No One Man Should Have All That Power

I've started religiously listening to the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. The first time I heard of it was when my roommate showed me a clip from it describing the effects of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, the most potent hallucinogenic psychedelic known to man (naturally produced by the brain during the dream state and near-death experiences). I'm naturally curious about such things, so when I was looking around for stuff to listen to on the mower at work this summer, I decided to subscribe to the podcast and check out a few episodes.

Joe Rogan is famous for being the announcer for the UFC and the host of Fear Factor. He's also a standup comedian and martial artist. His podcast is about cool and interesting things like drugs, mixed martial arts, comedy, current events, government, sociopolitical stuff, metaphysical stuff, philosophical stuff, or whatever he and his guests feel like talking about. Sometimes it's just him and his comedian friends sitting around getting stoned and shooting the shit. He is a critical thinker with a way of cutting straight to the heart of an issue and exposing bullshit. It's entertaining, thought provoking, and very informative. I absolutely love it, and recommend it to anyone that sees himself or herself as a cool person with a rational view of the world. But that's not what this blog post is about.

It had been a week since the last podcast, as Joe was on vacation, and I was going crazy waiting for a new episode to listen to. I downloaded the newest episode last night, got up all stoked to listen to it on the mower this morning, and arrived at work to find my headphones out of batteries. Major buzzkill. Oh well, I had a whole morning of solitude to reflect and think my own thoughts.

One of the main things I thought about was my summer fitness project, and why I did it. To understand that, I had to go all the way back to last summer...

 I had a summer fling with a girl I knew from Shad Valley. We were pen pals. She was doing research in Calgary for the summer, and we visited each other several times before she went home to Ontario for the school year. We had a falling out over the winter, and haven't been on the best of terms ever since. I saw her again at a Shad reunion in Florida this spring, and she was polite and friendly, but stone cold to any flirting. This was very unfortunate, because it turns out she is moving to Edmonton for grad school at the U of A this fall.

My motivation for start losing weight was, plain and simple, to look good for her when I saw her again in the fall. I saw us together in pictures from Florida, and it was obvious that in addition to what went wrong between us, my body wasn't doing me any favors in the situation either. She was fit, I was fat. All I wanted to do was to look so irresistibly good that when she saw me again, she'd want to jump my bones. I wanted her to think that she was wrong to not be interested in me anymore. Looking back, whether or not we actually got back together wasn't the point. It was about proving her wrong, reframing the issue, and placing the power back with me. It wasn't about sex. It wasn't about health. It was about power.

As the summer dragged on, it became more clear that that ship has sailed. I'm a very different person this summer than last, and she and I are looking for two very different things. But I'm still working out as hard as I ever did. I wondered, why?

I am building a better body because I despise the power that beautiful girls have over me. That's the best way I can explain it. When a beautiful girl views herself as "out of my league", on a different level of physical attractiveness than me, she has license to look down on me. I'm filed away in a lower classification of man, the ones she has no attraction to. Any interaction we have from then on is not on a level playing field; she has the upper hand. I'm attracted to her, but she's not attracted to me. She holds the cards, she's in control. She has power over me. Hopefully that makes sense.

I hate being controlled. I want to be able to have interactions that are, if not completely on my own terms, at least on equal terms. I want a girl to have the same sense of social accountability to me as I have to her. Right now, if I approach a beautiful girl and she blows me off, it's no big deal to her. It's no loss to her. It's like when gross drunk 40-year-old women hit on me at the pool hall and I tell them to fuck off, it's no loss to me because I can do so much better. But if I had big shoulders, hard arms, and hip-hop abs, a girl would have no choice but to, at the very least, consider what she has to lose. I'd be given a fair chance, or even the benefit of the doubt, not just in the dating world but in the world at large. Ever notice how good looking people universally get treated better? It's the ugly truth, no pun intended.

Fitness is one of the very best things I can do to to better my life, because of the way it makes people view you and treat you differently. r/fitness is full of stories about how guys got fit and all of a sudden, got so much more respect from friends and strangers alike, men and women alike. Best of all, it's something that is completely under my control. All it takes is a little know-how, a bit of hard work, and a lot of discipline. I'm feeling more and more powerful every day.

Big Time Muscle

I've been eating healthier foods, counting calories, and working out religiously all summer. I've lost a lot of fat. Here is my summer progress album! I went from 186 pounds and 23% body fat in May to 159 pounds and 12% body fat in August.

Today was the day I officially ended my "cut" and began my "bulk". During a cut, you take in less calories than you burn, resulting in a net loss. Lifting weights during a cut makes you lose fat instead of muscle to make up the difference. During a bulk, you take in more calories than you burn, for an overall gain. Lifting weights during a bulk makes you gain muscle instead of fat to make up the difference.

This morning I had a massive hammy, cheesy, peppery omelette and a protein shake. This afternoon I had a mess of bison roast, salad, and as much milk as I wanted. Over the course of the day at work, I felt absolutely amazing. It's so great to have fuel in the tank again, after months of eating a -1000 cal/day deficit.

I plan to bulk for the next four months, then re-evaluate where I'm at. Check back for another progress album in December!

So long, I'm off to the gym to lift some heavy shit :)

Eventually We'll All Have Lost Completely Everything We've Been

Last night, I ended up drinking in the hot tub with my two younger brothers and a few of their friends. It was totally unexpected. I came home around 9pm from collecting plant samples for a university biology course this fall, expecting to kill the rest of my Saturday night watching a movie in bed or something. Instead, I walked into my room to find my brother and 2 friends drinking Burt Reynolds's, and things just sort of escalated from there.

Alcohol is a hell of a drug. For all its vices and virtues, at the very least you can usually count on it to grease the wheels and make something interesting happen. One way it does this is making people open up and talk about topics they'd normally steer clear of.

My brother's friend started talking about how she'd been asked out to the movies that night by a certain guy, but turned the guy down. She told him she had to work til 9 and had to get up in the morning, but she ended up drinking in our hot tub til all hours and felt kind of guilty about her hypocrisy. I hazarded a guess that the guy wasn't that cool, fun, or attractive, and she didn't really want to go out with him very badly in the first place.

The girls in the tub rushed to this guy's defense, all quick to say what a nice guy he is. He's such a nice guy,  you guys are being mean. My brother chimed in to tell me how right I was. He described the guy as "if someone wanted to be a Hutterite, but wasn't a Hutterite. Skinny, old farmer clothes, good manners, and totally socially inept."

I was right. This guy, by all accounts, was a real sweetheart and probably deserved a date with this girl. But the proof was in the pudding. She blew him off, was prepared to go home to bed, but came right over without hesitation when a hot tub get-together with a bunch of fun, cool, good-looking people was  presented. I brought this up, and all the guys heartily agreed with me. A huge percentage of nice guys are nice because that's the only way they can get any attention at all; they have little else going for them. But the attention that they get is rarely the kind they want. "As a guy, you're never really going to nice your way into anything", I said.

That was the line that really set one girl off. "You know Michael," she snapped indignantly, "one day, a nice guy is going to trump you in a big way, and you'll be left in the dust." At the time, I thought she was wrong but didn't want to fight about it, so I went to my classic argument-defusing line: "You know what? Maybe you're right" and moved on to something else.

I thought about it more later, and found that maybe there was an element of truth in what she said. I stand by my statement that you can't nice your way into anything with a girl, but what if there was a guy with the complete package? What if a guy came along who was confident, funny, good-looking, didn't give a fuck, and didn't take shit from anyone, but who could also pull off the flowers and cute movie dates and telling her she's pretty, without one side compromising the other? That would be one guy who could get any girl he wanted.

I used to be a nice guy in the worst way. It didn't work very well, but it's not like it didn't work at all. When it did work, it was great because it was based on genuine care and feelings. But over the past few years, I've changed and I'm not that nice guy anymore. I've become more focussed on being confident and true to myself and what I want. People say girls love jerks, and they're right, but they don't love them because they're jerks. Jerks have attractive qualities, like confidence and not taking shit from people, that nice guys often lack. Imagine if you took a jerk, and then made him not a jerk. You'd have the perfect guy.

I don't know where to go with this. Examining myself, I see that I've become a jerk in a lot of ways. Its opened up so many new opportunities with new girls, but its also burned bridges with girls I care about.   Will I ever get the balance right? Is it right to be deliberately screwing around with who I am? Am I doing this for the right reasons? What's going to happen if I continue down this path?