Run.

I am not an athlete. This is nothing new, I've never been one. It's not like I was at one point, and then lost it. I'm just naturally the opposite of Sporty Spice. There's this video of me when I was about four, I'm wearing a pink dress and my poor dad is trying to teach me how to play wiffle ball. First he tried pitching on for size. "Over your shoulder, behind your head, pitch it!" I sucked at pitching. I still suck at pitching. I don't risk throwing anything at anyone, ever, because I'm fully aware that, odds are, whatever I'm throwing won't end up anywhere near where I want it to. So then he moved on to hitting, you know, with that skinny yellow bat, and obviously that didn't work out too well either, so he finally just comes up behind me, places his hands over mine on the bat, tosses up the wiffle ball and together we swing and connect and it's a home run and blah blah blah.

Instead of being excited about it, I just dropped the bat in alarm, exclaimed "OUCH!" and ran away. And that set the tone for the rest of my life. Later on, at the age of twelve, I would convince myself, my parents, and a team of pediatricians that I had "exercise induced asthma" based on my vivid descriptions of how difficult it was to breathe after gym class. Looking back, I'm pretty sure I was just unfamiliar with what happens to people when they run, but at least it gave me an excuse to walk a ten minute mile with the rest of the asthmatics for the remainder of middle school.

I hate gyms too and I'd prefer to let my metabolism do the running, but I'm also aware that I live in L.A. now and a sad fact of living in L.A. is that :

1) Everyone else loves gyms more than cupcakes

2) There's nowhere to walk/jog anywhere in my general vicinity that isn't a gym.

I'm not in Boston anymore. I can't fall back on the unavoidable vertical trek up Revere Street to get me home while simultaneously making up for my hatred of gyms. So occasionally I will get all crazy and go for a run around the track of this decrepit park in North Hollywood where prostitutes sleep in the grass and groups of hippies show up for their Tai-Chi silent, slow motion karate chop sessions. I did this once while I was unemployed and made it all the way around the park without stopping and was really proud of myself until I experienced an exercise-induced asthma relapse and had to sit down, trying not to pass out in the grass like a prostitute before making my way back home.

Now that I am employed, I'm a lot less antsy about getting requisite time out of the house, mostly because I get so little time IN the house. At the same time, I now sit at a desk for about twelve hours a day, which makes me concerned about blood clots and/or bed sores due to lack of motion a la paralyzed Hillary Swank in Million Dollar Baby as well as getting even fewer opportunities for happenstance cardio. The funny thing is, now that I'm aware of how little exercise I get, I'm a lot more health-conscious in terms of what I eat. Exercising always had kind of a weird effect on me where I'd feel like since I ran that one time three weeks ago, I could totally eat that pizza. Today I did a couple rounds of the godforsaken Santa Monica Stairs and was completely justified in investing in a pretzel in an attempt to make my poor quads stop shaking. Considering this particular delusion, it's probably better for me to just eat my peanut butter and celery and call it a day.

My whole existence is pretty much just one head game after another.