in which I come out of the closet as a very girly meathead

I finally realized I had been avoiding the gym because I hate doing cardio. However, I love lifting heavy things repeatedly. When I was in college, I lifted very many heavy things repeatedly. I spent two years busting my lats on the lat pulldown machine until I could finally do one pull-up. Once I could do one, I could do twelve a couple months later. When I did, people would sometimes put down their weights and watch for a minute. College was kind of great that way, even if it often involved hiking through drifts of snow to get to the gym. It's like you needed two lockers to hold the difference between what you were wearing in a New Hampshire snowstorm and what you were going to be wearing in a weight room.

I finally realized that there is no authority figure at the East Harlem Bally's who is going to force me do cardio, which (have I mentioned?) I hate. And also, since I'm not very good at it (I once blogged about the first-ever time I ran an entire mile, which was about a year ago, and it took thirteen minutes or something), it doesn't seem to burn enough calories to be worthwhile anyway; I'd rather just eat less. I mean, you can spend half an hour busting your ass on a treadmill and the little calorie counter says "you burned 110 calories!" Wouldn't it be more efficient to just put down the damn pie? "Not eating pie" is both free and time-saving.

So, up top is a photo of my actual college abs. At left is a photo of my actual college biceps. Well, one of them. I apologize for all the weird-ass cropping. Due to the presence of bad hair and ex-boyfriends, it proved impossible to fit all my formerly muscular bodyparts into a single photo. (I was once a redhead, and I had curled my hair for my college graduation, for which I was, in fact, wearing a sari-type dress).

In the end, after college, I didn't get lazy; I had started a dotcom that ate all my time and resources and I couldn't afford a gym. I was literally in my office eighteen hours a day, in pinstripe. I had little to no idea what I was doing, or I might have realized that staying healthy and having a balanced lifestyle would be conducive to effective entrepreneurship. At the time, I considered staying out of the gym a great sacrifice. I switched from protein shakes to Costco canned vegetable soup, fifty-four cents a can.

I can still out-arm-wrestle most women my size, and a few women bigger than me, and a few men my size (but not many men are my size, and the ones that are are generally a bit sensitive about it, so I wouldn't recommend arm-wrestling girls in public anyway. In private, well, that's another matter).

p.s., No, I am NOT a dominatrix. Please don't email me about it! I can only bench press, like, sixty pounds. I don't want to hit you. I'm a little tiny woman who wants you to open doors for her. Thank you.