On Intelligence, Emotion and Being a Geek...

I touched on this subject briefly in my last post, but so important do I think this topic is, that I'm writing a separate entry about it.  A warning: there's a fair bit of game show geekage in this post, but if you can wade through it, I do think you'll find what I have to say here worth while.

I've mentioned that my friends Ben and Tim live up in Glendale near the Galleria mall.  As a matter of fact, they live right across the street from the Glendale Public Library, and by a matter of coincidence, one evening Ben discovered that Ken Jennings, the quiz show virtuoso who won 74 consecutive games (and over $2.5 million in cash) on Jeopardy! was speaking there, promoting and signing copies of his book, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs.  I made the 45-minute long drive up to Glendale (clear traffic that night, thank God) and sat with the Ruly Mob in the library's gathering room to hear Ken speak.

Apparently, Jennings had been originally contacted to do a memoir of his life, but he wisely decided that probably his life by itself wasn't something people wanted to read about, so he expanded the idea into something far more interesting: an examination of trivia itself, and the subculture that has sprung up around the idea of collecting facts.  During his speech, Jennings touched on something I felt to be particularly profound and important.  In his research he noticed that many people tended to look down on trivia buffs and geeks in general as freaks with sponge memories who just spew out facts in an effort to make themselves look superior and others look dumb in comparison and in doing so ruin things for everyone else.  After all, this speaks to one of the oldest stereotypes of the "nerd:" the brilliant, socially-awkward outcast who'd rather sit at home and do nerdy things like read, mess around on their computers and play Dungeons and Dragons (actually, this kinda sounds like me, except I never cared much for Dungeons and Dragons myself, but I digress.  :D)

It's also surely one of the reasons why newer TV producers (and seemingly, TV viewers in general) look down on traditional quiz shows as being outdated and boring.  Bear with me as a I present a case in point: this past TV season, my friends and I in the game show fan community were absolutely thrilled at the announcement that a show called Temptation: The New Sale of the Century had been "greenlit" (that is, sold and syndicated to enough stations for the show to be worth producing a full season of) for the 2007-08 production year.  Temptation is actually the show's Australian name; the original Sale of the Century was an American daytime show that aired in the 1970's and made its way to Australia (via producer Reg Grundy) initially as a ripoff show in 1971 called Temptation (the source of the newer show's name), and later, in 1980, as a bonafide Sale of the Century, Grundy actually having bought the format lock, stock and barrel between the end of the last show and the start of the new one.  That version ran for 21 years as one of Australia's most popular and beloved shows.  So popular and well-crafted it was, that Grundy started exporting clones of the show to other countries, including, and especially the U.S., laying the foundation for the importation of other international formats.  Indeed, the show made so much money, that Grundy was able to retire and sold his international company to the group that is now known as FremantleMedia.

Which brings us back to the present.  In 2005, the Australians revived the Sale of the Century format as Temptation: The New Sale of the Century.  The Aussies have always played Sale as a big money format, and the newest incarnation made the game into a millon-dollar show while still preserving the important parts of the format.  You see, Sale of the Century is essentially a cross between Jeopardy! and Let's Make a Deal.  Three players compete, answering toss-up questions to earn money...except the questions are only worth five dollars each.  The upside is that at certain points in the show, the player in the lead is offered an opportunity to "buy" a luxury prize worth hundreds, even thousands of dollars for only a few of the dollars they'd earned in the game.  This leads to an important decision, which is to either buy the guaranteed goody, or hang on to their lead, hoping to win the game and use their total score to buy one of the big bonus prizes (including a luxury car and a monster cash jackpot for those persistent enough to get enough money to buy them) at the end of the show.  This thought process reveals the secret of the show's appeal: the quiz game is really just a mechanic to get to the prizes and the decisions (and especially the ensuing suspense) that go with them.  The questions themselves are meant to be quick and easy to come up with the answers to, and nowhere NEAR as difficult as something you might hear asked on Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? Simple enough, right?

Unfortunately, the North American arm of FremantleMedia has a poor track record of producing game show revivals; their sole long-term success has been the current incarnation of Family Feud which has shockingly had a longer run than either of its two illustrious predecessors, and has done so primarily by sticking to the traditional game format.  This lesson - don't fuck with the winning formula - seems to be lost on FremantleMedia, who in "adapting" Temptation for the American market, and desperate to appeal to a younger audience, insisted on tinkering with the format.  In doing so, they ripped off a large number of other game show formats, dumbed down the already easy questions and cheapened the prize budget.  The stations the show was sold to saw what a train-wreck the show had been reduced to and quickly banished the show to substandard timeslots, resulting in downright vile ratings, and tons of potential revenue being flushed down the proverbial toilet.

All this because they didn't think younger viewers cared anything about intelligence.

That brings up Jennings's point...and mine, too; an issue reaching far more deeply into the human condition than what was wrong with a simple TV show.  Our species has a tendency to put more weight on their emotions, and how they feel about a subject or a person than in what they know about them.  Those who are in touch with their emotions or are better at eliciting desirable emotions are often given more credibility than those who have high intelligence and are legitimate experts in one or more given fields.   The most obvious example of this I personally can think of is a job interview.  When you go on one, your interviewer presumably already knows your qualifications for the job; the purpose of the interview is for the prospective employer to get a feel of you, to see if you are someone they feel comfortable hiring.  Your task is to make a good impression on them, so they will like you.  If they don't like you, they're not gonna hire you no matter what your qualifications are, right?  The same is true of dating; you might be the nicest, smartest and even the most handsome/gorgeous thing on two legs, but if your prospective mate doesn't like you, they're not gonna want to have anything to do with you.

This weight on emotion is a major reason why our culture is obsessed with celebrity news, even over news about world events: ultimately celebrities are as human as anyone else, and watching what they do and what happens to them gives us catharsis from the hum-drum drudgery of our daily lives.  This is why we forced to endure endless tales of scum like Paris Hilton and who-the-hell-are-you-and-why-should-we-cares like Kim Kardashian, and why we take heart when we hear the achievements of sports heroes like Lance Armstrong, or more recently Michael Phelps, or why Entertainment Tonight continues to regale us with the continuing story of Brad and Angelina's new family, when we're likely never going to meet these people in person.  It's also why things like stem cell research, or gay marriage, or abortion or any number of controversial topics are so vehemently debated; they carry massive emotional baggage with them and some folks just aren't comfortable in dealing with that baggage, or feel so strongly about their point of view that they can't see eye to eye with those who disagree with them.

It's also why guys like me, who make a point of trying to remember little facts about the world around us, even stuff that may ultimately be truly useless, get such a bad rap.  In many social situations, when someone like me is part of a conversation and manages to find an opportunity to present something they know in the context of that conversation, oftentimes - not always, mind you - there will be someone who will be offended.  "Who does this jerk think he is?," they'll think.  "He must think he's better than me.  I can't stand this guy!"  Their emotion gets the better of them, and instead of enjoying the little bit of new information for what it is, become bitter and angry towards the geek...even if it's just for a minute or two.  This is a big reason why I was so bothered by the game night incident I mentioned in my last post. I was (and still am) concerned that in demonstrating my knowledge in the manner I did, I alienated someone else who I believe I had no business alienating in the first place; someone who, while clearly intelligent and well-read, was just playing the game to have fun and wasn't horribly concerned with winning.  I was worried that I might have embarrassed and alienated not only her, but in the process my closest friend, who while he is just as competitive as the rest of the Mob, still wants his girlfriend to be happy and confident in herself...and rightly so, methinks.

Does this mean emotion is something to be discarded?  Certainly not.  Humans are social animals, and emotion is an important part of creating and maintaining social relationships.  It's the glue that binds families together, enables individuals to achieve great feats, makes it possible for our culture to function beyond just the pursuit of personal wealth.  But it's our intelligence that makes us able to know how to interpret our emotions, how to act in certain situations, what to do to make a living for ourselves and our families, how to give pleasure and joy and happiness to our loved ones.  Without one, the other is useless.

It would do our species good to try and remember to work to balance the two.  It's not an easy task; we humans are very much ruled by our emotions.  But I believe we're up to it.  And if we can do it, we may yet survive.

What do you think?  Or should I say....how do you feel?

The biggest problem with working nights...

...is not being able to sleep on my nights off.  Because I work such a strange shift (10PM-6AM Thursday-Monday nights, for those unaware), on my two nights off, it's basically impossible for me to sleep during the time when everyone else sleeps unless I starve myself of sleep during the day, which makes it very difficult to do stuff even on my days off.  This, incidentally, is one of the big reasons it's taken me so long to get back to the gym.  On top of that, since I have such odd days off, I don't get to see my friends without an appointment...and sometimes I have to call in sick to be able to make those appointments.  This problem is magnified by the fact that my friends live pretty far away.  My closest friend, Jason, lives in Riverside, which isn't too horribly far away, but he's busy with his teaching job, his swing-dancing career, and his girlfriend, Sarah...the latter of which isn't so bad, since Sarah's a sweetheart and has started joining us at our game nights.

However I must admit making a bit of a faux-pas at the last event she joined us at; another friend, Ben, was introducing a new game concept to us and Sarah, myself and a third friend volunteered to be Guinea pigs to help test it.  Forgetting that we were just doing a friendly run-through of the game, my competitive instinct took over, and I and my third friend basically left the poor dear lady sitting on the starting line.  Had this been, say, a poker game, with money and marbles at stake, this might be somewhat acceptable behavior (after all, as the saying goes, it's a sin to let a sucker keep his money), but in this case, I am rather ashamed of myself.  Being competitive is one thing, but callously going full bore while playing against someone playing merely to have fun tends to leave a bitter taste in the other person's mouth...the kind of thing I have always tried to avoid in my dealings with others, especially someone part of our little group who's present primarily in support and affection for my friend than necessarily sharing any of our interests.

Jason, if you're reading this, please give Sarah a hug for me.

The rest of my friends, whom I refer to as the "Ruly Mob," live quite a bit farther.  Ben and his roommate Tim live all the way up in Glendale, just up the street from the famed Galleria mall (and the new Americana center that just opened there), another friend, Matt, lives all the way up in Valencia, which means at least an hour - sometimes two if traffic sucks, and the greater Los Angeles area is infamous for its shitty traffic conditions - to get to my house if I were to invite him.  Tim works the same kind of casino job I do (though he works at the newer Hustler Casino, while I work at the larger Commerce Casino) and Ben is a night auditor at a Marriott hotel in Burbank, and they have different days off than I do, so they have to make appointments to hang out, the same as I do.

I do know at least one family who is friends with our little group who live nearby, but I am never entirely sure of their schedule either.  Jeff, the dad, is a toxicologist at the famed UCI Medical Center, and Julie, the mom, is an accountant.  They have two daughters; Maddie is older and is just entering adolescence, while Emma is near the tail-end of grade school.  Jeff, Julie and Maddie have all been fairly successful contestants on quiz-shows; unlike most of my little group, these guys are more interested in playing the games as contestants, than in creating and producing new shows, like myself the rest of the Mob.  Jeff and Maddie have both been on Jeopardy! Maddie played on a Back-to-School Week, winning over $22,000, and Jeff was one of the legendary Ken Jennings's victims, though Jeff played like anything BUT a victim, being one of the few to legitimately challenge the quiz show legend on equal footing. Julie was on the Meredith Vieira-hosted incarnation of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, winning $64,000.  The four of them are as close to the perfect American family as one could imagine; attractive, outgoing, eminently likable and whip-smart (not to mention socially-aware, unlike most geeks), making them ideal contestants.

They are also big board game players, too, much like the Mob, but their taste runs toward heavier and more complicated fare, such as so called "Eurogames" - games with in-depth and innovative but easy-to-understand mechanics relying less on luck and more on strategy and featuring higher production values than most mainstream board games, so named because of their origins in Europe in particular - than my closer friends who favor game show adaptations (often featuring questions we've written ourselves!  I told ya we were geeks :D) and party games.  Jeff is particularly into these kinds of games; while Maddie, for example, is an Apples-to-Apples junkie, Jeff's favorite is Civilization, a 70s-era monster (with horrendously complicated gameplay and marathon playing time) that was responsible for inspiring computer programmer Sid Meier to create his 90s-era masterpiece.

Indeed, so into gaming is Jeff that he went so far as to create an introductory Powerpoint presentation for a game called Puerto Rico, which is about as shining an example of the Eurogame genre as one can get incidentally, and which he showed to Maddie's teenaged friends at a recent game night in an effort to get them to play it with him.  Now mind you, I'm all for bringing new blood to the table (especially to play such a fun and well-designed game as Puerto Rico) but even I have to question putting so much time and effort into what is essentially a diversion (an opinion, I might add, that Julie shares with me).  After all, even a guy who calls himself "Game Show Man" can't live on game shows alone.  Even so, they are dear friends, and I wish I could hang out with them more often.  But alas, I can never be sure when they're available, since Jeff is pretty much on call all the time.

And so, I sit here, banging on the keys, going slowly mad while I wait for my chance to shine...and some friends to share the moment.

We have lost a dear friend...

One of the most important functions the Internet serves is to unite people who live on one side of the world with other folks who live thousands of miles away with common interests and goals.

When I first start surfing the 'Net, I was surprised to find that other shared my love of game shows. At the time, it was a genre in decline, maligned and scorned as cheap, meaningless entertainment. But there were and are those who still enjoy the genre as it was, and back in the day, many of them congregated on a Newsgroup known as alt.tv.gameshows. This group enabled many people to discuss and debate their favorite shows, to make friends with their fellow fans. Two of the most important and influential of those who read the group were Randy Amasia and David Zinkin.

Randy was a researcher who interned on the original Card Sharks and appeared as a contestant on an obscure (to most folks) CBS show in 1979 called Whew! where he won $25,000 in cash to help pay for his education. His insight, sense of humor and love for the genre helped bring together many new friends, He died of cancer several years ago after many years of hoping he could get a videotape of his appearance on the show. He and the group managed to get access to one...only for Randy to pass away just as the tape literally reached his home. I never knew Randy, but I owe him a debt I will never be able to repay, because many of the people he helped bring together are now amongst my dearest and closest friends.

David was an administrator and IT guy for a school district in the New York state area. He served as moderator for alt.tv.gameshows' offspring, the Game Show Forum. He was possessed of a similar temperament and love for the genre to Randy's own, and he was important to helping me find my way when I started posting to the group. He also served as an important voice of common sense when things in the real world began to turn strange. But David suffered from Crohn's disease, a rare genetic disorder affecting the intestinal tract, and making the sufferer vulnerable to colon cancer.

Today, one of David's friends posted to the Forum to say that David had passed away. Unlike Randy, I knew David fairly well - though not as well as some of my other friends - and he touched my life in a profound way. Without him, I would not know some of my best friends, and I would not be part of a community from which I take great pride and pleasure in my association. As with Randy, I owe David a debt I can never repay.

Farewell, David. I hope you see Randy in heaven.

26 Down Addendum: the YouTube links

For some reason, the e-mail wouldn't embed the YouTube videos, so here are the links. Watch 'em in order. :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMkVGtVQuSA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCMsWnuMnD0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3jyVLvWEJM

26 Down: My Appearance on "Merv Griffin's Crosswords"

For your reference, that little gesture I do at the top of the show is the "Chang Sing Salute" from Big Trouble in Little China.

Punchin' the ol' heavy bag...

I finally started going to the gym again last week.  I went during the day when the place was empty, and I got a decent workout, but decided I would do better in a full class so I went again on Tuesday night.  Frankly, I think it went far better.  The instructor for that particular class only teaches at the gym for that one class, and he was a good teacher, so I'll try to go on Tuesday nights a little more frequently.

Boxing, although in decline as a sport in and of itself (although mixed martial artists are more and more using the style as a striking base), is on the rise as a form of exercise.  The secret of its popularity is that it requires the use of the entire body to generate the force needed for its punches.  The kinetic energy in each punch begins in the legs, is transferred through the torso into the punching arm and fist, smashing into the target.  Further, in order to make sure the boxer can hit and defend properly, they must remain balanced in their stance at all times.  Needless to say, this requires a great deal of grace and agility on the part of the boxer, about as much as any other martial art, most dance forms - boxing is often compared to dancing - or even *cough*gymnastics*cough*. ;D  The actual techniques aren't difficult to understand...but they are a little difficult to perform properly at first.  But once you get them down and programmed into muscle-memory, you can pretty much rip them off pretty easily; indeed, this is another of boxing's secrets - some boxers can fire off their combinations as fast or faster than many kung fu masters.

The usual pattern for a group-style boxing class is warm up-shadowboxing-heavy bag work-ab work-cooldown.  The warm-ups are pretty pedestrian; a few laps around the heavy bag "tree" (the big steel framework from which four or five rows of heavy bags are hung for classes), jumping jacks, mountain-climbers (ugh!), etc.  Shadowboxing, important to working technique and build muscle-memory, is next.  It's a little tedious, but it helps make sure you're doing everything right (and gives the instructor a chance to walk around and correct flaws).

Heavy bag work is the big attraction of these classes.  Everyone wears handwraps and gloves, and the wraps are almost always put on before class as the process of properly wrapping one's hands is time consuming but very important and necessary to help protect the hands; anyone who tells you different deserves to have a heavy, blunt object bashed into their skull for endangering your safety, thank you very much.  The gloves are put on just before bag work, and are, for most people 12-ounce "super bag gloves," which are designed specifically for hitting a heavy bag and are just slightly heavier than professional fight gloves, which are usually 8- or 10-ounces, just to protect the boxer's hands while still transmitting the full force of a punch to an opponent; this is opposed to sparring or training gloves which are usually 16, 18 or sometimes even 20 ounces and are designed for hitting sparring partners without chopping their bodies completely to pieces.  Incidentally, if you watch any of the boxing events in this year's Olympics, you'll note that the gloves (12-ouncers, FYI) they use have white "scoring" areas on their knuckles to help the judges keep track of landed punches.  Amateur-boxing is more like fencing; the judges are interested in the quantity of landed punches whereas in professional boxing the judges are interested in the quality.

In bag work, the instructor gives the class one combination to work for a full round while they come around with target mitts and have you try to throw the combination at the mitts properly; incidentally, in the class I went to on Tuesday night, the instructor, instead of bringing the mitts, put on a pair of sparring gloves and came around to folks who seemed like they knew what they were doing and had them do a little light contact sparring with him, focusing on body work, giving some good pointers in the process.  I kept getting tapped in the chest, but I managed to parry a few shots and even land a few of my own.  :D  Naturally, bag work is the big stress-reliever, because once the gloves go on you can finally release all your aggression on the bag instead of the bum giving you static at work or around the neighborhood.  After bag work, it's on to everyone's least-favorite part of the workout, ab work, featuring crunches, push-ups, leg lifts, bridges (double ugh!) and the dreaded bicycle-crunches (can someone tell me who invented those so I can hunt 'em down?).  After that, it's cooldown, stretches, and time to go home, usually quite exhausted and feeling quite a bit better...at least that's usually how I feel.

The first class I ever took was at a now-defunct Bodies-in-Motion facility in 2004 near the debt management agency I used to work for; at the time it was a "presale gym," designed to give potential members a taste of what the full gym had to offer.  The teacher, a cute and friendly but hard-as-nails redhead named Keren, was actually mostly a kickboxer, trained in the esoteric (to most Americans anyways) French kickboxing style known as savate.  The class itself was supposed to be a kickboxing class, but due to a typo on the schedule it ended up that the people who came to take the class, like me. were expecting straight boxing.  Keren taught the class anyways as straight boxing at a blistering pace, even more so than other classes I've taken, and even working out with us.  I still...mostly...remember the jab- and cross-series she taught us for conditioning and especially the stretching series she taught me, which I still perform at then end of my workout.  The last round of her workouts (before ab work) was always preceded by the command "Knock 'em out!  All boxing!" (at which I always put myself in the right state of mind by doing the late Chris Benoit's "thumb-across-the-throat") and was two minutes of just unloading everything you had into the bag - Keren's goal was always to make you had nothing left - until the time ran out and you switched to working your abs.    Keren's goofball personality and ass-whipping classes (not to mention her easy-on-the-eyes figure) made me a loyal follower for quite a while.  She later told me that it was "a pleasure to teach someone who actually gets (the techniques)." Incidentally, Keren is the reason I recently joined Facebook after a great of holding out. I did a Google search of her name and her Facebook profile turned up.  She's in Colorado now, I think, having married her longtime boyfriend AJ, a U.S. serviceman, who I believe served overseas either in Afghanistan or Iraq; I'm not entirely sure which.  Nice guy, too; I met him when he came to the gym to visit her while on a furlough.

I miss her to pieces.

After Keren left, my next teacher was Erin, a pro-boxer and mixed martial artist. She was tall, well-built and tattooed but attractive nonetheless.  You see, boxers are NOT 'roided-out bodybuilders by any stretch, instead being lean, mean, and toned.  Bulky boxers are slow boxers, and slow boxers eat canvas. She was more into technique than Keren; while Keren still taught proper form, Erin was into making sure folks had it down right than just throwing stuff at the bag.  Incidentally, if you've watched American Gladiators this season, you may have seen Erin yourself.  She was cast as the "strong, silent" Gladiator known as "Steel."  They didn't make her that because of her voice if you're wondering; she has a pleasant enough speaking voice, and she's a sweetheart with most folks, including me.  It's just that, besides having a bit of an aggressive streak (which serves her well on Gladiators), she's an insufferable trash-talker.  In interviews promoting the show, she has already called out her Gladiator teammate, fellow MMA uber-hottie Gina "Crush" Carano, the photogenic face of women's MMA.  Further, one of her most infamous losses during her pro-boxing career was to none other than Laila Ali, the female host of Gladiators.

You can see the logic of effectively gluing her mouth shut.  (Sorry, Erin.  Nothin' but love for ya, but you know I ain't lyin.'  :D)

There was a period when Bodies-in-Motion was shut down to be transformed into the complete facility, and I briefly trained at the original L.A. Boxing gym in Costa Mesa (which I believe is shut down now; they moved it to a newer facility matching the rest of the now nationwide chain's various storefront style gyms) hoping to find Erin there (IIRC, she got her start in boxing there), but instead trained for a month with a gentleman named Jason (whose classes were the only ones to compare in terms of pace to Keren's).  Sadly though, I had to give it up for a while (L.A. Boxing was too expensive at the time as well as too far and Bodies-in-Motion was a shell of itself until the full gym opened).

When the full gym opened, I started going again.  Keren was back by then (but only doing one class which I attended almost religiously), but I was out of work at the time, having been laid off from the debt management agency job, so I started going to the gym more frequently.  Besides Keren, there were two instructors I trained with.  One was Shane, a charismatic former pro middleweight.  Out of all the instructors I took classes from, Shane's were the perfect balance of fast pace and technique instruction, and I'm sad I didn't take more of his classes.  The other was Joey, who was primarily a karate practioner (and a motorcycle rider; I remember him having messed up his foot at least once in an accident while I took his classes, but that didn't stop him from teaching the class), but he knew enough boxing to teach the class properly.  He was a prince of a guy and a good teacher - I still miss his line-up-and-hit-the-focus-mitts drill -  but a lot of his class (a small noon-time class) was just running about the heavy bag room and hitting random bags with rapid salvoes of straight shots, which I hated because everyone treated it as a race, and because everyone went so damned fast, it promoted crappy technique which makes for a not-so-hot workout, IMHO.  I miss the boy anyways; he was a good dude and I hope things are going well for him.

I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to pay for a membership for a while, but then I got my casino gig and I had the money...but not the time (for those unaware, my usual shift at the casino is from 10PM to 6AM; at the time it was from Wednesday to Sunday, presently it's from Thursday to Monday).  I just didn't have the time to go all the way down there, so I sadly had to give up my membership there.  I briefly tried a membership with a smaller gym in Santa Ana, but it too was too far for me, based on my schedule (on top of that, for the second class I went to, the instructor didn't even bother to show up; it's a little hard to motivate oneself to take a class taught by a fool who doesn't even show up to his own class).

My mom later pointed out another L.A. Boxing gym closer to me, this one in Fullerton, near the county courthouse.  This is the one I go to now; initially, when I started going there in mid-2007 I went early in the morning when the gym opened for the day, just I got off of work.  The instructor was T.J., the gym's manager, and by his own admission a former Army sniper.  He actually was a lot like Keren in that he actually worked out with the class which was pretty small; a dude who exercises with you and is still motivated enough to teach you properly is a fellow to be reckoned with, IMHO.  I stuck with the class for a while...until August, my little week-long sojourn to Las Vegas with the Ruly Mob (my nickname for my circle of friends; another friend who lives in Phoenix also joined us).  I was hoping to take a class at Randy Couture's gym in the area, but I had too many other things on my mind to do at the time, so I missed out, and once I got home, it was too easy to just push boxing to the side and do other things.  I did go to one class, but the instructor sucked (and the new boxing shoes I had bought to wear were too tight).

I finally motivated myself to go back in the last month or so; July was not a fun month for me for some reason the customers at work are starting to wear on me, so I decided it was time to try and punch out some of my blues on the bag, so to speak.  So I got a new pair of sneakers (which fit much better) and started going to the gym again.

And I do feel better.