Friday, March 04, 2011

YMCA


[click on outward pointing arrows for full screen]

I have finally recovered from my winter funk enough to join the YMCA. This was after a week of promising myself then stalling or finding something else that just absolutely had to be done first, but in the end didn't get done anyway. That this turning over of a new leaf is an act of will is indubitable. That it amazingly happens to have occurred just as spring returns in earnest to the northern hemisphere is mere coincidence. Instead of staying in bed until 11 I am now up at the crack of 8. Which is to say that because there is now morning light in the mornings, I have left off semi-hibernating. There are now evenings that are not simply the onset of night in the afternoon.

I was uncertain about joining the YMCA since I qualify neither as 'Y' nor 'C'. But I have re-yclept it to 'Ye Mortal Curmudgeon Association' and I qualify handsomely. It seems like everyone I know or meet is having or has had horrible medical problems. I am starting to wonder when it will be my turn. My medical exams showed that I am in good health but too fat. The opportunities for sliding into horrible medical problems on account of the fat are manifold and manifest.

So I have started breakfasting on Faux Oeufs Turquoise a l'Oignon which sounds better in French but is still only barely edible. And have been to the aforesaid YMCA twice so far in two days and mean to go there again today.

I have been listening to Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim' on an iPod while I exercise (The YMCA seems to be a front for Apple.) and am reminded again of what an extraordinarily good writer he is, and all the more when one considers that English was not his native language.

The Berkeley YMCA is not a Wilde of homosexuals as the video would suggest but a Congregation of puritans. Berkeley's besetting vice is self-righteousness and nowhere does one feel more virtuous than when working out in a gym. The hard pious faces go a long way toward explaining the universality of escape into iPods. Appropriately they don't seem to care even for one another, being tolerant only of their own Puritanism, not that of others.

I have a bet with Pelfrey as to which of us loses more weight by June. I am intent on winning -- just this once.


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