Christina 2.0

That was the subject line of the e-mail that my boss sent out last week, announcing that I had found a new job in a new field and was leaving in two weeks.

A few days before that, I'd had to interview someone who wanted to work for my future former employer. She was bright-eyed and eager and seemed impressed with everything about my job -- even my colorless, impersonal desk -- because it sat under the glow of the three letters printed on posterboard and attached to a concrete column in my office.

A few weeks before that, a guy wrote to me on my personal e-mail to say that he had found my address on the Web and wanted my advice because he wanted to find a job just like mine. I did the best I could to help him and the interviewee, not only because of their earnestness but because they represented the hopes I used to have. I remember being like them, wanting to work for a major news organization or media outlet and thinking it would be the greatest.

Now I've worked for at least three major media outlets, in a capacity I never could have forseen when I was in college. When I went from undergraduate school to the job market, the Web as we know it didn't even exist. How odd to find oneself earning a living from a word that had no meaning for you as a child. Even for me, a kid who got some tutoring in BASIC at 8 years old and grew up with video games, the evolution of the InterWebs was unforseeable and blindsiding in a way that was simultaneously exhilarating, perplexing and depressing.

The exhilarating and perplexing aspect of the World Wide Web Revolution was that it seemed as if our generation was being handed the chance to define something, to shape not only our individual jobs, but an entire medium. We were doing something unprecedented, or at least it seemed that way.

The depressing aspect came with the realization that the thing you built today might well be obsolete next year; that other generations often saw your work as either confusing, or unimportant, or both; and that when it came to content, much of what was being created actually was not unprecedented but rather quite similar, and often inferior, to its "old media" counterpart.

Still, getting into Web work put me in a relatively Good Position, as good as could be expected for a girl with nothing but an undergrad English degree and an average work ethic. I had some very cool experiences and got to work for at least one journalistically respectable outlet. So why wasn't I happier? Why was I always nosing around on job and career sites, looking for more?

It was a bit like dating: I'd have a shot with some guy, a good guy that many women would love to have, and I'd be sitting there trying to twist my mind around being particularly glad about it.

Most normal people in this situation think, "Oh well, I tried this [job, man, whatever] out and it wasn't for me. Time to move on." In self-esteem-challenged people such as myself, it evokes the response, "There must be something wrong with me if I'm not into this. After all, [company, man, whatever] was nice enough to like me -- I owe them something. Maybe I'll keep trying for a few months longer and see if I can become the right person to match this situation. Or better yet, why don't I find something that's slightly different but more or less the same, and torture myself with that for awhile?"

Ultimately, I never became that sought-after version of myself, the one who wanted to advance up the Web media ladder and have the company-issued Blackberry or "director" in my title. Instead, I got comfortable in my discomfort. For awhile, I stopped trying to imagine something else for myself. Whatever ambitions I had within my field atrophied completely. I was stuck.

Now I'm taking a pay cut (something, I feel compelled to say, that would be infinitely harder without being married to someone who is supportive and makes enough to float the difference) to go work for a tiny company that throws cooking parties. It has the potential to be fun, challenging, yummy, busy, social, frustrating, boring, disappointing, tiring. But the point is, it has potential. I've been separated from my own career for a long time now. It feels bittersweet, but I'm finally completing the divorce.

Views.

Two months ago, we left the Haight (the Hate) and moved into a new place at the very top of the Potrero Hill neighborhood, a strange confluence of the industrial (Anchor Brewing is down the street), the yuppie and the disadvantaged.

Not long after we moved in, I was sitting at a place nearby called the Thinker's Cafe (yeah, they sold me a beverage anyway) and overheard a middle-aged guy with a sweatered little dog and tinted shades approach two cops who were on their break at the next table.

"Hey, guys, I'm sorry to bother you, but I live over on 23rd and Missouri? And I was just wondering, those gunshots I hear? Where are they coming from?" The cops pointed toward the projects that are just down the hill from my place. "Oh! Okay, and should I bother calling the police?" the guy asked. Oh yes, the cops said politely, feel free to call us. Everyone went back to their lattes.

I didn't experience what the man was talking about until a weekend afternoon about a month later, when gunshots sounded outside our window. They were loud enough that I actually dove from the couch to the floor. A police car sped by shortly afterward, but nothing else came of it, that we know of. Pretty soon, it was back to joggers and couples on walks.

The first word that comes to mind describing this new setting is "bizarre," and our many windows offer ample opportunity to contemplate it. Directly behind us is a fire station, where we can hear the three-tone signal before a truck goes out and see them grilling dinner in the back. My husband likes to wave to the truck through our living room window as it leaves on its assignment. (We can't tell whether or not the firemen can see him, but it's comedy gold for me.)

Off to the northeast (top photo), we can glimpse the Bay and AT&T Stadium -- we had a nice view of the fireworks when Bonds hit his record-breaking homer this week. On the south side of the house is a concrete water treatment plant surrounded by a wall of lumpy, netting-covered earth. On the west side, there is a brand new modern home going up and another glimpse of a view (bottom photo) of the city. And to the north, right next door? You're looking at it, at left. That's the view of our next-door neighbor's yard.

The people who live there have been quite friendly, on the few occasions we've crossed paths. One afternoon, as we were standing at our door watching the cat explore his new outside territory, an elderly woman with missing teeth emerged from the screened-in porch. "You have a cat?" she said. "I wouldn't want the dog to get at him... I came here to give my grandson money to clean this mess up." She waved her hand across the yard, and we nodded vigorously. "It's especially not good for me. It's hard for me to get around," she said. We introduced ourselves and she went back inside the porch.

Later, we found out that the dog she mentioned had killed the previous tenant's cat. It was, we were told by our downstairs neighbor, "an ugly scene."

Despite the grandmother's intentions, the place remains as hazardous-looking as ever. I get a perverse pleasure from staring out the window at it, imagining what the inside must be like and projecting the reaction of the city officials who surely one day will have to inspect and condemn it. They'll walk through with flashlights and face masks, making world-weary jokes a la Law and Order: "Hey Murphy, got a trashcan?" or "Sheez, maybe the maid quit."

The older man who lives there kindly directed us to our place on Carolina Street when we went to see it for the first time. "Sorry to be blocking the sidewalk!" he and his pal said cheerfully, presiding over a pile of junk that perhaps had tried to escape from his house.

Our future home didn't look much better than his, at first: It was under renovation and completely in shambles, full of the tenant's poorly chosen stuff. The exterior remains nothing to write home about, the bathroom looks like it belongs in an elementary school and the kitchen counter is topped with a marbled perwinkle blue plastic that looks like it was installed at least 40 years ago.

Still, inexplicably, I became obsessed with getting in here. I had dreams about it, lost sleep waking up at 4:30 in the morning thinking about it. I drove by during the day, stalking it, both before and after we signed the lease. (Incidentally, have you ever had a song creep in on you and haunt you along with an idea, absolutely defining a moment in your life? For me, the song here was "Tel Que Tu Es".) The three weeks between seeing it and moving in seemed interminable.

We danced around after moving in, feeling like kings: a washing machine with no coin slot! A little office! A yard with a grill! "It's a real place," we said, perhaps overly grateful after years of living in cramped urban apartments with almost no amenities. I found it remarkable that most people you pass on the street in this part of town actually smile and say "hello," instead of "Spare any change for a beer?"

We're settled in, but living here still feels simultaneously like being on vacation and being in exile on a foreign planet. A whistling wind, along with views (just squint!) of the water and fog over the city, are punctuated by noise from the 53 bus line, the fire station, kids on their way to the neighborhood center down the street, hip-hop booming from beat-up cars, dressed-up old people on their way to Sunday church and white thirtysomethings walking their babies and dogs. It feels isolated, yet highly trafficked by a dozen intersecting microcosms.

The fact that one of those microcosms is a fire station led our renter's insurance company to bump the premium down. Fortunately for us, gunshots and killer dogs probably don't merit an adjustment.

The Anti-Blog.

Not too long ago, I was out to dinner with some friends and the subject of blogs came up. "Why would anybody have a blog? I mean, who has time for a blog? I would rather do other things," my friend said.

"Yeah, I don't get it. Does anyone read them?" the other person at the table said. They seemed genuinely mystified.

Somehow, this provoked very little embarassment or defensiveness on my part, maybe because I don't actively court an audience for this blog and thus do not get much of one. "I have a blog," I said, "But I can see what you're saying." We talked about the surfeit, surplus and superfluousness of all the bloggity-blogging out there.

Yes, I'm part of the problem. But even before that conversation occurred, I had been feeling less inspired to post here. Whether it's a temporary bout of ennui or something more lasting, I haven't felt a major urge to "share" anything lately. The other day I found myself searching my memory for some recent instance of entertainingly painful humanity, nagged by the fact that the blog slate was blank. I used to have a little list of topics in the hopper that I was excited to write about, but that had dried up.

"If you don't catalog yet another one of your crazy neurotic moments for public consumption, it's really no one's loss," I told myself. "Let it go..." And so I have. (That's the trouble with those Buddhist philosophy books I've been reading lately: Sometimes they can be a handy way to buttress one's own laziness.)

It seems I'm not alone in this blogging fatigue. The pbdotc says he "is tired of his own cringe-worthy insights about world affairs." And a top food blogger in San Francisco just wrote that she has lost her appetite for the pastime.

My appetite for reading blogs, on the other hand, has not diminished. I still faithfully visit my favorites, and still find new ones to appreciate. But between blogs, the rest of the Internets, magazines, books, regular radio, XM radio, Netflix, downloaded shows, streamed shows and -- oh yeah -- actual daily human interaction, sometimes the last thing I want to do is add another voice to the mix, especially when it's the internal one I listen to all damn day.

So is blogging fatigue really about getting tired of listening to oneself, or is it also a need to trim the fat from an overloaded media diet? Are you blogging? Is your head still in the game, are you focused? Or are you drifting away from the chatter?

Friends with Money.

Back in 2001, my News Corporation subsidiary employer collapsed our office and laid off a large percentage of the staff, including myself. (That was in January. Boy, what a great New York year lay ahead!)

I got decent severance and set out to support myself in Manhattan for the first time since acquiring my sturdy Murdoch paycheck four years previously. It wasn't pretty: My rent got jacked up, so I had to leave my Upper Upper West Side apartment and move into one half the size down in Murray Hill. Then I proceeded to face a string of either freelance or staff jobs that paid just barely enough and, frankly, sucked. Unable to pay for my nights out anymore, but unwilling to give them up, I started to carry a credit-card balance for the first time.

During this time, I would hear about fellow ex-employees. One was spotted lounging at a Greenwich Village cafe with friends. Did he have a job yet? A year later, no. Another one was splitting his time between New York and Florida, where he had just bought a house. Then there was the Fabulous Couple: Friends of my cousin and just over 30, like me, they owned a gorgeous loft apartment and eventually moved to Australia to attend cooking school together, despite the fact that they seemed to be available at all hours of the day and spoke of no employment.

Having been brought up to believe that there are no free lunches, and as a corollary, that you should never order the most expensive thing on the menu, I was flummoxed by these people, and secretly fascinated by them. It drove me crazy that their financial status went unexplained, and that no one in the vicinity saw fit to broach the topic. How, how, how did they do it? Trust funds? Savings? Drug-dealing? A clandestine business? A sugar daddy (I grew up reading Cosmopolitan, I know about these things)?

Now, in San Francisco, I'm facing an even more financially mysterious breed: the culinary career-changer. Unlike my New York friends of leisure, these people are not dot-commers, so far as I know. They talk of previous careers in marketing, recruiting and biochem. Somehow, they have escaped these careers, attended culinary school, and are now volunteering on farms, teaching cooking classes and demonstrating recipes. And, just as in New York, I am too afraid to ask: How are you paying your bills?

The cost of culinary school, as compared to the income you make when you get out, has been well documented in the press lately: One six-month program I am interested in costs close to $20K, yet most cooking jobs I see advertised top out at $14 an hour. What am I missing?

Right now I am fortunate to have a partner who a) makes more than I do and b) is generously letting me explore my options right now. But I still feel like shit about it, and wonder how I could pay for some kind of education without coming out in the red and screwing both of us over. It makes me skeptical that I can withstand one more sunny kitchen conversation without finally buttonholing someone and asking the offensive questions.

Have you ever known someone who mystified you financially?

Hospital.

My father-in-law had a stroke on Tuesday. It apparently turned out to be a "minor stroke," which is simultaneously a relief and an oxymoron. We visited him at the hospital last night.

So far, I have been fortunate enough to experience hospital rooms mostly from the vantage point of a visitor. Every time, I feel empathy to the point of nausea for the person in the bed -- not only for the physical ailment, but for having to face a circus of people at precisely the time socializing is the least desirable thing. It seems almost cruel until you consider the alternative of having no one there at all.

Even worse, the bed occupant is often completely out of it, so he is forced to witness everyone standing around and talking about him as if he isn't in the room. How bizarre, to have people talking about what you've been up to in the last 12 hours right in front of you, as if you're not there. Odder still, you're generating a fairly substantial activity report, given the fact that you're just lying there: Did you eat? Have you spoken? Have you slept? Have you walked? Have you taken any medicines, and which ones? Are you taking fluids? Are you in pain? Who has visited you? Who has treated you? What happens next? A lot is going on.

One of the immediate effects for my father-in-law, a very pensive and witty guy, was that he had trouble coming up with certain nouns and pronouns. When they asked him if he knew where he was, he resourcefully answered, "The place where babies are born." The wing where he ended up staying happened to be labeled "Intensive Care Nursery," which was both poor signage and a bad joke. From babies to the sick to the broken, consider how many people wake up in hospitals and find that the word for where they are, along with their own bodies, fall outside their command.

This week in The New Yorker, Oliver Sacks tells the story of a man who was struck by lightning and suddenly became obsessed with hearing and playing piano music. Sacks specializes in these stories of neurological mystery, which are irresistible not only because they involve unexpected twists in a brain's fate (the blind person sees, the catatonic patient awakens), but because the events often precipitate a personal transformation.

The most marvelous Sacks accounts, this recent one included, tend to follow a similar arc where something terrible, such as contracting a tumor or being struck by lightning, becomes the catalyst for some wonderful new capacity. It seems like the stuff of comic books, hardly real. In the hospital it becomes plain that such reconfigurations happen, on a smaller scale, all the damn time. Then we have to cling to the hope that the hero comes out on the other side, if not with a special new power, then at least with newfound strength.

Not an Early Adopter.

A wise Buddhist once said, "We hate suffering, but we love its causes." The most recent manifestation of this truth, for me, is the iPod's shuffle function.

The fact that I'm blogging about this and not the iPhone should illustrate how many years I am behind in caring about new technologies.

I don't like the iPod's song shuffle function very much, but it continues to mystify and intrigue me enough that I can't turn away from it. When it does something goofy such as play a song titled "Strollin'" after a song called "Jammin'," or it relentlessly ushers in depressing ballads even though my selections make it clear that I'm working out and looking for upbeat songs, or it keeps playing interludes from rap CDs while completely skipping over other artists, I wonder if the Shuffle HAL was actually designed with my irritation in mind.

Part of the problem is that my own bad taste comes back to haunt me. I mean, I never really should have loaded in the entirety of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's greatest hits, so I can't very well blame Shuffle when I find myself tortured by an extended mix of "If I Take You Home." And how can I expect Shuffle to know that a piano rendition of "Karma Police" is not going to jump-start my gym session?

I had hoped that Shuffle would help me discover the albums in my collection ("Hey! I had never really listened to this song by Ryan Adams until my iPod dug it up for me!"), but actually it's the opposite: I realize how many of the songs are just painfully skippable at worst, or background music at best.

I used to invest a lot of time in an album: If I liked it enough to buy it, that meant I really listened to every song and knew each one, front to back. Now golden albums such as Who Is Jill Scott? commingle with the Zero 7s and Thievery Corporations of my collection. Depressive meditations contaminate exuberant pop classics, mediocrity intrudes on greatness, Linkin Park gets in my Prince. And it's all a monster of my own making.

On the other hand, the iPod can reveal aspects of your music collection that you never knew existed. For example, it turns out that my song collection could count to 10 were it not for the absence of a song starting with eight:

1-900 L.L. Cool J
2 Many Hoes (Jay -Z)
3 Chains O' Gold (Prince)
4 Leaf Clover (Erykah Badu)
5:55 (Charlotte Gainsbourg)
6 Minutes of Pleasure (L.L. again, with one of the best choruses ever: "Hey yo baby, I know you don't love me, I know why you're here, but I ain't sayin' nothing")
7 (Prince)
99 (Toto)
10 Dollar (M.I.A.)

Anybody got a shuffle-worthy eight?

Accidental Criminals.

So, a person I know did something bad.

"Really bad," the person told me. "I walked up to the ATM machine to get some cash, and the screen said, 'Do you want another transaction?' And I hit 'yes.'"

"No!" I said. "You didn't."

"I did. And then? I hit Fast Cash? And I got $100. And the person's card."

The perpetrator felt very, very bad afterward and was not sure what to do. The owner of the ATM card was nowhere to be seen. A range of options were considered: turning in the card and cash to the bank (too risky), cutting up the card and giving the money to charity (too lame), or considering it a lucky day and moving on (too unscrupulous).

"This doesn't excuse anything... I know it was bad... but I do feel a little less bad because the balance on the account was more than $20,000. I mean, I didn't take food off of anyone's table or anything."

Rationalizations aside, the thief said a feeling of nausea followed the act. I know that feeling -- it's a pit in your gut that tells you you just did something really crappy to somebody, and you have absolutely no excuse for it.

I thought about times I had experienced that feeling myself. The first thing that came to mind was an incident in fourth grade, during an indoor recess in the lunchroom. We had a supervisor named Ms. Dustin, a woman in her thirties with a large posterior, an extremely slow gait and not a shred of the authoritarian quality necessary to make us take her seriously.

I had gone to get a sponge out of a bucket on the stage of the "all-purpose room." (Remember all-purpose rooms?) I had the sponge in my hand, and saw Ms. Dustin's puffy jacket right next to me, on the floor of the stage. I slowly squeezed the sponge, with its dirty all-purpose water, over Ms. Dustin's jacket. I did it because a) I could, b) my friends were watching and thought it was highly entertaining and c) I am a terrible person.

An upset and incredulous Ms. Dustin, who had caught me in the act, brought me to the principal. With wide eyes and the pained look of an innocent accused, I swore up and down that it had been an accident. I got off the hook (apparently Ms. Dustin didn't have much clout with the principal, either), but I knew it was awful, and began the same internal self-justifications that everyone else uses to move on with their lives after doing something crummy. To this day, just thinking about the story conjures the same rush of guilty, excited nausea that comes from doing something bad and getting away with it.

The person who confessed the theft to me noted that there are cameras on ATM machines. "But, they couldn't catch me just from that, right? I mean, I wasn't stupid enough to use my own card right afterward."

I am the wrong person to turn to for any kind of comfort or reassurance in this sort of situation. Though not necessarily super-moral (as evidenced above), I am extremely paranoid. I have never smoked a cigarette or used an illegal drug, half out of a certainty that the minute I did so, a SWAT team -- together with my parents -- would immediately converge upon the scene.

"I... I don't know," I stammered. "I mean, yeah, they probably won't go after you." I was sure that just uttering the prediction had already tilted the odds toward formal charges.

A few days later, I still couldn't get the conversation out of my head. It had the potential to become a minor curse (as in the Haruki Murakami story "The Second Bakery Attack,"), and I felt that by just knowing about it and not doing anything, I was guilty too. I pushed a solution: Google the victim, find the address, and send the money back, with the card cut in half. It worked, I think... here's hoping.

Making Edits.

The other day I was telling my brother about my latest work ambition, which involves food writing and culinary event management. "That's... different," he said.

This is often the type of response I get from people when I tell them about my new explorations: blank stares and weirdly neutral responses. I was surprised initially, but I shouldn't have been, considering the only thing I ever cooked until the last few years was scrambled eggs and Amy's frozen dinners. Also, the subjects of knife skills and recipes aren't as riveting to some people as they are to me.

I've never liked the word "career," and I no longer feel compelled to apply it to anything I do for a living. In my mind, people who have careers make a conscious choice within a certain field and then become (or work to become) accomplished at it.

Then there are people like me, who fall into something because they love it, or because it pays, or something in between. Any level of accomplishment that happens along the way is purely incidental.

After a lot of talk and little action, I finally pitched and wrote my first bona-fide food article, which was published today.

I turned it in early and with excitement, especially proud of my first paragraph:

For all our reverence of the cherry, baked lovingly into pies and perched regally atop sundaes, Americans have not always treated it kindly. We have subjected it to a garish preservation makeover and dubbed it "maraschino," trapped it in cans with gelatinous goo and called it "pie filling" and married it to that fussbudget verb, "cherrypick."

Sheer poetry, I tell you! The editor called it "cumbersome" and advised me to do away with it.

Oh yeah: I'd forgotten about editing. For the most part, the things I've written as a freelancer or staffer have been published without major changes. I used to think that was an indication of my writing prowess; now I know that it's because I have written mostly for Web outlets that are understaffed.

Regardless, the article is out there now. I'm hoping it's the beginning of many future challenges involving cooking, writing and editing.

How Come U Don't Call Me.

I was watching So You Think You Can Dance last night on the television, because I am always looking for (yet failing to find) a new You Got Served experience.

During the break, something caught my attention.

"Is this a commercial?" I said, as Prince performed with those seizuretastic twins he's been sporting lately.

I hoped that I was wrong. I hoped that maybe the channel had been changed when I wasn't looking, or that Fox had broken in on SYTYCD to deliver an important update ahead of Prince's 49th birthday, which is today.

But I wasn't wrong. It was a commercial. For Verizon Wireless.

I sat there dumbfounded. "Do you want to talk about it?" said my couch-/life-mate.

"I don't think I can," I said.

"Let's unpack this," he said, turning to me. "You know you're upset. But the question is, why are you upset?"

I thought about this. "Because Prince doesn't do things like this. He doesn't do commercial stuff," I said.

In the skeptical silence that followed, I thought about the Super Bowl, American Idol, etc.

"Okay," I said, "Let me rephrase. He does do commercial stuff. It's just that, he's never..." I had trouble finding the right word.

He's never pandered.

There, I said it. The commercial seemed like pandering. I mean, Verizon Wireless? I'm too uncool and technologically unsavvy these days to even understand what this means. I'm supposed to try to get a new single via my phone? I can hardly get phone calls via my phone.

While I always believed him to be a magic man of mystery, Prince has always been a canny businessman. Getting me to buy that mystery blindly and lovingly when I was 13 years old was one of his first big sales.

This is not the first time his business practices have rubbed me the wrong way. When he released the three-CD set Crystal Ball, claiming it would only be available through his Web site, I dutifully signed up for the pre-sale. Then it came out with better packaging, liner notes (which were absent from the first release) and a lower price in stores not long afterward.

But for the most part, I've admired Prince's ability to walk the line between commercial and independent. He has challenged record labels on their own turf and performed largely on his own terms. So when it comes to the association with phones and perfume, something don't compute.

This reminds me of the time Prince decided to rap. Because he is a badass musician, he has been able change genres like he changes clothes: disco, funk, blues, jazz, rock, pop, you name it. So when rap came along, Prince did that, too. And with the exception of the raps on Lovesexy and The Black Album by that wacky dancer Cat Glover, it was... kind of lame. He has kept it up, with varying degrees of lameness over the years, sometimes handing the mike to Chuck D. or Eve or some lame unknown, and sometimes rapping himself. He's dabbling, and it's fine, but I don't think anyone would say rapping his is forte.

Now maybe Prince has decided that he can J-Lo, too, and be a brand as well as a musician. He's got to make a dollar, I'm not going to be a hater. But I will probably steer clear of 3121-brand high-heeled boots, or whatever is next.

Is this what happens when you get old, baby boomers? Will our children have to face Linkin Park brand energy bars or White Stripes limited-edition hybrids? Can anyone else think of some fun marketing opportunities for today's bands to consider in their dotage?

StairServant.

I recently joined World Gym, which I'm very excited about. Unlike my previous gym, it offers classes for me to not attend, as well as a steam room. For me, a steam room is an imperative part of the gym experience. How else am I going to work up a sweat?

As with many other gyms, World offers all new members a free "fitness evaluation" that is really meant to sell their personal training. A form asked me, "At what time of day are you interested in scheduling personal training sessions?" I checked the box that said "Not Interested."

Why do I sign up for the fitness evaluations? I like to know just how quickly my physical decline is progressing. Usually, I get a nice little fitness snapshot, they describe the training rates, I say thanks and resume the same serviceable but unchallenging routine I've done for 10 years.

The form I originally filled out saying that I wasn't interested in personal training sessions had somehow disappeared when I arrived for my evaluation, so I filled it out again with the same answer. The evaluation went like this: cardio test, flexibility test, abs/core test, weights.

For the core test, I nearly developed a spinal injury attempting to stabilize myself on a huge ball -- an activity that, when you think about it, really has no true-life application. For the weights part, I was asked to show what weight exercises I would "normally" do. This was fun because I don't normally do any weight exercises, but I showed the ones that I would do if I ever bothered.

We retired to the office and I got my results. "On cardio, you did pretty well. You exceeded your target heart rate, and your recovery rate was good," said the trainer. "Were you surprised at anything?"

"No," I said. "I pretty much knew that the abs stuff was going to be bad, and anything involving the ball is going to be a disaster."

She nodded. "Your core needs work. You had trouble balancing on the ball, and also could not raise yourself on the ball."

I nodded. I can take the bad news, I thought.

"Also, your abs are pretty weak. The crunches were difficult for you, and you had trouble with the reverse crunches even raising your tail off the floor by a few inches. You need to get much more height than you were getting."

Hokay, I thought. Thanks for the detailed refresher, but I can remember five minutes ago, friend.

The litany went on: my "normal" arm exercises were ineffective, my form was poor, my legs were surprisingly weak on weight machines given my good cardio performance.

"Do you believe in pinch tests?" she said.

What does this even mean? "I... I don't know."

After pinching my leg, she determined that my thighs had "some extra."

"You mean extra fat?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

Then her boss came into the room, and the takedown got serious. I had marked that I was an "advanced" gym user on my form (after 15 years of belonging to gyms, I wasn't sure what else to put), and they disabused me of this notion. The Boss sized me up. "She looks like she holds her breath," he guessed. "Did she hold her breath?" The trainer confirmed that I had, while doing weight reps.

He did some pinching of his own. "See, this is your problem right here," he said while grasping the back of my upper arm. "And this," he said, poking my back, "This is soft. You want some muscle tone."

I took this all with serious nods and a few laughs: Hey, they were telling it like it was. But a little part of me knew that later I would need a long steam to sweat out all of the mortification.

The good news was that I "didn't have far to go" to get in shape, they said, and would "only" need 10 training sessions, to the tune of around $600. I declined, fidgeting under their stares while I explained that I don't have the money right now (a half-truth). The Boss turned his back and began filing papers while the trainer ushered me out politely. Had I gotten the good-cop, bad-cop routine?

"They're just trying to do their jobs and make their money," I told myself, trying not to feel too ashamed as I took myself right back to the StairMaster routine that they had lobbied to shake me out of. The Boss passed me as I huffed away. I gave him a tight smile; he gave me an extra second of unsmiling eye contact before drifting past.

I now have two fantasies: In fantasy 1, I transform myself into Terminator 2-era Linda Hamilton, walk up to The Boss, flex and say, "Feel this? Hard as a rock. And I did it without any personal trainers, sporto," and walk away while he shakes his head in wonder.

In fantasy 2, I go totally anorexic out of spite and tell them it's their fault.