It's not all hanging out with Jimmy Page, drinking expensive gin and watching dissolute rock stars radiate hot hateful sensuality around here, you know.
I work for a health care company and this month is be healthy month. For a month, we've all been given a pedometer to wear on our hips, and the goal is to walk at least 10,000 steps a day, with the top few of us at each site entering into a walk-off competition of some sort where I can win some object or other with the name of my company printed on it. I've been taking it seriously and this week I've made the 10,000 steps a day.
Usually I've been stairstepping to infinity and beyond at the gym, but on Wednesday I stepped out to see The Dead Weather instead. Leaning on a monitor guzzling alcohol didn't actually add healthy, invigorating, Chinese-made-plastic-doodad-winning steps to the gadget's counter, so it was lucky I had previously walked about half the length of Sunset Boulevard. Since I usually avoid the outside world like I avoid Shigella, I'd forgotten about the existence of Sol (the nearest star, apparently) and didn't wear sunscreen. But - the technical term for "enough sun to go pink" is "minimal erythemal dose", and I didn't reach it. That strikes me as odd in southern California in June. But never mind, the doctors make me take Vitamin D tablets anyway. Sun exposure is apparently as unpopular with doctors as it is with me these days.
Another thing I usually avoid is being beholden to work on my days off. Apparently accepting the BlackBerry was a bit like Proserpina accepting the pomegranate in Hell. Now I'm tied to work by it, and even worse, I'm gathering more bits and pieces on my hips that report back to work about my non-work habits. If they could put urine drug tests and antismoking technology into a piece of plastic with my company name on, I'd have been fitted with one already, I'm sure.
I'm gathering moss. When I was young, I used to think that "a rolling stone gathers no moss" meant that a living, quick stone was blissfully without encumbrances. Later I heard it used in a way that suggested moss was a blessing - the coat of moss is the reward, the glory of the stone, making it beautiful. I'm thinking here of a scree slope compared with a Japanese garden. But still, deep inside, I don't want the moss. Heavy and clammy and slowing me down.
Workers of the world, unite and throw away your company pedometers. (And lose the chance to beat out Jim in Accounts Payable in the big walk off.)
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