To Eat Or Not To Eat

Like everyone else in the US, I want to lose some weight. That really should be our national pastime. Baseball is a great game, but seriously, do you know more people who play baseball or who diet? I rest my case.

Food didn't always run my life. There was a time when I was a regular Captain Kirk, taking my shirt off every chance I got. Now, I'm more like the Priceline Negotiator. If only I could negotiate a 200-calorie discount on pizza....

Southern California is an unfortunate place to be chunky. Aside from maybe southern Florida, nowhere else inundates you with as many examples of what you should look like. You can't throw a stick without hitting ... well ... a stick.

I suppose the people in these places are more patriotic in their eating habits than, say, the Deep South, where anything that can't be fried isn't worth eating, or the Midwest, where eating is actually a hobby. The people of the South and the Heartland just prefer baseball, that's all.

But the choice of baseball over diet also leads to high incidences of Dunlap disease (a deformity in which one's stomach done lap over his belt). I find myself in the early stages of this disease, my efforts to treat it with malted barley having proven unsuccessful. It appears that I may have to resort to more extreme measures like exercise and -- horror of horrors -- abandoning my vending machine diet.

I don't have anything against exercise. Back during my Captain Kirk days, I exercised all the time, and I even enjoyed it. But now, I've found that exercise is really, really painful. Not only does it hurt, but it hurts for days on end. After a brutal work-out, when you're sucking air like Darth Vader, sweating like a broken sprinkler head, smelling like a flatulent wildebeest, and wondering how you could feel like this after 8 minutes, how could you be expected to deny yourself the solace of a hot fudge sundae?

I confess. I've left the gym and headed straight to McDonald's for an ice cream cone. (Who puts a gym walking distance from a McDonald's anyway?) By the same token, I've stopped at that same McDonald's on my way to the gym to grab some fries. I need energy for my workout, you know. But, I can honestly say that I have never stopped there both before and after the gym. I do have my limits...sometimes.

My real problem isn't exercise, though. It's food. I like to eat. I really like to eat. I get amused by dietary supplements that are designed to keep you from being hungry. The problem we Chunks have isn't that we're always eating because we're hungry; it's that we're always eating when we're not hungry.

If there were nothing to stop me, I would eat all the time. Have you ever seen someone blow up a rubber glove like a balloon? That would be me, a big round ball with stubby little arms and legs sticking out of it. It wouldn't matter that I couldn't fit into a car, because I would just roll my body from fast food joint to fast food joint, stuffing my body with food that has a shelf life of 8000 years.

Fortunately, I am saved from that fate by my other great love, sleep. As much as I love to eat, I do manage to stop for several hours at a time...every day! This is only because I have not yet found a way to combine my two great passions and enjoy them both simultaneously. But bear with me, True Believers! I've put in a request for a government grant to do some research into the matter.

If you ask me, we are doing something wrong. How is it that the French and the Italians, both known for great food, are consistently thin, while we Americans, who boast the hot dog as our culinary contribution to the world, can't stop eating long enough to get on a scale? This observation has led to my next plan for regaining svelteness. I'm going to go on a French food diet. I'll let you know how that goes.

Pavement, Pavement Everywhere ... and Nary a Spot to Park

We've all done it. You pull into a parking lot and head straight towards the front door, hoping to get lucky. You pause for a moment to curse the fact that there are 20 handicap spaces, only 2 of which are in use. Then you start the Quest-- crawling slowly up one aisle and down the next, like Pac-Man on Thorazine.

The funny thing is that once you get halfway down the aisle (going away from the store), you stop looking. You're not even interested in what's available that far away. At some point, you speed up as you pass 6 empty spaces down at the end and then 8 more on your way back up until you decide you're close enough. Then you slow down and turn the radar on again.

I don't know what it is about walking from the far end of a parking lot that seems like a fate worse than death. For some reason, though, it appears that driving around the parking lot for 20 minutes is better than taking the 2-minute walk from BFE.

At some point, you wise up, and you wait for someone to come out of the store so you can stalk them to their car. Once you identify a target, you fall in behind them, going as slowly as you can get your car to go. You amuse yourself with a fantasy about mowing this person down. Of course, you wouldn't actually do that because...well...then there'd be nobody to move their car out of your space.

So, you just plug along slowly, just close enough that the lady you're following has to know you're there. Of course she will never let on that she knows. If she did, she might feel like she should hurry, and it's lot easier for her to just pretend that you're out for a Sunday drive...on Saturday... in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Inevitably, your prey turns in between two cars, and you think you've finally reached your destination, only to find that she picked this spot to cross over to the next aisle. So, you punch the gas and go tearing down the aisle like a 747 about to take off. You're cursing the lady for not going down the right aisle in the first place, but deep down, you know you've done the same thing.

In fact, you did it an hour ago at Best Buy. And you laughed your head off when the guy rushed to catch you in the next row. You even considered cutting back over to where you started, just to mess with him.

Somehow, though, that memory escapes you as whip around the far end and come flying up to where your mark is still crawling towards her car, and you're again thinking about running her over.

At long last, she walks up to a car, opens the trunk, and empties her children's college fund into it. As she makes her way around to the driver side door and climbs in, you idly wonder whether she does everything this slowly, or whether you're just special.

What do people do when they get into their cars that takes so long?! I can't figure it out. Do they say a prayer of thanksgiving for the good parking space they were granted? Eeni-meeni-miini-moh for which gear to select? Post an update to Facebook with a picture of the loser waiting for their parking space?

Even worse is when you finally see the white reverse lights come on...but the car still doesn't move! What is going on in there? Are they consulting the manual on what to do next? Did the voices interrupt with an urgent message?

By the time she finally gets out of the way, you've wasted 10 minutes and a gallon of gas, but it's OK, because you've got a parking space only halfway down the parking lot. Then, just as you're about to pull in, you see someone else pulling out 4 cars up, and you seriously consider going up there to try and get it. But then you see that that guy already has a stalker, so you reluctantly stick with what you have.

If you ask me, we should just head straight for the far end of the parking lot in the first place. Not only is it faster, but most of us can use the extra exercise anyway. Come to think of it, maybe I should start parking a block away....

Beating a Dead Tiger...er...Horse

I really didn't intend to do this, but it's very much like a car accident on the interstate. At first, you curse the rubberneckers who are holding up traffic because of their morbid curiosity. You have every intention of keeping your eyes forward when you get there, but as you approach, some invisible force starts cranking your head around. It doesn't take long before the strain is too much to bear, and you allow your head to swing the rest of the way over, taking in the scene as you slow down just a little, far too conscientious a driver to maintain top speed when your eyes aren't on the road.

I have fought the good fight, but now I capitulate and show myself to be no better than the pop culture equivalent of a rubbernecker. I am going to discuss Tiger Woods.

The guy has very successfully kept his private life private for a long time, but those days are over, because it turns out that his private life has more twists and turns than a Shakira video. From a rubbernecking standpoint, his car accident wasn't a simple matter of running into a tree; it was the equivalent of a 12-car pileup.

OK, so you're a bajillionaire superstar, the uncontested best at your chosen field. After you marry a former swimsuit model, women continue to throw themselves at you. Do you:

a) Repeatedly say, "Thanks, but no thanks" and go home to be with your beautiful wife?

b) Remain faithful except in the rare cases where the woman is so stunningly beautiful that your wife says "Yeah, I would have done her, too."

c) Embark on a series of infidelities with a trailer park lineup so frightening that even Bill Clinton calls to say, "Dude, what were you thinking?"

What was he thinking? Clearly, he wasn't after looks. These women aren't even in the same league as his wife. But then, I was once told that no matter how beautiful a woman is, there is somebody somewhere who's sick and tired of her crap. Could that have been it? Did Tiger learn the hard way that beauty is only skin deep and now he was looking for something else? Unlikely.

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt on that one for a minute and say that he had risen above the shallowness of going for looks. It doesn't appear that class was too high on his list either. Porn actresses and call girls?! Tiger should have just hung out on the set of Rock of Love and picked off all the skanky blonde tramps he could handle.

In fairness, I must point out that Rachel Uchitel went on record in a highly respected periodical, universally recognized as a bastion of truth and integrity (OK! magazine), to say that she is not a whore, tramp, escort, or bimbo. It's a good thing she told us.

Tiger went to Stanford, didn't he? Doesn't that mean he's supposed to be smart? He should be smart enough to at least be discreet. That means staying away from anyone described in a gossip column as a "party girl". Did he really think these attention whores would keep their mouths shut? Ever heard of Paris Hilton?

The guy makes millions of dollars playing golf over the course of a weekend, but he can't spring for a second cell phone to use with his concubines? Or better still, couldn't he just buy a disposable when he gets to town? It's a wonder he didn't get caught sooner.

With Tiger's money, he probably should have just hired his own personal "procurement agent, " someone to take care of enabling, arranging, and erasing all traces of Tiger's trysts. I'm sure he could have gotten a good reference on Capitol Hill.

Alternatively, he could have just paid for it. At least, that way, discretion is incentivized by professional courtesy and the promise of repeat business. A phone call to Charlie Sheen or Elliot Spitzer could have had Tiger merrily fornicating in no time. I have to believe that right about now, $1000/hr seems like a small price to pay. And I don't expect that a guy who cheats on his wife is going to get stuck on the legalities or morality of prostitution.

Still, I just can't believe that they're all telling the truth. Is it possible that Tiger would be dumb enough to pick up a homely waitress from the local Perkins and think that word wouldn't get back to his wife? Maybe he figured nobody would believe it. And if it weren't for his chew toys coming out of the woodwork, no one would have.

If you ask me, Tiger will ultimately be OK. It is disappointing to learn that he is a loser who cheats on his wife, but sadly, that sort of thing just isn't shocking anymore. The Tiger Woods image will never quite recover, but that just means that he no longer has to protect it. He can go ahead and buy himself a doublewide den of iniquity in the trailer park of his choice, and no one will think much of it. Unless his golf swing deserts him completely, he'll always have plenty of money and plenty of gold-diggers to choose from. As for Elin Nordegren, should she choose to strike out on her own, I think there will be no shortage of men prepared to console her...and help her spend Tiger's money.

Can't Afford To Be Broke

Being broke is expensive.

It doesn't seem like that should be true, does it? If you have no money, then you can spend no money, and if you spend no money, you live inexpensively, right? For the most part, I think it does work that way...until the day that you think to yourself, "But wait -- I have a credit card." That single thought is enough to start you circling the drain.

Back when I was a graduate student, I was a bit tight on cash. Store-brand bread was my primary staple, and while I usually had peanut butter in the house, cheese was a luxury that didn't see the inside of my fridge for 2 years. When the local supermarket had Kraft Mac and Cheese for 29 cents it was pretty much manna from Heaven. I ate enough rice to single-handedly keep the Cambodian economy afloat and enough beans to keep myself afloat.

I had no money, but I did have a car. One glorious day, a friend who had the opposite problem made me a sweetheart of a deal. "If you'll drive me to Burger King," he said, "I'll buy you dinner." I was on that like a fat kid on a Smartie. It would be the first of many cheeseburgers that I funded by prostituting my Tercel. As it turns out, automobile prostitution is perfectly legal in Indiana.

Now, on one such trip, I noticed a sign that said, "Credit cards now accepted."

But wait...I have a credit card.

Yes, I had one of those $500 cards that they market to students in order to introduce them to the debt that will be a constant companion for the rest of their lives.

"This is Visa the monkey. She will be on your back until the day you die."

So, my monkey started buying me fast food. It wasn't every day, but it was way too often. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that I was essentially financing french fries. Everybody else was paying 99 cents, but I was paying 99 cents at 15% interest.

The funny thing about circling that drain is that at first it's really slow. You don't even notice it. $5 on a credit card here and there seems harmless enough. But it's not. I didn't know it at the time, but I had taken my first hit of financial crack. That burger and fries became gasoline and concert tickets and clothes, and suddenly I was maxed out and back to eating Top Ramen and catsup soup.

Now I was beyond broke. I was in the red, wishing I could get back to only being broke. It's like cursing traffic because you're only doing 30 mph on the interstate only to have it come to a dead stop, and you realize how happy you would be to be doing 30 again. I had managed, without increasing my income, to add a monthly payment to the disaster that was my financial situation. It would have been much less expensive had I just been able to afford a Whopper.

But debt isn't the only thing that makes subsistence living expensive.

Being able to buy the 50-pack of toilet paper at Costco doesn't seem like much of a luxury -- until you can't do it. I never even wanted to until I had a wife and daughters all under the same roof. After years of trying to figure out how they could consume so much TP, I finally concluded that they do just that -- they consume it. I do recognize that a few squares of toilet paper with a little mustard constitutes a low-fat, high fiber, tasty snack -- perfect for Atkins Diet practitioners -- but I just can't get behind the idea. It's actually less appealing than rice cakes, and that's saying something!

But I digress. The point is that those who are broke cannot buy the 50-pack. These folks buy 4-packs and sometimes even the single rolls of that one-layer onion paper that is otherwise reserved for rest rooms in government buildings. The person who can afford to buy toilet paper by the truckload gets a volume discount, while the poor soul who is developing scar tissue where there should never be any is paying full price. As my 8th grade science teacher used to say, "Somethin' in the milk ain't clean."

Well, if you ask me, it's about time we recognize how much of our economy rides on the back of people with no money. If everyone could afford everything they need, credit cards would be almost nonexistent, and the vampires who run them would be relegated to rolling little old ladies for small change and knocking over blood banks to get dinner. Banks need to recognize that without the people who pay late fees and insufficient fund fees and over-the limit fees, their profit structure would fall apart like the Chicago Cubs at play-off time. Car dealers would lose financing as a means to rip off their customers. Debt collectors would have to find some other avenue for their...skills. And the list goes on.

How about a little respect for the people who really keep the economy going? Let's give the broke a break.

Ignorance is bliss ... but whose bliss is it?

On a hot, summer, southern California day, I stopped at a convenience store to get some ice. I'd never been to this particular place before and didn't know where the ice was. The place wasn't that big, and I could have looked around until I found it, but I am far too lazy to do that when there is a clerk standing right there eagerly awaiting the opportunity to help me out.

"Hi. Where's the ice?" I asked.

He just pointed towards the far corner at the back of the store. Apparently, he wasn't as eager to serve as I might have hoped. I looked in the direction he indicated, but from where I was standing, I could see no sign of ice. Well, laziness is a funny thing, because it permeates every aspect of your life. I wasn't interested in walking all the way back there until I knew there was some ice in that corner, and I hadn't ruled out the possibility that he was, in fact, pointing to a cooler outside. So, before taking another step, I asked my eager-to-please, service-oriented font of grocery knowledge, "Is it inside or outside?"

That's when any pretense of customer service disappeared. The clerk crossed his arms, looked at me and said, "How am I going to send you outside for ice?"

Every once in a while someone says something to you that is so unexpected, your brain struggles to process it. Had the clerk said to me, "It's raining pink elephants outside, and I don't have a thing to wear", it would have been one of those things. "How am I going to send you outside for ice?" was another. I stood there blinking at him for a couple of seconds like an orangutan with a lobotomy before I finally managed to say, "Are you serious?"

Apparently he was, because his answer was, "How am I going to send you outside for ice?"

There's not a lot of good that can come from a discussion with a guy like this, so it's best to just walk away. Unfortunately, that's really hard to do sometimes. Instead, I explained, "A lot of places sell their ice from a big white cooler that they keep outside."

"Those are the supermarkets."

What?? At this point, it was clear that the guy didn't know what he was talking about and would never admit it. I don't have a problem with ignorance; we're all ignorant about something. But ignorance with attitude is really annoying. I saw myself getting sucked in, and I didn't like it, but I just couldn't let the guy off with that.

"Well, I used to work in a convenience store that had one of those coolers outside, so it's not just the supermarkets."

Einstein-the-clerk shrugged. I headed to the far corner of the store where, sure enough, the ice was stacked in the bottom of the beer cooler.

I paid for my ice without another word, and while I'm sure the whole thing was forgotten, from his standpoint, by the time I left the store, I marveled all the way home at what this fellow had said to me, and more importantly, how he had said it.

If you ask me, I was the victim all the way. Not only did I get publicly ridiculed by a mental midget, but the guy got under my skin enough that I was still thinking about the episode long after it had stopped ratting around in the prodigious empty space between his ears. And to top it all off, I have to deal with the guilt of knowing that I could have avoided the entire thing if I had just been willing to find the ice on my own.

Getting Older ... Fast

I recently had a conversation with an employee who asked whether I would be available by e-mail while I was on vacation. I explained that my Blackberry had just died, and I lamented the fact that I was really going to miss the GPS during my trip.
"Yesterday, I had to resort to buying a map," I said.
"Mapquest?" he asked.
"No, a real map."
"Google Maps?"
"No, an actual paper map."
"Oh...they still sell those?"
He was serious. Apparently, the world of today's 24-year-old is so thoroughly electronic, that a map is a relic of an ancient time. When did I become old, and how did I miss it?
Thinking about it, though, the world he grew up in really is quite different from the one I knew. He has probably never seen a black-and-white TV with aluminum foil wrapped around the rabbit ears. He can't even imagine only having 3 channels, and he doesn't associate PBS with the UHF dial. He has never turned the television on at 2:15 in morning and heard the Star Spangled Banner playing because the station was off-air for the night. He probably doesn't even realize that once upon a time, MTV showed videos.
Chances are, he has never used a typewriter, and almost definitely not one of those first-generation word processors that was the size of a small suitcase. He's never had a phone with a pulse-tone switch, and he has certainly never had to actually dial a telephone.
All his classrooms, from kindergarten on, had computers. In college, he had a laptop, a cell phone, an iPod, and satellite TV in the dorm room.

Apparently, I really did grow up in the Dark Ages.

Well, if you ask me, those of us who grew up in more ... rustic ... times have better survival skills than the youth of today. If the cell phone dies, we actually know how to use a pay phone. If the iPod bites the dust, we still have a box full of cassettes in the garage and a tape deck in the attic. And if the GPS craps out, we can read a map.
And by the way, the youth of today may be more tech-savvy than us older folks, but I'd like to see one of them fold that map.

Enter the Yard Warrior

Today, I cut the grass in my backyard with a weed-whacker. It's not my preferred method, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Lawn care in the South is just not the same as it is in Southern California. In Socal, you do have to cut your grass...if you water it. There's a lot more effort that goes into making grass grow than there is in dealing with it once (if) if gets long. In Georgia, if you haven't mowed your lawn at least once by the end of April, you go from being the hunter to the hunted.

And when you do mow the lawn on your postage stamp lot in Southern California, it takes longer to dig the machine out of your garage and gas it up than it does to actually cut the grass. Since the front and back yards are each likely to be smaller than the largest room in your house, it's kind of like outdoor vacuuming. A riding mower in Los Angeles is about as useful as a snowmobile.

I suppose that's why so many SoCal people opt to do away with the yard altogether. A few brick pavers, and you have a perma-patio. No fuss, no muss.

I mean no offense to the many Angelinos who make their living as gardeners, but in the words of Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler, "That ain't workin'.... That's the way you do it.... Money for nothin'...." (That's about where the anology ends, though. The "chicks" in L.A. are anything but free...unless, of course, you do actually play your guitar on the MTV. But that's another discussion altogether.)

In the South, it's not about coaxing things out of the ground; it's about fending off an invasion. Take a Southerner to Los Angeles, and they will stare wide-eyed at the kudzu that's used as landscaping. Last year in the Carolinas alone, kudzu claimed 3 children, 4 cows, and a Volkswagen Beetle.

If you do fall behind, it can be downright frightening. I knew that the backyard badly needed to be cut, but I didn't get to it before going on vacation. When we returned, it looked like someone had planted wheat. I'll never again sing "America, the Beautiful" without thinking of my own little field.

Of course, in the week we were gone, the front yard got a little rowdy too, so I had to deal with that first. After all, everyone can see the front. The only folks who know the true dilapidated state of my back yard are the neighbors and whomever they complain to. "It didn't bother me at first. He can make a mess of his backyard if he wants to. But when the aliens come to make their crop circles, it's so loud that we don't get any sleep."

And when the 11:00 news led off with a story about a Bigfoot sighting at my address, I knew I had to take action. Since my little push mower was not up to the task, and I don't own a combine, I had to get out there with the weed-whacker.

Truth be told, though, I'd rather spend an hour in my yard with the weed-whacker than 15 minutes with a broom.