Gravity

Posted December 22nd, 2004 by Sean Williams

I am not a metaphysical person really, which is strange coming from someone who only understands the surface, pedestrian ideas of science. But I like what I know. If you are boiling a pot of water, it doesn’t help to start with a little bit and then add water as you go, it will simply take a certain amount of energy to boil all the water that you need. If you want to jump high, going to the moon will help, but you still will have only a certain amount of strength to mass moved ratio. You will jump higher on the moon than you do on earth, but so would everyone else.

Your weight is actually a measure of gravity, it isn’t a thing like mass or density. It is a completely capricious measurement in astronomical terms. It’s even useless in talking about your health, mental or otherwise, because density, fat percentage, mass, that kind of stuff is what we should actually be measuring. My weight has always been higher than you would expect. I’m five ten, and at the same height in high school I still clocked in at close to 180 despite being thin as a rail. I once dropped to 170 and my family thought I had contracted a disease. Meanwhile, several of my friends are my height and 150-160 and they look totally normal.

I have gained a bit of weight in the last year, and about three weeks ago I finally talked to my wife about the fact that I just don’t believe I’m ever going to lose it. I hired a personal trainer and got my fat percentage down, and couldn’t sustain it.

Is it a will power thing? … I am going to go ahead here… (yes, I’m stalling) and I’m gonna say… No.

I really need to reject the idea that my weight is a failure, and I have a list of reasons. Yeah, I’m gonna list them, eventually, this is a fucking blog, this is what we do with blogs, we write stupid shit that is only really meaningful to ourselves and the few friends we have peeking in our lives, so yeah, I’m gonna write the list, but first I want to clarify the rejection of failure.

A lot of people state rejections of widely held beliefs not because they actually reject them, but because they desperately want to. “I will no longer care what people say about my shoes, I love these shoes, y’all can go suck it,” says a girl, who secretly wishes people loved her shoes. Am I doing this? Am I rejecting my weight as a sign of my own failure and self hatred because I *want* it to be true?

Yeah, probably.

Anyway, these are the reasons-

1) There are a bunch of physical things that I love to do. I love to dance. I love to play tennis. I love to conduct recording sessions (which is a pretty healthy upper body work-out). I love to golf. I like weight training with a friend, or even by myself.

But I hate almost all of the physical things available to me. I loathe the gym. I hate riding or running on a machine wherein you don’t get anywhere and there’s no point. I hate “going for walks” or “running”. I don’t just find it irritating and hard, it triggers all of the worst things about being me, the endless cycles of shit I have been asked to do during my life that mean nothing to me, where the end justifies the means, but the end is a million miles away and the means are soul suckingly boring.

I spent years in school wishing someone would give me an injury so I could get out of class. How is the gym gonna help me?

2) I’ve gotten quite a lot done in the last six months, but a huge chunk of it has been sitting at this desk. A lot of us sit at desks too much. It’s a problem we all have.

3) I’ve been saving money, or trying to, for the last two years. Yeah, I got a personal trainer, but instead of meeting with her enough times in a week to be effective, I kept trying to stretch it out to once a week, or less, in order to get my money’s worth. At sixty dollars a pop, she’s not expensive, but anything over, y’know, five dollars is more than we can afford. We also can’t afford dance lessons, memberships to tennis clubs, golfing, etc. It would cost me more money than I have to do the things I enjoy.

4) The ultimate reward for a good cook is a flavorful meal. I’m sure there is probably a way to cook and enjoy it that is less damaging to me than the way I currently cook. And this is one place where I am willing to change, I really would love to be able to cook healthier food than I currently do. I’m sure this can be done with spices. Currently, most of the flavor in my food comes from animal fat, whether in actual meat or butter. I honestly don’t cook with much oil, and I haven’t been exploring spices nearly enough.

5) I have to give a nod to the self-hatred thing as well. although I don’t think it is as deep or as rich as, say, my sister, who always finds a way to take herself to task for every possible thing she’s done wrong (and has since she was very young), but I definitely have an abiding joy in wallowing in my own suffering. Jesus Christ, you read this blog, you can tell I almost eroticize my own suffering, great long galloping paragraphs all about how much I suck.

I’ve gained weight *not* because I have no control and I don’t feel like going to the gym. I’ve gone to the gym and lost weight, but it is worse to go there than it was for me to go to grade school. And I probably went to the gym more times, all told.

There have been stretches when I could get my weight under control, but only if I had a show I had to lose weight for. I couldn’t even do it for my wedding. I need to find an activity that will keep me healthy, and it has to be something I want to do and something really affordable. I’m not lazy, if I’m gonna golf with my Dad-In-Law, I’ll get up and drive for an hour at 7 in the morning through heavy traffic. It is *not* a matter of me being unwilling to put in the hours. But I just can’t afford to go on my own.

And the fucking gym is out of the question.