The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Three

On the third day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me

Three Gheorghemas Gifts to Give Yourself

Two Stones of Weight Loss (Your Mileage May Vary)

and Running Gags with Quatro Kitties

I previously gave you some gift ideas for Mother's Day and Father's Day.  I now present the three things I enjoyed the most in 2021 as potential Gheorghemas gifts to give yourself or others.

A Peloton bike

I ordered a Peloton bike in July 2020 and it arrived in November 2020.  The next day I sprained the daylights out of my ankle raking leaves (I rolled it when I stepped off the curb into a pothole in the gutter).

As a result I wasn't able to use it until January 2, 2021.  Since then I've done 367 rides on what I estimate to be 218 days, along with 108 strength workouts, 4 yoga practices and 3 cardio classes.  That's 333 days of exercise over the last 341 days.  Those of you who know me best are stunned--rootsy probably passed out when he read that.  For the rest of you, it's safe to say that I worked out more in the past 11 months than I did in the previous 11 years.

Why?  I'm middle aged, I have (or had) high blood pressure, and the day before I ordered the bike zdaughter poked me in the love handle and said "Wow Daddy, your belly goes all the way over to there?"  I was the fattest I've ever been, about 187 pounds, and my slight frame isn't meant to carry that much weight.

So I exercised a lot, essentially quit drinking, but continued to eat more or less whatever the hell I want but only between the hours of 11 am and 7 pm (OBX Dave stole my thunder).  I get horrible sleep when I drink so I don't miss the booze.  I didn't eat breakfast between the ages of 13 and 28 (which was when I was at my skinniest) so the fasting wasn't hard.  I started eating breakfast at 28 because a bunch of motherly women at work heckled me into eating "the most important meal of the day," and other people convinced me it was important to jump start my metabolism in the morning to keep my weight down but looking back at things, this is when I started gaining weight generally.

The Peloton was key though.  It's fun, it's convenient, and yes it's expensive but not much more than a gym membership and my health insurance covered a few months of the streaming subscription.  I've always hated gym-class-style exercise but the combination of good music, entertaining instructors, and on-demand content all in my basement made me want to keep doing it.  You also get an output score during the ride so you have a goal to shoot for, and you can see other people's scores as you ride which keeps the competitive juices flowing.  It's perfect.

via GIPHY

And I lost 18 pounds!  I am literally 169 pounds right now and I want to lose another 4-9 more.  I feel great.  I had to dig through my drawers to find my old belts to keep my pants from falling off I'm so much thinner.  

Bonobos Extra Stretch Travel Jeans

I kept my old belts but not my old pants so I needed new ones.  I've been wearing Bonobos pants for about 15 years.  They're great, although I prefer the original chinos to the new ones--they added some stretch that reduces the need to iron but adds a sheen I don't like.

Their Extra Stretch Travel Jeans solve this problem.  They look like and fit like jeans, but they feel more like sweatpants.  As the name implies, they are stretchy but there is zero sheen.  They come in a bunch of different colors.  I got Walla Walla Walnut because they split the difference between jeans and khakis, but they're actually darker than pictured on the internet so it's more of a brown.  The Amarillo Tan is also darker in reality so it's really khaki.

Hollah at me (or challah at me for Hanukkah) and I'll send you a 25% off referral coupon.

Glerups

Glerups are the best slippers ever.  They're Danish and thus exceedingly hygge.  The uppers are wool felt, and they keep your feet at exactly the right temperature.  Never too hot so your feet don't sweat but never cold either.  They come with leather or rubber soles, in backless slip-on, shoe, and boot styles.  I have the shoes with rubber soles (in gum, natch) and I wear them around the house every day, all four seasons.  I asked for them for Gheorghemas last year and I raved so much that zwoman got herself a pair of the slip-ons.  She is 100% on board and wears hers daily too.  You need cozy slippers if you're going to work from home all the time.

Yes, they look like cartoon shoes.  Yes, my feet look like Smurf feet.  Yes, zwoman's dog think they taste good so the left one has seen better days.  Yes, I'm wearing colored stretch denim.  I don't care.  I feel healthy, my pants feel comfy, and my feet feel cozy.  That's all I can ask for at this stage of my life, and I wish you the same this Gheorghemas.

Hygge Not Drygges

As America yelled at itself today over whether we should be more outraged that a Congressional candidate referred to the President as a 'motherfucker' or the fact that he confessed to grabbing them by the pussy (among a list of grievances too long to chronicle in the time I've allotted myself today*), I found myself drawn to a Freakonomics podcast entitled How to Be Happy.

* At the risk of pulling back too much of the curtain and exposing long-standing secrets, I generally allot myself about 15 minutes to crank out a post. I don't edit much. Stream of conscious dipshittery is the best kind, I find.



The secret, it turns out, is hygge.

We'll let Meik Wiking explain. Wiking is the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. Denmark is routinely ranked at the very top of the world's countries in the United Nations' annual World Happiness Report. (Dude's name is pronounced Mike Viking. That'd make me happy, too.)

Wiking defines hygge (pronounced hoo-guh) thusly, "So I think the best explanation of what hygge is, is the art of creating a nice atmosphere. So it’s about togetherness. It’s about pleasure. It’s about warmth. It’s about relaxation. And that is a key cornerstone of Danish culture. To Danes, hygge is perhaps what freedom is to the Americans."

It also involves candles, apparently. Listen to the podcast. It's fascinating.

The podcast goes on the explain that Danes have a significantly higher opinion of governmental institutions and closer societal bonds than many other developed nations. There's an implicit social trust that many Danes attribute to the extremely generous economic safety net made possible by the country's very high (50% of income, on average) individual income tax rates. That same taxation policy tends to depress income inequality, which also contributes to everyday Danes' sense of shared community.

All of which got me thinking about a conversation I had with my daughter's boyfriend over the holidays. He's a very sharp kid, a high-achieving student in a challenging STEM program. He also professes to be a communist. More of the live-on-a-commune kind of communist than a hammer and sickle command economy communist, as it turns out, but a communist nonetheless.

So I had some questions. I offered that I found that capitalism, while flawed, is the best system ever created in terms of raising the average standard of living in a population. Sure, I allowed, there are winners and losers in capitalist societies, and society has an obligation to those less fortunate, but the aggregate benefit is worth it, the rising tide that lifts the boats. He sees it differently. He's 17, so Winston Churchill's adage about conservatism and age applies to some degree, but his position wasn't whimsical - he's thoughtful and well-read on the topic. (Churchill didn't actually say the quote in question, but nobody comes here for accuracy.) We agreed to disagree about the practicality of society-wide communism, in the end.

But after learning more about the Danes and the balance they've struck, and how it contributes to the general welfare, I wonder if I'm right.

My daughter's boyfriend is tall and blond. I think he'd make an excellent Dane. He's got huge hygge.