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.
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