I suck at video games. I guess they’re still fun, though. I’m playing things at the lowest levels and just barely winning. At least that means there’s lots harder levels if I get good at them. Right now I’m playing Mario Kart, which is a lot sillier and more fun than my daily commute. I guess I could really slow it down and play NPR and pretend it was my daily commute. Not sure why I’d want to do that, though.

The day I found out that I couldn’t afford to date anyway, my friend called and told me that there were Wii’s available at the Target by work. So I went out with some friends and got one at lunch. This also involved eating a hamburger at Dairy Queen and my justification was in two parts:

1. I didn’t have to get cheese on the burger (thus maintaining my cheeseburger-less streak).
2. Target is near the Dairy Queen.

Of course I didn’t leave work early, and I didn’t miss my workout at the gym so that makes me a bad geek who didn’t play with his brand-new Wii much. I could have skipped the gym since my legs are sore from squats and my chest is sore from pullups. I played a couple of miserable holes of golf and an easy race around the track with Mario Cart but that was the extent of my Wii-ing.

The gym’s blog has yet another spectacular picture of me.

Now I’m beginning to wonder if I’d need to make a lot more than $10,000,000/year to go out with a 34-year-old.

I’m trying to decide what my “target weight” should be. I know it’s less than what I have, but not sure how much less. A couple of guys at work are shooting for 20lbs in 20 weeks and they have about 60 pounds on me already, I think. In any case, my ultra-accurate bathroom scale (a relic of the 1960’s) tells me I weigh about a pound less a few hours after dinner. The only thing I’ve been doing in that time is watching TV and moving my mouse around, so I’m figuring I’m getting a really good burn from computer use. OK, so I probably go to the bathroom, but I’d have to lose like a pint of liquid to lose a pound there. Maybe I need a better scale.

I spent a bunch of time trying to make a graph of how many years I’d have to wait for someone lower than my “dateable age” to make it to my “dateable range”. It’s really just about the math, because let’s face it, I’d have to be a lot richer to get anyone that young to go out with me. I work out in the suburbs and a 38YO woman requires a median income of at least $80K/year to pronounce you dateable (from my friend’s Yahoo profile). I kind of figure I’d have to be a multimillionaire to go out with a 18-year-old, so let’s just figure an income about $50,000,000 per year like a Formula One race car driver.

Obviously there’s something wrong with my math because I’d have to make $5,000,000 a year to date a 36-year-old. Or maybe not. Numbers don’t lie.

Well, my computer has crashed once from my graph-making and it’s late. However, I will insert another disturbing graph which shows if I wanted to go out with a 27-year-old, I’d have to wait five years (and make $28,000,000 a year according to graph #1). Yeah, it goes all the way down to 18, but I don’t have that kind of time or make that kind of money (or have that kind of patience to listen to 18-year-olds).

I guess I’m very very close to being at the gym more than anyone else (besides Nathan, The Head Honcho), but one of the yoots has been there the same number of times I have. Nurse Tiffany is going to beat me if I don’t watch it. She’s only 23, though, and pretty darn strong. And she speeds through things much faster than me. For example, her web site says she types 94 words a minute. And me?

64 words

Speedtest

So she’s one and a half times faster than me, and probably just as much faster at all the workouts at the gym. But then again, I’m a member of Team DFL (Dead Effing Last, for those who don’t remember). But lucky me, yoots like vacations and I think she’s gone tomorrow, the last day of the month. I may win after all!

In other news, I thought I’d figure out how much I should weigh and my body mass index is about 26, or “overweight.” I read how that’s not the most accurate measure of fitness, just easy to calculate. So I looked at my hip-to-waist ratio and it’s about 0.95, or “big load” and this is after losing 6 pounds. Either I have to get my waist smaller or I have to get my narrow Asian ass bigger. Maybe I should just quit measuring things.

Well, anyone who knows me knows that I’m always doing something stupid on my computer, especially when I should be sleeping. I didn’t sleep all that well last night and woke up repeatedly. This made for a joyful Monday at work, where first thing in the morning I have a customer meeting where I’m told what a disappointment I happen to be. But back to my poor sleep, I think the nice weather just made for more plant sex and that triggered my hay fever. I woke up because the inside of my head was itchy. If I could have scratched my ear canal with something nice and poky and cool like, say, a Phillips screwdriver I had left in the refrigerator, I think I would have given it a try. But I really don’t think I would have made it out of my 20’s if I was trying things like that.

If I really was on a diet, and not just a cheeseburger avoidance exercise, I would have really blown it this weekend. Carolyn was in town from Chicago and I had to go out to dinner with the group. I suppose the swordfish the first night wasn’t so bad, but the lasagna and the leftover bits of my sister’s chicken parmigiana were probably a little much. Oh, and then there was the beer drinking, but I was drinking with the fit yoots from the gym and, heck, the drinking works for them so I figured I’d give it a try. And finally I went to my co-worker’s open house on Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t insult his wife by not eating the high calorie nibbly bits, could I?

I was gone most of the day and someone seems to have picked today to deluge me with spam that made it through my spam filter. I received lots of weird crap, but on the plus side I found out that my Buttberry is able to display spam in Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Today was my co-worker’s open house, and I never know what to bring. So last year I figured I should buy some flowers and this year I did the same. There are pluses to this. One is, I like flowers. Two is, I let the women at the local florists pick them out and they’re usually kind of cute. Third is, flowers are transitory and no one feels guilty about throwing them out if they don’t like them. It’s an all-around win.

I told my high school counselor that I might want be a florist or cut hair and she told me to shut the hell up and finish my applications to MIT and Caltech. It’s probably all for the best.

So what does a guy do when he’s confronted by three other people from his gym who are eating cheeseburgers? Eating something even worse: lasagna and some of his sister’s chicken parmigiana.

I had a chicken salad for lunch (at a strip club) and I had a salad at dinner, and that’s what I’m blaming for my digestive troubles tonight. Not the undercooked swordfish, not the beer. But what are you supposed to do when you’re not eating cheeseburgers? I had dinner with the family and Carolyn from Chicago and 3 out of 5 people got hamburgers. One with cheese, one without, and one with bacon, cheese, and a fried egg. I was even offered a quarter of one but I resisted! And look where it got me! A trip to the Pepto Bismol bottle!

I wonder if the lack of cheeseburgers is making me hallucinate.

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.