Exercise Machines Are Magic!

This past Monday we got our brand spankin' new Precor elliptical machine. Dang, is it purty! And giant. It takes up all the fresh space we made in the family room by scooting 4-foot stacks of boxes to the outer edges. This is an improvement. When I first moved here with my multitudes of belongings (most of them unnecessary) those stacks were 7 feet tall and they took up the entire room. They were stacked right up against the wall-sized window and there was no longer a view of the pool, or even of the sky. It was a messier, less airtight version of the wall in Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado."

[I made a literary reference. See? I don't just spend my time watching reality shows and reading People magazine and clicking on celebrity-bashing websites. I read books. Classic things like Edgar Allen Poe short stories. As recently as junior high school.]

Just having a machine in the house that makes fitness a possibility has colored my shopping choices. For instance, today I grocery-shopped at Sprouts, the Phoenix store known for being all things healthy. Organic frozen foods, organic farm-raised stress-free libertarian chicken, "natural" canned soda, glistening fillets from happy catfish that were swimming earlier in the day with no thought of a late-morning death knell, piles of gleaming radishes that are sometimes stacked forehead-high, beautiful glowing produce in every direction. On the racks near the check-outs are magazines like Natural Health, and Yoga, and the covers of those magazines are populated with glassy-eyed gauze-skirt-wearing women who have never even been in the same room with a Hostess Ho-Ho or an Oscar Mayer hot dog, and if that horror ever did happen to them, they'd run barefoot, their long skirts flowing, to hug the nearest tree so hard that shards of bark would be embedded forever into their free-range boobs.

Even so, I was not inspired. I came home with four kinds of potato chips, 2 kinds of ice cream bars, some buy-it-by-the-scoop chocolate candy that resembles swollen, misshapen Butterfingers, and a 6-pack of Shinerbock for Scott. Oh I got other stuff, too. Veggies, fish, grainy sawdusty bread, blah blah. All those items that were actually on the list.

I am easily coaxed into believing fantasy, and that is why it feels as though I now have carte blanche when it comes to eating junk. Because I'm SO going to get on the elliptical and work all of these calories off. I mean, the machine is right there. I can jump on it 8 times a day and eat every lard/sugar grease/salt concoction in the house and I will still be Kate Moss in no time. Minus the heroin and the disconcerting Marty Feldman eyes and the pond scum boyfriend.

The problem: Once you have stayed on the elliptical for the equivalent of a angry hike from Madison, Wisconsin to the equator, you have burned the caloric equivalent of one tiny corner of a brown sugar cinnamon Poptart. Unfrosted.

This is unfortunate.

Especially because my good friend Belle just sent me a goodie box which included a bag of Caramel Creams, some Cow Tails and some Laffy Taffy. And a gift certificate to the Devil's Living Room, also known as The Cheesecake Factory. She said it's a belated wedding gift but I may never reveal its existence to Scott. He would only be unreasonable. Like, he might bring up the topic of sharing it.

Thank you, Belle.