gyms are weird
I spend a lot of time at the gym. I try to make it everyday: something feels curiously wrong with me if I haven't managed to drag my reluctant ass onto an elliptical machine on a daily basis. All the health magazines would probably consider this a very good thing and applaud me, but sometimes I am not so sure. In my experience, gyms are not storehouses of happy, pretty, well adjusted people. They are instead bubbling pits of insecurity, of which I am a charter member.
You can see it in the eyes of quite a few of the other regulars, the people I see every day but never speak to. When you're a girl at the gym, you learn pretty quickly that making eye contact with any male, even accidentally, is a pretty lousy idea. No one wants to have big liquid eyes watching you do chest presses, no matter how flattering it initially is.
And the men are all insecure too. Some are working endlessly to be better at baseball or football or whatever team sport they hinge their teenage existences on. Some are really short or really slender or some other unacceptable male trait, and thus are doing their best to reconfigure Nature, leading to the kind of amusing sight of a 5'0 guy with biceps bigger then his own head. The most amusing Insecure Gym Guy is always the guy who's obviously taking some sort of steroid, who is 6'7 and hairy and looks a little bit like he might want to cry, doing another bicep roll in an intentionally loosely fitting tank top. I would give them a hug but the testosterone might knock me back. Or kill me.
Some of the women are of course just as tragic, perhaps more so since society has beaten into our initially innocent heads that we must look like Gisele Bundchen or commit seppuku. This leads to hordes of marginally overweight women stepping onto treadmills and suffering horribly through 45 minutes of what must be extremely painful, probably totally unnecessary physical exertion. They are doing their damdnest to defy nature, apparently hoping that treadmills possess the ability to make their legs giraffe-like and their necks akin to swans, which of course is an unrealistic ambition indeed. They also have a curious tendency to park their cars as close to the entrance as possible. I have heard that walking burns calories too!
And then we have Anorexia Girl. There's one at every gym, an emaciated veiny looking woman wearing a big shirt to cover her immense perceived fatness. You get the sense you could probably knock her over with an extremely intent stare, but she's there every day anyway, forcing herself to get in that hour and a half of exercise before she eats her daily strawberry. I pity her - how could I not - but I have no idea how she could be helped. Should gyms allow people with underweight BMI's to self-mutilate themselves by way of Nautilus machines? It's a nice thought, but no one wants to be weighed when they walk into the gym. They're already insecure enough. Anorexia Girl is another unfortunate victim of I Will Never Be Pretty Enough syndrome, played out in gyms across the country. Come to the aerobics class at 4:30! We'll sweat to hits of the 80's!
You can see it in the eyes of quite a few of the other regulars, the people I see every day but never speak to. When you're a girl at the gym, you learn pretty quickly that making eye contact with any male, even accidentally, is a pretty lousy idea. No one wants to have big liquid eyes watching you do chest presses, no matter how flattering it initially is.
And the men are all insecure too. Some are working endlessly to be better at baseball or football or whatever team sport they hinge their teenage existences on. Some are really short or really slender or some other unacceptable male trait, and thus are doing their best to reconfigure Nature, leading to the kind of amusing sight of a 5'0 guy with biceps bigger then his own head. The most amusing Insecure Gym Guy is always the guy who's obviously taking some sort of steroid, who is 6'7 and hairy and looks a little bit like he might want to cry, doing another bicep roll in an intentionally loosely fitting tank top. I would give them a hug but the testosterone might knock me back. Or kill me.
Some of the women are of course just as tragic, perhaps more so since society has beaten into our initially innocent heads that we must look like Gisele Bundchen or commit seppuku. This leads to hordes of marginally overweight women stepping onto treadmills and suffering horribly through 45 minutes of what must be extremely painful, probably totally unnecessary physical exertion. They are doing their damdnest to defy nature, apparently hoping that treadmills possess the ability to make their legs giraffe-like and their necks akin to swans, which of course is an unrealistic ambition indeed. They also have a curious tendency to park their cars as close to the entrance as possible. I have heard that walking burns calories too!
And then we have Anorexia Girl. There's one at every gym, an emaciated veiny looking woman wearing a big shirt to cover her immense perceived fatness. You get the sense you could probably knock her over with an extremely intent stare, but she's there every day anyway, forcing herself to get in that hour and a half of exercise before she eats her daily strawberry. I pity her - how could I not - but I have no idea how she could be helped. Should gyms allow people with underweight BMI's to self-mutilate themselves by way of Nautilus machines? It's a nice thought, but no one wants to be weighed when they walk into the gym. They're already insecure enough. Anorexia Girl is another unfortunate victim of I Will Never Be Pretty Enough syndrome, played out in gyms across the country. Come to the aerobics class at 4:30! We'll sweat to hits of the 80's!