Ragnarˆk

Yesterday afternoon, sitting in a bar at La Guardia airport, waiting for a flight to San Francisco by way of Detroit for a short three-day jaunt of public speaking, deal signing and employee hiring, I watched a show on ESPN called Viking.

And, in short, it’s good that I don’t have a television, or else I’d spend all day re-watching Tivo’ed episodes of this show, as it’s absolutely my new favorite in the entire world.

Essentially, it involves a succession of Japanese guys running at top speed through ‘The Ultimate Obstacle Course‘, while a pair of American color commentators inanely summarize the action (“Nagano’s agility, built through years as a commercial fisherman, really shines on this rope maze.”, etc.)

But, really, it’s not so much that I want to watch the show; It’s that I want to be on it. Or, better yet, it’s that I want to live somewhere where I can have a giant Ultimate Obstacle Course of my very own built in the back yard.

Because, get liquored up with a few friends, go barreling through that sucker, and I guarantee you’re going to have an entertaining night.

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Countdown

With Cyan’s release of The Oh in Ohio just around the corner (7/14 in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Cleveland; 8/4 in a whole lot of additional cities nationwide), my days are crazier than ever.

Nearly every newspaper and magazine you can think of has RSVP’ed to our slew of upcoming press screenings; trailers, posters, screeners and prints of the film are high-tailing it around the country via FedEx; and early buzz is brewing in our favor. Consider IMDB’s take:

Unless it gets swallowed up by blockbusters and higher-profile indies, this stealth sex comedy should go into wider and wider release as the summer picks up. We hear Posey’s physical comedy is aces, Rudd’s brooding is unparalleled, and DeVito doesn’t plays it as hammy as you’d expect. Liza Minnelli locks down another bizarro role as a sex guru, while Heather Graham goes uncredited as a clerk who gets Parker P. hooked on the buzz.

And, of course, on a daily basis, everything falls apart completely, then somehow gets pieced tenuously back together. One of my Cyan colleagues tagged an email last night: “I should have been a doctor.”

Another, this morning, commented that he felt like “a Vietnam soldier considering shooting himself in the foot just to get pulled from the front line.”

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Macaroni

When I was growing up, I loved macaroni and cheese. But, for some reason, I believed the dish was best served for breakfast. The strange preference passed to my younger brother as well, and on most weekends, he and I would put in a request for macaroni brunch.

Complicating matters further, however, I liked Kraft’s Deluxe, which featured a large packet of congealed Velveeta, while my brother remained partial to Kraft Dinner and its powdery (even once cooked) orange ‘cheese’.

So, in an act of kindness and child-humoring that astounds me even to this day, my father (official school lunch and breakfast preparer of our family) would brew up two parallel pots, one of each, for my brother and me.

I think of this each Fathers’ Day, and of the countless other big and small wonderful things my father Andrew did (and still does) for us, and realize that, as far as dads go, my brother and I got it really, really, remarkably good.

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Correlation, Causation

A large survey conducted by Esquire magazine, on “the state of the American male”, determined that liberals have 60% more sex than conservatives (3.9 hours a week versus 2.4), and that atheists and agnostics have 20% more sex partners than those who believe in God (10.7 versus 8.8).

Most people would likely assume that’s because agnostic liberals like myself have lower moral standards, and therefore more sex.

I, however, contend that causation runs the opposite direction: there’s nothing like dating / sleeping with a lot of women to shake your belief in God, or to cause you to support your right to marry men.

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Freshman Fifteen, Ten Years Late

Most of the time I was in college, I was trying to gain weight. Influenced by some combination of He-Man episodes and Mens Health covers, I – like most of the guys I knew – was convinced that bigger would be better. I took creatine and bench pressed and drank protein shakes and ate and ate. And, the whole time, I stayed 135 pounds.

Which, at 5’6″, put me at precisely the same size as Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. A fact I began to appreciate post-college, as I started to compete in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai fights. The very real threat of getting my ass kicked in front of a crowd kept me honest in the gym, convinced me of the relative importance of function over cosmetics.

But, appreciative or not, I didn’t have much choice: In the five years since college, I stayed at 135 pounds so consistently that I didn’t replace the batteries in my scale when they died about a year and a half back.

Still, last week, in the locker room at the gym where I teach CrossFit classes, I absentmindedly stepped onto a scale, to play with the old sliding-weight mechanism. And clocked in at 150 pounds. Assuming the scale was simply out of whack, I went home, re-batteried my own scale, and weighed myself again. Still 150 pounds.

A caliper test – and the equally reliable ‘jump up and down naked in front of a mirror’ – confirmed that I’m still floating around 8% body fat. Which means, in theory, that I’ve put on some fifteen pounds of muscle.

Certainly, college-aged me would be thrilled. But, so far as I can tell, I look exactly, exactly, like I did fifteen pounds ago.

I said as much this weekend in Denver, to my brother, my parents, my grandmother, my aunt. And, by consensus, none of them had any idea where those extra fifteen pounds went.

Except for my eleven-year old cousin. Who, at several points, knocked on my leg to determine if it might actually be hollow.

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A Matter of Degree

I’m in Denver at the moment, having come in to town to watch my brother graduate from business school – an event that, officially, makes me the least educated member of my family.

The graduation ceremony itself, on top of the usual array of addresses and pontifications, involved every single graduating graduate student’s name being announced, as they headed up to shake the Chancellor’s hand and receive their diploma.

This was, in short, not a fast process. So, several hours in, to entertain myself, I scawled out a bit of poetry on the back of my program:

Commencement
[A triplet, in haiku verse]

I.
Pomp and circumstance
book-end a mind-numbing line
of young graduates

II.
A sea of black robes
undifferentiated
they flow across stage

III.
I sit in the crowd
ready to stab out my eye
with a dull pencil

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Sketchy

Given my ongoing fascination with myself, I paid $1 to have Sketch-It sketch-ify the picture on my about page.

For those too lazy to click, the original picture looks like this:

Joshua, looking cute as ever.

The sketched version I received, in turn, looks like this:

Sketchit_joshuanewman.jpg

Which, to be frank, doesn’t really look that much like me. It does, however, look sort of like an older version of me, assuming by that point that I still have hair.

I have seen the future, and it is Joshua Newman.

Excellent.

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To the Pain

With all the craziness of the past few months, my workout schedule has been erratic at best. Yet, despite that, I’ve continued to teach a couple of CrossFit classes each week.

There’s a CrossFit saying that ‘men will die for points’ – meaning that, given a bit of competition, people push themselves far, far harder than they would alone. I find that’s doubly true when leading a class, weighed down with the vague idea that whatever instructor street-cred I possess stems entirely from my ability to demonstrate exercises and blaze through workouts well enough to inspire the rest of the class.

Fortunately, years of competition with my younger brother instilled in me the ability to push myself far harder than wise, for the sake of shaming others. So, in class, regardless of my current overall fitness level, I put up more than my body weight in the Snatch or Clean & Jerk, do twenty-rep sets of handstand pushups or clapping pullups. (Yes, clapping pullups.)

When I’m working out regularly outside of class, that’s fine; the instructor days don’t really make a dent. But, at times like this, when lax workout schedules leave me sustaining in-class effort with nothing but grit and curse words, the day after, I’m inevitably a mess.

Today, for example, I could barely lift myself out of bed, started the day unable to squat down sufficiently to pick things up off the floor, unable to raise my arms above shoulder level.

But, perversely enough, that pain got me to the gym. First because, contrary to conventional wisdom, pushing through a workout when sore inevitably leaves me feeling far better by the end than when I started.

Second because, unless I get back onto a regular workout schedule, I’m going to feel like this after every class I teach. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have the Advil budget to make that work.

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