Rudynate

It's never happened to me. I take pajamas and a few towels. I sleep in the pajamas to protect the sheets and I cover the pillow with a towel so that the spray tan on my neck doesn't rub off on the pillow case. The minute I get back to the room after the finals, I shower, and dry with my own towels.

The hotels will charge you if you get spray tan all over the linens.

I must filter those guys out somehow. The bodybuilders I know are all positive, level-headed guys who happen to look amazing.

It washes right out.

Observations like this about guys with great bodies are often driven by jealousy and envy.

There is too much tipped hair, and I loathe shaped eyebrows on a man - ruins his appearance.

No, I only know the west coast scene. It is odd that straight men go to such lengths with their appearance, but such is the world of competition bodybuilding. There's a huge preoocupation with the "package"- an athlete's total look. They all have snowy-white teeth, perfectly cut hair, perfect skin all over, some hire makeup artists. A lot of them get their trunks and their board shorts custom-made so that they fit perfectly. They have spent hours perfecting their posing routines. They all discuss this stuff openly. Nobody's embarrassed by it. What I find interesting is that there aren't more gay men in the audience than there usually are. Any contest I've ever been to, I've seen a handful of gay guys in the audience, but that's it.

During my last cut, I ate 300 g of carbs daily.

What's wrong with liking well built black men? I would say if you're guilty of anything, it's having good taste in men.

Im quite involved in the bodybuilding scene. I know professional bodybuilders. And I compete myself. I think there's quite a bit of gay-for-pay, but my experience is that gay competitors are pretty rare. I've been working out at a bodybuilding gym in Santa Clara. Every time I go, I see a good looking young Latin guy-complete beast, personal trainer. Every time he gives me kind of a searching look. I promised myself I'm going to find out more about him.

I used to think a docs personality didn't matter as long as he was competent, but I ve changed my mind. Having had the good fortune to be under the care of some docs who are friendly and likable in addition to being competent, I can say it makes a big difference.

How about the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment? Once, I was pontificating about it with my partner as we lay in bed. He fell asleep, and I didn't notice. He said he woke up and I was still talking about the Equal Protection Clause.

What's strange, though, is a lot times,when someone is talking about their circle of friends, they are actually talking about all the people they are friendly with, rather than actual friends. in the early 90s I participated in a support group for discussing all the weird things we had to deal with in the midst of a raging epidemic - grief, survivor guilt, trying to date, etc. etc. One guy mentioned that every time another friend died, he removed their card from his Rolodex and placed it on top of a stack of similar cards on his desk. He said he stopped doing it after the stack had gotten to be a couple of inches high. I didn't say anything, but I thought,"Nobody has that many friends. " It was clear that the people he was talking about werent all friends, but people he was friendly with.

I heard a couple guys talking once in the locker room at my swim club. One was a guy looking for a surgeon and the other was a doctor. The guy looking for the doc was a member of Kaiser - an immense staff-model HMO that started here in the SF Bay area during WWII. The doc said "You can hardly go wrong with a surgeon from Kaiser. They all do so many surgeries in their specialties that it's safe to assume that almost any one of them will be very good. Where Kaiser falls down is on rehab and aftercare, which tends to be poor."

You're right, you should find that out. The scars from my spine surgeries are barely visible because the were closed from the inside out. As a matter of fact, on the outside all there were were a few big wire sutures in a zig-zag and then steri-stips to hold the edges of the wound together.

I think there is a sweet spot as to the doc's age - late 40s to early 50s. I've had two spine surgeries, same surgeon for both, he was in this age range. He was a triathlete, which mattered to me, and chief of the service, so I had no doubts about his maturity, experience or qualifications. I couldn't have had a better doctor, especially for the second surgery which was a 6.5-hour procedure.

I fiddled around with self-hypnosis years ago. It was very good for reaching a deeply relaxed state, but not much else. I concluded that there isn’t an easier softer way to habit change than to just do it. Just by getting up every morning, I’ve gradually stepped into a version of myself that I’m quite comfortable with. Werner Erhard used to say that life’s problems resolve in the process of life itself. And it’s true. What is life but one problem after another?

As a little boy, I was fascinated by carnies. They scared me because they were so rough-looking, but I really liked it when they picked me up to help me into and out of the ride. What I always noticed about them is that they rarely spoke or looked directly at you.

If a profile has lots of photos, I may or may not look at them all. If I think he's really cute and the pics are interesting, I look at them all, I might even study them. But if they're boring, I lose interest and go on to the next profile.

A lot of what is called "aging gracefully" is apologizing for being old.

There are all sorts of organizations that teach it. Buddhist meditation is basically mindfulness meditation. I first learned it in the 70s at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. All Zen Centers have meditation instructors. I have seen instructors at the Rochester Zen Center, the San Francisco Zen Center and the Hartford Street Zen Center.

During the inflation of the late 70s, early 80s, when the prime rate got to 22% or so, you could buy one-year CDS with a rate of 12.5%. That was scary enough for me. The price of gold went so high that there were all these exchanges were you could sell scrap gold for absurd amounts of money.

Nice work!!!

To Christians, 8 is the perfect number. To Jews, 7 is the perfect number. Why don't we say that good things come in 7 or 8?

If you're looking for something simple and dumbed down, look for Bensons "The Relaxation Response." You'll have to find it at a used bookstore. It was published in the 70s.