Push-Ups

Sorry for not posting lately. For a bit of great news, that song I have been working on is now done. I play it a little rough in some parts, but overall it's finished. In a few days it should be polished and then I can let this horrible project slip from my mind. I really hate it when I set a goal for something...maybe if I was better at moderation it wouldn't be such a problem.

Anyway, today I thought I'd briefly post about something that happened last Sunday.

Last Sunday I walked in on a conversation that two of my roommates were having with a girl. Let me paint the picture for you.

The girl was what in some circles is known as a "woo girl." This is a girl that yells "woo" in excitement all the time, a girl that has "girl's night out," that runs around the town and flirts with guys while wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, and a tiny cowboy hat.

(These girls are the female equivalent of those guys who get fake tans, wear really tight pink (oh, sorry guys....salmon) colored shirts, use way too much hair product, say dude in every other sentence, and wear Axe cologne)

One thing that is know quite as well known about girls of this sort is they also like manipulating guys. I don't know if they're trying to gauge the power of their feminine wiles or if it's for pure sport, but they always put challenges to guys that test their machismo.

Well, as I walked in on this conversation somehow my two roommates were talking with this woo girl about how many push ups they could do (woo girls are really good at steering conversations into topics like this).

One roommate said he could do more push ups than the other. The other laughed and said no way. The girl giggled because she knew that two guys were working hard to impress her. As I gauged the situation I decided it would be fun to help the woo girl out. So, I told everyone a story. I told them my push up story....

The push up story happened in 2005. I had been back from my mission for a year and I was getting ready to go to BYU.

It was late at night...probably around 12 or so. My sister had a boy over. They were talking about push-ups (and no my sister wasn't a woo girl, this guy was probably just a braggart).

So, the guy was showing my sister how he could do push ups and clap his hands. That really isn't very hard and I said as much. I then said "well, what would be really hard would be to do a push up and then clap your hands behind your back."

Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. The braggart said such a thing wasn't possible. I hate hearing that something isn't possible so I decided to give it a try.

Now, when it comes to feats such as this I'm a very stupid person. Also, I'm an overconfident person. So, instead of thinking ahead and realizing that it might be intelligent to find a soft surface to try this on....I went straight to my knees on the painfully hard tile floor and prepared to execute my feat of strength.

Well, I made a pretty good effort at it. I did clap behind my hands and I got my hands in front of me...sorta. But I hit the ground with my chin at the same time I hit the ground with my hands....so the hands didn't do very much to absorb the impact.

My head felt groggy almost immediately. I shakily stood up. I reached my hand to my chin and felt blood... I knew had a trip to the emergency room ahead of me.

It's always embarrassing when you go to the emergency room after doing something stupid. They always ask you what you're there for and you gotta just bear it and explain to them how dumb you are. Well, that night, as I was filling out my paperwork, when I got to the question"What caused your accident?" I wrote an answer that I thought was true but delightfully vague: "extreme exercising."

The doctor asked what that was when he started to stitch me. When I told him he started laughing....a lot. I started to laugh too and that opened my chin up again.

Now, I don't know if the doctor was a sadist, or if he thought I just deserved this because of my stupidity, but he decided to sew me up using red thread. This is a problem because my beard has a lot of red in it.

The doctor told me I couldn't shave for at least a week, but I could get my stitches out in a few days. So, when I went to get the stitches out I had a pretty full beard in the area of the cut, and the stitches and my beard matched almost perfectly.

When the nurse was pulling out the stitches she's usually use the needle nose pliers to pull out about 3 hairs by the root for every stitch she found. It really hurt. I think this hurt more than the initial injury.

That doctor got me so good.

Oh, and on a side note. That week was the week I interviewed with the stake president about going to BYU...a school that requires careful grooming....so I went to my interview to go to BYU with a beard. The president told me "You're aware that how you look will not be appropriate when you go to BYU?" I said "yeah, I'm just not allowed to shave right now." He looked at me sideways but I really didn't feel like explaining my stupidity to him. If I did he probably would have recommended that I not go to BYU...not for moral reasons but for intellectual ones.

Anyway, after I shared this story the woo girl got it into her head to make my roommates prove themselves to her. She said, "Oh, you can do a push up and clap behind your back?"

You'd think that from my story that she'd have taken home the message that I couldn't, but I did admit that as soon as I got my stitches out I performed the feat in more controlled and softer conditions. I said I wasn't going to, she pressed, I said "not gonna do it," she pressed. I said my roommates could do it, they agreed.

So, both of them attempted the feat. One of them (the one who is in the army and does push ups every day) made it look really easy. The other one knocked all the wind out of his stomach (but he sorta pulled it off).

The girl then continued the conversation about how many push ups my roommates could do and my two roommates had a push up contest. They each did about 100 push-ups.

The entire time the girl watched like a puppet master as my roommates acted on her every whim.

It really is depressing at times to see guys behaving like this. When it comes to showing off we don't have much dignity.

It really makes me sad to watch people blatantly and whimsically manipulated. Even when they sorta deserve it.

Anyway, when we got back to the apartment my friends joked that I couldn't do it, and since the girl was no longer around, I showed them that I could.

And that's the end of the story.

I was going to write a bit about the ethics of manipulation, but I'm sorta hungry so I'm gonna stop now.

Hope you all have a great and safe day.