Ugh.

Honestly, it’s probably actually working, but the payoff is not being reflected on the scale. I have been doing exhausting full-body workouts every other day, pushing myself to the point of (nearly) puking every time. My body is constantly sore from head to toe, and when I wake up most mornings I can barely move. This past week the soreness was actually getting so bad that I decided to take a few extra days off to help recuperate (and avoid potential injury). Hopefully my body weight is hovering steady due to a combination of both fat-loss and gains in new muscle and bone-density… rather than simply a total lack of progress. I imagine that I look slightly better in the mirror, but I can’t say for sure. I definitely feel better, though… excruciating muscle soreness aside.

Clearly my diet has significant room for improvement, but at least I am making some effort. However, because I am doing so much weight-training I am trying to eat a lot more protein than before, and as such I probably am taking in many more calories than I should for a pure weight-loss approach. I also have largely abandoned all cardio workouts since my full-body circuit has my heart constantly pumping as hard and fast as it does on the treadmill, and I am sweating even more. I wouldn’t have expected that doing weighted lunges or step-ups could be so aerobically intense. Even worse, I finish most of my workouts with weighted jump squats (to improve speed and vertical leap) that always threaten to empty my stomach onto the gym floor. At the end of my gym session I can barely stand, let alone ride a bike or elliptical. My days off are apparently crucial for allowing my body to recuperate and rebuild, so I am extremely wary of filling them with cardio sessions. I worry that doing so may actually cause me more harm than good.

My current routine has been vigorously attacking muscles that I had never bothered to exercise before. Presumably that is where all the pain comes from, and hopefully it will ease up soon, but eventually I expect that the new muscle will start arriving at the expense of my unsightly belly fats and not simply as an addition. I’m going to Hawaii at the end of the month and after that it will be coming up on pool-season here in Vegas. I need to get this bod ready for public consumption asap.

I have been meaning to write a blog post about it every day since then, but I just haven’t been able to. Honestly, I’m not really even sure what – if anything – to say. Brian and I weren’t all that close personally, I don’t want to pretend that we were, but he was a very good friend of one of my very good friends and as such we had spent a fair amount of time together. To me he was a totally normal, seemingly completely happy guy who was always fun to be around. However, from what I was told, he inexplicably transformed from his normal contented self to horribly depressed to dead by his own hand within a matter of only two weeks. It seems hopeless to look for reason in this sort of madness… so I won’t even try.

My own reactions to tragedy seem to be both delayed and largely internalized. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure whether I should even write or say anything in a public place like this. My personal sadness is nothing compared to that of his family and those people who knew him so much better than I did.

Still, I haven’t been able to fall asleep since I heard the news. I lay awake in bed, waiting in the darkness for tomorrow. After an hour or two, when I finally do fall asleep, I’ve been having strange but powerful dreams that leave me feeling sad when I wake up.

It will pass.

Brian is the second kid I knew who has killed himself. I don’t know what to think about that; I guess it just is.

Having been away from the game for so long I spent the first hour playing super snug while talking to a few people at the table about the best party colleges in the country. The high point of my night came when a cranky woman was complaining to the dealer (and cruel universe) about how she hated her current table position. “I want to sit over there!” she whined. “I hate this seat. I love that seat over there.”

On reflex I retorted, altogether way too loudly, “if you love it so much then why don’t you marry it?”

One person laughed, but the rest of the table looked at me with the exact expression that my third-grade wit deserved.

Anyways, I stayed even for about an hour until I was eventually dealt pocket kings. After a standard raise I went heads-up to a 6-high flop, and then got all-in against a guy with pocket aces.

Welcome back to poker. I forgot how much fun it is.

The very next hand I had pocket aces myself and won a small pot. The very next hand after that I had pocket kings again (three in a row!) and three of us ended up in a giant all-in pot on a board that read J-10-5. I had my kings, another guy had queens, and the third player had ace-ten (wtf, i dont know). The turn brought a queen and I was broke again.

Ugh.

If it hadn’t been so long since my last (or possibly next) time at the casino I probably would have just gone home. Instead, I pulled out some more cash and kept playing. Maybe twenty minutes later I found myself in another weird/dumb hand. Honestly, it’s not even super interesting as poker hands go, but I suppose there is something to take from it.

I was dealt pocket jacks and raised from middle position to my standard $10. Four people called and we saw a flop of 3-6-8 rainbow. I led for $20 and was called by one person, a young thuggish-looking black kid (being maybe around 25 years old) just off of the button. The turn came a 9, putting two clubs on the board. I checked for pot control, and the guy bet $25. I thought a few seconds and called. The river brought the king of spades and I checked again. Without much hesitation the guy went all-in for about $140, only slightly less than I had left. I stared at the guy for about 45 seconds and watched as he stared back at me, chewing a piece of gum with an open mouth.

Eventually I told the dealer, “I guess that I will just pay him, then…” and then pushed my chips towards the pot. The guy didn’t say anything at first, and then showed me the ace of diamonds. I waited. Sheepishly he then turned over his other card, the ten of spades. I flipped up my pair and won the pot, stacking the chips as the guy left the table. The other players all started congratulating me on an amazing call and talking amongst themselves about how great it was.

Honestly, I don’t think it was. I mumbled a few polite thank you’s, but I didn’t feel all that good about the hand.

There are times when I pick off a big bluff and feel really proud of myself. This wasn’t one of those times. I was happy with the result, but it really felt like I had just gotten away with a big mistake. If I had watched that hand take place online, or simply read it on paper (as you are now) I would probably estimate that calling the river all-in is the wrong move somewhere around 90% of the time. In fact, in the moment I struggled with the decision for so long (45 seconds being a very long time for me to make up my mind) because my brain kept telling me to fold. Meanwhile my gut kept telling me to call. That happens a lot, and usually you need to find a way to reconcile one with the other.

I wanted to call because, for no particular reason that I could possibly point to, I really didn’t think the guy had anything. His table presence pointed to a bluff: his chewing, his posture, the way he stared back at me, the way he had pushed in his chips… whatever. The kid’s betting line was also very suspect (call, call, bet, shove), but not completely unreasonable. Worse, my brain was telling me that there was not really any hand I could beat, but a TON of perfectly reasonable hands that had me crushed. The flush draw didn’t appear until the turn so he probably hadn’t called the flop and then bluffed the missed flush on the river. Meanwhile the obvious flopped straight draw had come in with the 9 on the turn, and worst case he could have missed his draw but ended up with a random two pair. All those middle cards are prime candidates for sets too… all perfectly normal hands for me to be up against, and all of which could have conceivably been played exactly as the kid was proposing.

I just didn’t believe him, though, so I called. And this time I was right. Still, it was probably a bad call. I was happy to win the pot, but didn’t feel much like high-fiving anyone either. Just the same, that hand got me back into the game a little bit. I stuck around until the game broke at 1am, playing short-handed for the majority. It wasn’t terribly exciting or even terribly fun, but after six hours I not only completely erased my disastrous start but managed to walk away with a solid win.

So that’s how I spent my night and morning. How about you?

If so, then you should join in the fun and play with us on Google Wave using one of the gadgets that I have written.

What it is

A full breakdown of Google Wave would take way too long – and is available elsewhere – but the ultra-short version is to say that Google Wave is “modern email.” Rather than the conventional email method of passing individual messages between people, Google’s vision of the future involves a single email message (or ‘wave’) with multiple people attached to it. Each person can add to or edit any part of the message at any time and the changes are broadcast to all other users instantly. Basically think of it as a hybrid of traditional email, instant messaging, and a wiki all rolled into one.

Google Wave is not yet publicly available, but a “preview” version exists on an invitation-only basis. You can apply for access here, or else simply let me know and I will get you an invite.

In order to play with us you will need an account.

How my game works

All of us who will be playing all join the same wave, which is basically a single ongoing conversation that will last all season. For instance, all of my friends who watch Survivor join the “Survivor wave” while those who watch American Idol will join an “Idol wave.” Embedded into each wave is a gadget that I have written which allows each of the wave participants to rank each contestant on that show based on the position they think they will finish. Because of the unique capabilities of Google Wave, each of us can update our own rankings at any time, and those changes are instantly viewable by everyone else.

Each week, as one or more contestants are eliminated from the particular show, the gadget is updated and each person scores points based on the accuracy of their projections. At the end of the season, obviously, the person with the most points wins.

Rules and scoring

Eliminations are considered in the order of when they get voted off the show. If multiple people are eliminated in the same episode, finishing order will be the order they are announced. (This may mean some luck/guesswork for early eps of Idol where they eliminate both boys + girls in random order).

Each participant can adjust their own rankings order as much or as often as they like. However, the gadget will automatically lock all rankings at the start of the east coast broadcast of the relevant episode each week. Every episode of Survivor is considered “relevant” whereas only the results episodes of American Idol are important. Basically, the gadget locks for any episode where somebody might get eliminated. I will unlock and update the gadget whenever I watch the episode (almost always that same night, but I am on the west coast so there is a delay).

Whenever a contestant is eliminated from the show they “die” in whichever projected rankings slot each player had them. That slot is then unavailable for the rest of the season. This means that if your projected winner gets eliminated in Week 1, then you will not be able to move anyone else into your First Place slot. Worst case scenario, when it gets down to the finals for American Idol you may only be able to put the two finalists in your 23rd and 24th place slots… which sucks for you because you will only get the minimum number of points for those two contestants. Consequently, at any point during the season two people may have identical scores but one player may have a much higher potential score because he still has his top slots open whereas the other player’s may already have been used up.

For each show contestant that gets eliminated, each player is awarded a variable number of points based on where the player had projected them to finish. Naturally, players are awarded more points the closer their predictions are to the actual results.

Specifically, the formula for assigning points per elimination is as follows:

score = (T – abs(Projected Finish – Actual Finish)) * weight

where T is the total number of contestants on the show (on Survivor T=20, on Idol T=24). The “abs” means absolute value so you take the same penalty for being too high as for being too low in your projection.

The weight is calculated as follows:

weight = (T – Actual Finish + 1)

This means that you earn a lot more points for correctly predicting the overall winner than for predicting last place. We tried to make the scaling fair, though. Unlike your March Madness bracket you don’t need to correctly pick the top spot in order to win (although it definitely helps).

The easy way to think of this is that, assuming there are 20 contestants, correctly picking 20th place is worth 20 points. Correctly picking 19th place is worth 40 points (20 x 2). 18th is worth 60 points (20 x 3)… and so on. The first place projection is worth a maximum of 400 points (20 x 20).

Credit to Lukas for helping me determine this scoring system.

Want to play with us?

It’s all for fun (prizes anyone?), but you need a Wave account to join in the party. Fortunately, getting an account is free and relatively easy.

If you already have a Wave account just send me a message at littlewyvern@googlewave.com and I will add you to our waves.

If you need an invite to Google Wave either leave a comment here with your email address, or send me an email at littlewyvern@gmail.com

I will be alternating between two lifting workouts, three days a week. Depending on how it goes I will also be adding one or two days of raw cardio per week. I only followed my initial routine for about two weeks, and this new one for only about one, but so far the newer routine is a lot more intense. Rather than having sore arms one day and sore shoulders another, my entire body is pretty much constantly exhausted. It’s a little painful, but I suppose that’s a “good” pain.

I have also switched my diet to more protein-heavy while also trying to cut out most of the added sugars. I am not counting calories, but supposedly just eliminating things like regular soda goes a long ways towards controlling body weight.

My plan is to follow this new routine for four weeks and then reevaluate depending on the results that I am getting.

Right now I am easily the fattest and most out of shape that I have ever been in my life. Not only do I see it, but worse: I feel it.

It Sucks. So Much.

I’m not at all big on New Year’s resolutions – ones involving weight loss in particular – but I AM a fan of arbitrary resolutions. Deadlines and goals, general and ill-defined though they usually are, seem to work well for me. Pride seems to be my greatest motivator (right up there with Fear), so the plan is to make my glorious return to health a public spectacle. Whether anyone actually cares or not (and I would bet heavily on the Not), I can easily delude myself into thinking that a public failure in my endeavor would be a source of horrible shame. I fail not only myself… but also you.

I actually first thought about inventing an arbitrary weight loss target and deadline and then offering cold cash to each of you for every pound I come up short. That incentive worked well back in the days of NaNoWriMo, but while researching weight loss and exercise routines I discovered that a 1-2 pound weekly weight loss is considered “fast.” The Biggest Loser makes it look so much easier.

My rough goal is 2 months and 20 pounds, but since I expect to be adding a good amount of muscle – I’m not sure I have any right now – a more realistic expectation is probably closer to 3 months and 15 pounds. I won’t be doing any special diets or calorie counting (that offends my sensibilities on a deeply personal level), but I’ll be making an effort to generally improve what I eat. I figure that semi-healthy eating coupled with twice-daily trips to the gym will go a long way towards achieving my goals of lowering my body-fat while increasing my strength and endurance.

Anyways, I won’t be offering up free money but I will be publicly recording my daily efforts. I have prominently displayed a link (it’s bold!) to my new exercise log in my right navbar for anyone who cares to occasionally check in. It still needs some work (header image?), and I won’t be writing full posts over there, but I will be sure to make daily notes of what I am doing for those who are otherwise bored and curious. Like I said, I don’t actually believe anyone is especially interested in my weight-lifting schedule, but simply having that schedule available to the public serves as a strong personal incentive for me to stick to it.

Whether anyone reads it or not, I feel horrible having to write “I’m a huge pussy” on the days I decide to blow off my workout. Oh, and write that I most definitely will.

As for the schedule itself, it is something that I put together after an afternoon of online research. In particular I read through these two websites and then crafted a hybrid approach of my own. Both sites seem to especially focus on gaining weight and building muscle, but my goals are to get lean and gain strength. They are both anti-cardio / pro-creatin, whereas I am more anti-fatface / pro-flexibility.

Aside from what I’ve read, I know basically nothing about exercise. While the jocks were all taking weight lifting in high school, I was busy dominating at pickle ball in co-ed gym. Still, I see no reason to blow a few hundred dollars on personal trainers just to be told one of the seemingly hundreds of equally valid opinions on the subject. I see personal trainers mostly as a motivation for the otherwise lazy – whether to knock out one more set, or even just to show up in the first place – but I’ve already solved that problem. My only real obstacle is in knowing what to actually do once I get to the gym. The program I’ve come up with seems like a pretty good starting point, though, and I’ll stick with it for a while and see how things go.

Still, if anybody has a suggestion I would be grateful and eager to listen.

Well… be careful what you wish for because this. is. awkward.

via WWTDD.com

…and finally his ridiculously awesomely weird roast of Bob Saget.

Well… we’ll get to that eventually.

I finished reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold yesterday, and then tonight I went ahead and watched the movie that Peter Jackson made out of it. I don’t know whether anyone else who visits this site has read or watched it as well, but for no better reason than to kill a little time I will break down my particular opinions of them both for you.

On my most recent flight into Vegas I was seated next to a woman who I noticed to be reading the final few pages of The Lovely Bones. At the time, I knew of the book only because of the movie trailers that seemed to run during every single commercial break around Christmas. The trailers made the movie look pretty interesting and when I asked this woman if she liked the book she gave me a short, but extremely enthusiastic dose of praise. I think her exact words may have been, “Oh my God! I LOVE IT!”

Having just been given a Kindle for Christmas (thanks!) I decided to hop onto Amazon’s 3G network and download the book while waiting for our plane to takeoff.

Ok, I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who still plan on reading the book or watching the movie. Come back when you are done and let me know your thoughts, but for everyone else you can click on the following link to read the rest of this post…

While the first seventy percent took me only two days to dominate, the final thirty lasted nearly two weeks. I honestly can’t remember ever reading a book where my opinion changed so dramatically partway through. The first hundred pages of Lord of the Rings was a massive chore for me, but the next thousand were amazing. Aside from that, though, I usually have a pretty solid grasp of a book after the first few chapters. Weirdly, The Lovely Bones completely fell apart in the second half. What started as an interesting, enjoyable read quickly devolved into an eye-rolling sack of girly nonsense. I literally used the final few chapters to practice speed reading.

When the book was finally over I really didn’t even feel like watching the movie anymore, despite having been so eager for so long. Of course, I sat down and watched it anyways, but mostly out of a sense of obligation. I could only hope that Peter Jackson had somehow saved the story from itself.

He didn’t.

For those that don’t know, The Lovely Bones is a story written from the point of view of a 14-year-old girl named Susie who gets murdered. That’s only the setup, actually, since she gets raped and killed in the book’s first chapter. The rest of the novel follows Susie as she watches her family from Heaven. The book tells a tale of the heartache of a senseless tragedy, the struggle of a family to survive in its aftermath, and the mystery of trying to catch a killer.

That description sounds like a pretty good read to me, and for the first half of the book it actually was. But then… things got super weird.

Around the two-thirds mark a cute, sad story about a dead girl watching her family from Heaven somehow transforms into a helplessly stupid literary clusterfuck. For no imaginable reason Alice Sebold suddenly decided to take a page from Stephanie Meyer’s approach to Breaking Dawn: she threw away everything that was good about her novel and instead asked herself, “what would a stupid 12-year old girl write?”

I don’t know, maybe the author just got bored.

Having watched from a distance for so long, Susie suddenly leaves Heaven and starts actively haunting the human world. She follows people around and randomly reveals herself to them (a power which no other ghosts seem to have, by the way, and which she didn’t have before either). The living people on Earth are never scared or surprised at seeing a ghost, naturally, and her haunting always makes them smile and feel loved. Nobody tells anyone else that they are seeing a murdered spirit, even though they all are. It is like each character has their own totally romantic secret.

Then, one of the girls from school suddenly develops the power to see other dead people. She becomes a stereotypical loner outcast and moves to New York City where she wanders the streets by herself, seeing the ghosts of murdered people. When she uses her powers to see what happened to a murdered child, she doesn’t bother calling the police or telling anybody. Instead she makes a little note of it in her five-star and goes about the rest of her day.

All of a sudden, everybody starts having sex with one another.

The killer keeps killing people, but we don’t hear much of anything about that – or the still unsolved murder investigation that dominated the first half of the book – because the main detective starts having sex with Susie’s mom. Unable to stand being around her family, the mother abandons her husband and children and runs away to live in a California wine orchard for five years. A few pages later it is suddenly five years in the future. Susie’s mom comes back from California and her husband takes her back immediately, the two now more in love with each other than ever before. Awww, it’s romantic AND realistic…

Towards the end of the book, the girl who sees dead people randomly comes across the spot where Susie’s body has been secretly buried for five years. In a completely unexpected twist (unexpected for a good reason), Susie comes down from Heaven and possesses the girl’s body. The audience gets twisted again though, because rather than tell someone about the body buried only ten feet away… or tell the police who killed her… or go see the family that she had been haunting relentlessly since her death… now-human Susie immediately has sex with a boy from her school that she barely knew, but always liked.

This tale of supernatural passion is a little weird when you remember the fact that she is still 14 and he is about 20. Bad gets way, way worse when in the middle of their preteen sexual escapade she looks into the boy’s eyes and tells him, “I am Susie.” Instead of being at all surprised to be having sex with a girl who has been possessed by the ghost of his murdered adolescent sorta-friend, the guy smiles longingly and says, “I knew there was something different about you.”

W.T.F.

After she finishes knocking boots, Susie leaves Earth again and decides that now it’s ok to finally leave the world behind her. Her unfinished business has been taken care.

Seriously…. W.T.F…

Her unfinished business was that she desperately needed to jump some dong? It had nothing to do with her horribly grief-stricken family? It had nothing to do with an unsolved murder and catching her killer (who is never caught, by the way)? There is no higher lesson to be had about finding acceptance in death, or forgiveness in the face of tragedy? All she needed was to ride some teenage dick.

At the very end of the book, before she finally ascends into Heaven, Susie makes one last Earthly stop and watches as the man who killed her tries to lure another young girl into his car. Susie uses her ghost powers to snap an icicle dangling over the man’s head, killing him.

Ugh.

So that sweet young innocent girl who we have lovingly followed for a few hundred pages spends the final act of the novel…

1) forcing control over a human body like some kind of demon
2) tricking a boy into statutory raping having sex with her
3) murdering a man

… and then she goes to Heaven with a giant Happily Ever After.

Hey, Alice Sebold: Shame. On. You.

Not at all surprisingly the movie plays out exactly like the book. The first half was decently good, but the final third was borderline unwatchable. I would actually say that the movie is probably better than the book, to be honest, if only because Peter Jackson goes nuts with his CGI. The story is still really bad, but P-Jax does a good job of making things look cool (I am a big fan of the ships-in-bottles sequence). The end result feels like a complicate mix of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Fall, What Dreams May Come, Zodiac, The Sixth Sense, and Twilight… but clearly nowhere close to as good as any one of them (except Twilight).

Take that however you want.

Oh, and the reason I say that The Lovely Bones is why I don’t have a girlfriend is because looking at reviews on Amazon the book has a 4+ star rating after 3000 reviews. On IMDB the movie has a 6.8 rating after more than 9000 reviews. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that no matter what their age may really be, all girls are still twelve years old at heart. They will completely love anything, no matter how stupid in concept or how poor in execution, so long as the annoying teenage girl gets to eventually have sex with the annoying, older boy.

IT’S TRUE LOVE!!

Chuck Klosterman wrote wrote a series of funny essays about how all girls have a deeply rooted, but thoroughly unrealistic expectation of love that can be most clearly represented by the works of Coldplay and John Cusack. Klosterman whines that he will never be able to fully satisfy any woman because they are only interested in a fantasy that no man can possibly uphold.

I agree, but I think it’s more than that. I believe that for girls the ultimate romance is being passed an anonymous note during third-grade recess. The girl basks in the secret danger of that note, then follows its directions to an unseen part of the playground where she meets a mysterious boy with a bad reputation who the girl never before even thought about liking until that very moment. He gives her a simple kiss just before the bell rings and everybody has to go back inside.

In my mind, it all breaks down to that. Forget roses and chocolates and exotic getaways. Girls just want that secret kiss.

If I could somehow bottle and sell that I would be a rich, rich man. Clearly, I wouldn’t even have to package it well at all. As proof just take a look at Sebold, Meyer, or the tens of thousands of overt romance novels that don’t even bother pretending to be real literature.

Honestly, I may never vote for a woman to be president. All it takes is a hundred pages of Nicholas Sparks (who I also think is a terrible writer, for the record) to reduce any woman to a blabbering mess. “But Allie and Noah were meant to be together!! It’s SOOO romantic!!” Two hundred years ago stupid girls had their bonnets in a bunch over Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Today it’s Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (and sadly, still Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy).

In her defense at least Jane Austin could write. Stephanie Meyer, Alice Sebold… not so much.