Take a stab at it

I have a good idea about the first thing you noticed when you looked at this picture. I saw it too. The iPhone makes me look like I still have a 32-inch waist. Damn I love that phone.

The other thing you might have noticed are what look like meth-tweaker track marks on both my arms. "He really needs to stop bingeing Breaking Bad."

I have to admit when they first appeared, they actually were a pretty combination of blue, purple, yellow and green. I sort of stared at them, detached from the fact they were actually my arms. Which is better than staring at my detached arms. Word play, it's ON!

Anyway, I think it was a lot to go through for a regular blood test.

I take a couple of meds for blood pressure and cholesterol. It's a pretty common cocktail. Whenever I start talking about it I'm always surprised how many of my friends are also in the same artery clogging, systolic and diastolic boat. I mean sure, I could drop a lot of weight and I'd be off both pills. But I'd have to have much more self-discipline, will power and respect for myself and my body. That's just crazy talk.

Anyway, every six months I go in for a blood test to make sure the Lipitor isn't acting like a meat mallet pounding my liver into ground round. Just one of the lovely possible side effects of cholesterol medicine, along with short term memory loss and, wait, what was the other one?

See what I did there? I still got it.

Now I'll be the first to admit I don't have the best veins, even though I do work my guns lifting those Double-Doubles up and down. And I've had excellent blood draws in the past. Sometimes it's over before I even know it's happened—which is the case with many things in my life.

Clearly this wasn't one of those times.

One of the downsides to being me, and despite how easy I make it look there are several, is that I have no problem watching while they stick me with the needle and make the draw. I know some people can't watch, but I have to. So I had a nice view of the technician moving the needle around, trying in vain to find the vein (sorry). After what seemed like forever, she decided to try the other arm. You see how that went. But somehow she managed to get enough blood out of me.

The good news is I don't have to go through it again for another six months or so.

Until then, I'll be working on getting in better shape. And by better shape, I mean taking more pictures of myself with the iPhone.

Guilty pleasures Part 4: Carrie

I know we're all thinking it, so I'm just going to man up and come right out and say it.

Few things are more fun than watching a girl covered in pigs blood take out after the mean girl and give her what she deserves. See, it's better when you talk about it.

Number four in my Guilty Pleasures series is the remake of the 1976 film Carrie. The original starred, and made a star of, Sissy Spacek. This new one stars Chloe Grace Moretz as the prom queen not to be messed with.

A quick recap: Carrie is the daughter of a religious fanatic who sees sin everywhere and in everything. As a result, she shelters Carrie from the world around her, which apparently includes telling her that her Aunt Flo will be arriving when she hits a certain age.

When that time of the month finally arrives for Carrie, it comes in the girls shower room at the school gym. And it terrifies her.

Apparently the only kind of girls that attend her high school are mean girls, because they throw tampons and pads at her then videotape her on the shower floor in her bloody towel and post it online.

Thus begins the theme of blood that courses throughout the film.

The leader of the mean girl pack is a girl named Chris, and if you know anything about Carrie's powers of telekinesis, you know it's not going to end well for Chris.

Julianne Moore as her mom doesn't pack the authentic craziness of Piper Laurie in the original, but she's fine and manages to color all the fanatic numbers.

But because we know what's coming at the end, basically the film is ninety minutes of waiting for the pigs blood to be poured on Carrie and her date at the prom, and Carrie to exact her revenge on everyone who did it. And laughed at her. And tried to be nice to her (say goodbye to the sympathetic swim coach).

Special effects are considerably better as you'd expect, and Moretz gives a good creepy-eyed performance as she's crushing bad boys in the accordion bleachers and causing cars to stop, throwing bad girl Chris' face through the windshield in slow motion.

I know I'm not supposed to like it, but that's why it's a guilty pleasure. Like I said in part 1 of the series, which was about the Final Destination films, there's nothing more entertaining than watching snotty, teenage stereotypes behave badly and then get what's coming to them.

In fact, in this movie, it was bloody good fun.