The master of disaster.

I've begun to rekindle my aggressive and definitively unpleasant brand of physical fitness. It's been almost a year and a half since I stopped working at 24 Hour Fitness, at that point being at my most svelte, but since then I was sort of coasting, and it's caught up to me. I've gotten a little soft around the edges, so I'm getting back into that boot camp mentality. Not the mentality of working like I'm in a boot camp (cause I hardly think going to the gym constitutes that), just the mentality of knowing when I wake up that I have to do something that day that will feel unpleasant.

I've never understood, you see, the people who insist that they love the feeling of working out. I cannot conceive it. While I have begun taking regular yoga classes in recent weeks, and have absolutely fallen for it, I find the sensation and relationship between the psychological and physical realms of myself the most alluring thing about it, not the fact that I'm sweating in a dim room with a bunch of menopausal women (at least two of whom have been very nice to me and chatted with me about how they wish more men like me would take up yoga - thanks!).

The down and dirty exercise, though, which for me consists of lifting, pulling, or pushing weight, followed by no less than a half hour of cardiovascular frolicking, is maybe the worst thing on earth. I have trouble precisely remembering how I managed to do it six days a week those couple of years ago. I think I was less confident then, and wanted to have an easier time charming women, so the desire to shed the seventy or so extra pounds was a little more primal. I'm going back to it now for health, which is important, as well as because I want to be looking lean when I head to LA for acting next year, but in all honesty, there are times when life and career don't seem quite as motivating as sexual desire does.

I think my weight loss and subsequent increase in confidence put me in an odd place, though, because my newfound confidence that I could entice a woman by appearance hadn't synced up with my intellectual side. I used to lean very heavily on the brain in such matters in lieu of the body, and not unlike a muscle, the mental impulses weren't really ready to let go. Consequently, I found myself very relaxed and able to charm women I would meet in that sort of casual, flighty way, but they'd seem to invariably retreat when exposed to the truer parts of my personality. I think the contrast between my laid-back approach and the passion of my personality was too great.

That idea was actually sugested to me, albeit phrased slightly differently, by my friend/at that time director Carla in the midst of our first check-in before rehearsals started. She speculated that I was likely the kind of person who would think my way out of kissing a woman regardless of how well the moment suited it, and she told me that my homework for the show was to go for it the next time I was in a romantic spot. There was also a basketball analogy in there about me being too much like Jason Kapono and not enough like Baron Davis, although I'd probably rather be a Canadian than a Clipper.

Unfortunately, that homework assignment never got finished. Despite the fact that between that suggestion and now I've seemed to have had good things going on with three- count 'em, three!- lovely ladies, one died the death of non-communication, one never got off the ground, and one jumped the shark when my lady friend expertly dodged my kiss attempt and turned it into a goodbye hug.

Following that last one, I was concerned to find that I wasn't that upset. I had devoted a couple months at that point to this particular girl, and while I don't really have that head-over-heels for almost anybody, I thought I'd at least be upset by loss of time. It was at that point that I realized that I think I've been undergoing a shift in my personality recently. My general goodnaturedness has turned to general disinterest. The people I know who I love I still love, but the people who I'm ambivalent towards I've found myself becoming shorter with, and the people I used to secretly disdain I now openly do. I've begun to have trouble sleeping, and some nights I wake up with the sort of upright jolt that you'd see in a cliche 80s horror flick, only having a foggy image of the last instant of my dream that caused me to shoot up in my bed. I feel absurdly aged, sometimes prone to muscular weakness and physical exhaustion when I've done nothing exaustive. My attitudes towards women have become increasingly and flatly sexual, and in particular when I'm wearing my reflective sunglasses that render my eyes invisible, I catch myself staring at women's breasts and hips with a frequency and carelessness that I would've been preturbed to observe in somebody else this time last year.

I had a self-reflective revelation a couple days ago, while I was waiting with friends at the Sol Food restaurant on 4th Street. I was wearing the aforementioned sunglasses, as well as faded green cargo pants and a heavy, black leather motorcycle jacket. I had a toothpick hanging from my lips, and I was spending my time watching an unfathomably sexy waitress saunter from inside to outside, bussing people's plates. The last time she passed by me, it struck me; I was sitting there dressed like an extra from Rebel Without A Cause on a Sunday afternoon, spending my time drooling over some woman I'd never met, and my fingernails were dirty. I decide to spend a few minutes staring at a woman's ass, and I didn't even have the decency to wash my hands first.

I'm curious about all this sort of stuff (the joking nature of that last paragraph aside) because I'm worried I'm becoming the kind of person I'll wake up one day and be unable to respect. When I was a kid I wondered if there was something that happened when you became an adult that allowed you to be capable of greater greed, deception and sleaze than you could when young. I hope this isn't it.

Maybe I should just go to the gym.