Personal Weekly Update Blog Post

What's up, nerds! Another week, another blog post. I had an okay week. This week, my car is due for its service and needs an oil change. It’s scheduled for the 20,000-mile service. I called them up, and they said it’s fine if I go over the 20,000-mile mark a little bit, so I might get my service done maybe on Monday or something—I don’t know. I don’t want to wait too long because it’s my only car, and if I lose it or it breaks down, there goes my life. In California, having a car is essential; maybe it’s different in New York, but in California, without a car, you're pretty much at risk of being homeless. Luckily, I have a really dependable car that’s built for commuting—a Toyota Corolla 4-cylinder sedan. It’s not made for speed but can handle basic commuting from point A to point B, which is what most people want out of their vehicle. A lot of the COs at my job drive really fast cars, and I can’t help but wonder how long those last and what their gas mileage and reliability are like. My Toyota is known as one of the most dependable cars in the American market, so I’m pretty much set when it comes to automobiles for a while. I also had CPR training yesterday, which was Friday. One of the trainers gave me a look that seemed like she liked me—or at least thought I was cute. I think she’s married, LOL! I guess I give off quite the impression to the women at my job, which is probably why some of the more masculine women try to compete with me and also the male COs. It can get annoying to go to work and feel like you’re in the playoffs constantly, as if you’re playing some sort of game where the prize is just a bigger ego. Personally, I’d much rather work together with others, but then again, that might be why my family doesn’t like me. I’m beginning to think that people like me, who don’t compete—let’s call us "Non-Gamers"—tend to make others look bad. Since none of my family are "Non-Gamers," they are all 'gamers", they probably all dislike me because, as I told a friend a long time ago, "When you don’t compete, you will win the competition" even if you weren’t competing in the first place or didn’t even know you were in a contest. It reminds me of when I started going to the gym here in Bakersfield around 1996. Nobody cared whether I was there or not; there were so many total badasses there—all ripped and big. I felt intimidated, like I didn’t belong, but I persevered anyway and kept at it. a year later, I got fairly big and muscular, but nowhere near as muscular as some of the others. I trained in a way that was different from them—drug-free and alcohol-free. Once, a big guy, steroid-using guy commented as another rookie at the gym was trying to follow my training style, he shouldn’t follow my lead because “I don’t know what I’m doing,” and I know the rest of the bodybuilders were laughing. Flash forward to 2026, and I am 52 years old now, and here I am. I do cardio for an hour, and I’ve been doing it for almost 25 years now. I’m a little bigger than I was before, and all those total badasses from 1996 are gone. I don’t see any of them in any gyms in town. I think one of them went to jail for drug dealing, and I know another one, who I kind of looked up to—he was my height but ten times bigger—died after a confrontation with some kids who were playing loud music outside his house. The three kids ganged up on him when he got angry, and they beat him to death. Over the years, I've worked out like them, always on the down-low, laughed at because I supposedly didn’t know what I was doing while they did. Well, they’re all gone from the gym now. I think a lot of them are embarrassed about how they look due to excessive steroid use, alcohol abuse, age, and chemical dependency. They thought they were invincible, but it caught up with them. But here I am, still looking the same, if not better, than in 1996—drug-free and alcohol-free. I also didn’t realize that when you work out and stay drug-free and alcohol-free for the rest of your life, you become mentally tough too. Now, not only am I slightly bigger than I was in 1996, but since I stayed sober, I’m mentally tougher than before and can handle any mental strain. Nothing gets to me. That bodybuilder from back in the day, who made that comment about me not knowing what I was doing in the gym, came to Planet Fitness one time. When I saw him, he looked like an old, overweight man with steroid and alcohol problems. His face looked old. He was probably just as old as I am now, yet he looked much older. I looked at him, and he looked at me. I started to think he might have found out that I still work out after all these years and wanted to see how I looked. When he saw that I looked slightly bigger and better looking from the neck up and the neck down, he never came back! I HATE PEOPLE! MAHALO!