If you spend enough time around a person that you don't loathe, you find yourself picking up little aspects of their personality and making them your own.
For example, many years ago, my wife-to-be and I visited our alma mater and while we were there, we dropped in on Barry, an old high-school acquaintance of hers. We spent a few minutes' awkward conversation with two major variant computer geeks: the round (Barry) and the pencil-thin (Barry's roommate). As we left the dorm building, my wife commented "Wow. Barry's really porked out."
That's the first time I'd ever hear the term "porked out". It made me guffaw. I've used it ever since.
Another more recent example has lodged in my brain thanks to Harlock. Apparently, he's encountered quite a few foodstuffs, such as anything in a Little Debbie package, that "taste like ass."
Again, the reference struck me in an odd way. It's concise, piquant, and it allows for some extensive and amusing extension, such as coffee that tastes like it's made from only the finest, regional, hand-picked ass.
Apart from a simple turn of phrase, this sort of identity contagion can show itself in a modified wardrobe, an expanding taste in music, or a new house in the suburbs.
I have to admit that I've been infected with one of these more overt signs.
A few months ago, Harlock pointed me to a geek workout site.
No, not an erotic site full of pics of 350-lb. people of indeterminate gender dressed up as Toilet Hanako, Peorth, or Faye Valentine.
I'm talking about a geek approach to exercise: shovelglove.
It's geeky because it's ingenious and practical and it was developed with very little consideration for how ridiculous it might look.
The basic workout appealed to me on so many levels.
It's easy to slot into even the busiest of schedules due to its avoidance of schedulistically significant time. Anything over 15 minutes is schedulistically significant and therefore must be accounted for in a calendar or in a PDA. The shovelglove workout is 14 minutes. No excuses.
It's inexpensive. All you need is a sledgehammer. You don't need to pay sign-up fees or dues. You don't need to sit through the high-pressure sales pitch of the gym employee and her manager and her manager's manager, ad infinitum. You'd don't have to cough up major bank for a bunch of equipment that will sit in the garage gathering dust. After all, it's a well established fact that there's an inverse relationship between the amount paid for exercise equipment and the amount of use it gets.
It's practical. Your sole piece of equipment is, hey, a sledgehammer, useful for all sorts of gardening and home improvement projects. The sledge takes almost no floor space to store when you're not swinging it. Also, the workout itself, with it's variety of movements, is a dynamic, full-body affair, at least from the waist up. I spent too much time in the gym doing curls or flies or bench presses thinking about how the exercises were designed to isolate muscles and muscle groups. I suppose this is great if you're into bodybuilding, but I've been interested in overall fitness and it always felt a bit inadequate. For example, I'd be working on one of our cars, trying to hold a contorted position while trying to thread a bolt deep inside the engine compartment, and it would only take a few minutes until all the auxiliary muscles that I hadn't had a chance to work would be shaking and shuddering in exhaustion.
So these are the parts of shovelglove that piqued my rational side.
What really got me swinging a sledgehammer around was that Harlock had been doing it for several weeks before he mentioned it to me.
Images of lost arm-wrestling bouts and the resulting scorn wakened a very male, very irrational part of me. I say very irrational, because whenever Harlock and I get together, it is not to go to a titty bar, chug beer, and arm wrestle.
See, Harlock is rather slight in comparison to me and I've learned that hard work and determination often trumps laziness and natural ability.
I'd be damned if Harlock was going to buff-out and leave me a putty-fleshed butterball.
I like to make the excuse that my Scottish heritage would not stand for it. In other words, I have the body type that would look exactly correct with a kilt on and a huge pole in my hands. (A caber, folks, a caber. Jeesh, you have some potty minds out there.)
I made another example of my acute testosterone poisoning when I went to buy my sledge. See, I happened to know that Harlock had a 10-pounder. Standing in Home Depot, I gave the 10-pounder a test swing and got the impression that I'd need to upgrade sooner than I'd want to if I brought it home. I lined up the 10-pounder with the 12, the 16, and the 20. No, I didn't succumb completely and buy the 20-pounder. I took the 16-pounder home.
A word of advice: don't overdo it. Do sets of 10 or so for the first week. Resist the pull of curiosity. You can really hurt yourself and set yourself way back. Your muscles react quickly, but it takes time for your ligaments and tendons to build up as well. Also, if you overextend yourself, you're more likely to apply heroic measures to complete a set and pull muscles you didn't even knew existed.
That's the unhappy stuff. The happy stuff is that I've been doing it for a few months now and I'm extremely happy. I can help my son jump around the house without feeling like I'm going to die after the first five jumps. Everything's grown a bit lighter. Big bags of cat food are less cumbersome. I just waxed the minivan last night and felt good enough to move on to my car.
Most of all, I don't feel like a putty-fleshed butterball. I may not end up with a Brad-Pitt-caliber bod, but at least I'm doing something.
Oh, and don't expect much enthusiasm from the significant other. When I'm swinging my sledge in the garage, my wife doesn't bug me, not because she doesn't want to annoy me, but because she doesn't like to see me looking like such an ass.
Pakeha