Almost three years ago I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I had a very interesting job offer which would have given me a unique professional opportunity and I was kind of excited about this. Unfortunately some last moment issues, connected to the visa status I had at that time, did now allow me to finalize this project and the job offer vanished under my eyes.

This was a hard hit on myself. At that time, I just finished my Master in Laws, I finished my job at Twitter (which I loved) and I was in a new city, without any friends and without a job. I started sending tons of resumes everywhere but unfortunately my visa status did not allow me to find any position. It was a sad period for me. I was spending the whole day sending emails to potential employers and every rejection letter was a heavy stone dragging me down and down.

I needed a shake and I have to thank one dear friend for giving me this shake. This friend of mine invited me to join a bootcamp on the beach. I did not even know what “bootcamp” meant. He explained to me that he was exercising three times per week on the beach together with a trainer and some other people. The bootcamp was early in the morning, 7:00 am. At the beginning I said yes just as a way to make my friend happy and because the idea of doing something so early seemed like an adventure to me…and I love adventures.

Well, that day was the beginning of a new phase in my life. Big Mike’s Bootcamp helped me to get the shake I was looking for. I started attending the bootcamp every two days. I made new friends (Mike today is one of the best friends I have here in Los Angeles), my body completely changed and I even added some new adventures, such as the participation at the Tough Mudder competition.

I am so happy about what this Bootcamp has done to me, that I always talk about it (and this post is an example of it). The fact that I talk so much about this Bootcamp has created a very funny situation with my dad. Before continuing into this post, you have to know that my dad is a very busy person and he always have tons of things floating in his mind. The consequence of this is that he picks only parts of the discussions we have on the phone.

Lately it seems like he started picking up only all my discussions about the Bootcamp. I swear that we also talk about many other things but his mind seems to filter all these things and retain only the information about the Bootcamp. As I previously mentioned, I go to the Bootcamp three times per week, for an hour, from 7:00 am to 8:00 am. Time to get back home and take a shower and I am ready to start my day at 9:00 am, three times a week. The other days, when I don’t go to the Bootcamp, I start my day at 7:00 am. This means that the Bootcamp takes only a small fraction of my time.

Well, you would be surprised at how many times, while talking to my father about my current professional status, he tells me: “If you want to have success, you should focus on your career and stop spending the whole time doing the Bootcamp”. In his mind, thus, I workout 12 hours per day, every day. Maybe he thinks my goal is to win the next Mr. Olympia. This is funny, but things even get funnier.

Another thing on which he has been focusing lately is the one time that I told him I had egg whites at breakfast. Egg whites are not popular in Italy, the country where I am originally from, and when I mentioned him that I ordered an omelette made with egg whites, he asked me why. I told him that egg whites are healthier and do not contain cholesterol. He was intrigued by this fact, given that he is very careful in what he eats. The only problem is that from that day on, he started asking me thousands of times if I had recipes for egg whites, how I usually eat egg whites, how do I cook them, etc.

If you combine his focus on my Bootcamp’s attendance and my only time I had egg whites, you realize that in his mind his son living in America does not conduct a normal living. His son, I am sure he believes this, is kind of a strange guy who spends his time going on the beach early in the day, every day, exercise on the beach at least 5 to 6 hours and then he comes back home at noon, cooks egg whites omelette, drinks liquid egg white, then goes back on the beach where he keeps on exercising until the sun goes down and finally comes back home for the night, where he enjoys a tasteful meal based on…you guess…egg whites.

It is amazing how filtering things can bring you to these kind of strange and crazy assumptions.

Well, typing so many things made me hungry. Time for an egg white sandwich 😉