Day 18

Like many of you, I also resolved to get into shape this year. Usually I just ignore that plan altogether the second I come up with it in the first place, knowing it is destined to fail, but this year I thought ‘hey- I am doing this art thing every single day. What if I just make this exercising thing part of that? Like, I can’t go to bed unless I make art first, and I can’t make art unless I work out first. It’s so crazy, it just might work!’

So I got home and turned on the Wii and fired up the EA Sports Active for the first time. It has something called a “30-day challenge”. I figured that was a good plan for making a habit of something and picked it. Unfortunately, it was drastically mislabeled.

It purported to be a variety of introductory exercises, when really it should have been labeled “Death by Squats” or “All Squats All Day” or “An ode to Guantanamo Bay in Squats” or something like that.

I wanted to stick with it and finish, but then I thought, ‘What if my muscles rip off of my bones and I can’t make it to the cell phone for help? What if I get a thigh cramp in the middle of a sales call and start screaming Tourette’s-style right into the phone? What if they hurt so bad tomorrow that I go to the bathroom at work and I don’t have the strength to get back up and I’m totally trapped in the cold bathroom that smells like mildew and there aren’t any other women working that day and I get locked in there because my manager thinks I left?!?!’ So needless to say, I had to stop “Sadist Squats for Masochists” before any of that happened. I’ll try it again tomorrow- minus the damn squats, clearly.

I ended up doing another small, simplified landscape in oil pastel on paper today. This bright color geometric shape thing isn’t going away any time soon so I figured I’d just go with it.