Monday, October 25, 2004
ten o'clock roar: the gym
Well, ladies and ghouls,
It's time for the 10:00 roar.
And at 10:14, this seems like the perfect time to do it.
It's also almost the exact time I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning, after sleeping through my self-apointed wake-up time and several tests of the smoke detectors on every floor of this Darwin-forsaken building. Will they just let the dumb ones who don't get up and smell the smoke in time to escape perish and leave more food and space for the rest of us?? I'm kidding really, such a suggestion is truly horrid, but so is having to sleep through....RIIIIING....silence....RIIIIING.....silence.....RIIIIING....silence. Beauty sleep is a scarce comodity, as I am fast-realizing. It's like gasoline to the Chinese.
After my emergence from bed I hacked up a whole pineapple (it seemed like a good idea at the time), brought it to school and gave half of it to the Boy while we watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the res commons at school. Then I handed in my book report, which after much stress turned out to be not too bad if I do say so myself, and went to the bookstore to hunt down the last of my previously perniciously unavailable textbooks. The bookstore was overrun with Asian private school kids, and I felt very white and middle-class for a while. After paying the usual highway robbery sum of $57 for a small paperback book I left to go to my real destination of the day: the gym (to be henceforth pronounced "guy-m" in honour of one Homer J. Simpson).
I've said this to myself before but never seem to heed my own advice to NEVER go to the 'gyme' between the hours of noon and five, since EVERYONE is there: all the HUGE guys with their tattoos and not-so-subtle staring techniques (do you reaallly expect me to believe you need to stretch your neck out that much?), and the skinny-skinny girls lifting their five-pound weights under great strain, furiously counting the calories they're burning in their heads, jumping frenetically around on the Stairmasters obsessively reading Shape magazine, while fixing their hair in a nearby mirror. The Boy always says that there are two kinds of people who go to the gyme: those who are there to work out, and those who are there to flex their muscles in the mirror and generally admire themselves and others for an hour, before completing their upper-body workouts (cause these guys always look like upside-down triangles -- huge broad shoulders, enormous biceps and chest and spindly little legs) and then leaving, with several backwards glances at hot chick of the day/week/moment.
Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy the gym as much as anyone else, but I also feel that a good portion of that enjoyment comes from watching the silly things people do when they're working out. I am occasionally entertained in a schaudenfreude kind of way by people who rock back and forth while doing bicep curls, and people who allow their entire bodies to be carried by the forces of gravity and by the weights rather than having their muscles do the work. But I'm more amused by girls whose workouts burn the calorie equivalent of me walking to history class and back. I'm talking about the girls who go to the gym to be seen, the kind who come with their sorority sisters or other chattering specimens, and spend all their time gabbing about how little they eat, or how cute that guy over there is, and they spend the whole time in the girls' corner of the gym, never venturing out into the big scary world of the boys.
It should be pointed out that they vast majority of the gym space at my school's gyme is a section in which it is understood that the boys hang out. It's the area with the tattooed maniacs and the dudes grunting and the pull-ups and the bench-pressing and the big scary machines. Let it be noted that severe feelings of intimidation aside, I spend a fair bit of time in the boys' corner, and I'm starting to get the feeling that they're having a lot of trouble categorizing me. I'm clearly not a sorority chick, as shown by the fact that I don't walk around the gym in my underwear (I have witnessed this phenomenon more than once!) or make orgasmic noises while lifting, but I'm clearly not one of the guys, either (this is obvious more due to the way I look than anything I do). And so I get to watch their confused faces as I go about my business, utterly unimpressed by their displays of bravado, an infiltrator in a guys' world. And that's pretty much the way I like it.
But I'm not starting to resemble an upside-down triangle, so don't worry about that.
In other news, I have some slightly crazy plans to learn how to tumble. Not the dirty kind (that I can handle) but the roundoff backhandspring kind. I haven't done gymnastics since I was a kid, but boy do I wish I could be that limber again! ("Man, you've got some fucked-up friends! Limber, though!" -a la Fight Club) Limberness is more useful when you're all grown up, anyway. One doesn't have toys to play with anymore, after all (I know exactly what Dag is thinking here). Anyway, we'll see how that goes.
I had really better get back to my reading on Gypsies and the Holocaust. It's not light-hearted stuff, and the print is so small I'm convinced I'm losing my eyesight.
Another late night for this crazy cat.
Thanks to all who've RSVPed for my b-day. You make me feel like there's something to live for. (tongue planted firmly in cheek)
Love and pineapple,
N
