Sunday, May 24, 2009

The world economy is negatively affecting my sex life.

Yes the all-pervasive negative effects of a massive economic system undergoing self-correction have managed to find their way into my bedroom/couch/handy countertop spaces. As if the depreciation on the house, fear for my job and general moodiness of the population were not enough.

Allow me to explain for Veko and any hapless stumblers who find themselves on this page.

Right now I am going through the biological experiment I have dubbed The Gigacalorie Project which necessitates burning 3800 calories via cardiovascular exercise per week. This entails 3-4 trips per week to the local YMCA.

Until a few weeks ago this was not a major problem however the local establishment is itself negatively affected by the world recession in highly visible ways. Allow me to enumerate a few of them for you:

  • The towel service has been indefinitely suspended. Therefore if you swim or shower you must bring your own linens. Also if you sweat enough to merit a little hand towel you are stuck bringing your own.
  • Excercise classes have been thinned out, some eliminated entirely. The pool schedule has never been freer once they trimmed off 8 of the 22 weekly water aerobics classes. Which is nice but all the flabby people still show up and take up both of the two available lanes. Bastards.
  • Shower time is limited to 5 minutes, which is fine but they've actually started having people periodically roam through and announce the limit. It's not exactly enforcement but it's enough to kill your enjoyment whilst cleaning.
  • Finally the worst and most egregious of the cuts has been to the air conditioning. This time last year, close to my failure of the last attempt at a gigacalorie the cardio room was kept around 70 degrees even when the outside ambient was above 90.
Nowadays the outside temp will be in the low 80's and the cardio room hovers around the 88-90 degree mark. I guess that's fine if you don't mind toiling through temperatures that make the third circle of hell seem downright breezy but this has had an immediate detrimental effect on my ability to lose weight.

A month ago I could easily crank out a 1500 calorie workout with exertion but still feeling pretty good once I got half an hour of sedentary fluid reclamation. Now it's a freaking miracle if I can crack 1200 and I feel like asscock for hours after. More on that later.

For now I interject a bit more bitching about the pool situation. Previously going was difficult because of the distribution of water aerobic classes and the constriction of the 2 available lanes. This only lead to three available slots when working out was possible and then there was always the fear that both lanes would be occupied.

Now, with lingering demand for the portly denizens of the indoor pool the schedule appears freer but is totally unpredictable. Somedays there is no one in sight, other days the place is packed to the rafters. It doesn't help that the outdoor pool hasn't opened to relieve some of the pressure for the locals to take their kids to swim.

But I am ok with that. I am no longer a swimmer and have made my peace with that.

Back to the sex life, here's the causal chain that leads from wall-street to my bedroom. In the spirit of brevity I have trunked the first few links into a simpler form.

Economy gets fucked>people spend less money>YMCA gets less revenue, less visitors>YMCA cuts costs to match the lack of funds>AC gets cut>workouts become harder, take longer>longer recovery times are needed to acheive normal operations>since I work out in the evening this narrows the windows when the time/opportunity to get jiggy with my wife are diminished.

Fucking economy!!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ironic choice of words 'fucking economy'

Christopher Miller said...

I've actually been reading through your older posts and, I have to say, good on you for your experiment.

As for the economic affecting the sex life, I feel troubles in mine as well. Recently I've been job hunting (stupid time to do it, I know), which means I'm running in circles to fill out job applications and other crap like that. I've found that spending all this time running around town, while still working a full-time night job, leaves me very tired. That causes less sex time for me.

P.S. That shower time limit is absurd.

Keippernicus said...

It's been brutal, I have started a campaign to spam them out with comment cards about the issue. On days that I don't work out i'll stop by, fill out a card bitching about the AC situation and leave. It's been brutal but having a loyal fan cheers me up greatly!

And that's you! So kudos to you, Veko.

natalie said...

you are the sexiest man i know.....;)