Feel the burn

My husband went out and bought the Wii Fit last night. I used it for almost an hour and a half - I love the step games and the hula hoop. The plan is to use it for at least half an hour each evening and track our progress. We're both doing this as a warm up to buying bikes and doing more high-impact and high intensity activities as summer approaches. Setting up the profile was actually pretty sobering - the board calibrates your BMI based on what you enter as your age and height, and then actually weighs you. Then, in what I like to call the "culmination of the shaming ceremony", the program calculates your fitness "age". Considering what my results were, its no wonder I feel like crap so much of the time...

Oh look. One of my office mates brought donuts.

A vicious nest of vipers

Last week I discovered one of my coworkers looking up the ancient story of Medusa on wiki. It turns out that it was referenced in an earlier conversation, and my office friend had no clue what Medusa even was. I proceeded to rattle off information about the gorgons (there were, depending on the source, three of them), and Greek mythology in general. I made the mistake of saying that the Edith Hamilton compilation of Greek, Roman and Norse mythology - that I had first begun to read in middle school and still have a battered copy of - was "like the bible of mythology". This made her a little offended seemed to offend her (thanks grammar police...) because she thinks that mythologies should not be compared to the bible. I explained that it was a figure of speech, and also explained that to the ancient Greeks this mythology was their religion. The pantheon of gods and goddesses represented different qualities, many of which are now attributed to the various manifestations of a single diety in modern Judeo-Christian beliefs. To the Greeks (and subsequently, the Romans, whose empirical aspirations had a vital part in the spread of the new western religion of Christianity that neatly co-opted bits of other belief systems as it went along), these tales of vengeful and lusty gods and questing heroes helped explain the phenomena that occurred in the natural world, and gave them a way to rationalize their cultural origins. It addressed the pentultimate question of "Why are we here?". Unless I'm mistaken, this is the basis and primary function of just about every religious belief system ever concocted by the collective minds of humanity since the dawn of time. Personally, I find the idea of a host of admittedly flawed gods twisting the universe to suit their whims more appealing than the possibility of a single god cloaked in the mantle of righteousness while conducting divine business in a decidedly contrary and deceitful fashion. At least you know what makes Zeus tick, and can take steps to prevent advances from giant amorous swans.

Since last week, I've been bothered by the nagging question of trying to remember the name of the hero of the Medusa story. I know he conquered her by looking at her reflection in his polished shield, and was able to escape the fate that met every other man who had ever laid eyes on her horrifying features (her stony gaze, if you will...). I just couldn't remember his name. It dawned on me last night while I was doing housework (some of my best thinking is done when my brain is on cruise control...), and I had to stop what I was doing and go online to make sure I was right. I was. Why can't I make a living from the utterly random and practically useless knowledge that my brain absorbs?

(It was Perseus, by the way!)

Sunday's Lio 'strip that I think I mentioned to M:

Emo pants and haircuts

I finally broke down and cut my hair, after a few months of trying to ignore the unruly mess and tie it back in a sad little ponytail in an effort to gorw it out enough to achieve a medium length style. I just couldn't take it any more. The end result is something with layers that resembles the haircuts that I see on certain teenage girls running around the mall. All I need are some chunky highlights in fuschia, eyeliner applied with a heavy hand, and a striped shirt paired with ridiculously tapered jeans in a cut that is as generally unflattering as it is uncomfortable.

My bangs look like this:

"It's a major award!"

I got an award certificate from the main branch's employee recognition program presented to me today. It was nice. Awkward...but nice. Of course, one of my friends nominated me but wanted it to be anonymous, so the fact that they gave me the nomination form along with my award I found kind of funny. She was not amused about that, though - she was trying to boost my "morale" (I really can't stand that damn word...), by making me think that one of the bosses might have nominated me. Of course, I would have eliminated the bosses from the list of possible suspects on the first round, and eventually narrowed it down to her, anyway.

A mid-week sigh of relief

Now that the all-consuming project that has taken up most of my time and consciouness over the last two weeks is completed I can breathe a little easier. I have time to work on the little things that I've been putting off, like fix my filing and tackle my learning library that has gotten out of hand.

The boss invited a couple of us lackeys out to lunch today. I'm curious as to what the will be discussed. I always find out the most interesting bits of news at these lunches.

News stories that have recently caught my eye:

• Vanderbilt museum is considering selling a 38 foot tall (approximately life-size) T-Rex replica that was originally made for promoting the movie version of 'Jurassic Park'in the 90s. They should call me if they've got a velociraptor they need to offload...
• Actual Discovery article headline:'Male Whales Prefer Enormous Females'...feel free to smirk and titter amongst yourselves.
• Tom Hanks has been asked to switch on the LHC as part of a promotion for his crappy new movie based on the sequel to the crap-fest that was 'The DaVinci Code', because the plot of the second book/movie somehow involves antimatter stolen from CERN. I'm sure that Hanks and Opie will take an interesting idea for a plot (even as ridiculous as Dan Brown is able to twist it and junk up the science) and make it the most dull sequence of improbable events ever captured on celluloid.