the irony of it all

I have been alternately dreading and looking forward to this day -- where I take the reins and attempt, finally, to make the kind of lasting changes that will improve my life once and for all.

Being as this is my first post here, let's get a little background, shall we?

My name is Prime (not really, but everyone needs a clever pseudonym). I have another blog elsewhere that I rarely post to these days, because I really don't think much of what I do in my day to day life is really worth writing about anymore. I tend to think my life is staid, dull, and on some sort of repetitive loop. And at 26, that really shouldn't be the case.

One of the things that I've always beleieved about myself is that between the ages of 27 and 35 would really be the prime of my life. I have (had?) aspirations to work in the entertainment industry, and those are the years that someone of my 'type' generally comes into his own. I'm now three months away from turning 27 and somehow it seems further from my grasp than it ever was before.

I've always struggled with my weight. I spent the first sixteen years of my life more or less morbidly obese, and of course, suffered through all the social awkwardness that goes with that. Then, at 17, I dropped 120 pounds over the course of a year and a half. I did so by altering my diet and becoming a lot more active. Since then, I've fluctuated wildly but never ballooned all the way back up. Last year, I took a job managing a gym, and that seemed to put finality on the struggle. I was working out regularly, I'd quit smoking, and even had the beginning of visible abdominal muscle -- no small feat, considering my past.

And then something happened that sent me into a tailspin. While riding my bike to work one rainy day, my brakes gave out while speeding down a hill. I managed to stop just shy of getting rammed by a Mercedes, but in the process, nearly destroyed the bike and broke my ankle as I skidded to a stop in the middle of that busy intersection. I walked with a cane for a week and kept the ankle bound for another month and a half afterwards. There went my regimen, there went the bike, there went my discipline.

So here we are, now about five months later. I started smoking again shortly after the accident (something about almost having your head smooshed by a Mercedes will do that, I guess) and I've added about thirty pounds. I have no regular routine, and now getting on the bike for a ride longer than one or two miles unnerves me to the point that I've become a master of the Atlanta mass transit system just to avoid having to do it. And now I'm three months away from what I always told myself would be the best years of my life -- depressed, smoking, and chunky. Whats more, there's a really hot guy underneath this somewhere. Its ironic that someone who manages at a gym should be such a portrait of vice and self-neglect.

Well, it stops here. This blog is not a burble of who said what or where I went, but a document of the positive changes I'm making, and a way to hold myself accountable. The smoking stops, the thirty pound drops, and the depression pops.

Right after I finish this pizza.