Mortality Rears It's Ugly Head

I have been relatively healthy my entire life. This is a combination of things. I have reasonably good family background as far as heart disease and cancer (I'm young yet so I haven't given a lot of that thought), I have been lucky enough to avoid pitfalls such as car accidents, and addictions such as cigarettes or worse. I also enjoy working out, where as most people would sooner eat their own underwear than go run a mile.

The last year or so has brought about certain realities though. I can no longer 'cheat' my way to performing well on my physical training test for the military (work out for 2 weeks and overextend my abilities to score well). At this last school I went to, from 10/25 to 11/6/03, I had to do a PT test, and I did worse than I've ever done, even when I was at basic. I only did 47 pushups, and I ran the 2 mile a full minute slower than I ever have (12:57). I was quite disappointed.

Well, as the days went on (we took that test on the second day there), I began to feel a soreness in my chest. Subtle at first, then it slowly got worse. Felt like my heart was going to explode at times. It got to a point where it became hard to sleep. At 31 years of age, the idea of my heart failing was really scary, to be quite honest.

I go into the doctor tomorrow to find out what it is. I have an idea already. I would think that if it were a serious heart problem, it would have gradually showed up, where as this seems to have popped up in a matter of two days. I think I caught some sort of infection or virus when I did my run way too hard, and it has caused the tissue around my heart and/or lungs to become swollen, either from infection or from fluid building up. Either way it hurts pretty bad sometimes.

I sit and wonder about things, it's hard to not have that 'ideal body', and to deal with the problems that arise as you get older. I know I need glasses, for instance, but it's almost as though getting the glasses is like admitting that I'm imperfect, and you know, I'm just not ready to do that yet? *blah, I do need the glasses though, getting to a point where I can't read highway signs at night*.

From this point on I realize I need to work that much harder at eating healthy and maintaining an active lifestyle that includes running, walking, biking, and my usual pushups and situps. But even with that, do I need to consider something other than situps to avoid hurting my back? Heh, the things I have to begin thinking of... I may not be ready for them, but my body is sure ready to force the stinking issue.

The Despised "Leap Year"

Next year is that year that comes around every four years, the one that I despise. No, I'm not talking about the traditional "Leap Year" that we all know of, I'm talking about that nasty, stinking, annoying, pure crap presidential election year, and all I have to say about that is a resounding YUCK YUCK BLECK!!!

Every day, we will be blasted with a stinking plethora of steamy political bullshit, a veritable cornucopia of oral feces in the form of news, commercials, editorials, etc, on the radio, on television, in the newspaper, on billboards. It will be force fed to us, 'the masses', as though we are all babies and this is our Gerber Political Food and we need to eat it to survive.

I would love to say that I will be boycotting all of it, but I'm too much of a news junkie myself to avoid reading the paper, or traveling to www.yahoo.com to see the headlines, or catching the latest news breaks on CNN.

I have to wonder sometimes: was it always like this? I mean, nowadays, rather than run on any real political platform with easy to understand agendas and clear cut opinions on the issues that concern 'the masses', presidential hopefuls instead spend all their time trying to make all the other candidates look worse than themselves. By the time November rolls around, each candidate has degraded himself, and been degraded by others to such an extent that it's like choosing the best pile of horse dung; none seem to be good, so you look for the one that has the least stink.

Was there ever a time when the candidates campaigned on their own opinions, when they let us all know what they thought, where their passions lay? If there was, I sure don't remember it. And here we go again, another leap year filled with the stench of waist deep spouting political bullshit, try not to drown folks.