Tag, I'm it.

Yup, I've been tagged.
Tagged by Shweta.
Tagged by Shweta as part of one of these games where you've got to give facts about yourself - in this case, six facts.

Gee, haven't I done this before? Didn't I give you all 16 facts just a few month ago? Didn't I once do a 5 facts vlog? Didn't I answer 55 questions, 65 questions, and various other random questions? Crap, what else is left? I seriously might be running out of random facts about myself. But hey, I respect the tag. If you're going to be online, ya gotta respect the tag. I'm not even sure what the 6 things are going to be yet, but I'm going to start by stealing the idea from the first thing on Shweta's list. I'm going to start by talking about my own issues with body image.

1. Some people are going to groan when they read what I'm about to write. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that anybody who has ever struggled to lose weight hates listening to skinny people whine about their inability to gain weight. Being naturally skinny is a blessing and people who whines about it are idiots who don't appreciate how good they've got it.

I'm sorry to say that I was once such an idiot.

OK, well maybe I actually didn't whine a lot about my inability to gain weight ( I was never much of a talker ), but I certainly fretted about it a lot. I was always a skinny kid, and I always felt really self-conscious about it. I thought skinny=wimpy, and I really didn't like the idea of looking ( or being ) wimpy. Of course, I became uber self-conscious by the time my teen years came along. By the time I was a 15-year old high school Freshman, I was 6 feet, 1 inches tall, but only weighed 120 pounds ( Yeah, I know most of my readers are from the metric part of the world, but it's 12:08 AM, and I'm too tired to do the conversions right now. Deal with it folks. ).

At the age of 15, I embarked on a rather intense workout regimen. I started working out with weights 4 times week ( Intense free-weight workouts that often ended with heavy weights pinned to my chest when my muscles gave out. I did all these free-weight workouts without a spotter - I was quite nuts. ), I rode an exercise bike 3 times a week ( to get my legs stronger for basketball ), and I started doing 300 sit-ups a day ( because I didn't want to have a physique like Shaggy from Scooby Doo ( Skinny guy with a bigger gut than chest ) ). By the time I was a Senior in high school, I had tripled my strength, but I still felt like I was far too skinny. By that time, I was 6' 1'' ( Never grew past the age of 15 - there went my hopes of being a basketball player ) and weighed 150 pounds ( I weigh 165 now, and most people still consider me to be quite thin ). I had gained 30 pounds of muscle, but it was hard to tell that it was there. Sure, I was as cut as a person could be, and my muscles were like slabs of granite, but they were like really small slabs of granite. My pectoral muscles were probably only about a cm thick ( there ya go, metric folks! ), so you really couldn't see them unless I flexed with my shirt off ( I'm ashamed to admit that I spent a fair amount of time posing in front of a mirror with my shirt off in those days. It's hard to work out a lot without getting at least a little bit narcissistic ( Why do you think they have so many mirrors in gyms? ) ).

So anyway, I was certainly a lot stronger, but I wasn't big. I really wanted to be BIG. I wanted to be the exact opposite of the skinny guy I had been all my life. Sure, I wasn't big yet, but if I kept working out with a fierce intensity, I was sure I would eventually get BIG.

But then I hit the wall. After three years of getting stronger at a steady pace, my workouts stopped yielding results. I was no longer getting stronger - I was no longer getting BIGGER. I responded by working out harder than ever. I worked out all the time. I felt sore all the time. I found myself alone in my basement with huge weights pinned to my body all the time ( This was getting really dangerous, because by this time the weights weighed significantly more than me ). However, no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get any stronger.

Based on this experience, I think I understand why some guys take steroids. I think that every person has a natural genetic limit to how strong/big they can get naturally. After 3 years I hit that limit. I very much wanted to go beyond that limit, but my body wouldn't let me. I'm not the kind of guy who would ever take steroids ( I'm "Mr. Natural". I'm a computer programmer with 2 little kids, and I don't even drink stuff with caffeine. My wife's a doctor who can get me any drug I want, but I won't take medicine for an illness unless I get really really sick ( I figure this will make my immune system tougher. ). ) , but I can see why some guys would. If a guy is working out as hard as he can, and his body is no longer responding, I could see why a guy might feel like he deserves the extra boost that steroids would give. It's certainly not a healthy thing to do, but I could see why a guy would do it.

Anyways, steroids were not in the cards, so I never really got any bigger after the age of 18. This frustrated me until I heard the following 4 words during my Freshmen year at college:

"Don't get big, Rich."

Those words were uttered by CG#1, and as you might imagine, that changed everything. I think I had mentioned my workouts to her ( because as much as I might have wanted to do it at the time, ripping off my shirt and flexing in front of her would not have been social acceptable ), and she told me "Don't get big, Rich. I think it's gross when guys get big".

Now, I didn't stop working out altogether, but I was no longer obsessed with getting big after that. I finally started to realize that lots of girls were more physically attracted to guys with thin athletic bodies ( the swimmer type ) than guys with big burly bodies ( the football player type ). Eventually, I wound up marrying just such a girl. Back when Ruth and I started dating, Patrick Swayze was considered to be one of the hot guys on the Hollywood scene. When I asked Ruth about seeing some Patrick Swayze movie, she made a face and said that he was "too beefy". Now Patrick Swayze was certainly in good shape back in the day ( see image below ), but I never thought of him of being a big burly football player type.


If Ruth thinks that this fella is "too beefy", then I guess it's good that I never got as big as I wanted to get.

Anyway, I'm now at the point of my life where I'm very comfortable being a skinny dude. I still work out regularly, but I work out for me - not to impress anybody else.

2) Baseball is by far my favorite sport. I follow almost every Mets game on TV radio, and I've probably been to at least 200 games in person ( I probably went to 100 games from 1997 to 2001 ). Unfortunately, I could never play baseball to save my life.
Specifically, I couldn't judge the flight of a fly ball ( when a high fly ball was hit to me, I was never sure ( until it was too late ) whether I should run in to catch it or run back to catch it ), and I couldn't hit. I'm still not sure why I was never any good at baseball. Anyone who has ever watched me shoot a basketball, catch a football on the run, wield a ping pong paddle, or juggle various objects, knows that I have good hand-eye coordination, and decent athletic ability. However, I could never get the bat to meet the ball consistently when I was at the plate. I played little league baseball for 5 years, and if you looked at 100 of my plate appearances at random, you would probably see the following results:

10 hits
10 walks
70 strikeouts
10 outs which were not strikeouts

So, I was pretty much a strikeout machine. Part of the reason why that was the case was that I subscribed to the "swing as hard as you can in case you hit it" philosophy of hitting. This was probably because my favorite player on the Mets when I was a little kid was Dave Kingman. Kingman was famous for hitting extremely long home runs and for stiking out a tremendous number of times. My baseball stats were just like Dave Kingman's, but without all the home runs ( Well, in my 5 years of playing, I did get manage to connect solidly enough to hit 1 homer, but hey - even a broken clock is right twice a day ( and I was only "right" once in 5 years ) ).

So yeah, I love baseball, but I pretty much suck at it.

( In the time between writing items 2 and 3, I played in the backyard with my kids )

3. I just discovered that while I might not have been much of a baseball player, I just might be an effective coach. I was playing baseball ( Not hardball - we used a plastic ball and bat ) with Michael a few hours ago, and let me tell you, the little guy can rake ( For non-baseball fans: Urban Dictionary defines rake as 'Baseball slang, a concise way of saying "hits extremely well."' ). I started to teach Michael the proper way to hit about a year ago. He was too young to understand when I first started teaching him, but now it seems like everything is starting to click. He certainly doesn't have prodigy-like bat speed or power, but what he does have is great form. His swing looks like it comes straight from the Ted Williams' book "The Science of Hitting" ( It should - everything I've taught Michael about hitting comes from that book ). I started out by pitching to him underhand today, but after hitting a few pitches he asked me to pitch overhand. So, I start throwing overhand, and he's making contact with every pitch ( he hit a few way over my head ). So then I decide to really test him. I rear back and throw him an inside fastball ( as fast as I could throw it with good control - I didn't want to hit him with the ball ). He swings and hits a line drive right back at me!

He's never hit that good before, so today could have been a fluke - but I think he's finally learned to swing the proper way. :)

4. The first grown-up album ( stuff other than Sesame Street ) I had as a kid was the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. I loved that album. When I was 7, I used to play that album in the basement of my house and do all the John Travolta dance moves.

( Right after I finished writing item 4 above, Michael ( who had been napping on the couch ) started making "I'm gonna puke" kinda noises ( parents know this sound ). I picked Michael up and tried to get him to the kitchen ( which doesn't have carpeting ) before he puked. I was a little bit too late. He still got a little puke on the living room carpet, and a whole bunch of puke on himself and on the kitchen floor. Poor Michael. I just spent the last hour cleaning up the rooms and giving Michael TLC with Ruth. )

5. I had a crush on the same girl from 4th grade through 8th grade. However, I never really thought about her once I got to high school ( we went to different high schools ). I found the girls at Stuyvesant High School so attractive, that I forgot about all the other girl's I had liked up to that point. So, I guess it's no surprise that I wound up marrying a Stuy girl ( BTW, to answer a question EZ asked in a recent comment, CG#1 was *not* a Stuy girl. ).

6.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
You other brothers can't deny

OK, that's actually not true, but I always have been amused by lyrics to Baby Got Back.

I've actually considered making a YouTube video based on those lyrics. I was thinking of dressing up like Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre, and introducing a show called Masterpiece Poetry. I would then anounce that was I about to read a work by the great poet Anthony Ray ( Sir Mix-a-Lot's real name ) - a poet so great, that he was knighted for his work.
I would then proceed to read the lyrics to "Baby Got Back" ( Starting with, "I like big butts ..." ) in a serious and reverential tone of voice.

I still might try something like this, but ...
1) I don't really have Alistair Cooke style clothes.
2) There isn't a spot in my house that even remotely resembles a stately British den ( Cooke was always in that type of setting on Masterpiece Theatre. ).
3) I think it would take more than 5 minutes to read the "Baby Got Back" lyrics in that fashion, and it would probably only be funny for the first minute.
4) Somebody has already done something similar ( Baby Got Back - Gilbert and Sullivan Style ) on YouTube.

Anyway, those are my 6 things. Now, who should I tag? Well let's see, I have 5 blog followers, and two of those folks have already been tagged in this game. So, let me start by tagging my 3 other followers:

Raysel
Paxomaniac
Loghum

I also know of 2 people who are not on my official Blogger following list, but comment quite a bit on my blog. I'd also like to tag those two folks:

EZ
Rochelle

I think I'm supposed to tag 6 people, so I'll close this post by tagging YOU.
Yes YOU.
YOU, that person out there who reads my blog but has never commented before. If YOU are out there, YOU are now tagged.

Rich