For most of my life, I have been blessed weight-wise. I have been able to eat anything and everything, as much or as little, and I would not suffer from any negative ramifications. Food hasn’t really been a big ‘thing’ in my life-it’s not my friend, I don’t eat when I’m sad or happy, to celebrate or to battle depression. I have plenty of pharmaceuticals that achieve those things. So what I eat and my activity level have not been much of an issue.
OK, two things happened in January that were just so wrong I was just stunned; they were that far beyond my comprehension.
First, in Kailua, a woman’s boyfriend beats her to death in broad daylight with people watching. The people watching are excused because the guy had a gun and so there was really nothing they could do. I can imagine this scene if I were in it and being all heroic like and running up and kicking the guy in the balls or something, but with gun in his hand, that’s a serious increase of the likelihood of dying in the process. And this is a total stranger. I think if it were a relative or close friend, my confidence wouldn’t wane so quickly at the sight of the gun and the prospect of being killed, and I bet the same for the people who saw this. But the fact that the guy did it in the day? Outside? In public? It’s not as though everyone had their eyes closed so they wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup. By committing this heinous act, he’s sealing his own fate.
And he’s REALLY sealing it. It turns out that the girl he just took the life from is from a big family here. A REALLY big, well known family here. A family who isn’t just going to take the killing of their sister/cousin/aunt lightly. And the boyfriend KNOWS this, hence further sealing his fate. Was this in his head (if I kill this girl, what is the relative likelihood of receiving repercussions from the family?)? Obviously not. I don’t understand how someone can get so mad that they’d be inclined to go kick,hit.strangle, the living hell out of someone to the point of killing them.
Now here’s the second story: A family lives in an apartment. In the apartment, there is an 18 month old boy. The boy’s father is there, and so is the mother’s current boyfriend. Needless to say, people were around. In this complex another guy occupies an apartment. The family has never had trouble with him; in fact, he has even babysat the 18 month old before.
The guy from the other apartment takes the kid (who was playing outside or something), holds on to him, and then throws him from the pedestrian overpass into the freeway traffic below.
No, this is no joke. The highway was closed for 5 hours. This is the one I don’t understand. Even if the guy didn’t particularly like the kid, can’t you see that ’if I throw this toddler over this overpass, he will die?’ I heard in places in CA they had to wire over the pedestrian overpasses because of the number of people who were jumping and opting to end their life that way, and the likelihood is that all of our overpasses will be caged over now too. I can understand people committing suicide this way. I can understand people wanting to throw things over overpasses. I can understand the desire to do some tagging on an overpass. But nonchalantly throwing another human being over? A short time later, the guy even came back to see the effect of what he had done.
This one is entirely beyond my realm of understanding. And even worse, what about the two cars that he landed upon? In a single instant, one person changed the course of many lives. Even though it had nothing to do with those two cars, that ‘what if?’ is going to linger with them for a long time.
But what about the guy? There was talk of his mental instability and whatnot. Regardless, sane or not, what kind of answer can a person expect to receive when asked “Why?” This was cold blooded, but it was also spur of the moment. Reports didn’t indicate he was a serious drug user, perhaps hallucinating that the toddler was Satan and he had to throw him for the sake of all mankind. What’s impossible to understand is also it’s simplicity. Guy gets up, guy gets a hold of a child that’s not his, guy throws child to his ultimate death. What makes this scary is that it seems to lack a motive.
Caroline Myss said that in this new age, many people deny the presence of evil. That there is no duality of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ anymore. She says she disagrees with it. These two occurences put me on her side. While most of the 6 billion or so people inhabiting this planet fall somewhere along the continuum of this duality, there are some, not many, barely half of a drop in the bucket when you think about the overall masses, but yes, there are people who are evil, and yes, they do exist.
Just wanted to let y’all know that everything isn’t always perfect here in ‘paradise.’
This all started because we went to a wedding expo a few months back. I’d never been to one, the word has come up in conversation, and honestly, we don’t do a whole lot on the weekends. One of the booths had this sort of vibration machine, and I tried it. I was impressed. Wow, you get in better shape just by balancing? 10 minutes of this equals 90 minutes of hard exercise? I was hooked. THEN a couple days later a commercial came on that boasted even BIGGER vibration machines. How could we pass this up?
I persuaded my boyfriend to go to this place, 5R Fitness (http://www.5rhawaii.com/), and the owner was very gregarious. He said it was a gym AND MORE. Above all, it was a gym, but it was also a place of HEALTH. He showed us the routine to health:  the drinking of oak vinegar infused water for detoxification, and then drinking several cups of high alkaline water because the average person’s is extremely acidic, and that’s not healthy. Then we were escorted to these infrared saunas, and ok, this part was absolutely AWESOME. You sit there for 20-30 minutes, sweat like hell, but you don’t smell because it’s kind of like a microwave so you don’t lose any of the salts or something. Then came the Vibrexer.
Now this machine made the one the girl was showing at the expo look like a toy. These ones were used by the NFL, we were told. And that first day, it was a challenge just to stay on it. There were a couple exercises to do, more oak and alkaline water to drink, and that was it. I was hooked! I walked out of there feeling like a million bucks. A one month membership cost about twice as much as an average gym, but hell, this one was going to get me in shape AND make my insides healthy. I’ll spend $125 a month on that.
Even better, this place was about a five minute walk from work, so I could easily do it on my lunch hour. And I did. Religiously. Five days a week I went, sweated, shaked, and drank smoke tasting water. At first I thought it was the best thing ever. I’m something of a sauna junkie, so that was a big part of it. For the first week, I walked out of that place feeling like a million bucks. I was even pushing it on my coworkers, who were surprised at my enthusiasm (come on, I answer phones at an engineering firm; for me to demonstrate any sort of excitement over this job simply never happens).
The next week, I was still there, Mon-Fri, but I started Googling ‘vibrational exercise,’ ‘5R Hawaii,’ and all variations thereof. My feelings were mixed; while there were a number of postings that said it was all a hoax, there were things that mentioned their benefits. Hell, it said Madonna used one; how can you beat that testimony? Also, there were so many different brands for sale. If so many different companies were selling these things, they had to work, or people wouldn’t buy them, right?Â
The place where I was going was really nice in that when we went on a vacation in the middle of this, they added the days we were gone onto the balance of how many days we would have had left if we didn’t go on vacation. I thought that was pretty cool. We were gone 12 days, which meant that when we got back, we had exactly two more weeks.
The trip was great, by the way. Man, just to DRIVE. You really get rock syndrome here in “paradise.” We had a good time even though nearly all of my hometown was on fire which altered our trip plans.
So back to work and back to the club. I’d been going there for three weeks now. I hadn’t lost any weight. My clothes weren’t any looser. Plus, they were yelling at me for increasing the temperature in the sauna. I always turned it back down when I got out; I don’t know what the problem was.
OK, now I’m getting pissed. One month and no results? I’ve worked in gyms before. I know that while you may not have guns of steel just yet, you’re definitely able to see and feel some results. Then one day came and I walked in, and two women walked in right after me. They were prospective customers. “Our focus here is on health more than exercise,” he said, “we’re kind of like a spa,” he says. SPA? He told us this was a GYM. There was no mention of spa. What was this? Turns out it’s this franchise that originated in Korea (oh so that’s why all the TVs were playing something Korean), there were a ton of them in California (oh so that’s what the ‘franchise opportunities available meant on the door), and they all proudly displayed the 5R motto: “Relax, Refresh, Reshape, Realign, Restore.”
I gave this place a full on chance. I gave them a month of my lunch hours. I tried to believe in this program, I really did. But if I’m going to look the same as when I began, I don’t need to give some theoretic ‘gym’ $125 a month of my hard earned receptionist money. For a quarter as much, I can go to a REAL gym.
And man, are my triceps hurting.
People talk about how addicted they are to their MySpace sites and similar places-MyBlogLog, Twitter, etc., I do have a MySpace place somewhere out there, and it is cool because I found a lot of people from the days of yore whom I haven’t seen or heard from in years. It was nice to know they were alive. A lot of people spend a lot of time doing a lot of graphic stuff on their sites, and I’m still pretty new to a lot of this, especially when it comes to graphic design related stuff.
However, I have found a pastime just as addictive and perhaps a little more useful or at least informative which is my beloved Google reader. I’ve spent hours on Technorati typing random words, finding random blogs, pressing random ESS buttons. There are usually 100+ postings within the reader on a daily basis. Many of the topics seem to have to do with personal finance or talk about how to blog, but it’s a pretty mixed bag overall. I like to read them with Google reader because you can scroll through it sort of half paying attention as each post goes by, or you can stop and go directly to that person’s site to see it in real living color if you so desire, and since it pops up in a new window, you do’t lose your place of where you were.
I was sort of skimming one article; I don’t fully remember what it was about. It had to do with your site’s name’s positioning and using that for maximum effect or something-effective positioning for highest traffic or SEO somethingof that nature.  A lot of blogs seem to be about how to make money blogging. For some reason, I’m pretty wary of them. While I’m sure there are blogs out there who have made money through blogging or their affiliate marketing, I’m generally  uninterested in it right now. I have 250 books listed somewhere on this site to be an Amazon affiliate. Recently, we joked about what ads would be selected to put on a site like mine were I to sign up for AdSense or whatever sort of company that places ads relevant to your content on your site. At any rate, I don’t remember much of what the article I was reading said, but it started talking about entering your site’s name on different search engines to check how visible you are.  All I really remember of the article was this line:  ’or god forbid, Dogpile,’ which brought back a nice feeling of nostalgia because I remember using Dogpile about decade ago; it was one of the first search engines I ever used. So I thought I’d give this thing a try-see if this site exists.
If you ‘Google’ me personally, one or two things might come up. One was that in the late 90s, a friend wanted to start a magazine, and I told him I would help him as long as I got to have the title ‘Editor in Chief’ with business cards. 90% of the time, you’ll find me as Editor in Chief for this joke of a magazine that only did 4 issues in 1999. There is another girl who shares my first, middle, and last name, and apparantely she’s doing tons of great things out in Chicago. If you really, really look, there’s an article in The Denver Post about the band Phish coming to town. My friend was working for The Denver Post and he ‘interviewed’ me (ie-put in a bunch of quotes of things I never said). Needless to say, I’m not much in the online world.
But DAMN, this site is! I’ve had about what? 6? maybe 8 or 9? Let’s say there have been 12 people total who’ve taken the time to stop by and see what this little site is about.  When I entered ’genxposterchild’ on Dogpile, I filled the page! I was someone! I existed! I was number 1! Hell yeah!
I then decided how I would fare with the big boys at Google (even though yes, Dogpile does say it covers Google). Again-2 FULL PAGES OF NOTHING BUT MY SITE! Here’s this little blog that doesn’t have much of a purpose other than to give me a space to unload my thoughts and hopefully come up with new ones, something that I didn’t think would amount to anything, and I MATTER! No one knows about it, my Technorati rank is 1,386,522, I have 3 links from 3 other blogs (two of them are from my boyfriend), and yet I ROCK! This site is like a club that is SO cool and SO selective that it has very few members, but everyone (if they wanted to-if they had the sudden desire to type in ‘genxposterchild’ on a search engine) knows about (potentially)!!! To find this out definitely gave my ego a boost.
So now I have nothing to worry about, I don’t have to be afraid if my readership is less than 10 people, and I don’t have to concern myself with who my ‘audience’ is or that I should be writing about different things to maximize my readership or advertisability, because all is going well in the first place because THIS SITE’s name is in FIRST PLACE. If you happen to be a reader of these humble words, congratulate yourself: you managed to find this site, you decided to read theses words, you perhaps decided to link here, and might understand and be interested in the disillusionments, problems, experiences and uniqueness of this particular demographic. You also have a lot else about which to be proud because you are one of the elite, the ones within the velvet rope, the ‘in’ crowd. MY ‘in’ crowd. Only a few may be present at this party, but all of the major players know it’s going on, and I thought that was pretty cool.
I just KNEW that picking GenXPosterChild as a name would be way cooler over SearchEngineOptimizationBlahBlahBlah…
Touching from a Distance by Ian Curtis
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Heat: An Amateur\’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Q by Bill Buford
Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas by Chuck Klosterman
What If I Had Never Tried It: The Autobiography by Valentino Rossi
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