Despite, as this site suggests, liking to think about myself, I’m not normally a big fan of online tests. Certainly not of the sort that categorizes you into some type. (“The Star Wars personality sorter says you’re C3PO!”)

Nonetheless, on a friend’s recommendation, I took OkCupid’s 3 Variable Funny Test, and was surprised to see the description it yielded was pretty much dead on:

Type: The Cutting Edge

Your humor’s mostly innocent and off-the-cuff, but somehow there’s something slightly menacing about you. Part of your humor is making people a little uncomfortable, even if the things you say aren’t themselves confrontational. You probably have a very dry delivery.

Your type is the most likely to appreciate a good insult and/or broken bone and/or very very fat person dancing.

Ah, very very fat person dancing; I laugh out loud each I time I even read that phrase.

Yesterday afternoon, sitting in a bar at La Guardia airport, waiting for a flight to San Francisco by way of Detroit for a short three-day jaunt of public speaking, deal signing and employee hiring, I watched a show on ESPN called Viking.

And, in short, it’s good that I don’t have a television, or else I’d spend all day re-watching Tivo’ed episodes of this show, as it’s absolutely my new favorite in the entire world.

Essentially, it involves a succession of Japanese guys running at top speed through ‘The Ultimate Obstacle Course‘, while a pair of American color commentators inanely summarize the action (“Nagano’s agility, built through years as a commercial fisherman, really shines on this rope maze.”, etc.)

But, really, it’s not so much that I want to watch the show; It’s that I want to be on it. Or, better yet, it’s that I want to live somewhere where I can have a giant Ultimate Obstacle Course of my very own built in the back yard.

Because, get liquored up with a few friends, go barreling through that sucker, and I guarantee you’re going to have an entertaining night.

Most of the time I was in college, I was trying to gain weight. Influenced by some combination of He-Man episodes and Mens Health covers, I – like most of the guys I knew – was convinced that bigger would be better. I took creatine and bench pressed and drank protein shakes and ate and ate. And, the whole time, I stayed 135 pounds.

Which, at 5’6″, put me at precisely the same size as Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. A fact I began to appreciate post-college, as I started to compete in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai fights. The very real threat of getting my ass kicked in front of a crowd kept me honest in the gym, convinced me of the relative importance of function over cosmetics.

But, appreciative or not, I didn’t have much choice: In the five years since college, I stayed at 135 pounds so consistently that I didn’t replace the batteries in my scale when they died about a year and a half back.

Still, last week, in the locker room at the gym where I teach CrossFit classes, I absentmindedly stepped onto a scale, to play with the old sliding-weight mechanism. And clocked in at 150 pounds. Assuming the scale was simply out of whack, I went home, re-batteried my own scale, and weighed myself again. Still 150 pounds.

A caliper test – and the equally reliable ‘jump up and down naked in front of a mirror’ – confirmed that I’m still floating around 8% body fat. Which means, in theory, that I’ve put on some fifteen pounds of muscle.

Certainly, college-aged me would be thrilled. But, so far as I can tell, I look exactly, exactly, like I did fifteen pounds ago.

I said as much this weekend in Denver, to my brother, my parents, my grandmother, my aunt. And, by consensus, none of them had any idea where those extra fifteen pounds went.

Except for my eleven-year old cousin. Who, at several points, knocked on my leg to determine if it might actually be hollow.

Looking at my Gmail inbox this morning, and feeling like a bad Tetris player as I watched the lines pile up far faster than I could clear them out, I decided to take a moment and tally my email count for the past month.

On average: just over 200 pieces of ‘legit’ email and just short of 450 pieces of spam, each and every day.

Looks like it’s time to return to my old trick of stopping sleeping and gong to the bathroom to free up time.

A bit more than a month back, I posted here trying to justify not having television. Tie into the cable network, I protested, and I’d be “dragged by the gateway drugs of The West Wing and Law & Order onto the icy top of a long, slippery slope that runs down, down, down, through Desperate Housewives, Survivor 8 and re-runs of Full House.”

Turns out, however, that even without cable, protected by my standard practice of Netflix-ing past seasons of TV shows one disc at a time, a catchy enough show can still be my undoing.

Friday evening, I threw in the first disc of the first season of 24. By Sunday afternoon, I had downloaded and watched my way through all twenty-four episodes of the first season.

I have, as a result, pre-emptively removed the subsequent seasons from my Netlfix queue. Clearly, I should stop now before this gets any worse.

I eat a lot of food. I mean, a lot of food. I always joke that, while I don’t think I could win an eating contest, if there were a ’24 hour total’ competition, where the winner was the person who consumed the most calories in a single 24 hour stretch, I could easily crush all comers. There’s no meal so large that, two hours later, I couldn’t sit down and eat the same thing again.

This is particularly odd given that, by any account, I’m not very large: 5’6″, 140 pounds. At that size, even using equations that incorporate my high activity level, I should need to consume somewhere around 2100 calories daily.

Usually, that’s what I consume by lunch.

Honestly, I don’t know where the food goes. Maybe I have a tape worm.

Over the years of running companies, my eating has been the butt of ongoing jokes: “Do we need to stop in at Subway and feed Newman before the meeting?” “I don’t know, it could last as long as an hour; can he go that long without food?”

And, of course, it jacks up my grocery bill unbelievably; I can easily eat my way through $150 of supplies within a seven day span, without even counting the numerous business breakfasts, lunches, and dinners intermixed therein.

But, mainly, all that eating garners from friends and family of all ages dire warnings about the inevitable, impending slowdown of my metabolism, and of a consequent slow ballooning into late-twenties obesity.

People tell me about their friend, or child, or husband, or self, who used to be thin as a rail, until he hit 27, when all of a sudden, his metabolism slowed and he porked up.

And they tell me this as though I’m eating every half-hour because I don’t have anything better to do. But, really, trust me, if my calorie needs dropped, if I could somehow eat a normal number of meals a day instead of having to constantly stuff my face, I’d be thrilled – thrilled! – at the time and money saved.

Until then, however, the eating continues. Literally, as I’m off to cook up a second breakfast.

Bon appetit.