Sore

I finally decided to start putting ab work back into my workouts and I obviously plan to start slowly. Along with legs and back exercises yesterday I did a couple different ab exercises with low weight, low repetition. So after a heavy leg and back day and a light bit of ab work, I finished up and headed out.

Next stop, cancel my membership with Cardinal Fitness. I had been torn on doing this for a while now since I have put on twenty pounds of solid muscle over my three years of membership there. But I haven't been in there since I got laid off from the school and didn't see too much reason to head out there anymore. Additionally, since I work for Lifestyle Family Fitness and have been in there seven days a week either to work, workout, or both I think it silly to keep paying for a membership with a different gym. Ultimately I went in and canceled and really didn't have this strange emotional upheaval I kept expecting. I just knew it was time to move on.

So after that a trip to the mall to screw around for a little bit. F.Y.E. played the entire Foster the People album so I stuck around for a little bit to listen to it. During my screwing around, I had that album, a few nice dvd sets, a few DS games, and other assorted crap before I realized I wasn't really there to buy anything yet. I went over to the GameStop and looked at 3DS games since buying that is also on my eventual purchases list. The dumbass employee I talked with about the 3DS apparently thought I never played a video game in my life, and I never knew that Zelda is a series that has been going on for 25 years now. I kept shooting him down but he kept on this high horse, I'm smarter than you crap so I left. Fucking gamers.

But ultimately last night was a going away party at the bar. The personal trainer manager at my gym took a job with a gym in Chicago and is moving up there. We had wings and pizza and I decided to actually try to act like I drink so I ordered a rum and coke and then several coke refills. Well, the bartender didn't hear me correctly so she filled a tumbler with rum. In thinking it was already mixed, I took a big swig and was in for a surprise. That shit is rough going down. I ordered a coke, drank it down, and then mixed the drink myself. It tasted a lot better and I likely wound up a bit tipsy. Obviously the crowd were from the gym, and were largely the guy's clients so obviously we talked gym stuff all night. It was cool and we had a lot of fun. The party went on downtown and I was pretty much done for the night. Another one of my co-workers wanted me to go bar hopping with him as though he has no idea I am just not a bar person. After a lot of bickering he went on his way and I went home.

So today I woke up really sore in my abs and with a sore throat from yelling over the music at the bar. And after a chest, shoulder, and arm workout today I am sore everywhere else. But somehow one mixed drink and like six cokes left me really ripped, so there's that.

The size seekers

One of my co-workers and workout partner at the gym job has decided to really start training the both of us for size, even more so than I have done in the past. He's a very skinny dude as of right now but has played a lot of sports in high school and college so he knows how to exercise. His plan is for us to do 3 sets of 20-25 reps of each exercise and we alternate stations doing exercises without taking a break. The plan is do be that much more of an intense workout and it will last only an hour rather than an hour and a half to two hours each time. It seems working so far as I am sore from exercise again and I don't try to fit every single possible leg exercise in on leg days. I leave more pumped up than normal so it's all good. Hopefully this new way works and we both put on a good deal of size.

Excalibur

During my teenage years I read a lot of comic books. The Uncanny X-Men was my favorite as it featured Colossus, a hulking Russian dude who can turn his skin to steel. He is a badass, through and through. Shortly after his sister Illyana died and he was written out of the series for a while, I began to look elsewhere for a new comic to enjoy.

And I stumbled upon Excalibur. This series had Nightcrawler and Shadowcat, two X-Men which I also really liked. I came in at an extremely awkward time in the series's run. The entire team was Britanic, Meggan, Daytripper, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, and Moira MacTaggart. And when I started reading, Douglock was brought in, of which was possibly one revived member of two former New Mutants team members. I enjoyed that these stories had little to nothing to do with the main X-Men stories and therefore have very little impact on their proceedings. Here was a whole new part of the Marvel Universe with a couple somewhat familiar faces and everything was new once again.

So I had to fill in the blanks and get ahold of the earlier issues and was shocked to see that the book was nothing like its present incarnation. I instantly came to like Rachel Summers as Phoenix and the rest of the cast grew on me, despite the fact that most of them had very little to add to the plot. Their dimension hopping and other silliness was so far removed from anything I had read in a comic before. I was engrossed. They faced off against goofy ass villains like Technet, a team of 8-10 beings and each of them had a pretty cool power but they were woefully unable to act as one, and The Crazy Gang, a twisted vision of a bunch of Alice in Wonderland characters. An early issue had a character closely connected to Captain Britain die and replaced by an evil parallel version but it took well over fifty issues for this to even come to a head. And Widget, a small round robot that looked kind of like a floating head took about 40 issues to transform into a really cool looking robot and it took another 20 or so issues to reveal that Widget was actually the future version of Shadowcat from Rachel Summer's timeline who was combined with a Sentinel.

Now I will say that the first 67 issues were really only good when Chris Claremont and/or Alan Davis were writing and mostly when Alan Davis was doing the art. Some fill-in artists on early issues were truly awful. Alan Davis is one of my favorite artists and a panel from issue #50 is tattooed on my body. I keep wanting to get the cover to issue #66 (pictured) tattooed on somewhere as it is my favorite comic book cover of all time.

After Davis left the book sucked outright until Warren Ellis started writing and Colossus joined the team. At the time I didn't know better. I wanted to read anything with Excalibur on the cover. After Warren Ellis left and Ben Raab wrote the book just petered out to cancellation. Raab was a horrible writer, though I will admit he got better the more issues he wrote. From issue #68 on the book had little to do with anything Claremont and Davis did. It went from odd little stories and dimension hopping to X-Men style action stories. I stuck this book out all the way to the end because I liked those characters.

I have all of the trade paperbacks put out for this series and everything that is worth a damn is out. I have my doubts these would be huge sellers. The series as a whole seemed geared toward my own entertainment needs and those are very specific.

Stupid music video of the day

Today's stupid video and song is about being "Free, free, free, free, free. The night is young. Free, free, free, free, free, free." It is sung by a woman who is clearly dealing with aging and desperately wants to connect with the younglings. I guess that really is all I have to say about this.

Band ideas

Over the years I have wanted or attempted to join/start a band several times and each time it fails. So today I shall speak of my genius ideas that have never come to fruition and you will pretty much see why I just will never be in a band.

First off, I have absolutely no musical ability which would make me a shoe-in for punk. I can punk sing, talk sing, and kind of hardcore scream. That's quite the range right there. Why aren't people lined up at my door?

Back in my first years of college, a couple of my friends who were in bands wanted to start a band called nerdcore and have me sing/scream the lyrics. Every song would have been about how Microsoft is evil. Obviously this never happened. And it's really just a one trick pony.

So a few years later, I wanted to start a band called Madame Maria and Her Twirling Ass-Ponies in which we would do covers of a wide variety of songs from indie rock to 80s New Wave. So obviously my built-up ass would be strutting around shirtless on stage for all of these songs. But the real kicker? Madame Maria is a lady who stands off to the side making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches during our live performances when she's not providing backup vocals. She hands out sandwiches and dudes walk away feeling good. Performance art!

And more recently I have been rolling around the idea of a cover band where we only cover songs that have backup vocals. And the comic twist here? All of the backup vocals are not sang but rather very plaintively stated.

As you can see, I have a ton of great ideas! You should probably go ahead and subscribe to this newsletter.

Going full retard

I have bitched about the media lot in my previous blog and have yet to really get back into that with this blog. But I have to post this lovely bit of utter stupidity from MSNBC's site:

"Sorry you're sick, but wow, you're
so skinny!

People suffering from illnesses often get weight loss compliments."

That's American news media folks. It's no wonder people are so stupid.

Direction

Since being laid off, I've been throwing the idea around of going back to school. For what? Physical Therapy, Nutrition, Exercise Science, Accounting, or even going to Gallaudet University for Sign Language interpretation and K-12 physical education. Thoughts, anyone?

Exerciser

Kind of short. There was a guy that worked out at my gym who had been working with our biggest trainer. This trainer is a massive dude and I would like to eventually get some sessions in with him also. So this trainer had this guy do this ridiculously hard bicep curls and this guy basically had me spotting him and more or less pushing the bar into his chest when he fatigued. Now that I know it's a good one for size, I've been trying like hell to build myself up to be able to do it. What is this exercise? Well, you do it on the bicep machine. I chose 30 pounds to start. It's 20 reps at 30 pounds, then 15 reps at 45 pounds, 10 reps at 60 pounds, 8 reps at 75 pounds, 8 reps at 90 pounds and then 8 reps at 105 pounds. You do this all straight through, take a couple minute rest and then start at 8 reps at 105 pounds and then back up to 20 reps at 30 pounds. Needless to say, it's just too much for me. However, today was the first day I've been able to make it halfway through this madness. I wasn't able to do any other bicep exercises but that's fine. Halfway is a lot further than I've done previously.

The other one is a set of pushups that are rough. You start with diamond pushups for ten reps, then to neutral pushups for ten reps, wide pushups for ten reps, and then neutrals pushups and back down to diamond pushups. I have to rest before the final set of diamond pushups, which isn't too bad.

And I've finally started to do ab exercises again since straining those muscles twice. I've been going real light on them.

I'm close to my goal weight and I keep finding new ways to put more stress on my body for bigger muscles, which is great. The only drawback is that I'm getting very close to getting stretch marks along the edges of my chest. I need to get cocoa butter to take care of that.

Troll feeding

I have come to really like the band Foster the People. "Pumped Up Kicks" took some time to grow on me but "Houdini" is such a great song that it sold me on these guys. The music videos for these two songs were basically comprised of the band playing in bars. Nothing groundbreaking but with YouTube does it really matter how artfully done the music video is anymore? Well, this band went ahead and made a music video for the song "Helena Beat." This song is decent, nothing too memorable in my book, but the video is the very definition of trying too hard. Let's watch, shall we? I'm trying to post the video under the text but apparently either I'm a moron because it will either post above or next to the text.


So anyway, some dumbass posted this comment: the symbolism in this video is satanic in nature,,,to the avg person this seems like just another creepy video but theres much more lurking in the shadows,,,the concept of the new man,,,,transhumanism, the luciferian initiation,,,the destruction of the old world to bring in the new world order,,,where evil reigns supreme,,,truth is trampled upon and the father of lies prevails
Wow that was deep. You have to admire certain people's ability to see the devil in absolutely everything. The use of commas like that makes this person look so much more intelligent. So anyway, I knew better than to comment. You ignore the trolls, not feed them. But I didn't. I commented anyway, and it was to the effect of "Michelle Bachmann is here to set us straight. Hooray!" Then I got this beautiful message:

you need to look into the nazi concept of the new man,,,thats right,,,,THE NEW MAN,,,then look up transhumanism,,,and then the RFID technology,,,then look up satanism in the music industry,,,,then look up the new world order,,,,then go to the website the rainbow swastika,,,,the concept being portrayed in that video is not new,,,,theres a meaning behind it,,,but unless youre really into the occult you wouldnt understand,, ,,,this is a promotion of a satanic agenda,,,this is not hidden ,,,,this is not a secret,,,its common knowledge for anyone who follows politics on a serious level,,,a world government is being put together,,,thats why you see all of these gov around the world imploding at the same time,,,
and what you see in that vid is social engineering its not new,,,look into it,,,this isnt a joke,,,this is serious

In short? Loved it. Here is someone who took a goofy music video to an entirely new level. I didn't even reply to this person. This level of clear stupidity/trolling is something I am not even going to deal with.

Pretentiousness

This video plays quite a bit at the gym where I work. It is, in my opinion the height of pretension. Watch and see for yourself:

I made a student film in college where I over-act every emotion available. It was in black and white and kind of a parody of those learning films from the 50s and kind of a parody of silly arthouse flicks. This somehow puts me in mind of that. It also puts me in mind of this classic clip from The Critic:

So in short, don't be all high and mighty with your art.