1. “The secret museum in every city is a grocery store.” This will make you want to travel (via Austin Kleon).
2. I need this:
3. It would look great framed as a diptych with this:
Category: swole
Friday Links
1. I didn’t get a new max on bench on Tuesday, but last night was max effort on deadlifts (my favorite) and I broke my last record by 15 pounds–for 150 pounds! More than my body weight! Soon, I will deadlift a car.
2. I didn’t realize this but Heather Havrilesky, quoted yesterday, writes the Ask Polly advice column for The Cut. (Again, Austin Kleon clued me in, this time via his newsletter.) This week’s column was like one of my therapy sessions, i.e. very true to how my anxious brain gets worked up about something and how I get called out (gently) for thinking instead of feeling. (That is praise; you should read it.)
3. We got a lot of snow Wednesday; it’s already starting to melt and today is going to be over 50 degrees. It’s time to break out this quote from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe:
And now the snow was really melting in earnest and patches of green grass were beginning to appear in every direction…Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. […]
“This is no thaw,” said the Dwarf [to the White Witch], suddenly stopping. “This is spring. What are we to do? Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you!”
Norwegian Bros
This isn’t new and I swear I’ve posted it before, but it’s more appropriate than ever now that I, too, lift weights and try to look huge:
My Life Is Now Just One Big Sports Metaphor
Since I last talked about swoleness, I’ve started working with a personal trainer at a gym and it takes everything I have not to tell all and sundry about it. (Trader Joe’s checker: “Got any fun plans this weekend?” Me, internally: “Yes! I’m gonna get my ass kicked at the gym! I never thought I’d like it! It’s the weirdest and best thing!”)
I have never been sporty. I never thought I would ever enjoy “the burn.” In fact, I did just about everything in my power to AVOID feeling any prolonged or extreme burn my entire life–but now I’m at a gym three days a week working towards a goal of lifting my bodyweight. No one is more surprised than I.
Every session with the trainer is literally the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I do things I never would have considered on my own (push a hundred-pound sled?! I SAID GOOD DAY, SIR!) But after every session–once I stop feeling like I might die–I feel invincible. If I can do [whatever Extremely Challenging Physical Thing I just did], I can do anything.
It’s like I’m in my own training montage in a movie.
I know–from a non-sporty lifetime of pretending to care about sporty people talking about their sport–that no one cares about your workout but you. But I can’t stop talking about it! It’s not even like I can brag about how much I can bench (12 pound dumbbells, bro!); I’m just so excited about my own action movie montage that I assume other people want to know about this too.
So if I know you and all I talk about is my workouts, or how sore one muscle is, or how another one might be getting bigger, or how far I pushed the damn sled: I’m sorry.
And have you considered powerlifting? It’s really fun.