New Workout Plan

I think the last four months might have been the most physically inactive period of my life other than my pre-walking phase, and I have been feeling the effects. I have to sleep much more than I usually have to, have trouble concentrating, and eat tiny amounts for every meal. I'm talking less than my Japanese friends. My Japanese GIRL friends. Yeah, the little tiny ones with the squeaky voices. Something needed to change. So I decided I would check out my workout options here on campus.

Behind the club houses, there is a large Physical Education building that is free of charge to everyone and anyone. After figuring out that I had to bring two pairs of shoes with me (one to wear walking there and one to wear when working out there), I was ready. Let me begin by saying that, as might be expected it was freezing in the building. It was my first experience being able to see my breath while working out indoors. After a long hallway with metal cabinets holding soccer and volleyballs so old their outer shells were rotting, I came to the main attraction of the first floor: a gymnasium with two basketball courts. The basketball club was working out, and inbetween the courts so was the gymnastics club, using equipment apparently inherited from an inner-city Boys and Girls club. To give you an idea, they practice the rings by hanging rings from the backboard of a hoop. It was kind of cute to watch them try so hard with such old, dangerous equipment; kind of like Cool Runnings or something. As for the basketball court itself, it's been awhile since I've played on wood so old (the last time was, surprise surprise, two years and a half years ago in Japan). Otherwise, the courts were almost perfect; all they were missing were the peach baskets. But did I mention it was free? Upstairs the weightroom is housed. It was the kind of weight-room with all iron-equipment, all of which is rusted. One of the benches had been used for so long that the padding was worn all the way through to the wood where you rest your head. Some of the bench-press bars were bent. They even had those dumbbells with the spherical weights at the end - the ones you only see in cartoons and posters from Prohibition Era circus side shows. Really, I thought all equipment like this had been melted down to make bullets during World War II. I was wrong. All in all, the experience was kind of like a cross between a YMCA, a Siberian Prison, and an episode of Popeye. But did I mention it was free?

Anyway, today I saw this story on cnn.com talking about how Fox blurred a butt on a RERUN of the CARTOON The Family Guy to avoid FCC backlash. You have to be kidding me. FOX, the sleaziest major network, has problems showing a cartoon butt? Something is wrong here. I mean really - a cartoon butt??? Wait, wait - which would be worse in the FCC's eyes: a cartoon butt or a baby butt? Really - so it's an adult cartoon, but clearly not realistically drawn (just sort of a curve), and a young child's butt, but it's real skin. This could be a difficult debate. And so recently we've had knee-jerk backlashes over T.O. and desperate housewives, Randy Moss pretending to moon people, Mickey Rooney's naked butt, and now a CARTOON butt. I know this is a post-"janet/jt halftime" show world, but does anyone else feel like this is incredibly stupid? There is a ridiculous amount of sex and violence on TV in the U.S. constantly and these little bits and pieces are picked out to be scrutinized and hanged in the court of public opinion? I've seen all of these clips courtesy of the great website www.ifilm.com and maybe this is just because i'm a crass individual, but none of them seem all that offensive to me. I sort of get the feeling that these reactions are the "moral" people in the U.S. trying to over-compensate for the fact that the U.S. is doing pretty immoral things at the moment (look out! Politics entering blog! Politics entering blog!). The president is spending $40 million on his inaugural "celebration of democracy", and offered only $15 million initially for tsunami aid. Okay yeah, he's bumped it up a lot, but come on, initially setting aside more money for a party celebrating yourself than for a natural disaster that killed 160,000 people is pretty questionable. Especially when we're spending billions on a war in Iraq and our soldiers are under-equipped AND the government finally quietly admitted the WMDs we went in for in the first place never existed. Oh, and they won't apologize for it even though it's costing us, the world, and thousands of young Americans and Iraqis of all ages much more than dollars and cents. I don't want to sound trite (though I already do! yay!), but come on - making huge fusses over Mickey Rooney's butt because it may or may not expose millions of young, impressionable, NFL watching children to the wrong message is pretty ridiculous when we're also sending them the message that the right way to do things is to go into a country and start killing people to make things the way we want it, and also to not spend much money helping other people in need because - why should we help them? We're too busy fucking other people up with our big guns! Good luck not getting shot while casting your vote in your first-ever democratic elections, (what's left of) the Iraqi people!

That's all I wanted to say.