We kindred few

The longer I’ve been going to the gym regularly, the more I’ve started to pick up on patterns of attendance amongst gym patrons.

Also, yes, this is yet another random post about my reflections on going to the gym that I’m using as a crutch on a night where I didn’t know what else to write about and happened to come up with a vague idea while actually at the gym. Figured I’d lampshade this post now and get it out-of-the-way.

Also also, yes, I’ve said  ‘gym’ five times at this point, less than 100 words in.

It’s just going to be that kind of post.

Shattered fourth wall aside, let’s get into business patterns like I established up top.

For the most part I’ve noticed the same kind of thing repeatedly. During the week, particularly Mondays and Tuesdays, a lot more folks are at the gym later in the afternoon than earlier in the day — though I admittedly haven’t gone super early in the morning to check that timeframe.

But then on the weekends, and Fridays to some extent, it’s empty at night during the same periods that are booming during the week.

Though on the surface level this difference seems a little bizarre, it actually makes a lot of sense when you think about general work week scheduling.

During the week, anyone who doesn’t get up before the sun rises to work out as a wake-up maneuver is stuck in work or school for hours on end during the day. Thus they have to go to the gym at night.

Hell I’m personally a victim of long day scheduling even this semester. My Tuesdays and Wednesdays have me out from 11:00 a.m. to at least 7:00 p.m., not encompassing the drive home. Even on my shorter Mondays and Thursdays I’m not home until at least 3:00 p.m. or so.

The weekends, however, are different.

Nobody wants to necessarily go to the gym over the weekends. Those are the free days where people spend time with their families, go out to do chores or whatever they might want/have to do when not stuck in true obligations.

So unless you’re a real gym nut, or trying to keep yourself honest and get better like me, why would you go on the weekends?

To be fair I don’t even really go until late at night on the weekends despite having most of my days open because I just get lazy. I spent time with my family, I play video games, etc.

That’s how I wind up in the gym at 7:00 p.m. with a relatively small slice of gym goers, from my experience.

It winds up being a funny experience to me because I stare around at the odd collection of vaguely goth-looking girls on the exercise bikes, somewhat heavy gentlemen doing squats between the rows of machines, old folks meandering on treadmills with their walkers set next to the apparatus and so many others thinking…

What are you all doing here on a Saturday night?

Which of course leads me to the inevitable conclusions that I, too, am at the gym on a Saturday night alongside all of them. Dealing with the newly ordered machines, avoiding the construction in the bathrooms and just sweating away. To whatever ends they might be aiming for.

I do sort of wish I could just walk up and ask for their stories without it being bizarre or creepy. Perhaps I will one day if I want to do a story about that for some outlet I land in.

But for now, imagining little headcanons for each of them is plenty fun.

Plus there’s something vaguely unifying about the thought, even if most of my time is spent tunnel visioned on the routine I’ve set up for myself while listening to podcasts or watching videos.

Even if today all I found myself thinking about was whether they noticed my brand new haircut or not.

Got that pre-shower fuzzy forehead like damn.

I’m more than aware that slipping this photo in for the sake of confirming the existence of my new doo (which I feel the need to confirm for some reason) will make it appear as a featured image on social media, thus confusing everyone about the purpose of this post and making it seem as though I’m using myself as a weird bit of clickbait.

But uhh… Guess that’s just how it goes.

Good thing I’m the only one that worries myself over things like this, right?

Giving less than thanks

Happy Thanksgiving Break week, everybody!

What a wonderful time it is to start decompressing a bit and spend extra time with your family and friends.

Unless you’re like me this year.

Fair warning, this is a ranting vent post. So if you enjoy railing against people who do terrible things, you’ve come to the right place.

This is the first time in a number of years that Cal State Fullerton has remained open the Monday of Thanksgiving Break. Every other year I’ve been here, we’ve gotten the whole week off.

That’s annoying, but a lot of my friends have never had the luxury of a full week off, so it would feel a bit disingenuous to complain about that alone.

Everything’s relative.

The annoying part comes from the fact that most teachers decided they would either cancel their classes or just offer online coursework today. Because they, too, would rather have the whole week off as it turns out.

My Evolution and Creation professor was very eager to just not have class today. However, my Learning and Memory professor decided to keep the train going.

Naturally his class is the one that offers so much compact material that I knew I’d have to come in for it at risk of falling dangerously behind. Otherwise I would have skipped out and joined my family in Burbank.

To be fair, I also have to come in tomorrow for a mandatory internship orientation, so I would have had school this week no matter what.

The part about today that really bugged me was the execution.

To set the scene: It’s a cloudy, dreary day in Orange County and campus is next to empty (hence my featured image of the often bustling Library). The universe seems to be in agreement that things aren’t right.

Every student who is here seems downtrodden, as if the gloom of coming in during Thanksgiving Break was folding into the gloomy grey skies.

When I get to my class on the sixth floor of the Humanities building, a typically 35-ish headcount of students has been reduced to about 12.

As the professor starts to take roll amid the sound of the 1:00 p.m. clock tower chime, he pauses after a string of missing names.

He says, and I quote: “What, is it a holiday or something?”

Then he offers a cheeky grin to the audience, as if the villainous character in a reality T.V. show’s confessional booth.

How much of a dick to you have to be to crack a joke about how you’ve forced your students to come in when they didn’t necessarily have to? It’s just a cruel, self-aware form of torture.

From there it was an average lecture. Lots of densely-packed information over an hour-and-a-half. It sucked to be there, but at least I felt somewhat justified by the breadth of material.

Plus, I incurred an extra benefit by getting back my research paper final draft considering I turned it in early. It was the paper from this earlier post actually.

I got an A on the final draft. Frankly that’s all that matters.

However… He was somehow even more frustrating by proxy.

On the rough draft, he said my paper was an “excellent start” before giving me a C. It was littered with red marks, to the point where I wondered how he could justify calling it excellent in any respect.

The final draft had this message adorning the front:

Seems like a great message to accompany an A grade, right?

Unfortunately the message feels very disingenuous when you see just how much the final draft is still littered with red ink.

I don’t get it, man. The mixed messages are real.

But hey, I never have to think about the paper again. So I can’t complain.

I just wish that my being required to come in wasn’t accompanied by such a frustrating series of events. It doesn’t help that cancelled plans made the drive out feel like more of a waste of time.

That’s not a judgement call on the person I made plans with, since I know they’ll read this ❤

Hence why I’m sitting here in the Library writing this blog post and working on some homework to justify the time.

If nothing else I appreciate seeing campus as empty as it is during the daytime. It offers me the chance to hang out in places that I couldn’t normally.

Such as the seat by this statue’s butt near a Starbucks.

Could have never gotten that picture normally and I kind of love it?

So long as you ignore my 5 o’clock shadow and devil horns.

I really need a haircut soon. Perhaps I’ll try to do that over the break once it starts.

But that feels like a post for another day.

Salons and Binge Watching

This might be an unpopular opinion here on the old Internet, but haircuts are nice.

Yeah, I said it. Don’t @ me.

Alright well for real, I got a haircut this morning and it feels nice. Everything is just a bit smoother, lighter. Both figuratively and literally.

I’ve already done the whole ‘check out this sweet haircut’ post in the past so I don’t really want to go down that road again. Though I suppose it was productive to go back and see that post again, because it made me realize I really like to use the mad ramblings cliché.

Not sure realizing that is going to change anything, though. I do really like to use that cliché, after all.

In fact I probably could name this post something about rambling too. Because that’s basically what I’m about to do.

See after getting said haircut this morning I haven’t exactly done a whole lot. I came home, plopped down on the couch, and (in no particular order) played some video games, did some work for my Senior Honors Project and watched Rick and Morty.

That’s right, Rick and Morty.

It’s a show I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time. In fact I have watched it in bits and pieces, mostly the episodes which are famous for how clever or meme-worthy they are. But up until now I’ve never taken the time to go through the full three-season catalog.

I got through all of season one last night straight through 1 a.m. and haven’t been able to stop watching the rest today. Everyone always talks about how great the show is, but I never realized how truly brilliant it was until I started to watch it in its entirety.

All of the seemingly random, disconnected plots each simultaneously come into their own with the full context of a subtle overarching story. Yet, at the same time, it’s all totally made pointless by the same sarcastic, casual and horrid sense of humor that pervades the entire experience.

Plus it’s dope watching different characters like Summer evolve over the course of the show.

It’s as awesome to think and theorize about as it is to watch just from the merits of its production value.

Seriously if you’re like me and know you’ll enjoy the show but find reasons to put it off, just stop putting it off.

In fact, binging Rick and Morty made me realize that I should have spent more time this summer binging more shows. Like the different anime I talked about that one time.

Maybe I’ll do it some more over these last two weeks.

It could be a good way to pass some time while I work on outlining my story. Which, by the way, I would argue is going well. I may or may not have finally come up with the connecting thread I need to get my characters from their starting point to the climax I was imagining.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise if it winds up being what I actually implement, since it’s a pretty cool idea in my head.

Just know that my trope-fest involves a prophet who bestows information on how to move the plot of the game along. One who has a secret, meta way of learning the information they need to pass along.

With that said, I’ve hit the 500 word count I was hoping to get to with these blindly fluctuating topics. So I think I’m going to jump off and… You know… Watch more Rick and Morty.

Watch it, losers.

The Ramblings of a Madman with a fresh Haircut

After a few too many weeks of waiting, I finally got my hair cut today. It’s been a long time coming, and as cliché or obvious as it must sound I feel a billion times lighter now that the mop on my head has finally been shaved down.

I was getting into that dark place of no return that my Cousin Erika would call the “Jew-Fro” zone.

In hindsight, I imagine it could’ve been interesting to do a “before and after” picture comparison for this post. But I didn’t exactly think of that until it was too late, so we’ll have to scrap that idea and return to it another day.

However, despite my initial plan to possibly talk about the feeling of freedom that comes with losing 20 lbs of hair, I think that’s a bit too cliché for my tastes right now. I also don’t exactly feel like talking about how I wish I’d gotten this haircut before going to lunch with my friend Mimi this afternoon because I looked like a wind-beaten Wolverine.

So I guess the question is: What do I want to talk about?

Honestly, I’m not super sure. So I’m just going to riff a bit and see where my tired mind takes me.

I didn’t decide to go for my haircut until after I got back from lunch in Fullerton this afternoon, which was around 5:30 p.m. or so. That’s what made it so surprising that when I called into my local Supercuts, they said it would be another hour.

An hour wait? For a Wednesday night haircut? Seemed pretty bizarre…

But I wasn’t going anywhere else, so I figured I would go with it. Mom figured they were potentially busy because it’s the middle of school graduation season.

As it turned out that didn’t appear to be the case when Aly and I arrived at 6:30. Instead it just seemed like there were only a couple people on shift.

Yeah Aly came along to the hair cut with me, because why not? Also because she was able to make me hold back laughter awkwardly by making faces at me in the mirror from the waiting area.

And mooch food off of me afterward.

One thing I found myself contemplating throughout my stay in the stylist’s chair was the large mirror, actually. As strange as that probably sounds.

It’s purpose is fairly obvious. It gives everyone under the sheers an opportunity to see how their hair is being treated, and likely gives the cutter another angle to see things from while they work.

But I found there isn’t much to observe just watching the stylist at work. So instead I wound up focusing more on myself. Staring into the void, as it were.

On the one hand, that kind of constant staring at oneself without any outside distractions was strangely meditative, allowing me to interpret my more casual resting facial expressions.

On the other hand it was kind of distressing to just stare at myself. Because I don’t know if it was just the writing in the room, but I swear I looked like a super villain in that moment. Large shadows all around my eyes and dark crevasses over my cheek bones. Kind of reminded me of that scene in Revenge of the Sith where Anakin walked into the Jedi Temple ready to kill some younglings.

Is it weird to compare myself to someone on the verge of large-scale child murder?

Maybe I just need to get some more sleep.

He says with a laugh. More sleep? As if. There’s way too much to do late at night. Like catch up on Let’s Plays. Or play Minecraft.

… Boy I’m kind of lame aren’t I?

I should cut this off before I start to get too real, it’s not like this is amounting to anything but silly filler anyway.