A hodgepot of thoughts 7.0

I’ve run out of stuff to write about, but still bound to an arbitrary post schedule, so I’ve decided to write about that. High five to myself for setting up the hodgepot precedent. While I doubt anyone cares, I feel I’m entitled to one of these every tri-couple of weeks.

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I’m turtling my way through 1776, reading 8 pages on the bus ride to work and 8 pages on the way back. If you have a math focused brain, you may be thinking (8 + 8) * 5 = 90, doesn’t seem like a turtle pace, especially since the book is only 300 pages, but I work from home most days. The short commute from the kitchen smoothie station to my home office is about the length of three sweatpants. Which is to say, I can’t smoothie and read at the same time. My real pace is closer to (8 + 8) * 0.5 = 8 pages a week.

I’ve been incredibly impressed with David McCullough’s use of parentheticals - those snippets between commas, like this one, that provide supplemental information. One of my favorite books on writing cautions against separating your subject and verb with a long string of parentheticals, with the reasoning that it will confuse readers, but frankly, David MC doesn't give a damn. All cool kid and sunglasses, he wedges a paragraph worth of parentheticals between his subject and predicate and makes his reader eat it. But in the overstuffed face of ill-advised writing structure, readers can’t get enough and tossed him a Pulitzer prize.

And I’m in complete agreement; the book rocks. The book is essentially a real life version of Game of Thrones, and I’m entranced with the well-told backstory of all the players. I’ve already developed favorites and can’t wait to see Daenerys overtake King’s Landing… I mean, Washington recaptured Boston. The word choice and writing style glide the reader through the story and make you feel superior to the other bus dwellers will all the history knowledge that you pick up along the ride. 

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I hope that bachelorette Michelle doesn’t choose Nayte. I’m more rooting against the choice of Nayte than I am rooting for the choice of Brandon. I have spoken.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” - wise mothers everywhere, and also probably Abraham Lincoln.

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I recently, incorrectly set up my direct deposit to route a portion of my paycheck into an investment amount. Unfortunately, I mis-entered the information, so assuming the payroll team can’t save me from being generous, my largest gift giving of the season might be to a random person. 

Not only did I mis-enter the routing number, I mis-entered the account number. In fact, I should have entered a 16 digit number, but what I entered only had 8 digits, so I was way off. Payroll has yet to answer my embarrassing email, conceding that I don’t know how to check an account’s info page, as to whether the error can be undone. 

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Whenever I’m at the gym for chest day, I do dumbbell press rather than barbell press. For reference, dumbbells are the ones Arnold Schwarzenegger uses and barbells are the ones Fred from Scooby Doo uses. When Fred claims he can bench press 220, this is the tool he’s referring to.

Back in college, I used to bench press with a barbell, but on one fateful occasion, I overloaded the bar with an ambitious amount of weight and didn’t have a spotter. I was on what became my last rep, without the strength to push the bar back up onto the rack. It slowly inched down toward me ready to crush the college-freshman Jackson. Essentially it was the same scene as the trash compactor from Star Wars, but with better storyline and acting.

Before all hope was lost, I used my mother-bear strength (you don’t have to be a jedi to use the force) to barely hook the right side of the bar onto the rack before the left side came crashing down. I slithered out of the awkward situation, avoiding the judgmental gaze of the gym folk who knew how to workout correctly, returned the weights, and went home.

The moral of the story is that dumbbells are better than barbells for chest press. This didn’t happen, but I recently saw someone squished to death at the gym by a barbell, so it got me thinking about it. When I see him in the afterlife (I’m sure heaven has a gym or at least a crossfit) I’ll give him my unsolicited opinion.