Prison Strength

It's cold here. Like below freezing cold with a few puddles of icy slush already forming where pipes have burst.  It's also quite dry so I've added a humidifier to my studio apartment/terrarium to deal with itchy skin and dry nasal fossae.  Surprisingly, the air quality hasn't gotten much better despite the changes in weather.  We had a few blustery days with clear blue skies, but once the winds died down there wasn't anything left to push the pollution out of the city.  So we're back to 'Jing grey today.  I'm slowly getting used to it, but that's not always a good thing.

For one thing, it makes me all the more surlier.  As it is, I already don't like smiling.  It's always been a little unnatural for me to turn that frown upside down or whatever, but here it's a little worse.  I spend a lot more time scowling and clenching my jaw, stomping around the streets of Beijing, shouldering people out of my way, and staring down any cars, cyclists and buses that try to run me over.  

For another thing, getting used to crappy air quality also means I'm getting used to being a big fat slob.  Since it's obviously more detrimental to exercise in sludgy air than it is to drink beer and crap whiskey, I tend to drink more than I ride bikes.  It used to be that these two behaviors coexisted in some twisted amalgamation of poor-quality, hungover cycling and having a low tolerance for alcohol, but now the ratio has turned much more in favor of working my liver instead of my legs and lungs.  I'm planning on changing that soon and I'm fortunately masochistic enough to actually enjoy freezing my ass off on a bike in the winter, but I still need a plan for when the air tastes bad.

So I'm just thinking outside the box here, but I think I'm just gonna get my prison strength on.  Pardon the allusion, but I can't help but feel like a trapped inmate when the air gets toxic.  That mentality, possibly compounded my habitual watching and rewatching of The Wire, has led me to this point.  I'm just going to do a million push-ups, sit-ups, and inverted handstand presses until I look like I should be working a G-pack for that mope around the way.  Oh, indeed!  I guess it's not unlike riding a trainer or rollers indoors.  The same kind of insane monotony, just without taxing the lungs too much or the need for excess gear (i.e. the rollers that I refuse to buy).  Plus, this gives me an opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Big Red during his Tunaaa days, albeit a bit more ghetto and Chinese and with a lot less smiling (obviously).  I could always go to the gym and I realize people in prison have access to gyms too.  My company offers a free membership to one so the opportunity is there if I want it, but I just plain don't like them.  Plus, I'm going for that crazy solitary confinement look and you just get get that when you're socializing with gym rats (it's all in the eyes).  Better watch out Beijingers!  If you see a tatted up, surly Chinese-Vietnamese American expat charging at you on his way to his boring and completely benign desk job, you'll want to stay out of his way.

"Unhealthy"