES YOU! YOU CAME FROM A PUPPY MILL!”  These words do not soothe any dog, especially not a Pekingese, and so the howling increased for the next couple of hours.

After two mornings of the howling, I was ready to roast the pup on a spit, ready to leave its carcass on the neighbor’s welcome mat. The most disturbing of my thoughts led me to kill the dog, skin it, and then fashion a bonnet out of its fur, where the head would rest lazily upon my forehead. Now that I look back, I realize that I was nowhere in my right mind and probably should have seeked out professional help.

Upon the third morning, I had lost all common sense, and when the dog started to bark at five, I decided to go out to my balcony, take a shoe that was missing its pair, and toss it at the dog to get it to finally shut up. My intentions were not to kill or injure the dog, mind you, but mostly to scare it, which I did accomplish. When the shoe hit the patio wall, the dog retreated back into its kennel and stayed there for a time. The only problem was that when the shoe hit the patio wall, there was an explosion of red, metallic wrappers that littered the back area of my apartment, and my neighbor’s patio.

Apparently, after losing the pair to this shoe, I had decided to stash away the wrappers of Dove chocolates that I had eaten during a fasting Sunday, and to hide the evidence from my roommates, I decided to squirrel them away within a shoe until I could throw them away without being shamed for not fasting. Unfortunately, I never got around to throwing the wrappers away, and now they were all within eating distance of the dog. And if eating tin foil didn’t kill this dog, the residue from the chocolate would have. So I sprinted out to the back of my apartment, in my sweats and a sweater that has become a midriff due to washing, trying to hide the evidence.

After getting my shoe and most of the wrappers, I noticed one gleaming, red, wrapper was left. And of course it was right at arm’s reach on the neighbor’s porch.  But when I leaned over to grab it, the Pekingese finally had a reason to bark, and it came after me like I was about to rob the place, which I’m sure it looked like I was going to rob the place. I needed to get a distraction for the dog before it would eat the tin foil, so I ran back to my apartment for some lunch meat.

I don’t know why I didn’t remember that I used the last of the lunch meat the previous night for my upcoming lunchbox, but I was out of lunch meat. So I made a sacrifice. I disassembled my sandwich, removed my lunch meat, sprinted to the backyard, and threw the MiracleWhip coated cold cuts to the far end of the patio: the dog ate, I got the wrapper, and my mission was done.

Pestilence

I would never call my apartment spotless; it could use a good vacuum and dusting, and possibly a mopping. And while my apartment is not sterile, I would never expect to find an infestation of bugs in my home. Unfortunately, I do have an infestation of bugs in my home, which I find to be rather undeserving. While living in Utah, my roommates were utter pigs. Our bathroom was a biohazard and our kitchen, a composting heap. But never once did we have an issue with bugs, besides a small bout with fruit flies that had found a four month old banana hidden atop our cabinets (we found it liquefied a few months later). But surely, that apartment was deserving of cockroaches, flies, and an assortment of other crawly things.

 So when I did find my first cockroach, I was rather confused. “Why do I have a cockroach in my sink? Nothing is in there.” This thought occurred after I ran out of my apartment, screaming bloody murder. My next thought was that my downstairs, Asian neighbor must have sent the beastly thing up. How he would have conveyed a message to a roach to make it upstairs, I don’t know, but I am convinced that he managed to communicate with them, sending them up my plumbing. To combat the issue, I trapped the roach under a tea cup and then later boiled a pot of water, pouring it on the insect, and hopefully boiling any other roach friends that it had down the drain. I then called my apartment super, who then managed to get a pest control service out to my apartment, but when he got here, there was not a roach to be found. I’m sure that he reported back to my apartment super that I was just the boy who cried cockroach, and that I wouldn’t need any more pest services.

After a while, the roaches started to come back, but this time in droves. Enough so that when I came home, I would open the door and the kitchen countertops would quiver for a good five seconds, before all the roaches could find a dark hiding spot. I would not stand for this, and called the super with another complaint. This time, I received a note on my door saying that the pest control service had been by and had not seen a problem, so it became my war to wage.

Roach motels freak me out, and so I decided to opt for caustic chemicals instead. I sprinkled borax everywhere I could imagine a roach would hide during the day, and then poured a cup full down the drain just in case the mother of all cockroaches was living in my pipes.  And this worked for a while. I didn’t mind living amongst a possible carcinogen, as long as I was pest free. But then the roaches came back again.

I went to wash my hands in my bathroom when I saw that the roaches had now taken up root in my sink. 

The borax had failed me, and I was out of options. After I tried smashing the roaches with various hair care products I had strewn about, I received inspiration from the heavens. I uncapped my hairspray and cemented the bugs to my counter top. This has become my solution for any bug intruder that has entered my home. From praying mantis, to houseflies, I have covered in hairspray and allowed them to slowly freeze into their AquaNet-ed death pose. I must look insane to my neighbors, lurching across my living room with hairspray in hand, quickly spraying the walls, windows, and cabinets, but who cares if they judge me anyway? I’ll probably wear a hole in the ozone layer and they will develop skin cancer in kharmic justice.

The Bother with Bathing

My size has excluded me from many things in my life: I will never be a jet pilot; I will never find pants that fit me correctly; I will never be able to fit comfortably in the back of a compact car. And while I love being somewhat tall, I do recognize that I could have a much more comfortable life if I were but a few inches shorter. Every once and again, I get a reminder that I was made too tall for this world, and most of these times occur while in the bathroom. 

For the past two years, I have lived in apartments with showerheads that reach barely above my navel.  To combat this, so that I can be clean from the hip up, I have had to take up limbo as a means to get myself properly clean.  So each morning, I get up, hit my head on the shower frame, turn on the faucet, and then proceed to dip my head down low enough to get my hair wet. This ritual becomes even more daunting when taking into account that my family is notorious for waking up with incredibly low blood pressure. So sometimes when I lean over to shower, I find myself unable to stand up again, and so I wait, doubled over in my shower, until I can stand up without fainting.

Today, I got home from the public library and decided, “Today, I will take a bath!”  which is incredibly weird for me to decide because I have not taken a bath in years and I was raised to think that baths were unacceptable for any purpose of personal hygiene. But determined, I grabbed my book, turned on the tap, and started to fill the tub. Impatient as always, I hopped inside of the tub before the water level had risen above three inches, but due to the laws of mass, when I sat in the tub, the water level rose nearly to the lip.

I tried to manage myself into some comfortable position, but found myself in a predicament in each and every one of them. When I sat with my legs straight out in front of me, I found my butt being pushed up the slope of the far end of the tub, making it so that I just hovered above the surface of the water. I then decided to bend my knees in, but to keep my feet against the floor meant that my knees nestled themselves into my nostrils. If I put my feet against the wall, my knees then found themselves in my eye sockets. I slouched further and further into the tub until my butt hit one wall, my head the other, and my legs shot directly up into the sky, where I could toe my showerhead like a lover’s foot. From here I grabbed my book, and tried to fit my elbows to my side so that I would be able to read. And there, feeling somewhat like a Jack-in-the-box, I read for half an hour, just so that I could accomplish my earlier goal of taking a bath.

I was never taught much about the Presidents, in school, and I might be able to only name ten of our country’s former leaders. But as soon as I started to unwedge myself from the tub, my mind settled upon President William Howard Taft. I know nothing about what Taft did as a president, nor do I know anything relevant about his life, but as I sat in my tub, I remembered how Taft did not fit the tub in the White House and had to have four men squeeze him from his porcelain shackle. I shuddered at the thought of becoming imprisoned in my tub, and having to pound on my bathroom wall until my fat and pleasant neighbor, Vern, realized that I was in trouble and needed assistance. So to make sure that I would not become stuck in the tub, I lubed up my body with as much soap as I could muster while the water level lowered.

After lubing up, the issue of getting out of the tub was no longer an issue, but actually being able to stand up became nearly impossible. After trying to stand a few times and then slipping, crashing my butt onto the floor of my tub repeatedly, I then realized what I a commotion my downstairs neighbors must be hearing. Of course, my concern lasted for only a second because my downstairs neighbors don’t speak English, and therefore, could never be able to complain to me in a manner that I would understand. I managed to get myself up, showered off, and then I realized something. When I am able to own a bath that fits me, and I can read in it to my hearts delight, then I will know I have been a success. And I can die happy.