Tuesday, October 14, 2008

COMMUNICATION!

Public gyms creep me the frak out. Every time I step onto a treadmill and notice the sweat residue on the handrails, presumably from the person who was running on it before me, it takes everything within me to not just turn around and run out.

Things That Are Weird About My Gym:

1) It's weird that you can see what everyone who is running on treadmills/doing the elliptical things/etc. is watching on their personal TVs while they work out. Yesterday, I spotted a man well into his 40s watching "I Love Money" and a younger woman gazing transfixedly into her small slice of visual heaven: an "Everybody Loves Raymond" rerun. (Because I couldn't figure out how to change the station on my personal TV, it appeared to any passersby that I was watching a senate hearing on C-SPAN. Hah. Little did they know my headphones were connected to my iPod, not the TV... and I was listening to this. Joke's on you, sweaty man wearing a headband!)

2) In addition to these individual TVs, there are large TV monitors up on the wall that, theoretically, I guess you can watch while you work out - though that would be weird. At all times of day, these monitors are inexplicably playing pop music videos from 5-10 years ago, exclusively. Over the course of the past few weeks, I have witnessed a steady rotation of Ashlee Simpson's "La La," Mandy Moore's "Candy" and the classic JoJo ditty, "Get Out (Leave)." How much do you love parentheticals in song titles btw? (So much!) Apparently the dude who owns my gym has a thing for platinum blond nymphets who are pretty decent at lip-syncing.

3) There is a room in my gym behind where the weight machines are located called the "Communication Room." It looks sort of like an office, I suppose. I was going to take a picture of it with my Blackberry (yes, I bring my Blackberry to the gym - on the scale of tools, I'm somewhere between Brody Jenner and a wrench) but a gym employee was loitering in front of the door. What goes on in the Communication Room?! Is it for verbal communicating - as in, if two dudes need to talk things out using their words after getting into a locker room scuffle? Or is it for physical "communicating" - as in, if two exercisers who have been eyeing each other across the gym need to exert their bodies in a different kind of way? COMMUNICATION! What a word! It can mean so many different things!

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