You may have noticed that there was not an update last week. You noticed correctly, and I apologize for that. There is, of course, a reason that there was not an update last week and that reason is, of course, hilarious.
Allow me to explain.
In the intervening time since leaving the Quizo fold I have, believe it or not, actually made a commitment to healthier living. Now, obviously, this isn’t really a NEW thing. My abiding commitment to healthy living goes back a ways, though it might be observed that my decision to stop drinking 11 years ago was more a commitment to “living in general” than “healthy living” necessarily. And the last time I quit smoking seems to have stuck – it’ll be two years come Christmas and I have ZERO desire to ever smoke a cigarette again. This amazes me; I actually don’t want to smoke MORE than I don’t want to spend twelve dollars a day on cigarettes.
Earlier this year, though, I decided to really take the plunge and tackle the last healthy living frontier: I decided, finally, to get in shape. I made this decision for two reasons. One is, obviously, that living healthily is, you know, good. That’s admittedly a kind of flighty reason, but thankfully I also have reason #2: my doctor is an evil little gnome, but if I show up at her office weighing less than I did the previous time she doesn’t bitch at me and I don’t have to answer a lot of stupid questions.
Yes: I am motivated to lose weight primarily by laziness. Sometimes I amaze even myself.
Now this, obviously, is a long process. Right now the best guesses are that it will take something on the order of 2-3 years to get where I “should” be. But, hey, no time like the present, right? So I went insane on getting healthy.
Getting healthy, in case you haven’t heard, involves exercise. Lots of regular exercise. So, I bought myself an exercise bike and planted it in front of my television. That worked for a little while, but now there’s two problems. One, unless you’re willing to spend a CRAPLOAD of money on it, exercise bikes are incredibly uncomfortable, and two, even if you’re watching your complete run of The Muppet Show while you’re doing it, riding an exercise bike every day gets really boring really fast.
I had mentioned this to a friend of mine who told me, “why don’t you try lifting weights?” I thought, you know, why DON’T I try that?
So, I joined a gym. I joined a Bally’s up here near me, actually, which ended up even surprising me. I had assumed the experience of going into one would be some horrifying ordeal, so before I did I visited basically every gym within half an hour of my house. All of them either had no free weights – supposedly respectable gyms with not a single barbell to their name – or were very scary hardcore-type lots of grunting and screaming places, or were just dingy ratholes (you know who you are).
Finally, convinced I’d never find a gym I could stand, I walked into Bally’s and braced myself for what was supposed to be the legendary Bally’s hard-sell.
The legendary Bally’s hard-sell consisted of a five minute tour of the place – with its very well-stocked free weight room – and the manager telling me once how much my month-to-month membership cost. I’ve been sold harder by a newspaper box.
Over the course of maybe two months I went from reluctant gym visitor who occasionally maybe skipped a workout to rearranging my schedule to make sure I got my workout time in. I’m hardly a gym rat or anything – I am only in there three times a week, after all – but if you told me two years ago that I would eventually be someone who woke up three hours early on a Saturday morning so I could make sure I’d get to the gym before the Chelsea game I’d have sent the men in white coats after you.
Funny old world, ain’t it?
Anyway, flash to a week ago last Friday – the 15th, to be exact. I’m still in the beginning of that day’s workout, which starts off with squats. When I lifted weights in high school for crew I used to love doing squats. Whether I loved them because I was in way better shape back then or I loved them because I was a teenager and thus an idiot back then is a reasonable question, because now I HATE them. I hate squats. Out of every single exercise I do that involves moving large masses of metal and rubber, squats are the only one I actively despise. I do them, however, and I do them without complaint because they are just about the most efficient weightlifting exercise known to man.
(Note: the without complaint part is not actually true.)
So last Friday, I’m onto my fourth set of squats. Close to done. I’m already eyeing the guy at the bench press, figuring he should be finished by the time I’m done my fifth set. I step under the bar, hitch it up off the rack, and start my lift.
When I’m about four inches down I feel like I’ve been shot. There’s a sudden, sharp pain in one spot on my lower back that half a second later has exploded all over my lower back. I managed to get the bar back up on the rack and backed away from it, but even five seconds on I knew what had happened: I herniated a disc in my back.
Again.
I somehow stumbled out of the gym and into my car, and then once I got home I somehow stumbled into my bed, where I proceeded to stay for the better part of the next 24 hours. The next day I woke up and the pain was so bad I had to go to the ER, where they very cheerfully gave me prescriptions for steroids (not the good kind) and painkillers (very much the good kind) and wished me good luck sticking it out until I could see my orthopedist in three weeks.
All of this, then, is why there was no charity Quizo update last Monday: I wasn’t upright until about sometime last Tuesday night, and by then it seemed a little late to bother.
No new or pressing information this week, but remember: tell your relatives. Tell your friends. Hell, tell your enemies. Their money is as good as any. Unless they’re that counterfeiter guy I saw a special on MSNBC about last week, his money we don’t want. But everyone else’s actual currency? That we want. So spread the word, stay tuned next week for some actual information about prizes and seating, and I’ll see you on the 10th.
JLK
Charity Quizo 