Two Fer One

Here's a post i wrote a few days before our latest election--the one where 700,000 South Carolinians pushed a button that said they supported America's new penchant for curtailing people's liberty:

I asked my drawing class today if they supported South Carolina'a attempt to define marriage as between one woman and one man. To a person--and without hesitation--they proclaimed they DID NOT support this attempt. Again: 100% of my students believed that marriage should be open to anyone. 100% of them!

You know what this tells me? Although it's difficult to recognize because of this state's current citizens, it just might be that South Carolina has finally done it's children a good deed.

What good deed might this be, you ask?

Well, this new crop of South Carolinians may actually be the first who have the good fortune to define themselves by what they love, and not what they hate.

(or, to put it another way: It appears they aren't growin' up to be bigoted, halloween-hatin', women-in-their-placin', hypocritical, war-mongerin', gay bashin', klan-lovin' freaks.)

The good news is that 200,000 South Carolinians felt the other way. That's a lot of folks. Anyway--Man, my heart goes out to those who seem to think that somebody doing something they don't like, or letting people do something they disagree with ruins their own good time. The kind of folks who only seem to know themselves through what they are opposed to. I've spent quite a bit of my life there and know now how much it sucks to be like that...i guess that's why i chose to not post this the other day--i just didn't want to be all angry and stuff. Anyway, God bless all our small little hearts.

Onto other things (mostly bragging): I have a long-term goal: i want to try and finish a very small tri-athlon. Like a 5k run/1k swim/10k bike. And i do mean long term: like maybe three years from now. But toward this goal I try and eat better, lay off at least some of the sugar, and i go exercise just about every morning.

My routine varies quite a bit, but i've figured out that i want to try and run long, slow distances on sundays. The rest of the week is an increasing intensity of a particular set of (currently all land-based) exercises. More or less, each weekday (with a skip in there if i want to), i go up to the local park and run three miles, do 20 pull-ups, 40 leg lifts, 40 inclined pushups, jump over a waist high bar 40 times, and walk fowards and backwards on a balance beam 6 times. (all the pullin' and pushin' and jumpin' is interspersed evenly over the last two miles.)

Well, this morning i reached a particular milestone. Each friday (what i've starting calling "hard Fridays") i take a shot at doing all that crap in less than thirty minutes. This morning i did it in 31 minutes and a few seconds, which is close enough for me. Whoohoo!