Working Out

It's amazing the kind of excuses I'll come up with for not exercising. Even as I walk to the gym it still permeates throughout my mind. Just yesterday in fact, I got the to the door of the gym and almost walked away, now understand that I made the effort to go all the way down there, subway ride and all, only to get at the door and almost cop out of my work out because I thought throwing in a load of whites would be the better way to spend my time.

But I sucked it up and went inside. "I'm gonna do some cardio," I thought to myself. And then I realize I don't have my ipod to listen to tunes while I breath heavily and go nowhere on an "arc trainer". But I figure whatever, just have to go without. So I get on the arc trainer and start punching in my time, weight, workout type etc....and then I pause. I just stood there and paused for about 12 seconds, looked down and then guess what happened?

I bailed. I just said "screw this! I don't want to do this today...not feelin' it. And I grabbed my bag and walked away. I had two people, one on each side of me, wondering what the hell they just witnessed--ME GIVING UP. I was in and out of the gym with no workout in what was probably 4-6 minutes. Has anyone ever gone to the gym to NOT workout? Cuz I just did it yesterday. Apparently I just wanted to pop in, swipe my access card and then turn around and walk out just for kicks. It was really sweet to see the front desk person's expression on her face after she just saw me walk in 4 minutes earlier.

"Remember me, I just swiped my card a few minutes ago. Yeah, just wanted to check the towel supply and weigh myself apparently."

"Hey, how you doin' today? You mind if I just stare at one of the treadmills for a few minutes? I'll be in and out, won't bother anybody."

Walking home I realized how mentally weak I am not to commit myself to a 25 minute mild workout without headphones. Even as I write this I'm thinking about how much I do not want to make up for it today by going back there. Part of me is really wishing there will be some pickup basketball games in the gym so that I don't have to hop on that damn arc trainer and pretend that I like it. Who wants to stay in one place and sweat? Whoever invented the stationary cardio machine is both genius and a real dumbass at the same time.

So if you're ever feeling bad that you can wuss out on a workout too easily, just look me up online and see the face of a man who literally walked in the gym, stared at a treadmill like Rainman counting toothpicks, and walked out shamefully with people staring at him thinking "nice willpower dude...you should climb back up the tree with all the other sloths."

The UFC and Their Fighters....Part II

The show is just filled with jackasses and idiots who have the most sophomoric and barbaric sense of how to conduct oneself around other human beings...even if they're martial arts fighters. And here's the thing, I can see if you were going for funny and the joke just kinda fell flat. But it's not even slighty humorous, it's just amazingly stupid all over the place. It's gone waaaaaay past some kind of blue collar mentality; we're talking about 12-14 dudes that literally can't do long division!

And here's the thing....even if I'm wrong, and I'm not....but even if I am and these guys are upstanding citizens, then all one needs do is turn the blame to the producers of this show who are clearly making them pull these shenanigans. Here I will come to the fighters' defense. You'd have to be just as big of an idiot as these fighters to not see that much of the show content is staged and partially scripted by TV producers that are trying to get ratings. I guarantee you the producers are encouraging a character like Junie Browning to act up and make it "interesting". What would really be interesting is if someone hog-tied that idiot, dragged him to his knees, put a shot gun in his mouth and blew the back of his head out. I guess the real question is, would he notice?

But I digress. Dana White is the president of the UFC and the executive producer of The Ultimate Fighter. No doubt a shrewd and tough business man, but this man is also an incredible tool at the end of the day. He knows how to run his organization, but I think the overall mentality we see in the UFC is merely a reflection of Mr. White setting the bar fairly low himself. The man can't answer a question or do a 30 second interview with dropping f-bombs all over the place. I myself don't have the most flowery language on a daily basis, but I know when to clean it up and I would think an accomplished tycoon like Dana White would know this as well. Apparently not. It's no wonder the meat-head toolbox mentality runs rampant amongst the athletes...their president is one of them.

The sad irony here is that Mr. White is constantly finding himself in defense of the sport and its participants and for good reason--the people involved are not people you want to hang out with. I'm not talking about judging a book by it's cover, I'm talking about people who can't even read the cover! I'm talking about people that can't spell "cover". And my response to Dana White's incessant plea to be taken seriously by mainstream sports culture is simply, "What do you expect when you cultivate a such negative and elementary aura surrounding the sport?

Exactly what kind of reaction do you expect from established journalists, politicians, city officials, and even fans when a guy is allowed to throw an empty pint glass at another man and is rewarded for it by giving him another chance....and another and another? When you show guys urinating on another man's watermelon and then seeing that oblvious man take a huge bite....did you think that kind of garbage is going to capture the respect and legitimacy you're seeking on a national if not worldwide level?"

The UFC is huge already, huge! Many many fans such as myself watch it regularly and even pay to watch it. But this president wants to get even more attention and grow this sport even larger; which is fine. But Mr. White, your talent for doing so is at an absolute end until you shake your gym-rat jock-tool mindset and start thinking about the way you're shaping the culture in your own organization. Male viewers are your target, yes. So I can understand a little shallowness and hijinks from time to time....that's part of entertainment and even I can appreciate some potty humor from time to time (if it's smart). But enjoy your cultural ceiling if that's all you are capable of producing from the majority of your fighters. There will never be a cap on athleticism and the spirit of competition, the UFC has demonstrated this ten-fold. But there is always a cap on tolerance f0r poor character and a "thug-ish", idiotic mentality and, unfortunately, this too has been equally demonstrated. Maybe the UFC should team up with the Hip-Hop industry and they can all go take the SAT together?

The UFC and Their Fighters....Part I

Last night the 4th episode aired of the hit reality show The Ultimate Fighter on SpikeTV. I have to say this show is going down-hill very fast and has gone from positively entertaining to simply insulting for anyone who graduated high school (depending on the high school). Mind you I got hooked on watching UFC fights a number of years ago through the conduit of this reality show. It's literally the only reality show I've allowed my brain to melt on over the years. But no more.

Let me first say that I'm a fan of the UFC--big time. I like the sport for what it is, I like the action, I admire the competitors and the things they can do with their bodies, and I simply find it highly entertaining. This wasn't always the case, however. Back in the early 90's when it first rose to recognition, I thought it was appalling and it was.....nothing but bar brawlers and thugs in a cage. Put plainly, it was human cock-fighting. However, over the last ten years or so it has certainly become a sport with some of the most intricate and consequential strategy involved and it's been a really nice evolution to notice and be a part of as a fan.

But as I've continued to watch the show The Ultimate Fighter, I've gotten to see the culture and mindset of these fighters at a much closer range. I must say I'm growing increasingly unimpressed. Being a tremendous athlete is a great thing....not being able to read aloud as an adult?....not so great. Imbecile is the most encompassing word I can think of to describe most of these fighters. There are certainly intelligent men fighting in the UFC, some with college degrees and even a few with graduate degrees. But unfortunately these terrific ambassadors are the minority and they have to stand side by side (and toe to toe) with these other cretins that respresent the sport.

I think one would have to formulate an exceptional argument to counter the claim that something must have gone wrong in his childhood for a man to want to be a UFC fighter. For if competition was the only thing driving these men, surely they would have picked another sport? I watch these guys and I can tell right away that daddy didn't give out enough hugs and neither did mom. There was clearly no playing catch or going to the zoo or even watching television as a family. I mean, how do you explain the watching of a great show like Family Ties and then going out and beating people up? Granted, there was an episode where Alex disrespected his family upon moving to NYC, caused a little anger even in me as a 10 yr old, but they settled it, he apologized and it was a great season finale!

No sir, these fighters generally come from really screwed up households and upbringings that have led to a leniency towards violence. Most of them grew up fighting in their neighborhoods and just generally being thugs with clearly no parental authority teaching them respect, patience, self-sacrifice, or humility. For most (not all) of these men, the innate human need to feel worthy of attention and respect has found its vehicle in violence; and by no fault of their own.

How hard is it to avoid a fist-fight really? I mean, I don't consider myself a tough guy by any means, I've had a couple fights in my life, but I can honestly say that all of them could have been avoided if I wasn't so prideful or had simply used better judgement at the time. My fight count should be zero. But nor do I consider myself a wuss when it comes to standing up for myself. I live in the Big Apple where people are pissing me off on a daily if not hourly basis. I've been absolutely enraged by some of the things I've seen and experienced...but not once has it come to blows.

Fortunately many of these men, once engulfed in the sport, have turned their attitudes around and have found an outlet for this anger through the sport of mixed martial arts. But it really is a shame that it took cage fighting to actually calm them down in normal society! I'll give credit here where credit is due, but I still contend that even this positive strain of the fighting culture is overshadowed by what we see on a show like The Ultimate Fighter.

to be continued....

More Economy Stuff.....

I really don't want to spend my blog time writing about stuff that every columnist is writing about...such as this hellish economic crisis we're in. But I'm just gonna chime in briefly about a commercial I saw endorsing Michael Bloomberg's plan for New York City.

I'll admit I tune out a bit when it comes to political advertisements, and by "tune out" I mean I go stick my head in the broiler until it's over, but I did catch something toward the end of this commercial which just illustrates once more (not that we need further evidence) how absolutely full of crap politicians are. Towards the end they put some text up and along with narration, it stated "....will create or save 400,000 jobs!"

This was fascinating to me and so I immediately stopped to ponder the statement I just heard....
And in conclusion I established the following critical thought........Wait, you mean to tell me that this economic plan will either save or create 400,000 jobs?
Let me make sure I understand this effect.....your plan will either create 400,000 jobs, or it will do fucking nothing!! So what you're saying is that either "x" number of jobs will be created, or your plan will have no affect whatsoever.

Man that is solid! Thank you Bloomberg. Glad you're not creating a plan that will lose 400,000 jobs. That's like saying, "hey, here's what I'm thinking, either we meet up tonight for a bite to eat....or we just eat seperately."

Why even mention eating separately as an option? If you don't meet up for a bite, if follows logically that you will eat separately...so just don't mention the neutral effect, no one gives a damn about that.

Domino's

I read an interesting article today about the fate of Domino's Pizza. Apparently a couple of nefarious employees thought it would be fun to pull some hygencially questionable shenanigans in the kitchen while preparing some food for delivery. But........they also decided to video tape it. Read the article:


Pranks show how clever or immature you might be. Filming the prank shows how creative or bored you might be. But posting a video of you violating health standards at your work place just shows a level of stupidity that illustrates why you are working at Domino's.

This of course begs the question, "does Domino's even have a health standard?" Does anyone even eat Domino's pizza unless it's 2am and you're trashed out of your mind? The 24-hr delivery policy alone simply barks the statement "Is the room spinning? Give us a call!" "Are you vearing off the road? Give us a call if you make it home!"

No offense to anyone who eats at Domino's, sometimes that's all you can do. Living in New York, I tend to fall back on a consistent alternative option called ANY OTHER PIZZA THAT'S AVAILABLE. Residing in NYC does make it hard to justify ordering Domino's when there's so many mom and pop pizza joints just around the corner. But I digress.

This story was about two very dumb people who were obviously bored at work. A recent Domino's spokesman had this to say about the tragedy, “Even people who’ve been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino’s, and that’s not fair.” Again I ask, does one really need 10 years to second guess their relationship with Domino's? I just need til the following morning, or pretty much right after my last slice. It's amazing to me that when these things happen some spokesman or GM is shocked and appauled. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that these employees (or any fast food employees) were not recruited at a job fair at Princeton. I myself have been fired from a fast food chain for some unfortunate instances. However, my firing was over something much more mature and honorable.......my drawer came up short $25. I was asked to turn in my drive thru headset--a sad memory to this day--and leave the premises.

I think this is a lesson to all fast food workers.....STAY IN SCHOOL.

Babies

I want to start off my thoughts by saying that as a general rule, I'm a fan of children. But why is it that whenever there's a baby in the room people feel the need to relate to the tiny human somehow? We gather around him or even wait our turn to hold him or play with him. There seems to be this incessant need to score points with the child even though it can't even rationalize what's happening around him.

It could be that people feel a need to show off their baby skills to other adults. I can say with honesty that I am guilty of this. I'm a 30-yr old single man, and if there's other single women in the room and a baby as well, I'm prone to show off how sensitive and nurturing I can be with a baby in the hopes that this will cause a strong desire in one of these women to one day perhaps make a baby with me. Course, if it starts crying and I start to get flustered, I'll either hand if off, or if no one is looking, I'll just leave the baby on the kitchen floor if it comes down to it. But what I'm saying is that most of us have this inclination to over-exert energy on a baby that isn't ours.

Where my interest in this endeavor stops is when I feel like I have to compete for time with the baby or try to show someone else up with my baby skills. I will not compete for time with the child nor do I have much tolerance for someone who is hogging the baby in what is usually an attempt to "show off". After all, really new babies are not that interesting so when you're spending more than 2 minutes with a newborn that's not yours, you're just putting on a facade. If the baby is being inundated with attention from 1 or 2 specific persons, I'll simply bail on the situation and pay no heed to this spoiled child. I'll just grab another beer and keep driving.

But what's most interesting however is when strangers want to talk or ask about your baby. "Ohhh, he's so cute, how old is he? Is momma taking you for a stroll today? You look so cute in your little pj's....yes you do!"

And you're like, "okay, can we end this charade please, I don't know you and I got shit to do, I'd like to get on with my day."

The stranger means well of course, but for the most part, that's merely 4 minutes of your time that you're not gonna get back. You're gonna part ways with this person and never see them again, so my take on this kind of interaction is...let's just not even do it. You see a baby, he's cute, he's cuddly, great...now keep it to yourself. When you're up all night nursing him and wiping his explosive behind, then you've earned some time to share your sentiments. Not until then.

Even worse is something that I often see here in New York on the streets and subways; which is REALLY strange looking people (often homeless people) that try to flirt with someone else's baby and its mother. I think if you're missing a shoe and haven't bathed in a week, you absolutely forfeit your right to talk to a baby or her momma. There's something non-intuitive about missing some important teeth and yet still trying to connect socially with a mom and her baby. Indeed, there's a certain physical appearance that you have to keep up if you want to approach a baby, and I"m sorry, but if your left foot is swollen 5 times it's normal size to the point where your tearing your own shoe and you're wearing Frankenstein's blazer....no deal!

"Oh...it's a little baby....hello little baby....and how are we doing today mom?"

"Not good......could you never talk to me again please? See, I'm a mother with a baby which makes me very defensive generally, and when you approach me with cheddar sauce on your beard and a Ralph Lauren cologne called "My Ass", it kinda throws me into panic mode. So if I could just get you to go away and mix in a shower, that'd be swell."

This is never said aloud, but is rattling around in the mother's 'head for sure. I think it's not asking much for everyone to just lay off the baby attention a little bit. I know they're super cute and there's something virtuous about their tenderness and innocence--all good things. I'm simply saying that if the kid's not yours, let's not overdue it and assume roles that don't belong to you.

What is a Job?

Currently I'm employed which is more than most people can say right now. I would not want to be "out there" scrambling for jobs that really aren't there. Looking for a job in any climate is really an arduous task and one that I find about as fun as going feet-first into a wood chipper. But it's especially grueling right now because even with optimal experience, skills, and impeccable resumes/portfolios, the windows of opportunity are incredibly scarce.

I think the government should intercede and fire everyone from their jobs right now. Let's all just start over and go back to working with our hands. I for one, enjoy that kind of work to a significant extent. The sense of satisfaction in having actually created or built something has got to be universally more appealing than doing research and then converting a document to a PDF file. Let's bring back the milk man, the farmer, and the cobbler....yes, the cobbler--one who does shoe repair. Surely there's virtue in quitting the day job (or lately, getting laid off) and going back to the drawing board where it all began....handling fire and make-shift tools and wondering what can be done with them.

No longer will it be these hedge fund jack-offs running the show. From here out let it be the man who builds the best treehouse or fort....let him be king! Let the man who owns the most horses be considered the most wealthy. Let's go back to plundering small villages and taking women as we please, surely this would even be empowering to the lesbian community.

Okay maybe that's a bit too far, but you get the idea. Returning to simple and basic living wouldn't be such a bad concept. Let's get back to building and creating and cease in our habits of strictly buying, selling and trading. If you don't believe how serious I am about this, then you should know that I just opened up a lemonade stand right by my desk and have sold 3 cups! Tomorrow I might build a go-cart and haul some ass down the streets of Harlem....of course, I'll have to put some sick rims on that thing, it might get stolen but I'm not afraid to put "the club" on it either.

All we need to do is come down from our lofty place of borrowing and trading and get back to a place where owning some livestock meant something in the world. I'm gonna go grind some corn now.

On Ideas

I sit here and try to crank out a brief piece of interesting literature once a day. It isn't always once a day and it isn't always interesting. But I try. I often wonder though, how far "trying" can get someone in the world of ideas. How hard must a writer try to put something on paper that's interesting to read? How long must songwriter sit with his instrument before some melody comes to him that is worth expounding on? How hard must a scientist or philosopher think to come up with an orginal theory?

There's some best selling literature out there right now that is tackling these concepts far better and exhaustively than I intend to. Nevertheless, reading books like Outliers and The Tipping Point (both by Malcolm Gladwell), though helpful in understanding the why of execution, don't really serve as a how-to formula for generating and marketing something good. It's not that simple. In fact, Gladwell's main overarching thesis to his books are that it's truly NOT that simple; there's so much that goes into a successful idea and often it literally seem to arrive ex-nihilo. But I wish not to indulge in analysis of these works or attempt to critique or re-formulate the ideas behind them. Rather, as usual, I wish to complain. Being a comedian by nature, God has gifted me with a keen observational sense that allows me to look at the world, notice what's wrong, and then essentially complain about it in a humorous and relatable way.

My main complaint on ideas is that you cannot generate them on purpose. This is a huge problem for any creative type; you simply never know where ideas come from or when they're gonna strike...let alone a good one. Granted, you can do things and put yourself in situations that are conducive to inspiration and reflection but ultimately the actual idea seems to come about randomly, from no purposeful source. Even just a moment ago when I sat down to write this blog; I always wonder "what's interesting to write about today". I drew suck a huge blank that, as you can see, I ended up writing about the fact that I often don't know what to write about.

In my field--the creative arts--I have nothing by my own mind to rely on which is a downright scary scenario in and of itself. And like anyone else, my success is contingent upon my work (among many other things), and my work is contingent upon ideas, and ideas are merely intellectual properties, the source of which is an abstraction--the mind. So if the artist encounters some kind of creative blockage, then he basically has no new work to show.

Obviously, I'm in that place right now which is why this blog entry sucks big time. But I think what bothers me the most is that it's out of my control. All I can do is keep reading, writing, going to shows, interacting with peers and friends, and keeping my eyes open to things that seem funny or odd to me. This is all one can do to cause ideas to surface.

So what have we learned thus far? Well, we've learned that I've been writing for a solid 20 minutes now and have only been able to produce this crap that you just read; seemingly interesting but ultimately without a point. And that's exactly my point. Sometimes you just cannot make a point no matter how hard you try. And when this happens, I think the creative person just needs to put the pen, brush, guitar, or microphone down, and consider his attempt valiant but with an ultimately resounding answer "Not today I guess." Which is exactly what I'm going to do now.