P90X

Man, ClipArt standards are just in the toilet these days.

Another thing that sucked about the Rose Bowl was how-

Oh, wait, I’m not doing that anymore.

Out of all the things that physical education represented to me back during my K-12 days, one thing I never associated it with was actual physical fitness. If anything, PE struck me as more a test of mental fitness, as it required the strength of character to run endless laps of the gym without committing suicide, survive dodgeball without acquiring PTSD, and then brave the inevitable accusations of homosexuality in the locker room.*

*On the off chance that my old nemesis Donovan is reading this, it’s been over five years since sophomore year and I still haven’t put anybody’s dick in my mouth, so I really have to disagree with the statements you made on November the 19th, 2004.

PE for me was like a game. The game was called, “How Little Physical Activity Can I Get Away With?” If by the end of one 80-minute period of PE you had not so much as broken a sweat, you had won. This was pretty easy to do if you played to win.

For example, when playing PE softball in middle school, one of my most cherished tactics was to wait at the absolute end of the batting order and stare at my watch, trying to will time to move faster. As people rotated through the batting order, I let them cut ahead of me in line, so that I could oftentimes get through an entire inning without having to swing wildly at a ball and then miss it. When the teams changed places, I would pick a random spot in the outfield and stare longingly at the chain link fence separating the field from the subdivision next door, and dream that perhaps everyone would forget I was there and I could climb the fence and run away. But not too quickly, lest I work up a sweat and lose the game.

Watching the jocks wholeheartedly excel at everything we did, I came to assume that I was the odd man out for hating basically every physical activity they tried to force down our throats. In all honesty, I probably would still be the same fat kid I was in elementary school had my growth spurt not given me suitable height to match my girth. Exercise just seemed like one big, unpleasant waste of time to me, which I thought put me in the minority as throughout high school I watched my classmates voraciously sign up for weight training classes.

The more television I watch, though, the more I realize that people who actually want to spend time exerting themselves and sweating are in the minority in America. Watch a full episode of Montel or Ellen* and you’ll be more or less cockslapped by commercials advertising easy ways to get thin without having to exercise.

*Shut up, Donovan! I’m not gay!

First off are the dietary supplements, which promise to employ all kinds of crazy science to make you thin. What’s more, they assure viewers that they can lose all this weight while eating whatever they want, without exercising (at about this point the screen is more or less flooded with footnote text explaining the highly specific conditions under which any of this information could be true).

However, when the dietary supplements have failed, then come the ads for exercise equipment. These ads make the grudging admission that there is no pill to make you lose 50 pounds while eating bacon with every meal. These commercials present the cold hard truth: To lose weight, you will have to exercise. Yet they are quick to point out that while yes, you do have to exercise, it can be quick and easy and involve little to no effort, although you might have to check dignity at the door. To wit:

It appears that everybody else hates the same things I do about exercise – it takes a long time and is often unpleasant. Yet at the same time, everybody wants to look good, so there’s a huge market for shortcuts. And as a fully-fledged lover of shortcuts, I can appreciate that, but at the same time, I understand that you can’t get anything good without doing something at least relatively unpleasant. I mean, does anybody actually enjoy drinking tequila?

Recently, though, a workout routine known as the P90X has gained a lot of popularity, and unlike most things sold on daytime television, it appears to actually work. I suppose the people marketing the routine decided that they’d forego finding a badass name like most daytime TV products and instead focus on results – this explains both why the name sounds more like the designation for an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and why YouTube is full of before and after videos of bookish anime fans with twelve-packs.*

*As a point of clarification, I’m referring to their abs, and not Mountain Dew Code Red.

The P90X promises its users a more or less perfect physique after three months of daily one-hour workouts, which incorporate cardio, weight lifting, yoga, nutrition, chainsaw juggling, and penis fencing as part of a fitness repertoire known as “muscle confusion.” At the moment, I would say “muscle confusion” is tied with “Book of Secrets” for the title of Stupidest Name (Object or Ambiguous Concept).

What this means is that now there is a certifiable method to become classically, traditionally good looking. No longer is it just the idea that one must “eat right and exercise” – now you just do these strenuous exercises every day, the way that you’re told to, and you’ll be all set. It isn’t a crapshoot anymore.

Before you ask, no – I’m not dropping a bunch of money I don’t have on exercise tapes that I won’t use so that I can get an impressive physique that I don’t need. It’s 2010, for God’s sake – sure, we don’t have robots doing all our heavy lifting yet, but there’s plenty of disenfranchised minorities who do more or less the same thing. The only reason a guy like me would invest three months of his life into such an endeavor would be to use his newfound fabulous body to pick up women, and the fact is, no matter how good I look I would still eventually have to talk, at which point I’d surely shove a toned and well muscled foot into my sculpted, ripped mouth.

I don’t know about you, but I think that me walking around with that sort of physique would really just be false advertising. Even after the P90X, I’m sure I still wouldn’t like exercising, but I’d have to exercise rigorously to keep up the new image that I’d made for myself. The thing is, a buff guy, by the very nature of being buff, suggests that he’s very interested in that sort of thing, whether he actually is or not.

I feel as though a thin guy in mediocre physical condition with abnormally thick hair doesn’t really lend himself easily to classification, and I guess I like that better.

Truman Capps will renege on all of this once his youthful metabolism gives out and he can no longer eat pasta every day and weigh 170 pounds.