About
Hi, my name is Jules. I’m a slacker and a nerd. I get up, I turn on my laptop, check my email, and stick to the pc, pausing only to occasionally switch to the Playstation. It’s been like this since I was six. Not surprisingly, I ran into some joint issues in my late 20s, caused by an embarrassing lack of muscle.
Grudgingly, I went to the gym. A few years later, at 30, I’m a fitness convert (my slacker friends say “fanatic”). I hit the weights three times a week, and try to get at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. The rest of the time I’m still checking e-mail, playing Super Mario Galaxy on my Wii, of course. Some things never change.
But I have a bit of ambition now. I want to do a pull-up. I want to die free of ‘affluence diseases’. I want to feel strong. I want some visible muscle (not tone, not defintion, muscle). I want to eat healthily. This is the fittest I’ve ever been, and I’m love seeing how much better it can get.
I live in Belgium and work as a Webmonkey. I have a gorgeous slacker boyfriend who joins me at the gym once a week and who couldn’t care less if when I occasionally lift more than him. My friends are all nerds – so apart from my gym buddies, I have no one to talk to about the PB, the best proteïn powder blend, how lifting is different for women, if bread was the worst invention in history, what healthy means. Since people tend to disagree on all those things, I just make it up as I go. It’s working fine so far.
It’s a lonely endeavour though, I have a lot of support, but no one to share this particular interest with. I guess that’s why I’m here, right?
Now, I have found a blog I shall be passionate about. Can a sweet tooth fairy join in?
Wow, we have a lot in common! I’m a web junky, too – which means all my friends are nerds AND male. I also live in London where people talk more about pints than pull-ups. Yeah, fitness can be a lonely endeavor. I’m also on the path to a pull-up. It’s slow going. Anyway, I am enjoying your blog and thanks for visiting mine!
Hi Jules – I wanted to respond to your comment on Letters from a Caveman Part 3, but am not doing it on the blog because the central conceit of the series is that I, the blogger, have genuinely been taken over by a caveman’s spirit – if I reply to any of the comments it spoils the illusion! You’ll see what I mean as the series concludes.
I was a bit worried that the scene where ‘the woman’ acquiesces might be seen in a patriarchal light – but this is definately not the angle I intended.
I guess the first thing I want to say is that I was not trying to present a historically accurate picture. Perhaps lazily, I took the view that over a several hundred thousand year span, there would have been all kinds of cultures from which my caveman could have been plucked, and in order to entertain people with the kind of sterotype they associate with cavemen, I decided to give him behaviour that might have existed amongst at least some of those cultures over the millenia.
It’s also important to say that this is about how the modern woman responds to the caveman. She has been angry for all this time because he’s been failing to conform to modern behavioural norms and basically being weird and awkward. In a way I was imagining the kind of thing you see in movies, where the audience knows something that a character does not – we can see that the caveman is scared and so he does not want to drive the car – but she thinks her man is just being a pain in the ass. When he gets aggressive with her, this is supposed to be a comedy moment, which in a way diminishes his power – because instead of being scared, she simply interprets it as her man finally stepping up and showing her the attention she deserves. After that, she is more willing to put up with his weirdness because at least something went right in the bedroom.
I hope you view the episodes that follow as showing the ‘woman’ in a better light and having some element of redemption for our caveman!
Methuselah (paynowlivelater at gmail dot com)
Yeah, I knew you were just going by the stereotype, but hey, Paleo is all about debunking harmful stereotypes like ‘fat is bad’ and ‘meat is unhealthy’, right? So to me it doesn’t make sense to then go affirming other, equally harmful stereotypes in order to do that. But yes, it’s not a big deal and i’m sure most readers saw the comedy element. Thanks for approving my comment, that was very good of you!
Jules,
I love your “about me” page. I have an opposite background. A fitness fanatic who slowly has joined the ranks of Web-nerd. My little blog now pays the bills so it is now my full-time job.
I usually have to “geek out” to take a 15 minute Street Fighter 4 break every 4 hours.
Good stuff!
Rusty
Nice meeting you Jules :)
weights will def help with healing the damage of a sedentary lifestyle/profession.
Cheers,
Yavor
I’m also a computer nerd turned fitness attic. In highschool, I used to spend hours in front of the computer. Over the summers, I’d log between 13-17 hours on the computer per day! I’m pretty sure the long periods of sitting is what caused my disc herniation between L5 and S1 when I was only 17. Even now, in my mid-twenties, I notice that when I spend a lot of time sitting (still on the computer) I’m more apt to run into back problems than when I keep active.