Friday, September 19, 2008

I'm a wii (un)fit

Well, after seeing that my 8 yr old nephew and niece have started blogs, I figured it was about time that I started one of my own. Also, I've heard that having a blog can be self therapeutic in relieving some of the stresses of the day; but mainly I'm just looking for something to give me an excuse to not study.



Being 24 yrs old, a mormon, and single, I often find myself either hanging out with people who are married (my age) or who are quite a bit younger than me. Because of this, I am either the loser 5th wheel or the creepy old guy hitting on 18-19 yr old girls. Lose, lose everytime. Last weekend I found myself in a particularly deplorable situation being not only the 5th wheel but also the oldest in the group.



My friend Todd who is getting married next month (traitor...) invited me to come to a high school football game (with his fiancee and another couple) to watch his brother Dak play on the varsity team. The game was pretty good--they won--and Dak, #7, had a great game with a few sacks and around 10 tackles.

As a side note, I guess in Arizona high school football they must have some
kind of etiquette for how they cheer for their team because each time I
yelled something out about three or four booster club moms would glare back at
me with a look like, "Shouldn't you be pumpin' my gas or something..." On
one instance it might have had something to do with WHAT I was
yelling--I remember feeling kind of dumb when I couldn't rember the name of the
mascot so I yelled 'Go Black Team!' and of course a group of African-Americans
swung around to glare at me. For a half second I thought about following up with
'Go Black JERSEY Team' but I could see that the damage was already done
and I didn't want to draw anymore attention to myself. I'm really not a
racist....


Anyhow, after the game we decided to head back to Todd's place and do what all hip early 20 year olds do on a Friday night.....play video games.


To our credit, however, we ended up playing what some would consider a fairly innovative game called Wii Fit. For those of you unfamiliar with Wii Fit, its basically nintendos attempt at redress in the wake of the obvious correllation between obesity/anti-social behavior and extended video game playing. Unlike most video games, Wii Fit actually forces people to move around and masks exercise with enjoyable activities like ski jump (designed to help balance) or doing push-ups (ok, i guess that one's not too subtle).

When you first play Wii Fit, it has you create a profile and it runs some diagnostic tests (weight, body/mass index, balance,....blood test, stool sample) as you stand on what looks like an elongated bathroom scale. This is the platform which acts as the interface and sensor for each of the exercises.