Anyone ever hear of the TotalGym(tm)? It's that home-workout "weight
lifting" set that consists of a few pulleys, a cable, and a
height-adjustable, sliding bench. You know; the one that Christie
Brinkley and Chuck Norris sell at 03:00 on Sunday nights, when you're
being an imbecile and trying to make your weekend last as long as
possible. While watching the commercial, you get this feeling that
you're a slob, an underachiever, and ultimately worthless and that this
wonder sled will bring back your life, your vigor.

I tell you what it really brings. Pain. Yes, hours and hours of
lovely, self-inflicted pain. It's the stuff that penance is made up
of, this home-workout fad. You may tell yourself that it's more
practical than spending hundreds of dollars on the gym each year, the
one you've visited twice in the three year's you've paid your dues.
That may be true. Now that you have the burn of lactic acid etched
memorably in your cortex, getting up in the wee hours of the morning
just aren't as attractive as they used to be.

Don't kid yourself. Mornings were never attractive. Now they're plain
torture. For the masochists out there, it's heaven, I'm sure. For the
night owls, the procrastinators, the couch potatoes, and the
underachievers, it's the bane of existence. I certainly count myself in
the number of night owls and sometimes couch potatoes.

There's one more category of slob to list, the computer nerd. Yes,
that's me to a "T." We sit on our asses all day long picking away at
obscure misbehaviors of code we didn't write, and some that we did.
Scratching our heads and lifting our coffee cups is the extend of our
workouts, if you exclude the minute muscle movements to strike the
keyboard a hundred times a minute.

Oh, well. So it's pulleys and cables for me, then, and nightmares of
lactic acid bathing my every muscle and joint. Maybe I'll actually get
my six-pack back. OK, truth time. The last time I saw ridges in my
stomach was when I was eighteen. That's a long ten years and
innumerable twelve-packs later; Mountain Dew and Mellow Yellow, of
course.

Masochistically Yours,

Chad