It's Nice To Be Naughty

Over the summer, when Rolling Stone published what would be the first of many articles on the cultural phenomenon we’ve come to know as blogging, the Daily Rice was featured in a think piece called “Rice Has It Right.” One writer quipped, “His works reveal a fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes for masculinity: the weird ritual facts…” Well there is but one place that embodies the absurdity and ballyhoo of the male species: the weight room.

Metal plates are hurled into the air only to be perpetually sucked down by gravity. Chests are arched out and discreetly (read: obviously) admired in full length mirrors. Hung over frat guys make primal sounds not unlike a woman in labor as they push out that last rep. It’s a testosterone driven carnival and everyone is a sad, inflated clown.

Of course in our society, brute strength and ineffectual muscle are the last things we need. But still, big, puffed up guys pack themselves into weight rooms and tiptoe around each other trying to generally get their “swoll on.”

But still I find myself drawn to it. In high-school my afternoons were spent on soccer fields and in weight rooms. Today, settling beneath the bar getting ready for a set of bench presses I felt the same draw that I did back then. It’s hard to explain, and arguably the most helplessly guyish thing about me. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily—the truth is I feel equally comfortable in gym as I do in an art gallery as I do watching One Tree Hill as I do in a beauty montage. The fact of it all is that I just don’t really see many valid gender lines and if I ever did, they were erased long ago. It’s comforting.

So it’s good to be back in the weight room, and I’m picking up my old workout routine. Old habits, after all, do die hard.

The biggest battle this semester will not be getting back to my erstwhile 220 pound bench press but instead keeping my little fingers off Nikki’s Dove chocolate pieces. Wrappers of these little sinfulicious delights litter her dorm room, and two bags have been consumed in the last four days. Last night I got sick after eating about eight and after promising myself NEVER to do that again, I did the EXACT same thing this morning. She’s my accountability partner (limiting me to two a day), a role usually reserved for spiritual struggles, but my stomach tells me this calls for an exception.

The worst part is that each wrapper, on the inside, has some sort of hedonistic whispering that we’ve decided to use as our guideline for the day. Yesterday I lived by the words, “Flirting is mandatory” and today is going to be great, since my foil wrapper informs me “It’s nice to be naughty.”