If you haven’t heard Janet Jackson’s classic song “Nasty” at this point, I don’t even know what to say to you. I’m not even the first comic artist to do a strip about it. Highlights from the music video include male crop tops, shoulder pads, and those funny squared-off haircuts that seem to have been popular in the 80s.
Everything was so square in the 80s, in a literal sense. What was with that design choice?
So following my marathon last week, which you may have read about here, I decided to run ten miles on both Wednesday and Thursday, sort of to see how I was feeling (the answer: tired). Then Friday we lifted legs. Some of you know that I lift with moderate seriousness[1]. This is something Bryan got me into just about six years ago next week(!) when we got our first gym membership together. Over time, I have come to appreciate leg day, because legs are a large muscle group and one that can do a lot of weight, so you can justify eating a lot of food after lifting legs.[2] For the last couple of months, I have been de-loading my squat (i.e., lifting less weight) to fix some problems with my form. So I was usually lifting about 95-100 lbs, but Friday I decided to go back to my typical working weight of 135 lbs (aka 100% of my body weight). Although I decided I would do five sets with five reps each rather than my more usual three sets of ten reps each, my quads unsurprisingly were not sold on the sudden increase. Then Saturday morning, I met my running group for thirteen (rather painful, hilly) miles. At this writing (Saturday night), my quads are no longer speaking to me. Basically I am currently sitting on the ground in front of the sofa and although I’m hearing a noise from the other room that suggests the dog is doing something untoward, I am having a really hard time motivating myself to get up and go check on the situation. Even the process of getting from a standing position to the floor where I could use my foam roller was rather harrowing. I may stay here forever.
Consequently, a new comic. Because I could sit on the ground and watch cooking videos and finish the inking. But hopefully my sabbatical is over and there will be more to come soon.
Anyway, dogs. So as the somewhat controversial Cesar Millan likes to say, dogs like to have jobs. This is especially true for working dogs like German shepherds and Australian shepherds, but it also seems to be true for regular normal house dogs like the shiba inu and the “mostly a flat-coated retriever.” If you don’t give the dogs a job, they come up with one themselves, I guess, because our dogs have certainly made a decision that they are each in charge of watching one of us. For the most part, when we are working during the day, we are in different rooms, and Edgar will be in my room while Maya is in B’s room. I am not sure how they came to this assignment, but it seems to be pretty consistent. If I move to another room to work, say, while Edgar is asleep (dogs spend most of their time asleep, much like cats), soon he will wake up and come find me in the new location. Similarly, I will find Maya either in the room where B has gone to nap, or occasionally in the next room if he has closed the door. Why do they act like this? How did they make the decision of which dog to assign to which human? And crucially, if we added either another dog or another human to the mix, what would happen?[3]
Questions that will probably not get answered.
We’ll file this under ML88.J3 L86 2014, for Literature on music–Aspects of the field of music as a whole–Visual and pictorial topics–Pictorial works–Musicians—Individual musicians, A-Z.
[1] Moderate seriousness defined as lifting 50-100% of my weight on most exercises, but without grunting, flexing in the mirror, or dragging along a gallon jug of either water or BCAAs to drink while lifting. Anyway, we lift on a body part-based rotation rather than an upper/lower split or that sort of thing. This fact included for the lifting nerds?
[2] Not that I need that sort of justification to eat a lot. Since my race, my diet has consisted mostly of romaine lettuce with parmesan cheese and Cesar dressing (a modified Cesar salad) and also cookies.
[3] When Daniel and Claire came to visit last, I think Edgar spent some of his time watching Daniel as well as me, but we were working in the same room enough that I can’t say for sure. He did really like Daniel though. We haven’t had any other guests either dog seemed to be as fond of.