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Archive for January, 2008

January 30th, 2008 2 comments

The human body sucks. Well, mine does. Yours is awesome. All svelte and muscular, lithe and tanned. I hate you. Get out of my sight.

Let me start over: my body is weird. If I’m not dieting, my usual daily caloric intake rivals that of a Kodiak Bear. Seriously, it’s like 4000 calories a day. My body has settled into a nice rhythm in which I hover just shy of 250 pounds on that diet, at least for a while, and then it seems to realize “Hey, the good times are here, might as well store some of this!” and then I start to develop freakish hairy jowls. Then I go on a diet, like the crazy strict one I’m on right now (it’s 12:30; I’ve been up for nearly 6 hours, and so far I have eaten one (1) 6 oz. container of strawberry yogurt and one (1) 6 oz. piece of braised salmon and shortly I’m planning on having a salad perhaps with a poached egg), take in like 1500 calories a day, and barely lose any weight at all.

I’m told this is because my body thinks I’m starving (which I am; I’m so hungry right now I’m eyeing up one of my more succulent cats) and so it stops burning calories. I’m going to figure out a way to make it burn them if it kills me. Except that I won’t exercise, because I hate it. It’s not just that I hate the actual physical exertion (though I do), but if I go jogging for a half-hour I have to allocate 10 minutes to change clothes and walk out to the track, 30 minutes to actually run, and then another 30 minutes to shower and change back into my fat boy pants. It’s worse if I go to the gym because there’s a 25 minute commute involved, and when I go to the gym I try and spend 90 minutes lifting and running to make the drive worth it, which means I’m using roughly 3 hours.

Do I have 3 hours to spare in any given day? In a related question, do I have a 20-month-old son? I think you have your answers.

Perhaps I should take Peyton Manning’s advice and just buy some bigger shirts.

Categories: rolling with the fatness Tags:

January 24th, 2008 1 comment

Things have been insane this week, so I haven’t had time to comment on the fact that, um, I’m old now. So I’ll do that now. The big 3-0. Three Zero. MattHearnIsFreakingOld.com. Some of you who are already in your mid-30s are saying, “Old? OLD? Screw you, you youngling!” To which I respond: let me have a moment of glory. I don’t get many, other than when Sarah changes Charles’s diaper and he takes a moment to point to his penis, yell “WANG!”, and giggle; that’s as glorious for me as it is mortifying for Sarah.

Anyway, in short, I turned 30 on Monday. I was hoping to have a leisurely day, but of course something broke, so it was just a big ball of stress in my stomach all day. NOT the way I wanted to start my fourth decade, for real reals. We did at least get to go out to dinner, at Walter’s, where I drank a sizable amount of alcohol, had a steak that weighed about the same as Charles, and enjoyed a raw bar that feature oysters and clams with flavors that could best be described as “hauntingly pungent.” Tuesday was no less stressful, and yesterday things began to ease up but I had 4 hours of rehearsals last night. So today is the first opportunity I’ve had to sit back and contemplate my ever-increasing age. I’ve come to some conclusions:

  • I am now definitely at the age where it is basically impossible for me to ever get a shot at trying out for left field for the Phillies. Sure, Chris Coste didn’t make it to the majors until he was 33, but he had spent something like 12 years toiling in the minors to get his shot. I’m, um, not doing that. Also he has actual baseball talent, and I couldn’t hit a major league fastball with a piece of 1×12 white pine.
  • I’m probably at the age where, despite taking piano lessons and practicing regularly, I am unlikely to become a concert pianist. I’m also nearing the age where it is unlikely I’ll be good enough to even accompany a bad church choir.
  • I’m nearing the age where people will start calling me sir instead of “Hey jerk.” This is good and bad, I guess.

So tell me, fellow 30-somethings, what’s the best part about hidding pre-pre-middle-age? Other than I think I can run for the US Senate now?

January 17th, 2008 1 comment

In my never-ending quest to develop SOME kind of visual artistic skill (I draw about as well as my son, and he’s mostly interested in eating the crayons), I have taken some new photographs. Feel free to ridicule them. I’m particularly fond of this one:

Click it, ho!

Categories: artsy fartsy Tags:

January 15th, 2008 2 comments

Here comes a batch of the hottest links since St. Andrews Golf Course got buried under lava!!! (Note: St. Andrews Golf Course hasn’t been anywhere near lava since roughly 3,847,328,497 BCE.)

  • Starting to wonder which presidential candidate is the one for you? Not certain how best to figure it out? Willing to make a choice based on their midichlorian concentrations? Here you effin’ go. This may be the most amusing thing to ever appear on craigslist, which is really saying something.
  • You know how most online multi-player games require ridiculous investments in time? Even Tradewars, the best multi-player ASCII-text game, requires you to monitor your automatic port-pairing/robbing/planet colonization scripts for hours a day. Well, not Travian. So far I’ve set up my little village, and I just check it every day or so when my population has gotten me more resources, and I build more stuff. I haven’t gotten to interact with anyone yet, so it may require a bit more time, but I’d say I’ve had to actually PLAY the game for about 15 minutes in 2 days. Seems pretty rad, though.
  • If you don’t read Overcompensating, you should. Do it. Do it.
  • Are you ready to be terrified? ::shudder::. Remember: these people probably vote.
  • This is simply going to make you feel warm all over.

Enjoy! Or don’t! Whatev!

Categories: link day Tags:

January 10th, 2008 2 comments

So: Heroes. HW and I are about halfway through the DVDs of season one, usually knocking out 2 or 3 episodes a night while cleaning, or working on our lappies, or whatnot. So far, here are my thoughts:

  • I am on the freaking edge of my seat. Seriously, it’s all we can do to get to bed by 11pm, and invariably when there’s any doubt, we watch another episode. We’re starting to reach the point, though, where keeping track of all the various plotlines is taking its toll on our sanity; about 10 episodes in, they introduced yet another new character, and Sarah paused the DVD, looked at me, and said, “Oh hells no.”
  • The show is deceptively gruesome. Early on we watched a few episodes with Charles in the room (not that he pays attention; the only things he likes on TV are “The New Yankee Workshop” (he likes to say “Morm!” when Norm Abram appears) and “Days Of Our Lives”), but after a few episodes I realized that the despite the fact that there’s very little actual violence in a given episode, there’s a heck of a lot of shots of the results of violence. For example, in an early episode (mild SPOILER ALERT), Niki rips a couple of mafia goons to shreds, quite literally. You don’t get to see it happen, but you do get a couple of glimpses of corpses with significant limbs in alternate locations. Later on, some people get their heads sawn open; you don’t see it happen, you just see the results. Pretty gritty stuff. IT’S AWESOME.
  • HW extols the acting of Ali Larter, who plays (another SPOILER ALERT) a chick with multiple personality disorder, but I don’t think it’s that hard. There’s no real subtlety between the two characters; one is timid and nice, and the other is insane and likes to tear people limb from limb. It’s interesting to see her switch back and forth in the span of a few seconds, but I think any actor outside of Keanu Reeves could probably do that. None of the acting is really that exceptional, although that’s mostly because the characters just aren’t that deep. They all have funny abilities and are conflicted about them. The best of the lot is probably Adrian Pasdar, playing politician Nathan Petrelli, because he’s the only one with more than 2 layers. (I don’t count Ali Larter here because she’s basically playing two separate characters who happen to look identical.) Nathan has his politician mask, his win-at-all-costs shark persona, his mild confusion and conflict about his abilities, and underneath all that, there’s a foreboding menace that’s hard to describe because we’ve only gotten to see glimpses of it yet.

    Hayden Panettiere is a little disappointing, mostly because her half-hearted attempts at a Texas accent falls WAAAAY short. On the other hand, she’s so hot that I have to put on loose pants to watch the show. So I can’t be truly objective about her acting. And don’t remind me that she was probably only 16 when season 1 was taped; I already have to counteract my shame and guilt with massive amounts of high quality English gin. Although I don’t feel so bad, now that she’s dating Milo Ventimiglia, who is 8 months older than I.

  • The inside jokes and shoutouts to other films and TV shows, usually involving Hiro Nakamura, are SLAYING me. When he tries to travel backwards in time a few minutes, and accidentally goes backwards approximately 6 months, he says “Great Scott!”, an obvious reference to “Back To The Future.” Later, we noted that his father was played by George Takei (aka Mr. Sulu), who rolls up in a limo with the license plate “NCC1701.” It’s also worth noting that Hiro is the most amusing character in a prime-time drama since Thomas Magnum. And Hiro’s cuter. All the nerdgirls I know crave his hott parts.

Right now our DVR is choked with episodes from Season 2; hopefully we can wrap up Season 1 in the next week or so and start to get caught up. If only to see what happens when Hayden Panettiere’s character hits her slutty college years.

Categories: artsy fartsy, wtf Tags:

January 7th, 2008 5 comments

In my never-ending quest to be exactly 4 years behind my peers, technologically, I finally got an iPod. For a long time I maintained that any music player was as good as another, and in fact convinced my wife a few years ago to buy me a little 256MB player that held 70 or 80 songs and was very small and compact and handy. It had some downsides, though: it used a single AAA battery, which it would burn through in about 45 minutes; it was nearly impossible to control the volume easily, which probably took a few hertz off of my audible range; and also it required a proprietary USB cable which I immediately lost, so the songs that were on it were gonna stay on it, which is unacceptable as long as Justin Timberlake keeps releasing albums.

So anyway, I put an iPod nano on my Amazon.com wishlist a while back, and managed to update it to the new video version long enough before Xmas that HW bought me one. It’s simply fantastic. It’s like a monolith, and it has changed me from a raving caveman into a hip Seattle-style intellectual. (Sorry, I just read 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time.)

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into some kind of indie band blog, ’cause let’s face it: 99.9% of indie bands are independent of the major labels because they suck Donkey Kong.

Anyway, a few thoughts on the iPod nano:

  • It is ridiculously small. Seriously, I look at it and marvel at what science can do. It’s about the size of 3 credit cards stuck together, and holds 8 freaking gigabytes of data, be it mp3s, videos, photos, or even games. Note: playing games on an iPod is kinda sucky.
  • I had never really gotten into the whole “podcast” thing, because without an actual iPod I could only listen to them on my computer, and if I’m sitting in front of my computer I’m undoubtedly reading something or playing a game, and can’t concentrate on the voices in my ear. Having an iPod changes everything; I download podcasts and listen to them in my car, which is fantastic because the average podcast is roughly 25-30 minutes, and it takes me 25-30 minutes to get from where I work to Sarah’s parents’ house to pick up Charles. So awesome.
  • Perhaps it’s just the shape of my lobes, but the earbuds just won’t stay in my ear very well. It’s not a problem if I’m just sitting at my desk listening to tunes, but I can’t imagine jogging with them. I think my ears are just too big. They make decent headphones that wrap around the ear (I have a pair I bought for my other mp3 player, although they’re kinda beat up now), but the iPod earbuds sound particularly good, and I don’t think a cheapy set would fit the bill. Some of my readers are enormous individuals who probably have iPods; how do you guys listen to your jams?

Also, since I’m always about 2 years behind on pop culture, HW and I are getting caught up on “Heroes,” which I think is the best network drama on TV. More about that later in the week.

Categories: dear diary, musings Tags:

January 2nd, 2008 1 comment

I don’t know when the hell I got so old, but somewhere between the ages of 18 and almost-30 I lost the ability to play a game of football without being crippled for days. I played some beach tackle football with my old Ychrome buddies yesterday, and as a result I can barely walk today. Every muscle in my thighs is on fire, my lower back is basically sending a constant series of “F U” messages to my brain, and also I think I dislocated part of my nose because I got elbowed in the face while trying to tackle the QB.

I also learned some things about my athletic ability:

  1. I am not an accurate thrower. What I am is a hard thrower. So the best option is to have someone park themselves near the line of scrimmage so I can throw the ball at their heads, like Peyton Manning. If they run to the endzone, I whip it far over them. So I am useless at that position. We tried it for 2 downs and I never threw the ball again.
  2. I am not an effective receiver, because I am fat and slow. This means that, despite the fact that I can pretty much catch anything thrown within reach, I never get open enough for someone to throw to me, unless they have specifically drawn a play up for me.
  3. I am a good runner, because I have no problem simply lowering my shoulder into whomever is attempting to tackle me. Since I was one of the 2 largest players, and the other one was on my team, the 80+ pound weight advantage was key.

In the end, we won, mostly because we had actual athletes on the team, but also because there were a few opportunities for me to run over people. Fantastic times. Except that now my groin hurts. And Charles has a fun game where I’m required to lie on the floor so that he can jump on my nutsack. So I’ve got that to look forward to later.

Categories: wtf Tags: