Snakes on a Rhythmball Paddle

I cannot WAIT for "Snakes on a Plane." Oh ho, laugh if you will, but in these days of movie plagiarism, this recent offering at least appears 1) new and 2) creative. I am getting very tired of seeing the same movie advertised every decade. From the morphing of "The Cutting Edge" to "Save the Last Dance" to "Step Up," don't the movie studios realize that we aren't spending money to go to the theaters because we've already seen everything they're showing? Like, decades ago?

While I'm ranting, I might as well continue: we saw "Syriana" a couple of nights ago. OK, we saw the first 35 minutes of "Syriana." After the (spoiler) kid died in the swimming pool accident (I blame Al Queda), we turned it off. It was the sloppiest screenwriting I'd ever seen. I could just picture the script meetings:

A: I can't figure out how to tie in the Pakistani guy.
B: That's OK. Just add 10 more characters in 12 different locations. We'll dazzle the audience with our foreign settings.
A: When you say "dazzle," don't you mean "bullsh*t"?
B: You mean there's a difference?
A: But how do I get the audience to care about my characters if I introduce 40 of them in 30 minutes?
B: Kill off Matt Damon's kid. Gets 'em every time.

Frankly, if a movie is going to kill a character who is under the age of 16, there should be a warning label on the box. Because it's really messing with my movie-viewing sensiblity. When DH and I went to see "Me and You and Everyone we Know," I couldn't allow myself to lose myself in the sweetness of it because I was completely convinced that someone was going to get hit by a car. And then, at the end of the movie, nobody did get hit by a car. We watched it again on DVD the other night and I enjoyed it so much more, knowing that nobody was going to meet a tragic end.

Less than a week until "Snakes on a Plane"! To pass the time, I've been leaving Samuel L. Jackson voicemails for people. You can do it, too!

Snakes on a Plane, Unhealthy Obsession, Need to Get Out More

New Proposed Rhythmball Slogan

"Like Tai Chi, but Funner."

Whaddaya think? Comments, please.

Just when I start feeling good...

I'm in a drama club of playwrights and actors here in Mytown, and last night we read one of the participant's new plays. She asked me to read the part of the rabbi. "I didn't work too hard to get outside actors to read," she said, "because a lot of the people in the group fit the roles I'm having read." I felt pretty good about being asked to participate until I sat down and read her Dramatis Personae. "Rabbi Adele: hip, slightly frumpy. 40s." And then I wanted to die. Frumpy??? Forty??????!!!!! The only way I got through it was by channeling Jon Lovitz: ACT-ing! I must be a hell of an actress if I can get people to believe I'm frumpy and 40. Yeah, that's it. Uh huh.

Acting, Frumpy, Despair

fAtitude Adjustment

So I bare my soul yesterday -- OK, my pants size, but the same level of importance -- and I've heard not a *word* in response. Are you all stunned into silence that I was such a fatty?

Let me tell you a little story:
When my best friend was pregnant, she ate family-sized trays of Stouffer's mac-and-cheese and gained 60 pounds. Et moi? I ate right, watched my calories, gave up ice cream halfway through my pregnancy (inside joke), and gained 60 pounds. Granted, the kid weighed nearly nine-and-a-half at birth, so plenty of it was baby-related, but even so? What a p*sser. Plus, during labor they stuffed me full of IV fluids so for days afterwards I looked like the first zeppelin ever to calve.

Unavoidable, but regrettable nonetheless.This new-baby weight in addition to my just-married 20 pounds? Ugh. Paging Fatty McFatterton.

At seven months post-partum I got honest and serious. This extra load is unneccessary and even maybe dangerous. If I got pregnant again, what the h*ll would I wear? Time to dump all the junk from the trunk.

(Of course, it's perfectly FINE if you're post-partum and you're not there yet. My baby's been sleeping through the night for more than three months, so I'm almost as caught up on my rest as I'll ever be. That helps, a lot. Plus, I work for a company that imports exercises and exercise equipment, so it behooves me to learn as much as I can about our product, and it's so much more productive to learn by doing.)

In conclusion: my buddy is in the throes of a medically supervised weight-loss program, by the end of which he will have shed a whole... him. His inspiration is that a lot of really overweight people, after dieting, remain fat. Smaller, but fat. If he's gonna do it, he said, he's going to do it all the way. And I'll have what he's having (but without the nasty "milk"-shakes).

First Month's Progress

I started this blog and my RR (Rhythmball Regimen) exactly one month ago today. What has the time and effort yielded, you ask? How does my cost-benefit analysis stack up? Pull up a chair:

1) Rhythmball 3-4 times a week, 30 minutes/session
led to
2) Drinking two liters of water daily
led to
3) Sucralose and fat-free half-and-half in my coffee every morning, instead of sugar and half-and-half or some sort of cream
led to
4) At least 500 stomach crunches a week
led to
5) Light beer only
led to
6) Watching less TV (at least two fewer hours each day)
led to
7) Completing at least 12 girlie pushups each night


These activities, coupled with carrying my baby more often than "strolling" him, has granted me the following benefits:
1) Down one pant size
2) Definition in my upper arms and, more importantly, the formerly fat-only bulge between my shoulder and boob
3) Speaking of boobs, at the beginning of RR I fastened my bra at the farthest eyes. Now, I'm using the closest eyes, plus have tightened the straps as much as possible
4) MUCH easier to climb stairs while holding the baby
5) Haven't bumped my hips into anything (doorframe, table) in more than a week

How much weight have I lost? Beats me. I don't have a scale, because they make me weird. I prefer to go by clothing size and fitness level.

HARD NUMBERS:

Pants size June 30, 2006: 22

Pants size July 30, 2006: 20

Bra size June 30, 2006: tight 42G

Bra size July 30, 2006: loose 42G

NEXT MONTH'S GOALS: Down to an 18, master Rhythmball's Set Two, eat more vegetables

OVERARCHING GOAL: Get back into my black leather pants -- preferably by Christmas

Do I work for Rhythmball? Sure. Are the above benefits real or imagined? REAL. And people are beginning to notice, which encourages me to continue.

Rhythmball got me to get up off the couch. What could it do for you???

Weight Loss, Fitness, Kick Ass

Got the World in a Sling

One of the many helpful things about getting fitter is that it's really helping me lug my baby around. He turned eight months old last week and is weighing in at 24 pounds. I'd been using the stroller in my pre-Rhythmball days, but now that my arms and legs are getting more toned (and my cardiovascular system is getting whipped into shape), I've been putting him in the baby sling and carrying him around on my hip. Yesterday he had a little walk-around modelling gig for a friend who designs baby clothes, and I walked around downtown with him in the sling for 40 minutes. Two months ago, this would not have been possible. He loves the view -- being able to look people in the eye is a real high for him -- and he was so wired by the time we got home it took me 90 minutes to put him down for his nap. I didn't Rhythmball yesterday and was feeling a little guilty about that, until I remembered I'd carried my squirmy, 24-lb. potato sack around town for 40 minutes. Great exercise, that. Angelina Jolie makes it look so easy and now I can, too. :)

Angelina Jolie, Baby Sling, Rhythmball

Progress continues

Progress is the opposite of congress, and to that end, my Rhythmball regimen is progressing fabulously. I did another thirty minutes of the basic set yesterday and then watch the advanced set on the DVD. It's looking much more do-able than it did when I started. Then, I did so many sets of stomach crunches that by the end of the day, I couldn't remember how many I'd done. At least 200. But the best part was sitting with Darling Husband first thing in the morning and having him look at me and say, "I can tell that you've lost weight." I tell you, hearing that perked me up more than a cup of coffee! Here's to progress!!

More Progress

I have culled my underwear drawer of maternity panties! Supermodel status, here I come!

The Word for Today

I have dropped one pant size, and my favorite pre-pregnancy shirt fits again! Thanks, Rhythmball!

VBS is over and Malan is gone...

Friday, beautiful Friday. The heat is breaking and we're supposed to have some rain this weekend. In other nature news, the bad-ass spider who lives in the space between my window and the screen has added a moth to his already impressive trophy web. He bagged a wasp the other day, which was more gripping than Boa vs. Python, though I felt the battle lacked the humanity of, say, Alien vs. Predator.

Last day of Vacation Bible School, it was, and t'was joyfully endured. Tough keeping tabs on two groups -- 11 fourth graders in one and your now-eight-month-old son in the other. The fourth graders were lovely, really no trouble at all, and quite sweet. Baby's final VBS Nursery feat involved pulling himself up to standing so he could play with a table-top toy. A whole new galaxy of childproofing is opening before me. Yikes.

After waiting two months, the Jake Shimabukuro CD I requested from the Neighboring Library -- "Dragon" -- arrived so I picked it up right before the Mytown Playwrights Lab presentation of my newly revised two-act comedy, "The Wash-n-Dry Laundromat and Uncensored Internet Salon of Salt Lake City, Utah." Or maybe just "Wash-N-Dry." (I think the first one's funnier.) It was a hit! The lab member I wasn't getting any love out of during the reading? When it came time to critique, he not only defended me against another critiquer by invoking my play's structural commonalities with Bertolt Brecht, but summed up with, "if it were funnier you'd have a little Woody Allen movie." So on to draft four, and writing funnier-er.

Gone like VBS is Malan from "Project Runway." He always seemed so creepy and then after hearing, "you're out," he turned all vulnerable outsider on us. Which makes me sorry he's going. Jeffrey is still in it, and I'm dying to write an estranged friend from forever about his opinions on Jeffrey's professional comeback after mental health issues, but I'm afraid Jeffrey's meltdown is going to be spectacular so I'm kind of waiting to see how Jeffrey fares before making any suggestions. There will always be the DVD release of Season Three, maybe just before Christmas?

I also want to ask Matt Roloff what he and his think of the new Burger King ad campaign. I don't know why BK went with miniaturized little people. Wouldn't miniaturized tall people better convey the bigness of the new BK stackable burgers? Isn't making the characters little people just... gratuitous? And, well, stupid?

Sometimes I just shake my head and then I sit down to blog.

They took a bunch of pictures of me playing Rhythmball with VBS kids. Yowza. It's time to get some non-maternity clothes -- mine, they're too big! While it's true that I thought I look better than I actually do -- never a comfortable feeling -- my shirts balloon from where my body stops, which I'm interpreting as a good thing.

Now if some of my tomato blossoms would just turn into baby tomatoes, I'd be freakin' set.

And Rhythmball is about to get its first press! It's super fun. And those who know me know that if there's one thing I know, people, it's Super Fun. So buy one, already.

Matt Roloff, Project Runway, Jake Shimabukuro, Rhythmball