Recap

I have a long and loserly tradition of spending a morning each year, just before New Years, thinking through the past year, and formulating goals and plans for the next.

This year, looking back, it’s pretty clear 2007 has been a decidedly mixed bag.

On the excellent news side, there’s getting engaged (I love you Jess!) and opening and building a thriving CrossFit NYC gym (I don’t love you, CFNYC members, but I at least strongly like you!).

And, on the less excellent news side, there’s Cyan, where – due to both unexpected outside forces (including, primarily, someone contracting Mad Cow Disease [yes, seriously]) and inside ones (including, primarily, me being an idiot) – we basically treaded water for the entire year.

Still, in this very last week of 2007, Cyan seems to be surging ahead – we’ve had three big pieces of positive news in the past three and a half days – so I’m hopeful that I can hit the ground in 2008 running, once again, at full speed on all cylinders.

Looks like it should be a busy year.

|  

Footsy

Here’s something I don’t often admit: I was a ballerina.

Okay, technically, I was a danseur. But still.

My mother, who did masters work in dance at Stanford, enrolled me in ballet at a very young age. And I loved it. I was good at it. I danced for years, until, presumably, the fear of cooties contamination from such a female-dominated pursuit caused me to rebel.

Looking back, of course, I realize I should have stuck it out a few more years. Post-cooties, I would have been one of the very few straight guys surrounded by a swarm of lithe women in spandex.

But, anyway, I stopped. Still, to this day, I often look down and catch myself in first position. I have terminal, intractable duck feet.

About a month ago, I badly sprained my ankle. Seeing me hobbling around on crutches and air cast, a physical therapist friend pointed out that my ‘everted feet’ might be to blame. He sent me a copy of the Egoscue Method, in the hopes that fixing my post-ballet posture might save my ankle from a repeatedly sprained fate, and similarly protect my knees – the next joint to go in what appears to be a fairly standard progression.

And, well, I think he might be right. Egoscue’s theory is persuasive, and though I’ve only been doing the exercises for about a week, and so can’t yet vouch much for the results, I already feel better. I’m standing a bit more solidly, with my joints squarely aligned from my ankles up through my shoulders and neck.

His other books, Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC also seem to have garnered rave reviews. So, if you find you’re not standing how you’d like, or if you have pain in your back, your shoulders, your knees or your wrists, they might be worth a read. I’ll post a further review after I’ve had a chance to do the exercises for another month or two. But, in the meantime, for ten bucks a pop, seems certainly worth checking out for yourself.

Merde!

|   

Complain, Complain

Yesterday evening, I smashed my finger in my brother’s front door.

It was my left ring finger – or, rather, just the tip of it, as I managed to close his heavy metal door right on the middle of my nail.

I’ve broken fingers more times than I can count, mostly during my years of wrestling and competitive fighting. But, back then, I always managed to break or fracture well up towards the first knuckle, between the MCP and PIP joints.

And while that hurts, it’s nothing, nothing compared to smashing the hell out of your nailbed.

Or at least that’s how it seems to me now. Which could either mean that it really is much more painful. Or, conversely, that I’ve turned into a total pussy in the intervening years.

|  

How am I Funny to You?

Despite, as this site suggests, liking to think about myself, I’m not normally a big fan of online tests. Certainly not of the sort that categorizes you into some type. (“The Star Wars personality sorter says you’re C3PO!”)

Nonetheless, on a friend’s recommendation, I took OkCupid’s 3 Variable Funny Test, and was surprised to see the description it yielded was pretty much dead on:

Type: The Cutting Edge

Your humor’s mostly innocent and off-the-cuff, but somehow there’s something slightly menacing about you. Part of your humor is making people a little uncomfortable, even if the things you say aren’t themselves confrontational. You probably have a very dry delivery.

Your type is the most likely to appreciate a good insult and/or broken bone and/or very very fat person dancing.

Ah, very very fat person dancing; I laugh out loud each I time I even read that phrase.

|  

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.

|  

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.

|  

Why I’m Not Blogging

Looking at my Gmail inbox this morning, and feeling like a bad Tetris player as I watched the lines pile up far faster than I could clear them out, I decided to take a moment and tally my email count for the past month.

On average: just over 200 pieces of ‘legit’ email and just short of 450 pieces of spam, each and every day.

Looks like it’s time to return to my old trick of stopping sleeping and gong to the bathroom to free up time.

|  

In Brief

About three years back, I observed that men are loath to part with beloved clothing items: sweaters, jeans, t-shirts, and – particularly – underwear. Given a trusty pair of boxers, I said, “we’ll keep washing and wearing… until it’s disintegrated to nothing more than a waistband and a few hanging threads.”

And while, fortunately, my own have not yet reached that state, they are undoubtedly looking rather rough around the edges. (Literally. One of the first things to go, it seems, is the waistband elastic.)

So, this past weekend, I set out shopping. By broad female consensus, boxer briefs remained the only suitable way to go. But, for reasons I’ve never quite discerned, nearly every designer – including my own long-preferred Calvin Klein – seems to sell their pairs in only black, navy and heather gray.

On my way to a department store, however, I stopped to pick up a hard drive I had lent to a friend some months back. And, next door to his office, I noticed Gap holding its REALLY BIG SALE. (Capitalization theirs.) With some time to kill, and my mind in shopping mode, I decided to pop inside.

Lo and behold, Gap, of all places, had somehow veered away from the tri-color hegemony. Even better, they had reshaped their boxer briefs’ cut, away from what previously looked like foreshortened long underwear to a much hipper ‘athletic square cut’. And, best of all, the sale took the price per pair to a scant $6.99

So, now, my underwear drawer has, once again, been wholesale refreshed, au courant with an array of stripes, primary colors, and even one pair emblazoned with little green alligators knit right into the fabric.

I’ve previously admitted my belief in lucky underwear, and can therefore say I’m particularly excited to discover the effects of that alligatored pair.

They look auspicious indeed.

|