Does This Blog Make Me Look Fat?

Home Workouts, My Junk (Food) Drawer and Other Deep Thoughts

Those of us old enough to remember the days of the 20 Minute Workout are well practiced at home exercise. We would don our leotards and leg warmers, lace up our Reeboks, let our hair down and eagerly await for Bess, Arlaine, Holly, Nicole and Anne to put us through the ‘oh so sexy’ rigours of 80’s aerobic dancing in the comfort of our homes. Wild hair down, bending and stretching, porn music playing…these girls really knew how to work it. Teenage boys, well their dads too…well any guy unless they were gay, would tune in for a different kind of workout…more the ‘5 Minute’ kind.

Bess was my favorite…she was so trashy…she would seductively gaze at the camera like a seasoned stripper ‘working it’ for her next meal…I loved her style. To get a look at her rockin’ moves fast forward to 21:30 in the video below.

Wait…got 20 Minutes? You’ve been sitting on your ass all day snacking on junk food don’t lie to me… Get moving. Don’t mock it until you’ve tried it

How’d that go?

Twenty minutes of your life you’ll never get back thanks to me you say?

So it was raining Saturday. Monsoon rain. Torrential. I took advantage of the crap weather to drink a pot and a half of coffee, send out the client newsletter I started working on before all this blog stuff started, had hours-long phone calls with the endless number of people to whom I’ve become an emotional support animal (I’m way to social for social distancing apparently) and then contemplated rearranging my living room as a kind of ‘home workout’ (reference my first post ‘I Should Be Running’ for my opinion on getting my feet wet).

After I worked up a moderate sweat scraping furniture across the floor I found a pile of photos from when I was dancing that I had printed up. I was waiting to get frames, you know, those things that pictures belong in. Frames are expensive and I’m pretty sure a non-essential item so ‘for now’ (I love that term by the way…I do a lot of stuff in the ‘for now’ mindset) I’m going to just tape them to the wall. Then when the Zombie-Apocalypse is over I’ll buy frames and really commit them to their spot.

Pictures. Hang up pictures.

Tape…I have to have tape somewhere.

I headed to my junk drawer with trepidation. You know the junk drawer. It’s the top or bottom drawer in the kitchen that serves as a holding zone for household items destined for the garbage (yes you have one, stop lying to me). It is also referred to as ‘The Man Drawer’ (see my previous post for clarification).

I contemplated taking a shot of tequila prior to going in. A bit of liquid courage. I pass…thinking that hanging up pictures whilst drunk is likely a bad idea. Pouring myself a glass of wine I opened the drawer with my foot, I’m a master multitasker.

My junk drawer appears to have turned into a bit of a ‘Junk Food’ drawer over the last week or so. I normally don’t buy chips and chocolate (no I’m not lying to make myself look healthy…I’m drinking wine at 11am for crying out loud)…I work so much that I’m rarely home for long periods of time. I have no time for mindless snacking while watching the television that I don’t own. But for some reason, over the last week, the peer pressure from seeing all my friends post things like this has led me to a few ‘impulse’ purchases at the grocery store…

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Looking down in the drawer the first thing I see is a bag of Reese’s Mini Peanut Butter cups I purchased on a whim at the checkout when I was picking up my insulin at Shoppers Drug Mart. Reese’s Cups and Strawberry Twizzlers are really the only two crap food items I can’t seem to resist buying periodically. Well those and Barbara’s Cheese Puffs, but they’re organic so they’re healthy junk food…right? Twizzlers are the perfect emergency low blood sugar food so I’ve always had some kind of twisted justification for that particular craving. That carefully crafted combination of corn syrup, red dye #40, palm oil and artificial flavors could save my life so best to have it on hand at all times…right?

I digress…

The bag is open and those little chocolate bad-boys are flirting with me shamelessly, mocking my attempt to withstand their charms. Practicing my own version of ‘Snacktime Stretch’, I reach down and grab a couple, popping them into my mouth. They’re small and calories consumed prior to breakfast don’t count…right?

I sift through the contents of my drawer…surely this is where the tape lives. I have tape don’t I? If not masking tape then the clear stuff people use to wrap presents with? Duct tape, I have to have duct tape…or my favorite…Gorilla Tape. It’s so damn sticky I could wax my legs with it (yes I tried…don’t do it…Just. Don’t.)

There’s no tape.

I do have:

• string
• command strips (I briefly think of using the sticky bits from those but they’re way too expensive and times are tight)
• reading glasses
• an old wallet (devoid of cash)
• a wall calendar from 2017
• various charging cables for devices I no longer own
• cheesecloth
• batteries-new and used
• tealights
• empty ziplock bags
• 2 hairpins
• a pair of broken sunglasses
• Spanish instructions for something…I have no idea what for… it may as well be written in kanji
• glue
• dry erase markers for the whiteboard I don’t own
• Christmas cards
• a bag of Cocomels
• 1/4 of a bag of stale potato chips

Disappointed I close the drawer. No Twizzlers.

Where else would I find tape?

I go to my bedroom and open the closet. Because you know…that’s the next logical place to look.

I have two closets in my bedroom. One for clothes and one for the shite I’m planning on getting rid of whenever I have time to sort through it. I look at the shelf unit in the closet and proceed to rummage through the various items tossed in there when I moved in…

• One red Sony Walkman. For millenials reading this post reference this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman. Mine is the swank water-proof variety that sported a radio as well as a cassette player.
• a twoonie, which I walked to the kitchen junk drawer and placed in the empty wallet…you know…for a rainy day)
• pens
• an old purse
• an old wallet (no money in that one either)
• a deck of cards
• an old sports bra
• photos

For millenials reading this post, back in days of yore, people used to take pictures with cameras loaded with something called film. Film came in little black plastic cylindrical canisters which were then repurposed for things like coins and weed. If you ever saw one of these in your fridge door when you were a kid, you now know your parents were being complete hypocrites when they lectured you about ‘Reefer-Madness’ and the evils of ‘The Devil’s Lettuce’.

Once the film was used up (usually 12-24 shots per roll), people would then take it to a film developing place…often the local drugstore…where they would wait up to a week for it to be developed into photos. For me this was always a nerve wracking week full of anticipation.

This was a time where you took a photo and didn’t have the luxury of immediately checking it on your digital camera or phone after it was taken to see if you had red-eye or if it was out of focus. This was pre-selfie days. I am adamantly ‘anti-selfie’…the term itself annoys me to no end. Don’t get me started on the selfie-stick (the person who invented that thing is sitting on a beach somewhere beside the guy who invented the lint roller as I write this… drinking cocktails and laughing at us)

Anyway, people didn’t take selfies back in my day. If you did you’d go blind from the flash going off in your face.

Staring at the flash was a big problem for me, my baby-blues often appeared blood red (an ominous precursor to the present Zombie-Apocalypse). The Kodak Instamatic had no ‘red-eye reduction’ setting. I look demon-possessed in most pictures taken of me in my youth thanks to the flashcube…

Once you picked your photos up from the store you would find two smaller envelopes inside the main envelope. One contained your printed photos (glossy or matte, with or without borders as specified when you dropped off the film) and one contained the negatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_(photography).

Usually about half of the photos were crap.

Sifting through the 40 or so photos of a sand crab I was trying to capture on film from a long-past Hawaiian vacation with my family, I forgot what I was looking for in my junk closet.

Pictures…it had something to do with pictures…

Tape! Right!

Ok…this is getting long and I’ve switched from wine to Margaritas (looking at old vacation photos will do that) so here’s what happened…

• I contemplated going to the store to purchase tape
• Nixed above idea. Too lazy and difficult to practice proper social distancing after a few cocktails
• Used my imagination to try to come up with alternatives to tape
  • glue-no…permanent and messy
  • gum-no…gross and I don’t have any at the moment…fresh breath makes social distancing more difficult
  • strips of lint roller…Hell no…that Dickhead’s sitting on a beach right now mocking me
  • bandaids…don’t have any…should get some…
  • medical tape! I have medical tape!

I pasted my pictures to the wall with surgical precision. They look great.

What’s the takeaway here I wondered that evening as I sat in my newly arranged living room…sipping wine…it was a good day. Productive.

This is my thinking at the moment:

1. It’s ok to have a junk drawer…the junk closet is up for debate
2. Necessity is the mother of invention
3. Using Gorilla Tape to wax your legs is a bad idea
4. It’s ok to snack on junk food as long as you put it slightly out of reach
5. Calories consumed before breakfast don’t count
6. Twizzlers are an essential item
7. Bess and the 20 Minute Workout ladies have really bad form (but I love them for it)

Tomorrow’s a new day.