Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • Hawaiian Vacations Are About Stepping Outside the Clock and Cheating Death

    Hawaiian Vacations Are About Stepping Outside the Clock and Cheating Death

    Spend a week with your family in Hawaii and you slip into a parallel time zone—one that ignores clocks altogether.

    It starts the moment you survive five airborne hours in a 400-million-dollar jet. You land feeling like Superman, minus the cape and plus a mild dehydration headache. Within 24 hours, you’re barefoot, in swim trunks, marinating in mai tais, spooning loco moco into your face, and demolishing lilikoi pies. The weather is so perfect it feels like it was made to flatter you personally. Sunsets become private screenings. You have no deadlines, no alarms, no reason to measure the day except by the height of the tide or the level in your glass.

    In this dimension, you’re not just on vacation—you’ve stepped outside of time. And outside of time means outside of death. Some corner of your brain starts whispering that you’re untouchable. Immortal.

    That’s when the trouble starts.

    The thought of getting back on a plane becomes revolting. It’s not just leaving Hawaii—it’s leaving Sacred Time and returning to Profane Time. Back to the grind where schedules nag and mortality hides in every bathroom mirror.

    Even after you land at home, you’re not really home. You’re in a kind of sun-drunk denial, still hearing the ocean in your ears while the neighbor’s leaf blower whines outside. The older you get, the worse the hangover—because you know the clock is running, and the illusion of timelessness is an intoxicant more potent than any cocktail with a paper umbrella.

    And then it’s over. You reenter the machine. Days are counted in emails, not waves. The tan fades, and with it the fantasy that you’ve cheated the countdown. That’s the real brutality of reentry—not the weather, but the eviction notice from the one place that convinced you, however briefly, that you could live forever.

    So yes, I’m already searching for Big Island resorts. It’s not wanderlust—it’s a hunt for my next fix of immortality. And I know the danger. One day I might just stay.

  • The French Toast Zone and Other Dangerous Places

    The French Toast Zone and Other Dangerous Places

    Recently, I watched the new King of the Hill, where the gang has aged into the gentle patina of later life. In one scene, Hank, Peggy, and Bobby are seated at the kitchen table, devouring what looked like French toast or chocolate chip pancakes—something golden, sweet, and unapologetically bad for you. It was an ordinary family breakfast, the kind you imagine smelling from three houses away. Watching it felt like slipping into a warm bath of contentment. These were normal people, enjoying themselves, at ease in the sacred space I call the French Toast Zone.

    The French Toast Zone is the place where life is easy, breakfast is decadent, and you’re at peace with your waistline, your arteries, and your eventual mortality. But step into the biomarker minefield—calories counted, protein ratios calibrated, insulin spikes plotted like military campaigns—and you’re in the Restriction Zone. The mood shifts. Every bite is an act of negotiation with your cholesterol, your bathroom scale, and the grim actuarial math of your lifespan.

    Real life, of course, is not an all-inclusive stay in either zone. Most of us shuttle back and forth—half saint, half sinner—forever bargaining between the delights of German chocolate cake and the promise of three extra years of foggy-eyed longevity. Too much denial, and you die having lived as a monk in a bakery you never entered. Too much indulgence, and you’re trapped on the hedonic treadmill, sprinting after pleasures that get smaller the closer you get.

    Some people manage this dance effortlessly. They live in homeostasis, exercising moderation as naturally as breathing. I have never been one of these blessed creatures. As a teenage bodybuilder who saw biceps as salvation from low self-esteem, I learned early that moderation was for other people. My internal wiring is a one-way circuit from obsession to burnout and back again. I am, in short, Extreme Man.

    Extreme Man has his own archetype—a tragic, sweaty figure charging at his chosen folly until he mutates into something grotesque. Then comes the epiphany, the Damascus jolt that scrambles his molecules and sends him hurtling into a new life mission. It could be religion, music, bodybuilding, stamp collecting—doesn’t matter. Once the lightning strikes, moderation becomes an obscenity. He must convert the world.

    When I was a teenage Olympic weightlifter, I preached squats with the fervor of a street-corner prophet, convinced proper form could change lives. My audience—bewildered, politely nodding—failed to share my revelation. Some Extremes get written off as harmless cranks. Others, gifted with charisma, build religions followed by millions.

    The homeostatic types are often immune to these evangelists. They are already content. But for those of us who never knew balance, the siren call of radical change is intoxicating. We cling to the hope that the right transformation will lift us out of our malaise.

    Neither camp is wholly admirable. The balanced can model moderation—or smug mediocrity. The Extremes can inspire reinvention—or display unhinged egotism. The truth is in the messy middle, where both tendencies collide, and if you’re lucky, you learn from both without being consumed by either.

  • The Farmer’s Walk of Shame and Glory

    The Farmer’s Walk of Shame and Glory

    At thirteen, I became an Olympic weightlifter—because what else does a wiry, overachieving kid from suburban California do when puberty arrives like a freight train full of testosterone and insecurity? My coach, Lou Kruk, had the gruff certainty of a war general. His command: Squats. Lots of them. Squats were the foundation, the gospel, the holy writ. Lou didn’t care if your femurs screamed or your glutes cried for mercy—he wanted you buried under iron like a potato under mulch.

    And I obeyed. I squatted in the gym. I squatted while playing goalie in soccer. I squatted in line during PE roll call, waiting for Ernie Silvera to butcher yet another attendance list. I even squatted in front of my locker, hoping posture would hide the acne. Eventually, the kids at Earl Warren Junior High stopped calling me by my name. I was simply: Squats.

    But here’s the thing: squats weren’t just reps. They were a romantic infatuation with self-improvement. A ritual. A sacrament. I didn’t fall into squats—I plunged, like a lovesick poet into madness.

    Fast-forward to middle age—forty years and one mid-life crisis later—I traded barbell bravado for kettlebells and met a new myth: the Turkish Get-Up. It felt like choreography from some warrior ballet: lie down like a slain gladiator, then rise with a kettlebell overhead like a triumphant god reanimating himself for vengeance.

    Then came the Farmer’s Walk, and I was undone.

    Here’s the scene: I grab a 48-pound kettlebell in one hand, a 53-pounder in the other, and saunter out of my garage barefoot like a lunatic monk of pain. I circle my Honda Accord, not for superstition, but for symmetry. Then I march around the front lawn, beads of sweat trickling down my temples, tank top clinging to my body like a polyester declaration of war.

    The burn in my delts and forearms? Biblical. Especially when I’ve just finished kettlebell swings and around-the-worlds like some masochistic circus act.

    Why do I love the Farmer’s Walk?

    First: its austere simplicity. It’s manual labor disguised as exercise. I’m hauling metaphorical water, carrying invisible suitcases packed with existential weight.

    Second: it taps into a fantasy. I imagine I’m a young, vigorous farmhand, righteous and virtuous, about to earn a sizzling plate of bacon and eggs just for showing up to life.

    Third: it’s primal. I’m walking twin beasts, two snarling metal bulldogs, and I’m the alpha. My heart rate spikes, my skin gleams, and I feel, absurdly, alive.

    But with greatness comes peril. I go barefoot, which means one mistimed drop and I’m dialing podiatry from the ER. If I stub my toe, I’ll be hobbling like a Dickensian orphan. Then there’s the risk of dinging my Accord, which would be both tragic and hilarious.

    Yet the greatest threat isn’t physical—it’s psychological. I am, without a doubt, the neighborhood oddity.

    My neighbors stare. They whisper:

    “What’s he trying to prove?”
    “Is he unraveling?”
    “Is this a cry for help or a cry for gains?”
    “Why doesn’t he take up pickleball like a normal old man?”
    “Oh dear, that poor wife.”

    But despite the scrutiny, I press on. I rise each morning with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated Spartan. I brew my coffee, stir my buckwheat groats, and prepare for my ritual. And when it’s time to perform my ceremonial promenade across the lawn, kettlebells in hand and sweat on brow, I do so with one thought:

    Let them watch.

  • The Unspeakable Miracle of the Clean Break

    The Unspeakable Miracle of the Clean Break

    I stopped buying toilet paper three months ago. Not as an act of rebellion or eco-virtue—just as a natural consequence of no longer needing it. At first, I thought it was a fluke. But week after week, the same strange reality: quick, frictionless exits from the bathroom with nothing left to wipe. Naturally, I retraced my steps. What had changed?

    Breakfast, for starters. I began eating buckwheat groats—just under half a cup—bathed in soy milk, whey protein, and a handful of berries. Think monk breakfast with gym-bro toppings. At lunch, I ditched meat and tinned fish in favor of twelve ounces of super-firm tofu atop a cucumber salad, dressed with Greek yogurt, nutritional yeast, and whatever herbs made me feel like I was living in Tuscany.

    Dinner? Whatever my wife cooks. I’m not a monster.

    Of course, the hero here is the buckwheat. It isn’t wheat, not really—it’s a seed masquerading as a grain, gloriously gluten-free and loaded with insoluble fiber and resistant starch. In less science-y terms: it bulks, it sweeps, it feeds your gut’s good guys, and it delivers the elusive clean break. The kind of bathroom visit where nothing lingers—physically or emotionally.

    Then there’s the tofu. It doesn’t showboat. It doesn’t need to. Its gift is its non-disruption. High in protein, low in drama, tofu is the digestive equivalent of a self-driving electric car. It quietly replaces the gut’s old sputtering engine, the one bogged down by greasy meats and dairy sabotage, and makes everything hum.

    Put the two together, and suddenly, bathroom time became… efficient. Minimal. Almost elegant. No TP required. Just a moment of stunned gratitude, a small prayer to the intestinal gods, and a confused gaze into the middle distance: Did I just hack the human body?

    And then came the real question: Do I tell people?

    Because while we’ll chat endlessly about protein macros, creatine, cholesterol, and God help us, cold plunges—we go silent on the topic of TP use and the miracle of no longer needing it. And yet, so many are secretly miserable. The bloating, the straining, the endless wiping. And here I am with the holy grail—and I’m supposed to stay quiet?

    No, I won’t promise this will work for everyone. But if you’re even slightly intrigued by the promise of digestive liberation, consider the humble buckwheat. Consider the tofu. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself typing from a place of lightness, efficiency, and radiant intestinal peace.

  • What Fifty Years of a High-Protein Diet Taught Me

    What Fifty Years of a High-Protein Diet Taught Me

    These days, there’s no shortage of content promising health, strength, and longevity through high-protein diets. Everyone’s got a take. I can only give you mine—earned through fifty years of trial, sweat, and a steady stream of protein powder.

    I first learned the value of protein in 1974. I was thirteen, a Junior Olympic weightlifter, and determined not to be outlifted by anyone with better genetics or better snacks. I made it my mission to eat no fewer than 160 grams of protein a day. That habit never left. For the past five decades—save for the occasional vacation detour—I’ve kept my intake between 160 and 200 grams daily. Today, approaching 64, I train in my garage like a teenager on a mission, kettlebells swinging, breath steady, muscles intact.

    Protein isn’t a trend. It’s foundational. Just the other day, I was driving my daughter and her friend to Knott’s Berry Farm when her friend said, “I think I’m going to faint.” I asked if she’d eaten breakfast. “Yes,” she said. “A bowl of fruit.” I told her the truth: “That’s zero protein. No wonder you’re crashing. First thing you do when we park—go find yourself a carne asada burrito.” I told her to eat a meal with forty grams of steak-powered resurrection.

    Here’s what people still don’t get: if you don’t eat at least 40 grams of protein in a meal, you’ll be starving and sluggish thirty minutes later. It’s not magic; it’s physiology. Back in the day, I inhaled bodybuilding magazines. Everyone warned me: “Don’t believe those. They’re just selling supplements.” Sure, some of them were. But when it came to protein, they weren’t wrong. The numbers don’t lie. For men, 160 grams a day is a solid target. For women, around 120. I’ve lived it. I’ve trained on it. And I’ve aged with it. The science has finally caught up to what lifters have known all along.

  • Groats, Greens, and the Gospel of Self-Control

    Groats, Greens, and the Gospel of Self-Control

    I’m a man prone to obsessions. Not in a cute, quirky, Wes Anderson way, but in the full-blown, white-knuckled grip of irrational fixations that orbit around some grand illusion of self-improvement. These fixations rarely tether themselves to anything as vulgar as reality, which means I have to approach them like a man handling live wires—gingerly, skeptically, with rubber gloves and a fire extinguisher nearby. My latest obsession? A brutally austere, monastic eating plan masquerading as discipline but smelling faintly of madness.

    The rules are simple, almost religious in tone: three meals a day. No snacks. Breakfast is a steaming bowl of steel-cut oats doped with vanilla protein powder and berries. Lunch: buckwheat groats, same protein powder, same berries, different bowl. Dinner: a joyless, crunchy salad of cucumber and bell pepper crowned with sauteed tofu and doused in a dressing so puritanical it could double as penance—balsamic vinegar, Greek yogurt, nutritional yeast, and a blizzard of righteous herbs. To add some zing, I’ll dump a tablespoon of Trader Joe’s Italian Hot Bomba Sauce to give me a lifeline to joy and pleasure. 

    But here’s the rub: the long, harrowing stretch between lunch and dinner. That’s when the madness starts to whisper. Could green tea keep me afloat? Coffee? A heretical diet soda or two? These are the thoughts of a man trying to barter with his own obsession, bargaining with the jailer who’s taken his afternoon hostage. I pretend it’s hunger, but what I’m really feeling is the hollow buzz of addiction to a narrative: that if I follow this sacred routine, I will unlock a better, lighter, more transcendent version of myself.

    Of course, it’s likely just another chimera—one more shimmering lie I chase like a half-crazed mystic in a Whole Foods aisle. I suspect I don’t actually change. I just trade compulsions. Some people devour cheesecake. I devour grand narratives of control, discipline, and spiritual rebirth through groats and greens. My real diet isn’t food—it’s fantasy. And I am a glutton.

  • The Dopamine Dial: Why Your Grail Watch Can’t Make You Happy

    The Dopamine Dial: Why Your Grail Watch Can’t Make You Happy

    To understand the madness of the modern watch addict, you’d do well to consult Dopamine Nation by Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, a book that should be shelved somewhere between philosophy, neuroscience, and quiet screaming. Her central thesis? In an age of relentless indulgence, the line between pleasure and pain is not only blurry—it’s the same neurological pathway. You’re not escaping pain with your latest acquisition. You’re feeding it.

    “The smartphone,” she writes, “is the modern-day hypodermic needle.” And the drug? Dopamine—delivered in neat little parcels: TikToks, tweets, memes, and yes, wrist shots of watches you don’t own (yet). If you haven’t met your poison of choice, don’t worry. It’s just a click away.

    Lembke makes the uncomfortable truth clear: The more dopamine hits we seek, the more our brain adapts by reducing our baseline pleasure response. What once thrilled you—your grail watch, your Rolex Explorer, your Seiko with the Wabi-Sabi patina—now barely registers. You’re not chasing pleasure anymore. You’re just trying to feel something.

    Watch addicts, of course, understand this intimately. The pursuit of horological perfection starts out innocent enough: a G-Shock here, a vintage diver there. But soon you’re tumbling into the abyss of boutique limited editions and message board enablement, haunted by the need to stay relevant. Because here’s the twist: It’s not just about the watches. It’s about being seen. You post, you review, you flex because if you stop, you vanish. No new watches = no new content = digital extinction.

    And extinction, in a social-media world, feels like death.

    Lembke warns us that addiction thrives in secrecy, in the exhausting double life. The watch addict may present as a tasteful minimalist to family and friends, while secretly rotating 19 watches, five straps deep, waiting for the next “drop.” The addiction is fed by access, and we live in an access economy. New releases are no longer annual events—they’re hourly temptations. The vortex is bottomless. The supply creates the demand.

    Even worse, modern society normalizes this behavior. Everyone is scrolling. Everyone is upgrading. Our addiction to novelty is passed off as taste. Our frenzied consumption masquerades as identity. Lembke borrows from Philip Rieff to explain the deeper shift: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” The modern watch collector doesn’t believe in salvation. He believes in configuration.

    But here’s the cruel irony: The more you seek to be pleased, the less capable you are of being pleased. In Lembke’s words: “Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia—the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

    What’s the solution? A dopamine fast. Lembke prescribes it like a bitter medicine: Remove the source. Reset the brain. Let it reestablish homeostasis. For the watch addict, this means one thing: a watch fast.

    And yes—it’s brutal. I’ve been a watch obsessive for over twenty years. My longest fast? Six months. And I nearly went feral. New releases tempt. Friends enable. Algorithms whisper. Strap swaps and vintage reissues beckon like sirens. Even the FedEx truck starts to look like a personal tormentor.

    So you get creative. You stash watches in the safe and “rediscover” them. You buy new straps instead of new watches. You try to redirect the compulsion toward something productive: fitness, music, sourdough, monkish austerity. Anything but another chronograph.

    But the real cure, oddly enough, may be conversation—actual human connection. At watch meet-ups, we start out discussing bezels and spring bars, but within ten minutes we’re talking about life: real estate, parenting, knee surgeries, emotional burnout, dinner recipes. We talk for hours. But barely about watches.

    The truth slips out in these moments: we want to be free. We crave community more than we crave sapphire crystals. What began as a shared obsession has become a trap, and these conversations, paradoxically, offer relief from the very addiction that brought us together.

    Imagine a bunch of watch enthusiasts at a watch meet-up and we’re talking about everything but watches. Wrap your head around that.

  • Cavebrain, Clickfinger: How Evolution Doomed the Watch Addict

    Cavebrain, Clickfinger: How Evolution Doomed the Watch Addict


    In the early 1990s, I saw comedian Rob Becker perform Defending the Caveman in San Francisco—a one-man anthropology class disguised as stand-up. His central thesis, stitched together from kitchen-table spats with his wife, was that men are hunters, women are gatherers, and this prehistoric wiring still runs our modern relationships like a bad operating system.

    His proof? Shopping.

    For the gatherer, shopping is a leisurely daydream. Wandering the mall for six hours and imagining buying things she can’t afford is an enriching sensory experience—like spiritual window-shopping. For the hunter, shopping is a surgical strike. He wants pants. He buys pants. He leaves. The suggestion to “just browse” makes his eye twitch.

    “Let’s get the hell out of here,” says the man. He has completed his mission. He has felled the beast.

    That moment—man as single-focus, tunnel-visioned, goal-oriented predator—explains a great deal about the pathology of watch addiction. We are still cavemen, just hairier and worse at squatting. And we don’t hunt food anymore. We hunt wristwear.

    We see a watch online and a brontosaurus steak lights up in our brain. Locked in. Target acquired. Our dopamine circuits spark like faulty Christmas lights. We must have it. There is no tranquility, no peace, until the object is in our possession.

    The problem? Our primitive instincts weren’t designed for the digital age. Back then, acquiring a new object meant trekking through wilderness, battling saber-toothed tigers, and earning your meal. Today, it’s clicking a “Buy Now” button while half-watching a YouTube review at your ergonomic standing desk, surrounded by a sea of unopened Amazon boxes.

    Our brains still think we’re walking 40 miles to spear a mammoth. In reality, we’re reclining in office chairs with lumbar support, ordering $2,000 divers like they’re takeout sushi. The hunt requires no sacrifice, no sweat, no real effort. And so it never satisfies.

    You get the watch. You admire it. You post a photo to Instagram. Then—you twitch. You fidget. Your brain says, “Good job. Now go get another.”

    We are not content in the cave. Evolution didn’t design us for stillness. It designed us to be hungry. To prepare. To hoard. So we keep hunting. And the cave fills with stainless steel trophies until the glint attracts low-flying pterodactyls that dive-bomb us in our sleep and try to pluck the Omega off our wrist.

    We are maladapted creatures. Our eyeballs evolved for survival. Now they doom us. We were built to scan the horizon for danger. Now we scan Hodinkee, Instagram, Reddit, eBay, WatchRecon, and Chrono24 until our dopamine is a wrung-out dishrag and our bank account is an obituary.

    We’re trapped in a glitch—stone-age instincts, 5G bandwidth. Our visual fixation, once essential to survival, now chains us to a cycle of desire and regret. Thousands of watches flood our screens in a single hour, and our brains are too old and too soft to resist. The only real solution is exile. But exile from what? Our jobs, our networks, our entire digital lives?

    There is no cave to retreat to. Just another tab open.

  • The Next One Is Always the One

    The Next One Is Always the One

    About eight years ago, I experienced the horological equivalent of speed dating. Two watches arrived on the same afternoon: a Seiko Sumo SBDC001 with a black dial and sapphire, and the sleeker SBDC051—a reissue of the classic 62MAS. I placed them side by side like two contestants in a Darwinian experiment, then strapped each one on as if I were auditioning them for the role of “forever watch.”

    It wasn’t even close.

    The 051 had the refinement and wrist presence of a watch that knew it belonged. Crisp finishing. Perfect proportions. Lume that could guide ships through fog. The Sumo? It felt cheap. It wasn’t worth half of the 051. I sold it before dinner. Brutal, but deserved.

    Fast-forward eight years. I’m hunting again—not for a grail, but for something that will sing when paired with my beloved orange Divecore strap, the one accessory that unlocks my inner Watch Beast. Naturally, I thought about giving the Sumo a redemption arc—maybe the gray-wave dial SBDC177? But my instincts flared. Once a dud, always a dud?

    Then I spotted the polygonal Seiko SBDC203 (SPB483), aka the “Coastline,” and something clicked. This one looks like it could go toe-to-toe with the 051. Sharp lines, killer specs, and the kind of tactile satisfaction you only get when Seiko decides to actually try.

    Two closing thoughts:

    First, nothing has made me feel more bonded to my watch obsession than the orange Divecore strap. It’s not just a strap—it’s a mood, an identity, a wrist-based mission statement.

    Second, I’ve come to believe the real addiction isn’t the watches. It’s the brain hijack you constantly crave. The way your brain lights up when The Next Thing to Get starts coming into focus. That little thrill of clarity when you think, Yes, this is the one. It’s the same buzz I get from customizing a Camry XSE in Heavy Metal Gray on Fletcher Toyota’s website and seeing it listed for “only” $38K—a car I may or may not buy but already love as if it’s parked in my soul’s garage.

    Humans are a deranged species. We crave imaginary ownership like it’s the secret to inner peace.

  • Flex Day: A Tragedy in Tube Socks

    Flex Day: A Tragedy in Tube Socks

    Another Flex Day had dawned—yet again a gaudy parade of icebreaker drivel, PowerPoint piety, and educational workshops led by people who looked like they’d been conjured by a bureaucratic séance. Against my better instincts—and with a flicker of masochistic hope I should’ve interrogated—I signed up for a session titled Exercise and Mental Wellness. It was being held in the Hobcallow campus gym, a crumbling monument to deferred maintenance and broken promises. If buildings could sigh, this one would’ve let out a long, exhausted groan. Everything about it screamed “run,” but I ignored the sirens blaring in my skull and walked straight in, armed with denial and a water bottle.

    The gym was a fluorescent-lit dungeon, the kind of place where even the light seemed desperate to escape. The air reeked of mildew, ancient sweat, and the crushed dreams of generations who’d suffered through dodgeball and underfunding. I could practically hear the scent—a low moan of institutional despair.

    Then the “fitness expert” took the stage. He looked like he subsisted on steamed kale and unprocessed anxiety. His limbs were pipe cleaners, and his tube socks rode high up his shins like he was waving tiny surrender flags. A whistle hung from his neck, though it clearly served more as costume than command. The guy had the aura of a substitute gym teacher in a 1979 after-school special—minus the charm. With the fervor of a man unveiling the cure for cancer, he launched into a sermon on the redemptive power of push-ups. According to him, daily push-ups could defeat depression, boost classroom charisma, and chisel us into statues Michelangelo would envy.

    I sat among fifty or so other professors, all of us bearing the glazed, shell-shocked expressions of people who’d just survived a bureaucratic earthquake. When the whistle-wielder asked for a volunteer to demonstrate the proper push-up, silence fell across the gym like a dropped curtain. Heavy. Suffocating. It was the sound of collective academic burnout, of souls ground into dust by budget cuts and endless committee meetings.

    Eventually, someone was nudged forward. “Volunteer” was a generous word. The man was more of a human offering. He shuffled onto the stage in a suit that draped off him like wet laundry. His glasses clung to his face like they were afraid to be part of what came next. He moved like a man who had made a series of increasingly regrettable choices that had all led here.

    Then he went down for the push-up—and the moment collapsed into slapstick tragedy. His arms gave out instantly, like a folding chair kicked from behind. His glasses launched from his face and slid across the gym floor, desperate for escape. He lay there wheezing like a deflating accordion, the very embodiment of what happens when the intellect thrives and the body is left for dead.

    You’d think someone might offer sympathy. A supportive chuckle. Maybe a smattering of ironic applause. Nope. The room was pure stone—emotionally fossilized. A few professors exchanged murmured postmortems. Most stared ahead with the blank-eyed stillness of DMV patrons or people deep into a hostage negotiation.

    And when it finally ended, I fled. I bolted, heart pounding, mind racing, lungs grateful just to be outside again. It wasn’t enlightenment I’d found that day. Just confirmation: some kinds of despair really do come with a whistle.

    After surviving thirty Flex Days—each one more spiritually numbing than the last—I’ve come to a grim conclusion: these spectacles aren’t designed to make us better instructors. No, they’re the bureaucratic equivalent of waterboarding. Their true purpose is to remind us, in the most humiliating way possible, that we are not free agents but indentured servants to a cabal of institutional overlords who wouldn’t recognize actual education if it bit them on their lanyards. The activities they concoct—team-building scavenger hunts, trust falls, and workshops on how to smile while grading—aren’t just irrelevant to higher learning. They are a brazen insult to critical thinking itself, proof that the people orchestrating these charades are not only disconnected from the classroom, but from basic cognitive function. Flex Days are not professional development; they’re intellectual purgatory dressed up in business casual.