Fattie: Week 5 (Good Goals / Bad Hair Judgement)

When it comes to my HASAY update this week, I've got nothing, absolutely nothing. And I'm not one to make excuses for veering off course either. I know I've got no one else to blame but myself. But if I were to make excuses, here’s what that list might look like:

1. My recent flu totally killed me and my will to eat sensibly.
2. I became really hungry and decided a cheeseburger would be delicious. (It totally was.)
3. I thought about exercising, but then decided it would be more satisfying to crash on the couch and watch a little television.
4. I avoided any direct contact with my treadmill. (Out of site=out of mind.)
5. I couldn’t find my running shoes. Well, to be honest, I kicked them under the bed on purpose. (See excuse #4.)

What I lacked in actual physical activity, I totally made up for in goal-setting and motivation. Let me break it down for you.

Sunday afternoon, Jeremy and I watched The Terminator (1984) on cable. I hadn’t seen the whole thing from start to finish in years and had forgotten what an awesome film it was. After the movie was over, Jeremy and I felt a little sad and empty inside. We filled that void by renting Terminator 2: Judgement Day and eating a bunch of nachos.

During the sequel something amazing happened. First, I used an entire package of shredded cheese for the nachos as opposed to the usual half a bag. It made all the difference in the world. Those nachos were delicious. Second, I was reminded how cut and toned Linda Hamilton was for her role as Sarah Connor. Remember her doing all those pull-ups in the mental hospital? I totally want her shoulder and upper body definition.

Jeremy and I debated what it would take for me to get arms of steel in under twelve weeks. I maintained that increased reps with free weights would do the trick. Jeremy insisted that I would have to be the mother of a rebel leader fighting futuristic cyborgs in order to get that in shape. I told him to “Get real”. Jeremy then looked at me very intently and whispered, “Time travel is real, Jen. Oh, it’s very real.”

I found it a little odd that my husband had such strong feelings about time travel in The Terminator series because just a few days earlier when we watched The Lake House, he rolled his eyes so often that I was sure he was suffering from a mild seizure. He complained that the premise of a two-year time gap between strangers who trade letters back and forth through a magic mailbox was totally unbelievable.

Sure, two people finding each other through threads of time and the U.S. Postal Service is completely preposterous. But a world where a futuristic soldier (Kyle Reese) is sent forty years into the past by his leader (John Connor), who is really his son, to protect his mother (Sarah Connor) could ACTUALLY HAPPEN. Also, there's a terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who has been sent back in time to find and kill Ms. Conner so that she doesn't has the chance to meet the time-traveling soldier and the father of her unborn son. Huh?

Jeremy and I then wondered what we would do if given the opportunity to visit ourselves in 1984? What would we warn ourselves about at the tender age of thirteen? Jeremy claims he would definitely tell his young self to keep his Transformer action figures in their original packaging and to invest every bit of his allowance in Google stock options.

I, on the other hand, didn't feel it necessary to secure my financial future because I knew one day I would marry a handsome architect who found wealth from his pristine toy collection and sound investment strategies. Instead, I felt it far more important to travel back to the fall of '84 and steal my family's powder blue station wagon so that my parents would be unable to drive me to the salon where I would cut my hair into a pseudo mullet. This mullet, which I sported through most of my junior high years, would take over 18 months to grow out and more than a lifetime to forget.

To put Jeremy's time travel theory to the test, I'm posting my seventh grade picture below. If I've successfully thwarted the hair cut from hell, then I should be sporting a stylish chin-length bob in that photo. If for some reason I've failed in my mission, you'll be be staring at a young girl who made the ill-advised decision to chop most of her hair into a bowl of bangs. It's also safe to assume that either way, the junior high Jen has not yet to discovered how much better her eyebrows would look after a good tweezing. That little revelation didn't hit me until high school. Wish me luck, people.


HASAY Summary:
1. I now have a goal to get ridiculous arms.
2. I'm thinking that time travel may be counted as my cardio workout.
3. Mullets are never a good idea.

UPDATE: My mom reminded me that during my junior high years, our car's tires were mysteriously flattened repeatedly in the span of about four months. My parents never did catch the culprit whom we all assumed was just the boy next door. But after this weekend's revelations about the properties of time travel, it is entirely possible that my future self may have tried, on several occasions, to travel back to 1984 and prevent myself from succumbing to the seduction of the seventh-grade mullet.