I started working on a very deep post about my recent job move, but then I realized I don't have anything interesting to say about it, at least not yet. Instead, I'm going to talk about something very mundane: exercise.

As background I will tell you a tiny bit about the job move. And since this is a new blog and people might stumble upon it who don't know me, I am an amateur photographer, but during the work week I am an attorney. I am not one of those unhappy attorneys who loathe their job and their life and long to give it all up to follow their dream of being an artist or a clown or a kindergarten teacher. I love my job. It's interesting. I work with great people, both colleagues and clients, and what I do matters. Photography is my way to bring brain balance to my life: I love my job, but I have other interests as well. This is one of them. 

Back to the story at hand. I left the firm where I had worked for 12 years, my first and only job since taking the bar, and moved to another firm that does similar work. The move was not motivated by any problems at my old job, far from it, but by what I think is a better opportunity for me at the new place. Besides, sometimes you just have to shake the tree you're in just to see if you'll fall out. I'm not sure where to go with that metaphor after that.

I started the new job in June. The new office is in El Segundo, CA. This is meaningless to anyone who does not live in the LA area, but while the office is not really that much closer in terms of commuting time, I'm now back in LA County. The office is in a commercial corridor that has all the yummy chain stores: Trader Joe's, REI, Costco, Equinox, 24 Hour Fitness, Starbucks (not everyone agrees that it's yummy, I get it), Fresh 'n' Easy. And I haven't even had a chance to fully explore yet, there are lots of as-yet-unexplored commercial centers between my office and Sepulveda Boulevard, where there is a Whole Foods and a Yogaworks, for starters. Lots of restaurants of all sizes and prices, too. A number of these places are within walking distance. 

The key to this post is the 24 Hour Fitness.

Due to a special offer many years ago, I've been paying $99 a year for my 24 Hour Fitness gym membership for about a decade. If you're a member of 24 Hour Fitness, you can go to any club of the same level, and all the ones of lower level. I am a member of a Super Sport club, so all the clubs in LA County, basically, are accessible on my already existing and obscenely inexpensive membership. Thus, I can use the 24 Hour Fitness a block from my office to my heart's content.

Here's another thing you may not know: I hate gyms with a white hot passion. Well, no. Gyms bore me to within an inch of my life, and there's no passion, good or bad, in extreme boredom. I prefer being outside. But the reality is that I can't run anymore and I don't have time to gallivant in the wilderness with any regularity. (Also, I'm justifiably weary of the wilderness since I'm a hopeless city slicker.) As I get older, I need to keep an eye out for the inevitable loss of muscle.

So I'm sucking it up and going to the gym after work, once or twice a week. (I also go to yoga once or twice a week.) But here's the genius part: I only go for 30 minutes. I time myself. 30 minutes and I'm gone. I do something different each time: bicycle, stair machine, treadmill, elliptical, weights, rowing machine, or a combination of a couple of those things. I don't give myself time to get bored, although 30 minutes on an elliptical was about 25 minutes longer on that thing than I wanted to be on it, but you know what I mean. 

These quickies seems to be the way to make myself go with any consistency. I’m not going to win any athlete of the year awards, that’s for sure. And my FitBit is thoroughly unimpressed with me. As far as it's concerned, I'm a couch potato. It has even stopped giving me encouraging messages in the morning when I first put it on. I swear, if one of these days I get an "Well, look who decided to get up"s, that thing is flying right out the window. Technobastard.

But I digress. 

Unexpectedly, I am enjoying the rowing machine. I feel like it should be harder; it’s just kind of lovely and meditative. Maybe it gets hard when you do it on actual water for hours. I bet that’s hard. But as I sit there “rowing” I find myself regretting not trying out for crew when I was in college. Not that I would have made it, but who knows, maybe they might have been desperate right then. Of course, at that time, I didn’t know that crew was even a thing, I was an Italian coming from Japan.

Anyway, point is, I wouldn't mind trying the rowing thing.