Gym Day in Germantown

Because my last wee entry seemed sort of like one of those death-cries like when Marla Singer calls Ed Norton after she’d popped all those pills in “Fight Club,” I thought I’d give a little update to let everyone know that I’m still kicking.

Not having a lot to do, as I’ve beat to death in previous entries, has amplified my depression time and time again, so I spend more time than one might think facilitating “depression management,” since the thought of meds makes me roll my eyes. Effin pharmaceutical companies. Whores. They’re all WHORES I TELL YOU!

Seriously, though. I have crappy, short-term, you-can-only-use-it-if-you’re-air-lifted-to-the-Med-and-have-to-talk-out-of-a-Stephen-Hawking-box insurance right now, so meds aren’t an option. Shout out to Joey L re: Stephen Hawking boxes.

I’ve been doing a lot of work that might seem menial but has been very therapeutic for me. I’ve been working on my book and trying to articulate my whole L.A. experience and the cultural differences and all that, and I feel like it’s coming along pretty well. I’ve also been working on these effing grad school aps, which are starting to wear me out, but once I’m over that hurtle, it will be well worth it. I think.

I also did something on Friday that I haven’t done in a long time.

Crack.

Just kidding. I’ve never done crack.

Wait. You don’t “do” crack. You smoke it, right?

Clearly I need to catch up on “Intervention.”

Anyway, on Friday, I went to an exercise class with my friend! And it was actually pretty fun.

I used to occasionally go to some sort of sweat-your-face-off, 300 degree yoga class with my neighbor at a studio full of sculpted gay dudes in Santa Monica and I’d always leave feeling sick and empty and sore and wanting to gorge myself on pizza and Chunky Monkey afterward, but I also felt a little better, like I was able to buy into the whole Eastern voodoo hippie stuff for a few minutes and make those really mad groaning noises and think of everything in my life that made me mad and I could just let that negative energy spew out of my body like puke. But yoga also made me bored a lot because you just stand or sit or pretzel yourself into ONE position for freaking EVER and I’d have those flashbacks of when I’d cross my eyes as a kid and my uncle would say, “Your eyes are gonna stick like that if you do that for too long!” and I’d be afraid that my body would be frozen in time in the “Warrior 2” position until kingdom come.

So I have this love/hate relationship with exercise. I like the idea of it, but I don’t always like it in reality if it’s really boring or if I have to be in a real gym.

I never go to gyms because I’m insecure and I hate the smell of sweat and I have performance anxiety and big hulky men who shave their calves and lift trucks over their heads make me very, very uncomfortable. I hate those stupid slutty girls who walk around with their Under Armor spray painted onto their-rock hard bodies, and they all have names like “Chrissy” or (I almost wrote a really cheap hooker name right here and then I realized that one of my readers has this name and I’d hate to offend her on purpose. So just fill in this blank with some slutty whore name) and you never actually see them WORK OUT, you just see them prancing around in their booty shorts trying to seduce a hulky gym man-whore with the IQ of an eggplant. I am so grossed out by those kinds of women. They make me want to start burning bras and listening to Gloria Steinem tapes and going undercover as a gym whore to really see what it’s like self-marginalize and to expose all of the stupidity and desperation.

But, all caustic tirades about women who marginalize themselves aside, Friday at this particular gym was Senior Citizen day or something, and I didn’t feel intimated at all.

We walked into the class with a bunch of late-Boomer Germantown housewives, and we collected all of our equipment- those rubber band things, blocks, a huge exercise ball, a basketball that weighed 400 pounds, a yoga mat with someone else’s disgusting sweat all over it.

Then our instructor lady started the class.

Let me preface this by saying that the instructor lady looked like she was about 50 years old, and she did NOT, under ANY circumstances, have a hot bod the way you think that a personal fitness person would have. She was wearing a work out shirt that showed her flabby arms and she was wearing pants so tight that you could clearly see her frontal camel toe and her butt looked like a big old salami sandwich sitting vertically.

Anyway. I sort of thought to myself that this class would totally be a joke, because our leader lady was old and not very fit and her butt looked like a salami sandwich.

Boy, was I wrong.

That lady kicked my butt. She also came back to where I was (insecure and behind everyone else since I hate physical exercise) and kept smacking me on the arss, trying to put more stress on my hammies and all that.

It was awesome.

I haven’t laughed or grimaced like that in a while, and it sort of made me want to grow up and be an absolutely INSANE, old, unfit fitness instructor and yell and scream at a bunch of 55 year old women in spandex and talk about how exercising justifies eating four bags of Halloween candy.