Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    I’m fewer than four semesters away from retirement—June 2027, the final curtain—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. For nearly forty years I’ve worn the armor of a college classroom persona: bigger, bolder, more disciplined than the fragile, fumbling man who hides inside. Teaching gave me a stage and a referee’s whistle. Without it, who am I? Just the broken man-child without a supervisor, left to his own devices.

    During the pandemic, when colleagues were clawing to get out, I puffed out my chest and declared I was born ready for retirement. I pictured myself a disciplined Renaissance man: mornings at the piano, afternoons writing, evenings lifting kettlebells in the garage, book in hand before bed. A gilded schedule, as though I were independently wealthy. Now those boasts feel like hot air. Structure is one thing. The man animating that structure is another. In the classroom, the stakes were high: thirty pairs of eyes asking, Are you boring? Do you know what you’re talking about? The pressure kept me sharp, funny, and, occasionally, wise. No one lets you coast when you’re trapped under fluorescent lights for two hours with judgmental twenty-year-olds.

    Bitter irony: I’m leaving just as I finally got it right. It took me decades to balance theater with approachability, to drop the drill-sergeant persona that once scared students into silence, to actually build a classroom where people learned and laughed. Now I can scaffold essays like an architect and coax timid students into crafting arguments brick by brick. And just as the machinery is humming, I’m stepping offstage. Melancholy doesn’t begin to cover it.

    And then retirement makes you pay with loads of endless paperwork. Work forms that warn you that you cannot rescind your decision. Medicare forms with their cryptic alphabet soup (A, B, C, D), switching to my wife’s insurance, navigating private plans that read like IKEA instructions translated from Martian. I’ve joked I’d rather do faculty assessment reports than wrestle with retirement forms, and I meant it.

    Meanwhile, time itself heckles me. I’ll be sixty-four in six weeks. At my cousin’s seventy-fifth birthday, the guests—all seventysomethings—mingled like ghosts of futures to come. One cousin, seventy-eight, told me that old age makes you invisible. You still occupy space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture. Old age is rude like that: the world resents you for hogging resources after your best years are spent. You should apologize for existing. Step aside, old man.

    So here I am, staring down a three-headed monster: paperwork, invisibility, and the slow evaporation of the job that kept me sane. What’s the plan? At six years old, I invented a companion—James, my imaginary friend. I’d knock on the apartment wall and tell my parents James wanted to play. They laughed, which only confirmed that James and I were onto something.

    Now, on the cusp of retirement, I feel his absence. Because when I think of retirement, I think of loneliness, and when I think of loneliness, I think of Gollum—squatting in the cave, muttering “precious” as he caresses the ring. Only for me, the ring isn’t a piece of jewelry. It’s youth. Precious, lost youth. I stroke it with nostalgia and curse it with bitterness. How dare people treat me like I’m invisible, when old age has taught me more than their Google searches ever will? And yet—I know this bitterness is the opposite of wisdom.

    So maybe I do need James back. But not the sweet, knock-on-the-wall James of childhood. I need James 2.0: a drill-sergeant life coach who will slap me across the face and bark: Stop whining. You’ve got love. You’ve got lights on in the house. You’re walking into retirement with more than most people ever dream of. Be grateful. And don’t you dare let this next chapter kick your ass.

  • Food as Storytelling, Not Spreadsheet

    Food as Storytelling, Not Spreadsheet

    I screened The Game Changers for my student-athletes, pausing every few minutes like a referee blowing the whistle on another bogus call. The film is a carnival of half-baked studies and overcooked claims about the superiority of a plant-based diet, and I wasn’t about to let it slide. Still, I tried to be generous: a well-planned plant-based diet can be a heart’s best friend. But then we hit my favorite scene, the one I couldn’t resist rewinding. Derrick Morgan, the former Tennessee Titans linebacker, is feasting with teammates on a vegan spread prepared by his wife, Charity. The science was questionable, but the spectacle of love, respect, and camaraderie at that table was undeniable. I told my students, “This—right here—is what eating is about. Not macros, not calculators, not the cold math of nutrition. It’s love.” A volleyball player nodded so hard in agreement, I swear I almost heard her whisper “Amen.”

    Because what is food without community? Nothing but calorie slop shoveled into our mouths like feral beasts at the trough. Food made with love is alchemy: it transforms ingredients into joy, health, and communion. Yet here we are, obsessed with mimicking the hollow thinness of the GLP-1 crowd, mistaking the absence of appetite for virtue. We’ve lost the plot. Food isn’t just fuel; it’s the oldest social technology we have, a medium for bonding, story-telling, and remembering why we bother to sit at a table together in the first place. Strip away the love, and you might as well be gnawing protein paste in solitary confinement.

  • Quarterback Hell: America’s Favorite Demigod and the Price of Glory

    Quarterback Hell: America’s Favorite Demigod and the Price of Glory

    In her New Yorker essay “Consider the Quarterback,” Louisa Thomas plunders Seth Wickersham’s American Kings and paints the quarterback not as a football player, but as America’s most tortured mythological beast. Quarterbacks embody our national delusions about leadership and manhood; they manage violence and spectacle at once, parading each week into a gladiatorial hell where one misread or misthrow detonates in front of millions. Actors can flub a line, pop stars can botch a note, tech bros can tank a product and still recover. A quarterback’s mistake, by contrast, is immortalized on ESPN in slow-motion high definition. Surviving this gauntlet elevates him beyond celebrity—he becomes a demigod, but one forged in a furnace that melts sanity along with steel.

    Wickersham’s question—what happens when you achieve the dream of being a star NFL quarterback?—turns out to be a warning label. The answer is grotesque. Yes, genius is displayed on the field: the audibles, the poise, the impossible throws. But the book catalogues the price—alcohol, depression, busted marriages, fatherhood disasters, chronic pain, and, at the core, narcissism metastasized into pathology. “Football, it seems, can unleash the kind of narcissistic personality that normal society might constrain,” Thomas notes. Being a quarterback isn’t a job; it’s a metamorphosis, one that can turn men into monsters.

    That Faustian bargain echoes across sports. Once you buy into a mission of athletic greatness, you accept self-destruction as the down payment. Ronnie Coleman illustrates this truth with brutal clarity. His eight Mr. Olympia titles were purchased with 800-pound squats, deadlifts, and a training style that would make orthopedic surgeons salivate. The bill: spinal fusions, hip replacements, shattered hardware in his back, and a daily life of chronic pain, crutches, and wheelchairs. And yet Coleman, a family man without scandal, smiles through it all. He insists he’d repeat it, no regrets—because the wreckage of his body was, to him, a fair trade for immortality.

    Coleman is a useful counterpoint because, compared to the quarterback, he got off easy. Bodybuilding stripped his mobility but not his humanity. The quarterback, however, inherits the same orthopedic carnage plus something darker: brain trauma, depression, addiction, and the corrosive narcissism required to play the role. Football elevates these men into Olympian figures—half god, half brand—while hollowing out their hearts and souls. To be a quarterback is to win everything the culture worships, and to lose everything that makes life worth living.

  • Farmer’s Walks, Rotator Cuffs, and the Ghosts of TypePad

    Farmer’s Walks, Rotator Cuffs, and the Ghosts of TypePad

    Everyday I try to learn something new, though today’s lessons felt like a report card in masochism. After three weeks of doing the Farmer’s Walk—barefoot, lugging kettlebells across hot pavement like some deranged strongman wannabe—my feet staged a revolt. Now I shuffle around in cushioned flip-flops, praying for pardon from my inflamed soles.

    Lesson two: a rotator cuff tear heals on its own calendar, not mine. Gone are the days of explosive kettlebell theatrics; now I creep through slow, deliberate rows like a man tiptoeing past a sleeping dragon.

    But the real education arrived online. When TypePad collapsed and I ferried a few dozen radio-obsessive posts over to Cinemorphosis, I stared into the abyss of my own archive. What I saw wasn’t noble enthusiasm but neurotic Internet poisoning: the frenzied output of a man hooked on the performance of being “a journalist,” even if only in cosplay. The early 2000s gave me all the symptoms of attention addiction—posting too often, sharing too much, mistaking volume for meaning.

    I’m grateful to have deleted X and demoted Facebook to a ghost town. My writing belongs elsewhere now. On Cinemorphosis I can stretch out, let literature, culture, music, television, even dreams bloom into full color. It feels like stepping through a door into a new world, one I don’t intend to leave.

  • The Pea Protein Plague

    The Pea Protein Plague

    For three days, I flirted with the fantasy of going vegan in the protein department. Out went my dependable whey; in came Orgain’s peanut butter-flavored vegan powder ($32), built on the gritty backbone of pea protein. Waiting in the wings was OWYN Pro Elite in dark chocolate ($47), still sealed, still smug.

    But curiosity didn’t last. It curdled into resolve — the kind of resolve born from three days of gut-twisting cramps so vicious they stole my ability to work out. Imagine the irony: my protein obsession, meant to fuel training, knocked me out of the gym entirely. Not just any protein, but vegan protein, embraced in part to end my petty larceny of cow’s milk from calves. My humanitarian mission dissolved in a haze of bloating and despair.

    So I texted my neighbor Holly, handed over $80 of organic powders, and felt as if I were banishing demons. She was delighted. Her family loves vegan protein powder for their smoothies. I was both exorcised and relieved. Good riddance to powders that turned my insides into a war zone.

    Looking forward, I’ll still be a thief — but only a petty one. A scoop of whey stirred into my morning buckwheat groats. Two modest helpings of plain Greek yogurt with honey at lunch and after my nap. A splash of stolen milk here and there. I hope the calves understand: my theft is not egregious, just survivable.

    Still, my diet is 90 percent plants, enough to keep my conscience propped up. My protein intake will slide from 180 grams to about 140, and so be it. I’ll trade hypertrophy for digestive peace.

    Because let me say it clearly: some of us must never touch pea protein again. It expands inside us like an alien organism, leaving us to wish for death’s consoling embrace. Never again.

  • The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    Like many people, I want to believe that a plant-based diet can deliver optimal nutrition for everyone—from casual gym-goers to powerlifters and elite athletes. It’s a hopeful vision: strong bodies built on beans and lentils instead of beef. But a memory from 2019 lingers in my mind and keeps me cautious.

    That year I had a nursing student in my class. She was sharp, disciplined, a straight-A student who also worked as a personal trainer at Gold’s Gym. On top of all that, she was a powerlifter. Under the guidance of an experienced coach, she decided to go vegan. For the first several months, everything looked fine. But after about nine months, the cracks showed. Her skin grew pale, her training stalled, she felt weak and lightheaded, and worst of all—her hair began to fall out in clumps. When she abandoned the vegan diet, her health rebounded.

    At the time, I didn’t know what I know now. Maybe she was missing key amino acids like lysine or leucine. Maybe she wasn’t using vegan protein powders that could have filled the gap. Maybe she didn’t know that a vegan diet contains no creatine at all, and a simple 5-gram daily supplement might have made the difference. The truth is, neither of us will ever know.

    This is what haunts me: a vegan diet can be excellent for cardiovascular health and a powerful humanitarian stand against factory farming, but only if it’s done with knowledge and precision. Done carelessly, it can lead to exactly what my student experienced—decline, weakness, and disillusionment.

    I can’t know for certain whether a few smart adjustments would have allowed her to thrive. But I can’t shake the suspicion that with the right tools—a quality vegan protein blend, a steady supply of B12, an algal omega-3 supplement, and a scoop of creatine—her story could have ended very differently. Instead of decline and disillusionment, she might have been proof that a plant-based diet, done right, can power even the most demanding athletic lives.

  • The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    “The double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” Guilty as charged. Case in point: my tortured relationship with FKM Divecore straps.

    The Notre Dame study had me spiraling—researchers tortured the material with solvents, heat, and abrasion until they squeezed out PFAS “forever chemicals” and then warned these might leach into human skin. Ever since, I’ve gone back and forth, back and forth, like a malfunctioning metronome, on whether to keep wearing the straps I love more than any other rubber I’ve tried in two decades of watch collecting.

    Of course, no one wants to think of their wristwear as a poison delivery system. But context matters. First, FKM is highly stable under real-world conditions; the lab tests were more horror show than practical scenario. Second, it’s the manufacturing process that endangers workers, not the end-user. Third, if we’re ranking PFAS risks, drinking unfiltered water, eating from PFAS-coated packaging, or cooking on scratched Teflon are solid tens on the risk scale, while wearing an FKM strap is a lonely little one. That’s the Fallacy of False Priorities: panic over the trivial while ignoring the obvious.

    Even so, the issue isn’t a Nothing Burger. Divecore’s own Paul admits handling FKM worries him, and he’s working on alternative materials—silicone, vulcanized silicone, HNBR—to protect his workers and reassure consumers. That’s just smart business.

    Meanwhile, I’m not without options. My strap drawer holds factory Seiko silicones and urethanes, plus top-tier Tropic straps made of vulcanized rubber. They’re fine, but none hold a candle to the sleek perfection of Divecore FKM. I tried swapping them in, but they feel like consolation prizes—serviceable, never glorious.

    So I made a deal with myself: enjoy my pristine FKMs for now, and when the new HNBR or silicone Divecore straps arrive, I’ll switch. Sounds reasonable. Except once you’ve let the idea of PFAS seeping into your skin lodge in your brain, it refuses to leave. I’ve written about it on Instagram, made a YouTube video, and now I’m stuck in an obsessive loop, second-guessing every strap change as though I were rewriting my will.

    Which brings me back to my original point: the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. And right now, that man is staring at seven watches, toggling between glory and paranoia, wishing he could strap on peace of mind.

  • The Influenza of the Mind

    The Influenza of the Mind

    Last week, one of my teen daughters caught a cold. She shrugged it off with the stoicism of a soldier, and I barely noticed she was sick. Then my wife came down with it five days ago. It hit her harder, but she still managed to run errands, wrangle housework, and conquer the Everest of six laundry baskets stuffed with clothes that needed folding.

    Then there was me. Yesterday, after my afternoon nap, I felt aches and pains and immediately began writing my obituary. Sprawling out on the couch in the living room, I put on the docuseries The Kingdom on ESPN but had to close my eyes, then take another nap because I was “so unwell.” 

    Convinced I was succumbing to something sinister, I staggered into the kitchen and cooked dinner. The salmon, broccoli, and rice all came out overcooked—not because I was incapacitated, but because I was deep into Internet articles about PFAS “forever chemicals.” Nothing like a side of toxic paranoia with your charred protein.

    My family tolerated the burnt offering, attributing it to my alleged illness. But once I slumped onto the couch after dinner to watch Below Deck, I went full opera tenor: sighs, groans, complaints, the whole libretto of impending doom. My family, unimpressed, mocked me. “Illness always makes me morbid and lugubrious,” I explained, as if quoting from a Victorian diary.

    My daughters laughed. My wife rolled her eyes: “Here we go. The man flu.” I thought about citing research suggesting men actually suffer more with the flu, but even I knew I’d already overshared.

    “Maybe you’re just tired,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t work out tomorrow.”

    I declared that one missed workout would cause my muscles to shrivel like neglected houseplants. “I’m doomed,” I muttered, then retreated to bed before nine like a bereft invalid.

    This morning, I awoke braced for catastrophe—a full-blown cold, a fever, the Grim Reaper at my door. Instead, I felt…fine. Perfectly fine. My wife and daughter had been right. I wasn’t sick. I was just tired.

    The truth is, when I sense illness creeping in, I go from zero to tragic opera in seconds. I suffer from Influenza of the Mind, a performance illness that turns me into a paranoid man-baby. Last night’s theatrics were not the noble struggle of a fading patriarch, but the wailings of a melodramatic hypochondriac in need of nothing more than eight hours of sleep.

  • The John Deere Shoulder Massacre

    The John Deere Shoulder Massacre

    A month ago, I developed “golfer’s elbow”—a tender, nagging ache in my inner right elbow, courtesy of my stubborn devotion to single-arm kettlebell rows. Instead of backing off like a sensible adult, I “modified” the exercise into something more idiotic: a lawnmower pull, yanking the kettlebell skyward like I was trying to start a rusty John Deere.

    The good news: within a couple of weeks, the elbow pain disappeared. The bad news: two weeks ago, my left rotator cuff staged a protest and tore, lightly but persistently. The pain has lingered, not as vicious as before, but enough to remind me that recovery at sixty-four runs on geological time. If it truly is a minor tear, I’m looking at six to twelve weeks before my shoulder forgives me.

    When—if—this shoulder heals, I have no illusions about returning to my “factory settings.” The glory days of kettlebell carnage six days a week are behind me. The new plan: three or four sessions, lighter weights, and absolutely no more lawnmower rows. Instead, I’m pivoting to Zone 2 circuit training—steady sweat, elevated heart rate, endorphins over ego, sanity over low-rep bravado.

    For me, exercise isn’t just exercise—it’s therapy. It’s the way I shut down the mental chatter and scrub the cobwebs out of my skull. A life coach wants me to analyze my feelings. I’d rather blast them out with sweat and iron.

    Still, I know this is whack-a-mole. One injury heals, another pops up. That’s the deal when you insist on playing Atlas with kettlebells well past the warranty period. The only answer is to be smarter. The lawnmower row? It was my dumbest idea yet. Never again.

  • What Is the Risk of FKM Rubber Watch Straps in the Overall Scheme of Things?

    What Is the Risk of FKM Rubber Watch Straps in the Overall Scheme of Things?

    PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals,” deserve our attention. They accumulate in the body, persist in the environment, and have been linked to cancer and organ toxicity. The question is not whether they are harmful—the science is clear enough on that—but how much risk each type of exposure carries.

    To live reasonably healthy lives in a world saturated with PFAS, we need to focus on reducing the high-risk exposures. Think of a scale from one to ten. At the top end—a full ten—you find firefighting foam, Gore-Tex fabrics, stain-resistant carpets, certain cosmetics, fast-food wrappers, fish and meat from contaminated waters, Teflon pans, unfiltered drinking water, and some dental flosses. At the bottom—a one—are minor exposures like wearing athletic clothing, sitting on treated upholstery, applying certain sunscreens, or strapping on an FKM watch band.

    On this spectrum, FKM straps rank very low. The lab studies that raised alarms subjected the rubber to extreme torture—solvents, high heat, and abrasion—to force PFAS out. That doesn’t resemble daily life. Normal wear—exposure to sweat, sunlight, or water—isn’t nearly enough to release meaningful amounts of PFAS. Compared to drinking contaminated water, eating food in PFAS-coated packaging, or scraping dinner out of a Teflon pan, the risk from a strap is trivial. If the PFAS risk ladder runs from one to ten, FKM sits squarely at one: background noise against the heavy hitters.

    In the end, acceptable risk is a personal calculation. For me, the sensible path is to avoid the high-risk exposures and stop fixating on the negligible ones. That means changing out my water filter, skipping fast-food packaging, and ditching old Teflon pans. But when it comes to wearing my FKM watch straps, I’m not going to lose sleep.