The scale at my gym used to sit next to the water fountain, right in front of all the cardio machines. Under those circumstances, weighing yourself suddenly becomes an even larger test of your mettle. Can you stand out in front of all the hyper-fit gym bunnies and big, dumb, aging jocks while you balance out that scale? And remember, it was out in the open, so you can't do all those tricks you use to bring yourself down a few ounces, like take off your shoes or all of your clothes. The most you could do under the circumstances was maybe put your iPod on a nearby shelf and exhale as completely as possible before stepping on the scale.
Of course, I never got near the thing.
But for some reason, the scale was moved into the women's locker room. The first time I noticed it was when I was with Kelly, my workout partner, and I said, "Look! What the hell's that thing doing in here?" She was, like, "What? Hasn't that always been in here?"
Uh, no. If it had always been in here, I might've noticed that it has a name:
What the hell is a 'Detecto'?
Kelly said, "You get on it and it's all, like, 'I detecto you ate Cheetos for dinner last night.'" And I was all, like, "I detecto you need to lay off the pizza."
About Kelly: It turns out that one of her secret Superhero powers is the ability to issue hilarious nicknames. Take that guy I wrote about earlier, the flamingly gay guy who wears super-short shorts and sunglasses to the gym: Kelly has him dubbed "Gay Spiderman." And you know? He is totally what Spiderman would be like if he were gay. She nicknamed one of the yoga students--a sexy grandma type with a fake tan over a real tan and a handful of random and inexplicable dreadlocks--"Jack Sparrow." Which is hilarious. (But maybe it's hilarious in a "you had to be there" kind of way.)
Dave came to the gym with us tonight, too. He was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of my current Gym Boyfriend. Unfortunately, when I asked him to rate my Gym Boyfriend on a scale from one to ten, he gave Gym Boyfriend a five. It wasn't even a solid five. Gym Boyfriend took a fifty-percent deduction for having bad lifting form. I was, like, "Oh, does he actually lift weights?" because as far as I'm concerned, all he has to do is walk around looking gorgeous. He does that all right. And, you know what? Maybe out in the real world, he'd be a five, but in Gym World? If you were to line up all the men at my gym and rate them solely on the basis of their looks, my Gym Boyfriend would be close to the top, like, in the top five--maybe even in the top three. Behind Gym Boyfriend would be a long line of what Kelly calls "Bloated Raisins," those old guys who started lifting weights in 1957 because they saw one of those Charles Atlas "Are you tired of being a ninety-eight pound weakling and having sand kicked in your face?" ads in the back of the Superman comic books or they were inspired by Jack LaLanne's first television appearance. Now they're a bit old and a bit wrinkled and still dutifully trudging to the gym three times a week. Gotta love that.
Anyway, this day turned out to be oddly busy, from the early ditchwalk with Kelly and Kevin and Lewie, to the dim sum lunch with Kelly, Shawn (who I think would be the perfect daddy to have) and Shawn's wife Paula, to the workout with Kelly and Dave, to dinner with Jean, Jan, Kelly and Dave, to an hour spent playing with Kelly and Jean's rescued kitties. Honestly, I don't usually socialize that much in a week.
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