|
The
Perils of My Healthy Lifestyle
I
thought I was in luck when I saw the sign for a brand new gym
- just blocks from my house! I’ve been a gym member
in the past, but I let my memberships go out of sheer laziness.
Lately I’ve been determined to embrace a healthier
lifestyle. As I explained to Muscles, my “fitness
counselor” at the gym, my fitness goals are to be able to
eat as much as I want and drink lots of beer and margaritas and
still not get fat. Muscles was strangely unimpressed with
my goals. “Are you serious?” he asked after
choking on his bottled water. “Absolutely!”
I said and I turned down his offer of personal training. He
still gave me a free t-shirt. What a guy! Muscles
explained that the gym near my house was still being built, but
I could use their other gym in Soul Killing Suburbia (a.ka. North
Austin)
in the interim for a low, low introductory price. He showed
me brochures touting the gym’s features, including a steam
room, hot tub, massages and a juice bar. Sold! Oh
yeah…they also had cardio equipment, weights and fitness
classes. And a pool! OK, now I was really sold.
I
went to the gym the following day, and really liked it…well,
not the exercise part, but the gym itself was highly cool. It
was clean and lovely and had lots of scary cardio machines that
I could use to burn calories. They also had a bunch of TVs
with cable to watch while you torture yourself with exercise.
Nice place! And it would have been totally out of
my price range if I hadn’t joined the not-yet-existing gym
at the low, low introductory price. I’d get to exercise
with the rich! Oh, I was very self congratulatory about
my gym choice.
And
then I went to the gym on a Monday in the throes of DMS.
What was I thinking? First, I dropped and spilled my bottled
water outside the gym. AAARGH! Then when I got to
the cardio contraption that I planned to use, I realized that
I’d left my headphones at home and would have to read the
closed captioning on CNN to block out the pain of exercise. Damn!!
But still, I was determined. I’d eaten Oreos for lunch
and was feeling all bloated. So I started using the elliptical
machine and did fine for about 20 minutes when all of a sudden
I stepped wrong and fell off the machine, catching one of the
pedals with my shin on the way down. I got back up immediately
and saw that my leg was not only bleeding, but bleeding profusely.
Gross. And kind of distressing… I limped down the
stairs to the front desk to see about getting a bandage.
And that’s when I saw him…a person who causes me to
gasp and become light-headed even when I’m not bleeding
to death. No, it wasn’t Justin
Timberlake. It was my ex-husband.
Oh my.
Old
“Vile Niles” was the love of
my life for 8 years. We met when we were 18 and 19 in line
for the bathroom at a party (ooh, how romantic!) and became inseparable
within a week. We had the kind first love type of romance
that you read about or see as a montage set to music in 80s movies.
You know, with the hand holding and walking in the park and making
out on the subway and stuff. I’m sure we nauseated
a lot of onlookers. It was fun, though. We were wild
about each other and we had all kinds of crazy adventures together.
He made me laugh every day. He is still the person I’ve
been closest to in my life. But it all went to shit at some
point in our mid-twenties. He cheated on me and went to
great lengths to lie to me and betray my trust. And I found
out and divorced him. That’s a short description of
a whole world of pain.
We
aren’t in contact and I hadn’t seen or heard from
him in a couple of years. I didn’t even know he still
lived in town. I tapped him on the shoulder and said hello.
He gasped when he saw me, too. And then he looked at my
leg with alarm. I explained about falling off the elliptical
machine and he burst out laughing. He always thought my
clumsiness was endearing for some reason. (I once read that
lots of guys confuse clumsiness with sexiness. If that’s
true, then it’s quite possible that I am the sexiest woman
alive! But I digress...) VN
was gazing at me and I asked if he wanted to sit outside and talk
for a while. So we sat there on metal benches in the Texas
sun and exchanged the brief version of what each of us has been
doing for the past 3 years. And he said things like, “You
look really great.” and “I think of you all the time.”
He looked older…not in a bad way, just like he had
more life experience or something. He wasn’t the young
guy I remembered…he seemed less sure of himself. More
human. Maybe I was reading all of this into him. Hell,
I’d lost a lot of blood. Interestingly, I felt more confident
around him than I had when we were together. I didn’t
care what he thought of me anymore so I was relaxed and felt free
to joke around and reminisce a little with him and then leave
without any bad feelings.
All
in all, this was a surprisingly nice meeting. It was one
of those times when you realize that some of the life experiences
you thought would hurt forever don’t actually end up doing
so. You move on and change and they just become part of your history.
It was a good thing to learn. I felt strong and healthy as well
as gorgeous and sassy. And I owe it all to the gym. Sort of…
Gigi 8.26.03
|
