Lofty Goal

Last night Travalon and I went to to Café Porta Alba for dinner, and they were having a special on black linguine with seafood, so I got that. I’d had this particular dish years ago on State Street and remembered it with great fondness. It was so good that Travalon wished he had ordered it too. After dinner we had a delicious glass of limoncello, then when we got to Point Cinema, there was a half hour before our movie started so we went into their swanky new bar and had a cocktail called a Liquid Snickers – really tasty. We saw The Lego Movie, which was hilarious the way it mocked popular culture and movies like The Matrix, but it did have an interesting message about building by the instructions versus building from your imagination. I was always a “build from imagination” kid, and I used to take my brother’s little (presumably) Caucasian Lego men and turn them into black Lego women. They had the most fabulous hairstyles, which when you think about it is strange because I can’t be bothered to style my own hair. Now Lego probably makes actual black women figurines, but I’ll bet mine still had more fabulous hair.

This morning Richard Bonomo, Luxuli, and I did weight training. Rich said we were going to “lift to extinction,” and I assumed that was some sort of weightlifting term, but in fact it was just the early morning hour and he meant lifting to failure. If you haven’t done this before, it means finding the absolutely heaviest weight you can do the exercise at, usually for two reps before you’re like, “Okay, I am DONE.” That’s lifting to failure – you succeed when you fail. Weightlifting is so strange that way. Luxuli asked me what my goals were, and I said, “You mean like visiting Antarctica?” and she asked if I were going to swim there. I said, “Of course not, I’d take a boat,” and she said, “How is that exercise? Oh, I didn’t mean goals for your life! I meant for your workouts!” I said I didn’t have any particular goals, and wouldn’t you know Richard Bonomo has that covered too? He said, “My goal for you ladies is to get you to bench press 150% of your bodyweight.” So it’s good I didn’t have any goals, because he already had such a lofty one for me. Though if I do lose some weight, my goal will be that much less lofty.

Famous Hat