I think all this aerobics crap has been straining my knees and I’ll have to start doing other things instead of hopping around. I’ll swim, I guess, as soon as I can stand the thought of walking around smelling like Chlorox; I’ll get a bike and ride and chap my butt for a while when spring comes, and I suppose I’ll do the elliptical cross-trainer machine some more.
Of all of these options, I like the elliptical cross-trainer the best. I like how it has the word elliptical in it: I like the idea that I am exercising my sense of obscurity. The treadmill, I think, is all about plain old existential banality; the NordicTrack just takes things way too literally, and as for the StairMaster–well, you can tell the StairMaster reads The Fountainhead and that kind of crap. I’m not sure about the dogma of exercycles. I’ll have to think about that.
But when it comes to the elliptical cross-trainer, it’s not clear just what the fuck you’re doing. You’re sort of running . . . but you’re also kind of pedalling, except then there’s no bicycle . . . and then at the same time you’re pulling these lever thingies, which you sometimes also push. And then sometimes the whole thing tells you just to stop pedalling and go in the opposite direction. It’s such a Beckett play, that cross-trainer.
Anyway, my knees suck. I think I might get some rubber knee braces, which would make me look like I’m in the roller derby. I’d like that.
I went to WW and in my two weeks of futzing around and eating lots of stuff, I managed to lose 0.2 pounds. That’s like about three ounces, right? Somehow those little increments seem more bizarre, especially when I wasn’t working particularly hard to lose them. What happened to cause 3.2 ounces of matter to turn into energy–or however the hell weight loss occurs–anyway, what happened? I think of everything I ate in the past week, Thai food and popcorn and chocolate and whatever, all of it somehow turning into a heat vapor and dispatched efficiently and used up completely. And then I guess I use up parts of myself.
What wigs me out, what with my half-assed knowledge of science and all, is that I don’t know what these parts are–they’re not cells, are they? It’s all something else. It’s intangible, in much the same way things that bother me about being fat are intangible: I’m happy, but…
Maybe my body feeds on vague dissatisfaction. In which case supply would not be a problem.
