I used to say my fantasy was to be 30 and to go out with a 20-year-old. This all started when we were talking about all the weird-ass dudes out on the street and their fantasies. I figure mine was pretty simple but really, I’d have to be pretty young to be able to listen to a 20-year-old for any length of time. At some time in the past, my friend Melanie told me that there was a formula for the youngest woman I could go out with. I’m a geek, so I remember what she told me:

So working backwards, that means if I wanted to go out with a 20-year-old, by Melanie’s reckoning, I’d have to be 26.

But now my fantasy is a bit different. I’ve been going to the gym since, what, January sometime and still the yoots are kicking my ass. Even the brand new yoots. Run around the block and do as many pullups as you can and then repeat until 20 minutes is up? Holy hell, that’s a game for the 20-somethings. So now my fantasy is to be 26 when I’m at the gym.

I did, however, come up with a new plan to beat the kids at the gym. I’m going to replace my ass with helium. This isn’t completely ideal, since I wouldn’t be able to run or do any squats without an ass, but pullups would be easier.

I had no idea how much my ass weighs, so I looked on the internet. I found some data for the gluteus maximus of a mouse in the Journal of Physiology (J Physiol. 2004 December 1; 561(Pt 2): 535–545.) Now if my ass is the same percentage of my body weight as the rat’s ass is the percentage of the rat’s body weight:

So that means my ass only weighs 6 ounces? There’s something wrong with my calculations. Either that or I’m going to have to replace other parts of my body with helium.

I think I’ll go back to my earlier fantasy of being 26 at the gym. Or just being 26. I think 26 is the age I was when I got engaged. It didn’t work out, but at least things were looking up then.

And, if I recall correctly, I only weighed like 145lbs then!

So I was reading Make Magazine and some dude decided the only way he could beat his kid at Guitar Hero was to cheat. So he made some sort of video recognition hardware and a custom controller to play guitar hero automatically. What a geek. Awesome.

I, on the other hand, was so pathetic at doing a kettlebell snatch at the gym that The Head Honcho told me to just do a high pull during the workout of the day. So much easier. So much better to be pathetic sometimes.

I found another funny picture of me on the gym’s blog. It’s during Mark’s first muscle-up (he’s not a cheater) and I’m so happy that I’m getting a cheeseburger that I’m grinning like a fool. No, really, we were pretty psyched for Mark who looks pretty happy as well. I’ve probably mentioned before that it’s a difficult maneuver and quite an accomplishment to finish a muscle up.

And mentioning cheating, I did have a birthday hamburger on 4/14, but no cheeseburgers since the one The Head Honcho bought me on 4/9!

I’ve been told by the young guys that if I can stay out until 4AM like they do, then I should have to do the same exercises with the same weight as the young guys. I think it would kill me. However, I have decided that my non-manly music enjoyment is growing today but I can’t really remember what it was that made me decide that. Duran Duran maybe? More Erasure? Just can’t remember.

I have decided that I think the woman in the Yoplait commercial who is having all her clothes “taken in” by the seamstress is kind of hot. She has a very expressive face. Really, I don’t know where I’m going with this, but last Friday night my heterosexual life partner Il and I were discussing my old girlfriends (and when was I actually dating non-imaginary women? 15 years ago?) and a couple of them were kind of frightening to Il. Honestly, they were kind of frightening to me, too. The one he remembers being non-scary and attractive, however, kind of looked like the woman in the Yoplait ad. Not a lot like her, but a little.

Oh, and even with my ridiculous diet of this weekend, I’ve lost about five pounds recently. I seem to vary 5 pounds up and down so it’s not like it really means anything. I even tried to get a taco salad today at Juan Colorados (the Mexican restaurant where I’ve never seen any patrons who looked Mexican) and even tried to avoid the fried shell, sour cream, and guacamole. What I got had a little bit of lettuce and a bit more chicken and a whole lot of melted cheese. Not much of a salad. That’s what I get for eating with gringos. The place I wanted to go, Don Pedros, has things that aren’t a whole lot more healthy, but I think I like the two chicken tacos, rice, and refried beans a lot more. The best thing I can say about my melted cheese salad is that it wasn’t very large.

I suppose I should be happy that we did a “Chipper” workout and not a suicide drill. (Hey Nathan, that’s the truly barf-inducing exercise I was thinking of the other day.)

Thanks to my sister, I have an abundance of iPods. She got an iPod from freeipods.com about a month after I gave up on the site and and just got a couple people to pitch in to buy her a damn iPod mini. Then when I helped her buy a MacBook, she got a free iPod Nano that she didn’t want and so I got that one, too. I have the mini in my car and the Nano is what I use at work to drown out the loud typer in the next cube. They both have similar playlists full of dance music and silly pop and that backfired today when I had to listen to Maroon 5 twice in one day, once in at my desk and once in my car. I’m not sure what I did to deserve that (besides buying two copies of the Maroon 5 CD back in the day).

I’m still recovering from Saturday night and I thought I was going to fall asleep on the way to work. Of course I went to the gym, and I think tonight is the closest I got to getting ill. I’m just pooped. Of course, instead of going to sleep early, I’m watching Pet Shop Boys videos on YouTube.

I’m not sure if I’m getting any man points for my actions today.

Oh, and I now have a goal at the gym, something I haven’t had in the 10 years I’ve been told to have one. I didn’t have one when I was running with Team Oregon and I never had one when I was working out with Dave the Trainer. So here it is: the ability to lift, at least for one fraction of a round, the weights listed on the named Crossfit workouts. And to do at least one muscle up. This is going to take a while, which is a good thing because it took me 10 years to come up with a goal and I don’t want to have to come up with another one too soon.

And I better hit the hay because now I’m hitting the YMO videos and that seriously takes me back down memory lane.

I was at my friend Sylvia’s party last night, drinking too much and acting like an idiot. Especially since I was out until 4AM. I’m way to old for this kind of crap. Fortunately, I had just checked out a mystery from the library so I got to sleep in, finish the book, and then take another nap before I went out to dinner with friends.

Get this, I avoided the cheeseburger at dinner. I’m fairly sure the pulled pork sandwich wasn’t much better for me, but I also avoided the fries and got a salad instead. But I did have crème brûlée for dessert so it’s still slow progress on my part. For those in Portland, the restaurant was Cava on 54th and Foster and it was excellent. There are several things on the menu I want to try there.

The gym is not a competition, so I’m only cheating myself. HAH. Of course it’s a little competitive, and I’m telling on myself just so I can work up with some flimsy excuses before I get called on it.

• I wasn’t doing box jumps today.

  I’m an old man and I was using the tallest box for box jumps. It was the one that was left. So I did some jumps for a while until I decided I could either just stand there sucking wind or just step up onto the box. OK, so we were counting how many we were doing and I should have stopped counting the number I did, but did I mention that I’m an old man? At least compared to the guys who are either in their 20’s or just barely in their 30’s? Besides, I just saw a blog posting of what happens when you screw up on a box jump. Also I saw a dude limping out of the earlier class. So instead of calling me a cheater, you can also call me a chicken shit.

• I do less weight than the other guys.

  I do less weight than the 20-something dudes (and I’m including the 32-year-old dude in the 20-somethng category) because, honestly, I’m not as strong in the shoulders as those guys. Or anywhere else (except maybe in the mouse arm.) Maybe my big Asian thighs can handle more air squats (squats with no weight) but really, they’re 20-something and they’re not carrying around all this IT weight that I had to develop for my career. (Ka-rear, get it? Hahaha. I’m so funny.) Sometimes I feel like it’s cheating because going up or down just 5 pounds in a shoulder-press makes a big difference for me. So if I’m doing 5 pounds less, I’m getting off a lot easier.

• I eat too many cheeseburgers.

  Wait, this was about cheating. I think I’ve lost my train of thought.

In other news, Mark got his muscle-up today and it should be posted on the Recreate Fitness blog soon. This means I could go off my cheeseburger boycott, but maybe I should keep that up until I can get my own muscle-up. Now I have to figure out if the other things I eat are worse for me than cheeseburgers.

I’ve been drinking and so I’ll just list the things I shouldn’t have eaten today. I did have another grilled chicken salad at Buffalo Wild Wings today but I had my birthday dinner at RingSide.

• A half of a small bottle of wine.
• Half of the seared scallop appetizer plate.
• A mixed green salad.
• The Kobe beef tenderloin (rare) with garlic mashed potatoes.
• A shot of single malt Scotch (Oban).
• Some large fraction of a hot fudge sundae.

But I did lose weight in my wallet again.

There’s a warm-up exercise we do at the gym where we throw a medicine ball to each other around the block. If you have the ball, you can’t move. The other person runs ahead and you throw it to them, then they have to stop and you run ahead. I thought I was going to have to go home and take a nap after I did that, but for some reason I was able to finish the workout of the day a lot stronger than I expected. I kind of doubt it was because I had a salad for lunch today. It cost $12 and for that price you’d figure it would be gold plated or at some chi-chi place in the Pearl, not at Red Robin in Hillsboro.

So there’s a big sign at the gym: Todd held Hostage – Day 1. I wonder if this no cheeseburger/salad idea is actually going to improve my workouts. It never seems to work when I have the awful taco salad at work. I was kind of convinced that following the “zone” diet was just superstition, but maybe it actually works.

Somehow I don’t think Get Smart is going to be as funny without Don Adams but I’ll probably see it anyway. And Speed Racer. But in any case, The Head Honcho at the gym told me he’d buy me another cheeseburger if I beat 1min 40sec for 500m on my row tonight. I could hear Tina, (The Brains Behind the Gym) saying, “Oh no. Not this again.” Well, my row time was 1min 41.9sec. So I missed it by 1.9 seconds. And a guy who should have been rowing faster than me for the last month or so has finally passed me and I’m probably not going to catch up. He’s 12 years younger than me and I’m too lazy to score any steroids. I mean, really, what’s the point? If I get too strong then I could just RIP that mouse right out of its USB socket and then where would I be?

I’ve decided to give up cheese burgers until Mark (the guy whose diet I really should be emulating) gets a “muscle up.” I only say this because I KNOW HE’S READING THIS and I KNOW HE CAN DO IT. This probably just means I’ll eat something worse for me, but cheeseburgers are kind of my thing right now. I may actually like fried chicken more than cheeseburgers, now that I think of it. In any case, here it is in print, no cheeseburgers for me until Mark gets a muscle up.

In all honesty, I’ve been trying to work up to a muscle up for a while and I’m not even close to doing it. All this googling and research isn’t getting much closer to lifting my big ass over the “sticking point.”

Maybe it’ll be easier now that my wallet is $350 lighter. I bought tickets (or at least put my name in for the lottery) for NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball 1st & 2nd Round. Maybe I’ll be there. Maybe I’ll watch it on TV. We’ll see.

My friend Megan is coming to town this weekend and we’re all going out to dinner somewhere. I’m sure I won’t be able to follow the guideline, “What Would Mark Eat?” I’m also going out to my yearly (now like 4-times yearly) trip with my buddy Il to RingSide because it’s my birthday. I just stepped on my ultra-accurate bathroom scale and noticed I’d lost a few pounds (like 3 or 4) but I’m sure I’ll erase any of those gains this weekend. My mom’s buying me doughnuts, too. Some help she is.

Il’s mom passed away a year ago on the 13th and my dad passed away a year ago on the 15th. They both missed my birthday, which also happens to be Il’s brother’s birthday, and my dad died on an already inauspicious tax day. So I figure we have reason to at least mark their passing and, if nothing else, that’s a reason for us to go to Ringside.

I should apologize to my friend Mr. Slab the photographer for stealing this picture of my dad and posting it without permission. The Slabs went out to lunch with him at Wan Q in Beaverton. My dad always wanted to eat what someone else ordered, so very often he’d finish what my mom was eating so I wonder if that big bowl of noodles was what he actually ordered. It’s hard to know.

I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in the afterlife, but sometimes it makes me happy to think of my dad still doing the things he liked to do. Maybe not in his last few years where he just seemed to sleep a lot and watch re-runs of M*A*S*H all day and night, but maybe more like when he would do bonsai and make model boats and airplanes and actually putter around trimming the trees outside. Or the guy who filled up his room with toy cars and “Hello, Kitty” crap. Maybe I’m wrong and he’s somewhere finally figuring out how to run a video camera or computer he just bought. I guess I’ll never know.

So it turns out my sister’s flikr site wasn’t as secret as I had thought and I stole some pictures. Here’s a picture of the cake, which is also on my sister’s blog today. I successfully blew out the candles, but I can’t remember what I wished for.

As long as I was stealing pictures, here’s one of me and my birthday beer. This is what I look like all hopped up on pollen and Benadryl.

I was pretty tired today but made it to the gym anyway. I think I’m too tired to remember what we did besides slamball and rowing, alternating each minute for ten minutes. There’s a couple of hardcore crossfitters at our gym now, I think they’re going to find out pretty quickly that no one at this gym wants to work out so hard that we see our last meal again. There’s a clear line between working out and overdoing it and I probably would have given up bicycling and running and going to the gym for all these years if I was throwing up all the time. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have to do all that exercise if I quit training with a steady diet of Popeye’s fried chicken.

I ate way too much tonight. Funny thing, I didn’t feel so bad after the big German dinner last night, but we were finishing up some of my birthday cake and now I feel like someone set concrete in my stomach. My sister made the cake and it was so good. My sister made a birthday cake for her friend Wendy once that had five pounds of Hershey’s chocolate in it. At least that’s the way I remember it and I’ll deny any corrections to it.

Oh, and I’d show you a picture but my sister has some secret Flickr account and I don’t know how to get to it.

My sister gave me a Nike driver and I went to Golfsmith today to check out the one that’s the larger version of the one she gave me. The guy there warned me that the bigger was easier to hit, but it was a lot louder, too. He let me try them both out. I cranked the big one back (it looks like a lunchbox on a long stick) and WHAM! Holy hell, I though my ears wouldn’t stop ringing. I figure I didn’t want to carry hearing protection with me to the golf course and that I’m not good enough to be making that kind of noise. I kept the smaller driver, which made a lot less noise.

Other than that I spent a lot of time realizing that my 1990’s computer is a lot slower than my newer computer. I think it may be time to upgrade some of them, including the one that runs my blog and SuperEggplant.