Killing myself slowly...

I went to the gym today. That's not unusual, but I haven't been updating my gym journal as much as I should. I did five minutes of bagwork for the warmup then turned to doing mostly legs in the gym proper. I did two circuits through: hip adduction (60, then 70), calf lifts (90, then 115), knee/thigh (60 both times), lower back (110), and the new exercise: deep lunges while carrying 25 pound dumbbells in each hand. To my great pleasure, neither the acid reflux nor the trick knee gave me any trouble whatsoever.

Which is good, because I've been kinda worried the past few days. Last week I was home for large swaths of time and dedicated solid hours to writing. When I write, I sit on the floor cross-legged, and the muscles that stretch over the kees were all stretched out, and they were giving me pain and soreness, but it's all good now. I just needed a few good workouts and some solid self-imposed suffering.

The pornification of mainstream literature

The following are quotes from short stories that appeared in a popular and well-known magazine. Without googling for it, can you tell me which magazine?

He ran full throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. He jerked his hand away as though he'd touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours, and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed.

Sasha was adjusting her yellow eyeshadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vault-like door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale-green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman's blind trust had provoked her.

( The answer. )

It's all about the mindset. Writing it is hard. Understanding it is harder.

This answers a deep mystery that FallenPegsasus has commented on in the past:

Broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes-- their total environment-- as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply, as far as the peasant is concerned. Not only do these and all other "good things" exist in finite and limited quantities, but in addition there is no way directly within peasant power to increase the available quantities. It is as if the obvious fact of land shortage in a densely populated area applied to all other desired things: not enough to go around. "Good," like land, is seen as inherent in nature, there to be divided and re-divided, if necessary, but not to be augmented.

Except in a special-- but extremely important-- way, a peasant sees his existence as determined and limited by the natural and social resources of his village and his immediate area. Consequently, there is a primary corollary to The Image of Limited Good: if "Good" exists in limited amounts which cannot be expanded, and if the system is closed, it follows that an individual or a family can improve a position only at the expense of others. Hence an apparent relative improvement in someone's position with respect to any "Good" is viewed as a threat to the entire community. Someone is being despoiled, whether he sees it or not. And since there is often uncertainty as to who is losing any significant improvement is perceived, not as a threat to an individual or a family alone, but as a threat to all individuals and families.

Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good, by George M. Foster.

Bad Elf Art

Jan 23rd: Hard boiled eggs.

One of the kids' favorite lunches is egg salad sandwiches. Making the eggs is a bit of a chore first thing in the morning, so we make them in the evening, and usually they're left to chill while the girls are going to bed. One morning a while ago one of the girls, I think it was Kouryou-chan, picked up the wrong egg and cracked it expecting it to be hard-boiled when it wasn't. Since then, I've taken to marking the hard-boiled ones. Usually I just write their initials on them, but oftentimes I try to draw something. I've drawn a porcupine and a dragon (Yamaraashi-chan and Kouryou-chan), a snake and a pirate, I've written "How do you keep a fool busy? See other egg." on both of them, and lots and lots of bad chibi^[?].

This was last night's effort. I think the Elvis is better than the Harry Potter.