jen larsen dot net » my bad habit is comedy

my fitness routine

jen larsen — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:00:28 +0000

Every day I look at the class schedule at my gym—my gym, I say, as if I have some kind of claim on it, having been there so often and really marking it with my sweat glands—and I fantasize about what it would be like to go to a class. A class! Me in comfortable clothes, my sneakers unearthed from the back of my closet, filled with endorphins and joy and joyful endorphins and FITNESS.

Tomorrow, I say. Tomorrow I’ll just—I’ll go to a class! It will be so good for me! It will be good for me emotionally, and spiritually, and for my heart and for all my powerful muscles and all my strong bones. I’ll go to one of those lifting classes, where you lift things up and then you put them back down, all in unison with the rest of the class, who are lifting things up and also putting them back down, and no one will notice what amount of weight you are lifting and putting down! Because we’re all in it together, you, and me, and our classmates and our teacher and the techno music that thumps as loud as our hearts in our chests!

Or I could go to yoga, where the Official Gold’s Gym Yogi can fix all my back problems and my front problems and my middle problems and also put me in a soothing state of being soothed, where my body is relaxed and wrung out and my soul is so at peace you’d think someone had injected me right in the earhole with a turkey baster full of liquid morphine.

Or forget the class, because someone’s always looking at your butt in class. I will load up my phone with many delightful audiobooks and I will while away an hour on the treadmill, lost in a story, my mind exercised at the same my butt is.

But if I’m going to walk/jog/run/lurch/limp/stagger, speaking of butts, I should just take the dog, and we should walk briskly through the crisp mountain air, strengthening our bond and our love for each other even as we strengthen our cardiovascular systems and our senses of self-worth!

Except it’s cold out. So I’ll just go to the 4:30 Body Pump thingum. Or is there a yoga class? I could get on the treadmill any time I want. But I should just take Crommy out—it would be rude and selfish to not take Crommy, to kill two birds with one stone! But it’s so cold, and it’s icy too. The gym makes the most sense. But I hate what time the class. When’s yoga again?

And thus, my fitness routine. Mix it up however you like! But please remember to make sure you consult with your doctor before attempting any physical activity.

revolutions

jen larsen — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:07:17 +0000

Every once in awhile I develop this overwhelming desire to become a better person—someone who smells better, looks better, acts better, is better. I think this is a unique phenomenon that should probably be studied by scientists as something brand-new and unusual that no one on earth has ever experienced ever in the history of time, or when the new year rolls around and the calendar looks all shiny and new and blank and filled with possibilities. For instance: the possibility that this year, you won’t suck.

This year, I’m not going to suck. There, I said it. This year it is very likely that I will suck. Four days into the new year, this shiny fancy 2012 we’ve been given, it’s pretty likely I have already sucked any number of times. That I have messed up in countless tiny ways, leaving nothing but pain and disappointment in my wake. But I have decided not to think about that, because that way lies madness.

The opposite way lies new year’s resolutions, which is a bunch of pledges you make solemnly to yourself and the people around you, whether they realize it or not, that you will do your best to quit being a bad person and instead become a better person with whom no fault can be found, and also to develop (or invent) new excellent qualities to be admired by all.

I spent a week thinking about the person I wanted to be in 2012, the accumulation of which would make me the person I end up being on January 31st of this year. I hope that I’m going to pat myself on the pack gently, admiringly, and say good job, Jen. You tried really hard, and look how well you’ve done.

The other reason I want to make resolutions and write them down and be all conscious and alert is because I have no idea if I made resolutions last year, if I wrote them down anywhere if I did, and whether I kept any of them, even accidentally. It is highly unlikely. This vague sense of unease I have about 2011, most of which I do not remember, probably springs from that fact.

But this year will be better! This year I will cherish the people I love, related and un-related by blood. This year I’ll stay in touch with them. This year I will only make promises I keep. This year I’ll pay off my credit cards and finish the majority of the unfinished projects that languish on every floor of the house.

This year I’ll be creative—super, extra, crazy-fancy ultra creative. I’m going to learn to use my camera, and I’m going to finish this book I’m writing and start a new one and revise an old-old one, and work on sewing projects. I’m going to write flash fictions. If you were to take me at my word, you’d believe I’m going to be writing flash fictions every day and posting them on a secret website somewhere on the internet every day, even when they’re truly terrible. I have this feeling that there’s going to be a lot of truly terrible flash fiction written this year.

This year I’m going to be bright and shiny! This year I will go to the gym! This year I will breathe in, and then I’m going to breathe back out again! This year I will keep at least one of my resolutions—this I swear! You heard it here first.

winter, winter, i’m through

jen larsen — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:56:46 +0000

This is the time during the winter where you officially are obligated to say that’s it, I’m finished, I’m done, it’s over, another snowfall will kill me and if it doesn’t, I will kill myself, because really, winter, you’ve gone entirely too far. Really, winter.

When E and I booked our fancy vacation the hell out of winter, I thought we should go as soon as possible. No, E said sagely, as he has lived in winter climes for the entirety of his life, we should go as late in February as possible. Because that’s when we’re going to be sick of winter. That’s when we’re going to need a break. But I want to go nooooooow, I whined. Believe me, he said. You’ll be grateful at the end of February. You’ll be glad we waited.

I would like to be grateful and glad we waited but I can’t right now because it is a week and a half before we’re in temperatures above freezing, and in the meantime, snow keeps falling from the sky in blizzard-like sheets, and I can’t get warm and I keep slip-sliding over the ice, starting to fall, jerking up, starting to fall, jerking back, starting to fall, jerking sideways, so that I look like a marionette with a clumsy drunken monkey at the strings. I kind of wish I would just fall already and break something and never have to leave the house again. I kind of regret writing that sentence, because my next post is now obligated to start, “Remember when I said I wanted to fall and break something? Funny story…”

This morning, three cars were stuck in the snow that came down last night. The snow is now almost to the top of my boots. The top of my boots is almost directly below my knees. I have stubby legs, but that is still, you must admit, a lot of goddamn snow. It is less snow than some people have, I am sure, but it is more than enough snow for me, is what I am saying. It is snow that used to make me go “snoooooow!” but now makes me go “graaaaaah!” which is a sound that neatly combines rage at the elements with despair for my continued survival.

My hands are blocks of ice and my fingers barely bend. The tip of my nose is gone. I am snow and freezing wind all the way through to my core and back outside again. Blankets do not warm me, hot showers do not thaw me, life is very difficult and I miss you, the sun. Where have you gone? Why have you forsaken us? You are yellow and warm. I remember yellow warmness. I remember having toes. Those were good times.

There are some things I like. Pretty pictures. Hiking around the mountains with the dogs who love bounding through the snow and catching snowballs. Not being in the snow, because you are inside with a guy who’s got a core temperature like a furnace and does not mind being used as a blanket. I’m fond of hot cocoa. Tiny marshmallows are a miracle of the future, but it’s not enough any more.

Winter, I am done with you. Won’t you please get finished with us? Won’t you please wander off somewhere else where they are very tired of high temperatures and sunny days and picnics in the park and swimming and ice pops and bare toes? I’m sure they’ll be happy to see the backside of all that bare skin. So to speak. Go where you’ll be appreciated. That is my advice to you. That is my advice to everyone, in fact! Go where you are appreciated and loved! Thank you, winter, for making me see an important life lesson. Now get the fuck out.

the future

jen larsen — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:59:34 +0000

Sometimes I am taken up by such a tornado of amazement and wonder that I land three states away, blinking and with two broken legs and only one shoe. Probably because I have a gentle and completely credulous nature which makes me believe you when you say that it was you in the big dance scene in Flashdance (true story, and I don’t want to talk about it). It’s never beautiful, mystical and sensitively spiritual things like dew drops on roses and the small and wondrous pink nose of a kitten that makes me contemplate the nature of a loving Universe and blows my hair back–no, what usually astonishes me and makes me wide-eyed with awe is when I am struck anew by how much in the future we are totally living.

It’s always the little things that get me. I am dutifully impressed and fascinated by monkeys controlling robots with their minds and the creepy-cool Large Hadron Collider, but it’s the daily evidence in our lives that while we may not be living in a future with personal jetpacks–yet–it’s still a goddamn amazing place filled with wonders and miracles no one could have imagined a century ago, a half a century ago, ten years ago. THE FUTURE!

Usually I go about my business here in the future as blithely and unconcernedly as anyone else does, taking it all for granted because that is what you do, if you are of my generation and later. But like everyone else does, usually of my generation, this weird set of kids (and we are so often still just kids) that somehow straddles the divide between the quaintness of the 80s and the brilliant flashing diamond of the millennial years, sometimes you have to stop and marvel at the marvels, and go wow. You know, that is just cool. I appreciate that I live here in the future, with access to hot and cold running water, adequate sanitation and access to sophisticated medical care. And also the internet.

Yesterday, it was two things, practically back to back, that made me stop and shake my head, and feel a little old and also grateful for penicillin and antilock brakes. I had to get my book manuscript into the hands of a reader, I don’t have a printer, they live all the way across the country. I uploaded the document to FedExKinkos , and this very morning, even as I type, they are printing it four blocks from her house and then they are going to deliver it right to her front door, in a box, bound with rubber bands, fresh and hot off the printer. And for some reason, it absolutely blows my mind. My file went from being here, electronic in Utah, to a hard copy in New York, delivered within a day. Maybe my astonishment is all hayseed yanked off a farm in the mountains and set loose in overalls, blinking up at the bright lights of the big city–boy howdy, that’s shiny! But I tell you–that’s brilliant.

And as I was uploading and marvelling over the futuristic convenience of on-demand printing and shipping, I looked at my twitter page, saw that a friend was stranded because his train was delayed by an oil refinery explosion along the tracks. I didn’t have my cell phone on me, so I emailed his phone instead and asked him if he needed a ride. We messaged back and forth while he was on the shuttle bus. “I think the driver is lost,” he wrote. But no, he doesn’t need a ride. “Holler if the bus driver starts heading towards Vegas ,” I write back. When we don’t hear from him for awhile, we check Google News, and see that the trains are running, if slowly, and he ought to be home soon with Arby’s bag in hand.

And okay, I want to jump up and down and yell oh my GOD do you REALIZE how many AMAZING things just HAPPENED in that SINGLE PARAGRAPH! Today a wonder we behold. These things are so commonplace and ordinary and I feel a little dopey when I get that urge to bounce around and take people by their sweet little chipmunk cheeks and look deep into their eyes and urge them with uncomfortable-for-everyone sincerity to say hallelujah, amen! I should just take everything for granted until we get ourjet packs that are guided by the minds of the monkeys who run the Large Hadron Collider . But probably tomorrow I will become speechless with wonder over the miracle of heated automobile seats and those sneakers with the little wheels inside.