I may wobble, but...

Consider the Wii. The Wii is an ingenious video game system that uses motion-sensing remote controls to register your actions and reflect them on the television screen.

The Wii gives kids and adults the opportunity to move around while playing video games like bowling and baseball - until you realize it's the motion of the Wii remote and not the rest of your body that determines what happens on screen. So a tennis stroke, for example, doesn't really require setting your feet, cocking your arm, driving through the ball and following through. All you need to do is flick the Wii remote. My kids figured this out on day one, and often play Wii sports while lying on the couch.

One of the games I like is Wii Fit, which includes yoga, strength training and aerobics. As I may have mentioned in the past, I could lose a few pounds. The other day I saw a picture of myself from college. My head looked huge on my skinny body. Nowadays, my head is considerably larger. Yet despite the massive increase in my head's size, it looks tiny on top of my much, much (much) larger body. So I've decided to enlist the help of the Wii to shape up.

Unfortunately, to use Wii Fit you first need to create an animated cartoon version of yourself called a Mii. The system weighs you and asks your height, and then creates your Mii. Daniel, Madison and Stacy all look like normal cartoon character people, and I look like a Weeble with legs. The only way my Mii could have come out looking close to normal is if I told the Wii I was nine-and-a-half feet tall.

Of course, there's a method to this malevolence. To paraphrase Cal Naughton Jr. in "Talladega Nights": "Alright, tough love it is: Lose weight, idiot!"

The Wii then provides oddly real but not quite realistic animatron trainers that look like mannequins come to life.

One of the exercises is a Push-up Challenge in which you see who can do more push-ups: you or your computer-generated trainer. I don't do that one - I know when I'm being hustled.

For my trainer, I picked the female, partly because I just don't need some cartoon mannequin dude showing me up when I exercise and partly because the female is vaguely attractive.

It's weird though: sometimes I think she may be trying to impress me, and then sometimes I think she's being patronizing, and then sometimes I think she's a cartoon character, and maybe I ought to look for a Wii Psychology game. I mean, this is taking the whole Betty and Veronica thing to a disturbing new level.

All that notwithstanding, the training is going well. Sure, it's not exactly pumping iron, but I've finally realized I'm not trying to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger anymore. Smart goals need to be, among other things, reasonable and realistic, and I just want my Mii not to look like a Weeble. That's reasonable, isn't it?