“You don’t know how to enjoy yourself. Americans, you work too hard; you get burned out. Then you come home and spend the whole weekend in your pajamas in front of the TV.”
I am well aware that starting a blog post with an Eat Pray Love quote all but admits that I am a middle-aged soccer Mom trapped in the body of a young man, but I couldn’t resist since the quote perfectly ties into the theme of today’s blog post.
As of eight days ago, I officially became a twenty-five-year-old. Since it’s often viewed as a milestone year, I considered using this post to wax poetic about how I’m now a quarter of a century old. But after some thought, I realized that’s probably been done before, so I should instead just go ahead and share this year’s list of goals…
It’s been 144 days since I wrote Thank U, Next (the blog post, not the chart-topper sung by Ariana Grande). And while I wish I could come on here and write about how the past few months have been full of aha moments and unwavering positivity, I’d be lying if I gave that impression.
“Hey, Dan? Calm it with the sports references.” I know, this is my third sports-referenced blog post title in the past few months, so I guess you could say I’m one overtly-masculine grunt away from being a full-blown athlete. But let’s save the conversation about my transition into a sports icon for another day so we can get on to the actual matters at hand.
I was a junior in college when I decided to try a radical form of exercise: 80’s workout videos. I was sitting on my bed thinking about my resolution to work out that year but was still unwilling to go to the gym. Faced with this conundrum, I racked my brain for a gym alternative. It was not long before memories flooded into my mind of times spent working out to old Richard Simmons DVDs.
I have always enjoyed eating, and can remember how even as a young teenager I would binge on food. One memory that sticks out is of a time when I snuck into our laundry room to eat ice cream that was in the freezer. I was so scared of getting in trouble for eating something that I had been told not to touch that I did not even use a spoon to eat the ice cream. Instead, I scooped it out with my hands, as if I was a starving man who was raiding a dumpster. I wish that the stolen ice cream was an isolated situation, but that was not the case.