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love handles
Friday, August 23 2002
I was at a client's house today and the harddrive and Windows XP installation I was doing was going on longer than expected. At five o'clock the guy said, "I just can't hold out any longer," and he got a beer. He also gave me one. Then his brother from San Francisco showed up and it turned out that this brother used to work for my old company, Launch, and now is absorbed into Yahoo. Despite such coincidences, it's important to bear in mind the fact that it only seems like a small world because the only evidence we notice is that which supports the conclusion that the world is in fact small, something we so desperately want to believe.
Back at my place, Gretchen's brother Brian and wife Jen had just flown in from Pittsburgh. The plan for tonight was to eat dinner at Long Tan, the überhip Park Slope Thai place down on funky 5th Avenue. There we'd be joined by one of Brian's old friends from Yale along with the friend's actress wife (if you're into that kind of thing, you may have seen her as a minor actress in various mainstream television sitcoms).
The six of us sat at a long table in Long Tan's cozy back garden. For several reasons, dinner conversation proved unexpectedly dull. The fundamental flaw of our seating arrangement was that Gretchen and I sat at one end of the table and Brian's friend and the friend's actress wife sat at the other. This meant that our contingent tended to fragment into two conversational units, one being Brian, Jen, and the friends, and the other being Gretchen and me. Since Jen and the actress woman are both pregnant, the other four spent most of the dinner discussing the joy of bringing a brand new life into this world. Gretchen, who is seriously considering getting her tubes tied with nary a procreation to her credit, had little to contribute to this conversation besides a few socially-mandated pleasantries. Later those four moved on to reminiscences about the good old days back in Yale, and again, Gretchen and I (as well as Jen) had nothing to add. Mind you, Gretchen made several bold attempts to join the conversation, but these all went essentially unacknowledged.
At the end of the meal everybody but me decided to order dessert, and by now I was so bored that it was as if five years were being added to my prison sentence on the eve of my release. I've never understood the ritual of restaurant dessert. Why do people even contemplate ordering even more food after they've just finished a big meal? For me there was no socially-acceptable recourse other than to lean back in my chair and try to look happy. Instead, however, I spent a good half hour repeatedly dunking my finger in molten candle wax, constructing a fake rope of snot.
After eating some mango icecream and sweetened sticky rice (Asian desserts have always baffled me), Gretchen suddenly decided that she was sick. As bad as this was for her, it had the desirable effect of bringing the meal to a slightly accelerated conclusion.
Outside the restaurant, Gretchen made an observation about Brian's friends, saying, "They're terrible conversationalists." She theorized that this might have had something to do with the fact that the friend's pregnant wife was an actress, and actresses are often self-absorbed.
I've heard a second-hand story about Tom Cruise that showcases the sort of self-absorption I'm referring to. Tom Cruise was once having a restaurant meal with a number of people, including a confidant who would later relate this story to someone who would go on to tell it to Gretchen. Apparently this confidant asked Tom if he felt honored acting beside Anthony Hopkins in Mission: Impossible 2. At this point, several of Tom Cruise's handlers jerked backwards away from the table and made urgent throat-slitting motions at the confidant. They then leaned forward and loudly observed, "Oh, I'm sure Anthony Hopkins felt honored to be working with Tom." It's hard to imagine an actor requiring this sort of sycophancy, but then again, it's also hard imagining anyone falling for Scientology.
For my part, I'd anticipated a dull conversation the moment I'd seen a tiny alligator on Brian's friend's shirt. I didn't even know that the tiny-alligator-on-a-shirt company was still in existence, but in the prejudices of my mind it seemed to correlate with an overly-self-secure look-you-in-the-eye-while-firmly-shaking-your-hand business informality that so many sales and marketing types can't keep themselves from bringing to their casual socializing.
As we were getting ready for bed, Gretchen told me to pull down the window and lower the curtain. At the time I was completely nude and in one of my goofy moods, so I started wiggling my hips back and forth in front of the window on the slim chance that someone in another apartment was looking. As I did so, Gretchen suddenly exclaimed, "Oh my God, Gus, you totally have love handles!" Evidently my gyrating was doing a good job of distinguishing unflexing ropes of fat from the muscles of my lower back.
I was horrified. I've never been "fat" or even so much as flabby at any time in my entire life. Of late I'd developed a very slight paunch that I'd been monitoring closely, but I'd thought everything was under control. Evidently, though, the distraction of my belly had allowed for the stealth development of love handles!
I climbed into bed and spent the next fifteen minutes riffing on my love handles with a shtick that lay somewhere between mock-horror and serious. "Ewww! I want these things off of me!" I shouted. I then proceeded to do five or six situps right where I lay. Finally I switched on the light and examined them closely. I could see a tangle of blue veins just beneath the surface of the skin of my new sidecars, and I realized that the building authority of body was quite prepared to construct all the utilities necessary to support whole additional zip codes. I immediately resolved to make a few changes in my lifestyle, changes that wouldn't be all that difficult to make.
When one considers my existing habits: one or two beers each day, a pint of icecream every week or so, coupled with almost no physical activity of any kind (aside from decidedly non-ærobic dog walking), it's a wonder I'm not a rather plump 34 year old. So I decided to cut out the icecream and the beer and develop some sort of daily routine of physical exertion. It wouldn't have to be anything too extreme; I'm not going to join a gym or start lifting weights. But a few situps every now and then isn't going to kill me.
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