They say that the older you get, the more you realize what you don't know. I'd have to agree with them, whoever "they" are. It's recently come to my attention that living a healthy lifestyle requires math skills and a darn good calculator. I wasn't aware of this fact before now.
Yesterday morning I got up and took the dog for a walk. To counteract this healthy behavior, I came home and ate a Pop-Tart. OK, it was two Pop-Tarts.
It's all about balance.
This morning I did the whole walking thing again, but I'm out of Pop-Tarts, so I'm going to have to bake some cookies. Again, balance is essential. I'm concerned, though, that the calories I burn making the cookies will negate the eating of the cookies. I'll have to do some calculations to find out just how many chocolate chip cookies I'll have to eat to keep my system in check.
Let's see, eight times the square root of a cup of lard, plus the number of mixer rotations, divided by the coefficient of the gross national product of Kuala Lampur. Ten. I'll have to eat 10 cookies to make this come out right. And to think I never thought math would be relevant in the real world.
Then of course I'll need an ice-cold glass of milk to drink while I'm munching on the cookies. One cookie to ... oh, say half a glass of milk. If the cookies outlast the milk, I'll need to refill the glass. One time I ate an entire box of cereal this way because there was either milk or cereal left over, and that caused me anxiety, so I had to keep putting in more milk or more cereal until finally there was no more cereal. I had achieved balance.
Don't laugh. You know you've done that before.
Back to my calculations. Ten cookies should go with five glasses of milk, but that means I'll be lifting my hand to my mouth in that classic workout routine favored by housewives with too much time on their hands. This is going to be a tricky calculation.
Ten cookies times three hand-to-mouth maneuvers divided by the weight of the fingernail polish applied to my nails, plus one wedding ring equals the fact that I don't know what I'm doing. No wonder dieting is so frustrating! You need a degree in mathematics to succeed.
I'm hungry again. I wonder how many cookies I can eat to counteract the typing I've just done? Let's see, 1,096 characters with spaces (always count the spaces because pushing down on the space bar is a seriously underrepresented source of calorie burn in the dieting world) times 15 chocolate chips per cookie, divided by the number of mastications by my mandible divided by the algorithms of deep-space telemetry for Venus.
Five. I come up with five. Is that what you got? No? Are you sure? Check again. I'm OK if you got a higher number than I did, but if you came out with a lower number of cookies, then I think I can say with some degree of certainty that you simply don't understand the equation.
It's all about balance, remember? Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Woof. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to calculate how many calories are burned as my eyes (times two!) move from left to right reading the words on this page. I'm sure there are a couple more cookies in that for me.
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