Simplify, simplify!
Dec. 9th, 2009 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrRandom blathering time!
People sometimes ask me, given that I sleep in a hotel about as often as I sleep in my own home, what I do with all those evenings on the road. Do I go out to local tourist attractions? Do I work out? Do I just hole up and watch TV?
No, no, and mostly no.
Tourist attractions are annoyingly NOT OPEN at 7 o'clock at night. (Example: I've never been to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and I've been to Chicago dozens of times. They close too early.) Moreover, when one leaves work each day at 5:00 or 5:30, wearing a full suit, has to head back to the hotel to change into 'regular human' clothing, has to fight rush hour traffic to get there, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum ... well, let's face it: by the time you'd get to the local Museum of Awesome Local Stuff you'd have about an hour left until closing. Not worth it.
Working out: I should do more. As I've lost all that weight this year (184.5 pounds on Sunday, down from 224 at the beginning of August and down from 235-240 a couple of years ago), my increasingly lean frame has revealed a distressing lack of manly muscle. But your average business-class hotel fitness center will typically have two treadmills, an exercise bicycle or elliptical trainer, and some free weights of the light barbell kind. And it's different at each hotel you go to. I look at all that, packed into a tiny space half as large as it really needs, look at the person already in there walking on a treadmill while watching Nancy Grace on CNN, look at the other person doing crunches on the floor, and just go ... "No."
I do watch some TV in the evenings: mostly NCIS reruns on USA. Since I've seen every episode, it's just background noise while I fix dinner and then eat it. (I prefer the kind of hotel where there's a small, basic kitchen in each room. Residence Inn, Homewood Suites, etcetera.)
In general, though, what I do with my evenings is think about all the stuff I'd like to be doing back home in Vermont. If I had kids, I'd probably have the usual messy train-wreck of a house; it seems as though you have to work full-time when you have a family to keep your house from being declared a toxic waste dump by the EPA. But I don't have kids, and with each passing year, I get more and more satisfaction out of reducing the extraneous crap that I have around the house. I find myself excited by the idea of coming home from a business trip and spending the weekend hauling loads of intense junk I'll never need to the dump or to Goodwill or whatever. My wife's own pack-rat nature and aversion to pulling a bin of stuff she hasn't used since college, 17 years ago, down off a basement shelf and going through it all is a continuing annoyance to me, but bit by bit, I wear her down.
And right now, "stuck" in Boston for 23 days (since I'm working long hours Monday through Friday and just really don't want to have to spend half my weekend driving home and then turning around driving back), all I can think about is how good it's going to feel to go home on December 23, turn in my rental car, and merrily spend the Christmas holiday going through various closets and figuring out what else I can give away.
See, one price that I've had to pay as I've lost all that weight is that my clothing doesn't fit. Amazing, isn't it? Who knew that losing 25% of your body mass would result in clothing not fitting anymore? Some of my dress pants and suit pants just hang loosely off me like I got them out of a basket of clown clothing. If I didn't wear a tight belt, cinched up, they'd fall clean off. And my suit jackets fit me like a tent. I have suit jackets that used to barely meet in the front, whose tails would spread apart in the back whenever I buttoned the jackets (which drove my wife nuts -- she'd unfasten my suit buttons whenever she saw me absent-mindedly buttoning them). Now I can wear those same suit jackets like they were meant to be double-breasted. And I've got shirts that are now so loose in the collar that when I wear them and fasten a tie around my neck, they bunch up like I'm a kid wearing one of Dad's shirts in some dress-up-like-the-grownups game. It looks like I've lost at least an inch around the collar, maybe more. I should stop by a store and buy a measuring tape or go to a department store and get measured again... because it looks like I'm going to have to give away half of the stuff in my closet. Just about all my current suits, some of my shirts, a lot of my dress pants -- and some of them are pretty new and in good shape.
And I'm looking forward to it. Thoughts of my closet, half-empty, bare hangers where clothing used to be, is, well, stimulating. It makes me want to go home and go through my dresser and get rid of old pairs of shorts that are tatty or just very loose fitting, go through my regular closet and toss polo shirts and turtlenecks that the cats have snagged, you name it. Even if I don't then turn around and buy a ton of new stuff (although in the case of the dress clothing, I'm going to need to) the idea of walking into Goodwill with bag after bag of donations just makes me go "woo hoo!"
Strange.
I don't know how I turned into a compulsive de-clutterer. My mom could tell you that I sure as hell wasn't that way when I was a kid, and people who came by my apartment when I was a college student can tell you how you could count on never being able to see my bedroom floor for all the crap on it. (I recall one day that I did clean up and my friend Larry came over, opened my bedroom door to use the phone or something, and stopped, foot suspended in the air, stunned by all that open, empty floor that he'd never seen before.)
And now I'm mister "if you don't need it, THROW IT OUT".
I'm sure most people have hobbies or something. Mine has, perversely, turned out to be "a deranged fascination with simplifying my life."
People sometimes ask me, given that I sleep in a hotel about as often as I sleep in my own home, what I do with all those evenings on the road. Do I go out to local tourist attractions? Do I work out? Do I just hole up and watch TV?
No, no, and mostly no.
Tourist attractions are annoyingly NOT OPEN at 7 o'clock at night. (Example: I've never been to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and I've been to Chicago dozens of times. They close too early.) Moreover, when one leaves work each day at 5:00 or 5:30, wearing a full suit, has to head back to the hotel to change into 'regular human' clothing, has to fight rush hour traffic to get there, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum ... well, let's face it: by the time you'd get to the local Museum of Awesome Local Stuff you'd have about an hour left until closing. Not worth it.
Working out: I should do more. As I've lost all that weight this year (184.5 pounds on Sunday, down from 224 at the beginning of August and down from 235-240 a couple of years ago), my increasingly lean frame has revealed a distressing lack of manly muscle. But your average business-class hotel fitness center will typically have two treadmills, an exercise bicycle or elliptical trainer, and some free weights of the light barbell kind. And it's different at each hotel you go to. I look at all that, packed into a tiny space half as large as it really needs, look at the person already in there walking on a treadmill while watching Nancy Grace on CNN, look at the other person doing crunches on the floor, and just go ... "No."
I do watch some TV in the evenings: mostly NCIS reruns on USA. Since I've seen every episode, it's just background noise while I fix dinner and then eat it. (I prefer the kind of hotel where there's a small, basic kitchen in each room. Residence Inn, Homewood Suites, etcetera.)
In general, though, what I do with my evenings is think about all the stuff I'd like to be doing back home in Vermont. If I had kids, I'd probably have the usual messy train-wreck of a house; it seems as though you have to work full-time when you have a family to keep your house from being declared a toxic waste dump by the EPA. But I don't have kids, and with each passing year, I get more and more satisfaction out of reducing the extraneous crap that I have around the house. I find myself excited by the idea of coming home from a business trip and spending the weekend hauling loads of intense junk I'll never need to the dump or to Goodwill or whatever. My wife's own pack-rat nature and aversion to pulling a bin of stuff she hasn't used since college, 17 years ago, down off a basement shelf and going through it all is a continuing annoyance to me, but bit by bit, I wear her down.
And right now, "stuck" in Boston for 23 days (since I'm working long hours Monday through Friday and just really don't want to have to spend half my weekend driving home and then turning around driving back), all I can think about is how good it's going to feel to go home on December 23, turn in my rental car, and merrily spend the Christmas holiday going through various closets and figuring out what else I can give away.
See, one price that I've had to pay as I've lost all that weight is that my clothing doesn't fit. Amazing, isn't it? Who knew that losing 25% of your body mass would result in clothing not fitting anymore? Some of my dress pants and suit pants just hang loosely off me like I got them out of a basket of clown clothing. If I didn't wear a tight belt, cinched up, they'd fall clean off. And my suit jackets fit me like a tent. I have suit jackets that used to barely meet in the front, whose tails would spread apart in the back whenever I buttoned the jackets (which drove my wife nuts -- she'd unfasten my suit buttons whenever she saw me absent-mindedly buttoning them). Now I can wear those same suit jackets like they were meant to be double-breasted. And I've got shirts that are now so loose in the collar that when I wear them and fasten a tie around my neck, they bunch up like I'm a kid wearing one of Dad's shirts in some dress-up-like-the-grownups game. It looks like I've lost at least an inch around the collar, maybe more. I should stop by a store and buy a measuring tape or go to a department store and get measured again... because it looks like I'm going to have to give away half of the stuff in my closet. Just about all my current suits, some of my shirts, a lot of my dress pants -- and some of them are pretty new and in good shape.
And I'm looking forward to it. Thoughts of my closet, half-empty, bare hangers where clothing used to be, is, well, stimulating. It makes me want to go home and go through my dresser and get rid of old pairs of shorts that are tatty or just very loose fitting, go through my regular closet and toss polo shirts and turtlenecks that the cats have snagged, you name it. Even if I don't then turn around and buy a ton of new stuff (although in the case of the dress clothing, I'm going to need to) the idea of walking into Goodwill with bag after bag of donations just makes me go "woo hoo!"
Strange.
I don't know how I turned into a compulsive de-clutterer. My mom could tell you that I sure as hell wasn't that way when I was a kid, and people who came by my apartment when I was a college student can tell you how you could count on never being able to see my bedroom floor for all the crap on it. (I recall one day that I did clean up and my friend Larry came over, opened my bedroom door to use the phone or something, and stopped, foot suspended in the air, stunned by all that open, empty floor that he'd never seen before.)
And now I'm mister "if you don't need it, THROW IT OUT".
I'm sure most people have hobbies or something. Mine has, perversely, turned out to be "a deranged fascination with simplifying my life."
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 06:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 12:29 am (UTC)If I leave the office at 5 (which I don't always manage) I usually am back here by 6 pm. Tomorrow should permit an earlier return because class finishes at noon and then I spend the afternoon prepping for the next round -- and I can do that just as well from my room as from the customer site. Or alternately, the same situation will be true next Wednesday.
Good Hotel Gyms
Date: 2010-03-11 07:07 pm (UTC)Thanks!