2004-4-2 1:24 p.m.
It's A Small World, New Millenium Style
So I've started dragging my slacker ass to the gym. I ditched Old Scummy Cheap-Ass Gym (those of you in the Bay Area will know precisely which one I'm talking about) and shelled out for Nice Clean Yuppie Gym. Nice Clean Yuppie Gym is clean, of course, and it's right on BART, and it includes such niceties as towel service and equipment that's not broken and shower floors that aren't ridden with athlete's foot fungus. Did I mention that it's also way cleaner than that other dump?
Membership also includes a couple of sessions with a personal trainer, in which they sit down with you, go over your entire life and tell you how not to be such a lazy fuck and become fit and perky. I like my trainer a lot -- besides being very well qualified, and having a fit body with curves instead of that of an irritable, underfed greyhound, she's fun and snarky and has a cheerfully sadistic streak that I respond well to.
But there's a problem. No, the problem is not that I feel like I've been beaten with a club after last night's workout, which is really only fitting since I've been getting in touch with what a sad mass of flab and knotted muscles I am. That one is just not going to sort itself out without many, many days of me limping around, twitching and sore, with an internal monologue chanting MY ASS HURTS on endless loop.
No, the dilemma is only one that we could have in the 21st century. It's the dark episode in my trainer's past that I only discovered when she e-mailed me some stuff she wanted me to read and cc:d one of her work accounts. It's that she used to spam one of the newsgroups I read. The site she was advertising was a dating advice site aimed at African-Americans, and the newsgroup in question, by sad accident rather than design, was one of the whitest damn enclaves on the Internet. While her site wasn't exactly off-topic, it was missing its intended audience by a rather wide margin, and she wasn't a regular participant in the group, so it was a pretty serious breach of netiquette.
I debated it and ended up not saying anything. After all, it was five years ago, and she's apparently since reformed. Besides, this is the woman charged with guiding me through my physical rehabilitation, and she might hurt me more.