Guest Post: Exercising: My Love/Hate Relationship With The Gym

By Patricia "Patty" Pendleton

When I moved to Minnesota at the age of thirty-six I decided to get healthy. Well, I would like to think that was why I joined the gym, but it really was my desire to get skinny. I even went so far as to have liposuction a few years back. All that did was take the fat from my butt and redistribute it to my abdomen and arms. I have never liked to exercise. If I could take a pill to do it I would go that route. I do not like getting sweaty and winded. I haven't the drive to be the best and compete for glory. I just want to be thin, plain and simple. It sounds vain and I own up to that. After being nicknamed Piggy by my two older sisters during my teen years my body image suffered greatly. Now, going on thirty-nine I am still battling this demon that drove me to do an unspeakable thing to my body. I joined a boot camp class.

Over the years I have spent thousands of dollars on at-home exercise equipment. Sitting in my garage right now is the elliptical machine I had to have. The most exercise I got from that thing was dragging it up from the basement this past weekend so I can Craigslist it so I can pay for my gym membership. At the gym there are plenty of free classes I could go to, but I decided to do the boot camp class, which cost extra, much to the dismay of my ever patient husband. I did the boot camp class because it is supposedly the hardest class at the gym. Boot camp is for bad asses and I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to have a sculpted stomach with a tight, high muscular butt, free of cellulite and jiggle. I wanted arms like Madonna. I would get thin in this class. I just knew it.

After twenty-four weeks of boot camp class not much in my physical appearance has changed. I still have my mom gut and, sadly, cellulite. However, I can pump out one hundred seventy push ups during the hour long class when told to do so. I can even run five miles with little fatigue. If someone told me I would be able to do these things when I first started I wouldn't have joined at all. I would have said: "They are going to make me do what? Why would I want to run holding twenty extra pounds of weight over my head? I am a house wife for Christ sake, why would I ever need to hold a plank position for ten minutes?"

Though my initial goals were not achieved, the whole "thin" thingy keeps me going. It isn't because I love the feeling of reaching a new level of strength and endurance. Rather, I am afraid if I quit now I really am going to get huge. I figured I was burning, on average, at least five hundred calories per class. Times that by three, and the calories I burn running twice a week, and I would have to cut out a lot of food from my life to maintain my current weight. It is a vicious cycle. The exercising increases my appetite, so I have been eating more food then ever, and if I quit exercising my metabolism is going to tank. I feel like the rat on the wheel running in circles and going nowhere fast.

Another thing about exercising I have noticed is I don't feel any healthier. In fact, I have more aches and pains then ever. My ankles, knees and the muscle right underneath my left butt cheek have suffered from "fitness". The running has made my neck problem flare up from all the jarring. I hate exercising so much I clench my teeth the entire time (when I am not mouth breathing, gulping air into my burning lungs) creating tension headaches. On top of all that it makes me swear like a sailor. I drop the f-bomb at least thirty times during a class. I think the other people in class think I have Tourette Syndrome. So what is a woman to do?

I have one month left to figure it all out before my boot camp ends. It would have been over this week, but I won an extra month doing a fitness challenge at the club. Isn't that ironic? I can admit I am proud that I have stuck with it as long as I have. My motivations were shallow and trite, but I think in all this misery, which I paid extra for, I learned something about myself: I realize if someone tells me to do something I will do it. On my own I am a quitter. I need people to inspire, motivate, even threaten me to reach my potential. I can live with that.

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The Beauty of Grey

Is it still possible to separate your personal life from your professional life?

I say no.

With modern communications (i.e. smartphones) we have the potential to always be connected. Currently, being constantly connected is a conscious choice. I think that in the not so distant future being constantly connected is going to be a requirement.

Being constantly connected will be a requirement because the smartphone is becoming pervasive and the call and data plans associated with the smartphone will continue to become affordable for everyone.

As the smartphone market continues to grow, the expectation will be that we are constantly connected personally and professionally, and the days of leaving your work at work and your personal life at home will become a thing of the past. The line between work and play will blur.

For some, the line between work and play has already blurred, but this will be the case for everyone soon.

You can run, but you can't hide. And if you try to hide you will find that you will become irrelevant because you are not connected.

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Guest Post: Zombie Housewives

By Patricia "Patty" Pendleton

Somehow over the last twelve years I have joined the ranks of the living dead. I am not talking about your flesh eating, stinking corpse types, which may have automatically come to mind. No, I speak of something even worse. Something real that exists in every town, state, and I would surmise it occurs even at the global level. I speak of zombie housewives.

Zombie housewives are not created over night. It take years of mindless and mundane day-to-day events to transform a perfectly normal woman into a monster. The brain slowly turns into the consistency of oatmeal after hanging out with infants and toddlers all day, everyday, at home. The first signs of zombification are the inability to complete a sentence, and speaking with a sing-song cadence. The watching of daytime television has been shown to speed up the process. The amount of exposure to chemicals found in cleaning products may be the determining factor to who will succumb to this terrible fate.

An ideal candidate is a stay at home mom with young children and a freakishly clean house. This will eventually change after the metamorphosis is complete and when all of the children are in school full-time. Cleaning will take the backseat to going to the gym and wandering around aimlessly at Target. We become experts in killing…killing time that is. In bookstores we congregate in the romance novel section and can be seen flipping through the entertainment and fashion magazines trying to remember what it was like to be alive. Malls and coffee shops are crawling with us, too.

Zombie housewives, like myself, can pass off as functioning human beings from time to time. This usually occurs when we are interacting with some sort of professional on the behalf of our children’s well being. Pediatricians, teachers, coaches…you get the picture. Even our husbands can be fooled. Our children, especially the girls, tend to see us for what we really are around the age of eleven. Only to our doctors and each other can we find comfort. The doctors’ promise to bring us back from the dead with drugs like Prozac, Welbutrin, Effexor, and Celexa gives us hope. Our fellow zombies let us know we are not alone . That is why we tend to hang out together in small groups.

Some housewives probably will take offense being compared to zombies. I am well aware of perfectly normal homemakers that intermingle with us sub-human moms. The likes of them are readily found at the Parent Teacher Organization meetings and community building functions. Their eagerness to be involved and informed motivates them to take action. They roll up their sleeves with a can-do attitude and lend a helping hand when needed. They even manage to return to work. Me and my kind admire and hate them at the same time.

In the end, all I am trying to say is there are many of us zombie housewives out there staggering through life lost. Personally speaking, I never wanted to end up like this. To many we seem lazy and self absorbed. In reality, during our pursuit to raise happy, healthy children and creating a home, part of us died. I am not trying to garner pity; rather, I wanted to educate the unknowing masses who we are and how we came to be.

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Be Unexpendable

How can I keep my job? In these tough economic times that's a question many are asking.

Here's how to keep your job: Make yourself unexpendable. Be the person that is always hustling to make things better. The person that is always looking for ways to keep busy. Be the person that gets creative and has ideas to make your organization better. Be the employee that shows up with an idea that brings value to the organization -- brings in business.

Don't be the person who shows up every day and looks for someone to give them something to do. These are the expendable employees. They add no value -- other then they do their job, or do what they are told. Sure, every organization needs these types of employees -- they do the grunt work. But what every organization needs, and values highly, are the knowledge workers who can, both, do the grunt work but also add value with an idea that brings revenue to the organization. The guy that just shows up and does what he is told to do -- the minimum requirement -- is the guy that's expendable when money gets tight.

Tom Friedman wrote a recent piece, The New Untouchables, in the New York Times about this topic. Instead of calling these workers "unexpendable," he referred to them as "untouchable." His article is worth the read.

Be the employee that brings value to the organization and you'll never be wanting for a job. If you prove you are a creative thinker and a problem solver, you'll make yourself unexpendable.

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The $100 Rule

Have you ever noticed that if you walk into a Target, Wal-Mart, Lowe's, Home Depot, or any other retailer of choice, it's damn near impossible to walk out without spending a hundred bucks.

More times than not, when I walk into one of these retailers, I don't have any intention of spending more than a few bucks, or just browsing for the purpose of browsing and spending no bucks, but inevitably, I walk out with a few bags and, at least, a hundred dollars lighter in the wallet. I call this the "$100 Rule."

Now, many of you will probably bristle and say, "Well, I was just in Wal-Mart yesterday and only spent ten dollars..." Look at the overall history of your trips to the retailers. I would venture that you come pretty close, on average, to the $100 Rule.

It's not good, bad, or indifferent. It just is.

It doesn't matter what your intentions are, over time, the retailers are going to get your hundred dollars.

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