Friday August 14

Had a pretty fun day yesterday. Hastings was chosen (right word?) to work the concession stand for the local bigtimeevent baseball game last night and I was volunteered by the store manager to work in it. I've worked in a concession stand before. No big deal there. It was kind of fun to work with my co-workers in a different setting. I could have, however, done without the snootiness of the regular workers who mocked my inability to know the price of frito pies off the top of my head. I'm sure they couldn't tell you the price of a movie (with tax) off our best renter wall either.

We got out about 9:45 and I was tempted to just go home, but I was badgered into going to the bowling ally to hang out with a few people afterward. I had a drink, which was strange, because a lot of these people had never seen me drink before. I also bowled, which was fun, and I'm glad to know that I STILL suck at bowling. All-in-all, I'm glad I went.

For some strange reason yesterday, in my idle moments, I was reading my mom's Time magazine and read two interesting articles. The first was the review of Amy Adam's new movie Julie and Julia. A somewhat uninteresting review as a whole, but had this little nugget:

There are the memoirists like Child who write about what made them famous, or infamous. There are unremarkable people who write about a remarkable thing that happened to them. And there is the 21st century memoirist who makes him or herself interesting in order to write about it.

So, so true. This is sort of the peril of the Internet age. On one hand, anybody willing to do something stupid can become famous. On the other hand, ANYBODY WILLING TO DO SOMETHING STUPID CAN BECOME FAMOUS. Oh, what a world.

The second article was the cover story "The Myth About Exercise". What they basically did here was cram 3 paragraphs worth of story into about 5 pages. The basic idea is that heavy exercise may be counter productive to weight loss because it causes us to eat more afterwards. Like oh so many popular magazine stories, this one seems to get the facts right, but misses the point entirely. Not once during this whole article was the word metabolism used. It even used that old canard about how if you eat ____ (in this case, a muffin) you would need to do ____ minutes of ____ exercise. That may be true as far as it goes, but without bringing metabolism into account, which is increased by physical activity, you are totally missing a huge part of the equation. People who work out a lot burn more calories in the course of everything they do, not just the work out itself.