I Went to the Gym this Weekend

It may be difficult to see my bulging muscles, due to them being covered with several layers of winter blubber, but I assure you they exist and are awesome! I am like an Adonis wrapped in bacon.

I love the naive exuberance of a new gym membership - the endorphins released by body parts that have not felt oxygen in years - the belief that that this time I'll stick with it - my dream of landing a movie role as the sexy-but-shallow love interest opposite Scarlett Johansson. I am going to try to ride this wave of obliviousness as long as I can.

This pleasure is in addition to the ongoing show of sexy women huffing it on the treadmills in shorts and skin-tight T-shirts - "eye-candy" it is sometimes called. They get to check me out too, but that is more like "eye-pork-rinds". I like to believe they are thinking, "If he keeps working out, he might be good looking someday". I know that is what I think when I stand in front of the mirror and suck in my gut.

I got a free fitness assessment when I signed up. It included having to lift up my shirt in the middle of the gym to have my torso fat measured with calipers. That was motivating. Especially knowing that if I bust my ass for a few months I can get reassessed and lift up my shirt again. Then all heads will turn. Maybe even towards me this time.

To inject some levity into the gym orientation and fat assessment, I cracked a few jokes to the personal trainer unfortunate enough to be helping me. Instead of laughing, she'd stare at me blankly like I had spoken in Esperanto. My idea of humor is to think of the best thing to say and then say the exact opposite, so I understand when some people don't find it terribly amusing. When my act is bombing, I only have one solution: crank the silliness up a couple notches! I still never got her to laugh or even smile a little.

A week later I took my teenage sons in for gym orientation and the same trainer helped them. They told me later that she talked a lot about me and how funny I was. I guess she had been laughing on the inside. It's good know that that even though I am not in as good shape as I used to be, I still have my winning personality.