Black Evil Television

I've only seen 10 or so episodes of Boondocks and find their humor hit-or-miss, but they knocked it out of the park with these two banned episodes lampooning BET. Many black people are waking up to see BET for the insulting trash that it is, so McGruder's hilarious depiction of its execs (particularly Debra Lee) is right on the money. Enjoy them while they're still available.

No pain, no gain.

Whoa it's been almost exactly a month since my last post. My apologies.

So after many months of getting absolutely nowhere at the gym, I decided to get a personal trainer. If nothing else, I'd learn to exercise more effectively and efficiently and it would give me some motivation to get my eating on track. Our first meeting would be a general discovery session so he could assess my overall body composition. To say he found problems would be like saying explorers found sand in the Sahara. During stretching he discovered that I'm not very flexible, which I already knew. I can't even sit cross-legged for Pete's sake. It also seems I shrug my shoulders a lot, often involuntarily. And I have been performing push-ups all wrong for years, putting my hands too far apart and one in front of the other. At the end of the session, my trainer said my body was a "trainwreck". I think he might have a second career delivering bad news to cancer patients.

My trainer stressed posture as my most glaring problem. He described the misshapen, wart-riddled old men who suffered due to years of bad posture, confined to either playing organs in basements or, at best, managing Republican presidential campaigns. I was a little take aback to hear it myself. In all the years the media warned us about smoking, heart disease, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, staying active, eating stuff with too many preservatives, high blood pressure, diabetes, having too many eggs, SARS, the bird flu, mad cow disease, mercury in fish, depression, and flesh-eating bacteria, you'd think they would've squeezed a peep about posture in there. The problem is there's no way to sell a product based around posture. At least not an exciting one ("Realign your spine with a few thousand hours of discomfort!").

Between my horrid posture and poor form when exercising, our sessions feel more like basic training. The trainer barks out a stream of commands to correct my blunders. I’ve completely given into this mentality, responding to almost all his feedback with “ok” and “sorry”, instead of “my legs are about to give out”. Throw “sir” at the end of my sentences and “maggot” at the end of his and the transformation will be complete.

Here's the thing about exercising: you can do the same exercise umpteen zillion times and still do it wrong. It seems I've been doing that all along. And doing an exercise correctly is difficult. Other things I've learned in these sessions:
*Put any weight on my arms and they become very wobbly.
*You can dry hump a pole and work your glutes at the same time.
*You can dry hump the air and work your quads at the same time.
*You can be sweating so hard that sweat goes flying in all directions when you talk and your PT will still push you for one more rep.
*My PT knows a little jujitsu.
*I don't trust my PT to not let me bust my head open while he demonstrates a foot sweep.
*Turning my right heel out can take any awkward position from "manageable" to "horribly unstable".
*Sitting like the fella below hurts like hell.




My next session is tomorrow. Maybe I can score some Vicodin before then.