Crazy Health Kick

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Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I am on a super amazing healthy kick and I would like to share my sense of smug superiority with all of y'all. Ha ha! I haven't had a cigarette in 12 days (yeah, yeah, just forget about last Thursday, would you?) and I went to the gym again today and yesterday I took the dogs to the park for a 40 minute run. Is this not freaky? Are you not astounded? I am. Well, I had to do something to outwit the stress baking. Also, this is how I'm quitting smoking: I'm exercising a lot so I keep on hoicking up really horrible unsavory shit from the depths of my abused lungs and it keeps making me think EWWW this is DISGUSTING EWWW braaargh (that is the patented barfing noise code used in our family) and that in turn makes me think that I am damned if I'm ever going though this fresh hell again so therefore I cannot start smoking again. Besides, I enjoy the people watching at the Y. I am not the fattest, freakiest looking person there, nor am I the skinniest, most beautiful by a long, long run. It's good to be in the middle. I feel normal.

Here, by the way, is what normal looks like naked (via, naturally, Metafilter.) I might at some point (after, probably, the gym has had an effect other than making me feel smug) take some naked pix and send them to this site because I find it a little annoying/disturbing that the vast majority of the pictures are young women and older men. That is because, I think (wild generalization alert!) that young women, even the non traditionally beautiful, are confident that they are young and therefore attractive, while older women think they should be put on the ice floes. Meanwhile, men get more self and body confident with age and it doesn't faze them at all to be 50 and, well, ginormous. Sometimes it should. You see this at the beach occasionally and it's like hooo, daddy! Put on some clothes!

There was a guy in the pool at the Y today who I was totally sure was naked. I was getting my new picture taken for my new gym ID and while I was standing there waiting for the Y person to figure out how to work the ID machine I was watching the pool out the window. I kept seeing this guy doing laps and I was all, wow, he is so naked, that is totally his butt, how liberated they are here, naked swimming, huh, you wouldn't think that would go over well even in Asheville, I wonder if his bathing suit fell off, that would be amusing, perhaps the lifeguard will go racing over there, ha ha, high drama! Then I realized finally that he was merely wearing a completely flesh toned bathing suit. Why? Why was he wearing that? Why is that even manufactured? I do not know.

However so as to leave you with better people watching anecdotes this morning as I was driving down Haywood by the cathedral I saw a lady and her dog who I want to photograph and enter into one of those dog/owner lookalike contests. The dog was fuzzy and round and white and the lady was round and wearing a fuzzy coat and had fuzzy white hair and they were just delightful and it made me happy.

Then I went to the gym? Did I mention my gym trip? Ha ha I am more exercisey than you!!

Oh and also I AM GOING TO ATLANTA TO SEE THE POGUES. On Monday. I have not seen Shane McGowan in the decaying flesh since 1989 when I saw the Pogues and the Violent Femmes and Mojo Nixon in NYC, so I am extremely, but extremely, psyched. Yay yay.