The year of living dangerously / by vanessa

My friends roped me into invited me to do Artist's Way.  It's basically where you write three pages of chicken scratch every morning and you make a date with yourself to do something creative once a week.   The easy thing -- perhaps smart -- thing to do would have been to simply say no.  It takes seven hours a week at least and I'm a busy girl.  But you know I like a challenge (3 for 30, 100 days of blogging, etc.) and good things always come from these types of experiments so I went for it.  Plus my friends' enthusiasm is contagious.  And now I'm actually happy.  See how that works?  Yesterday I continued on a creative project I'd long since shelved, I started some poetry (I'm so not a poet), and well, it's fun to do projects with people you dig.

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In other Things You Begrudgingly Do With Friends news, I joined a gym.  My friend G and I have been talking about working out after/before work.  I haven't belonged to a gym since Cambridge primarily because they remind me of feet.  But I do like exercise and I like exercise with friends.  Today for lunch we checked out 24-Hour Fitness.  It was nasty.  The locker rooms looked dirty.  It smelled.   We asked the tour guide (or whatever you call the people that basically try and tell you that they have a deal for you for one day only!) about the funk and his answer was that the rain in LA affects the circulation in the gym.  Uhhh, what?  I asked him to explain it and he was all, "See the fog on the windows?"  Me:  "Yes."  Him:  "Well that's why it smells in here."  Right.  Discouraged, we checked out another place.  That place won.  Did I mention the gym we chose is known for its porn star population?