Arianna Georgi

 I belong to 24 hour fitness because I joined when I first moved back here with the misguided notion that I might get a trainer.  And I belong to the Frog’s down the street because my work offered me a really nice cheap membership and I was already swimming in the pool once or twice a week to get ready for my first triathlon.  On top of that, I live in sunny San Diego, which means the outside is essentially one big gym.  Also, I have a gym at my apartment complex.  This means, that a ridiculous variety of gyms and fitness activities are at my finger tips whenever I decide to work out but, of course, I generally work in my apartment complex’s gym since it is the closest (and worst).

I am not even really sure it is fair to call my apartment complex’s gym, and “gym.”  It’s actually more of an unventilated room with a TV, a bike, an elliptical trainer, and weight machine.  It has little to no lighting, and smells pretty terrible.  If there’s an exercise room in hell, it probably looks slightly nicer than this and at least has a water machine.  Anyway, there is pretty much no reason you would work out there (especially if you belong to like 5 other gyms) unless you are incredibly lazy or, you have something to hide.

Let’s call it the Curves effect.  Curves is a nice idea and all, but the blacked out windows and “no men allowed” policy means that at least some of the women going there are going because they really don’t want anyone to see them.  The gym at my complex is similar, and since it has very little traffic it attracts a large number of people whose bizarre and/or obsessive compulsive behavior would be noted and probably mocked at 24 hour fitness or Frogs.  A few examples:

1. Guy that wears a large fishing hat and walks on the treadmill at a pace of about 1.2 mph for 3 hours every day while reading mystery novels.

2. Obsessed with stair-stepper in an unhealthy way girl- who works for hours on the stair-stepper, all the while looking utterly miserable and watching Food Network (probably just to torture herself). Since I started living here, I personally have seen her lose about 15 pounds.

3. Crazy southern man with a bowl hair cut that is incredibly ripped and lifts weights for hours in the gym while making various screaming noises.

Now, it’s that last one that really was at the source of this post.  I don’t know what crazy southern man’s deal is, but I like to make up various back stories about him in my head while I exercise to pass the time.  He’s in the gym constantly, and he looks exactly how I would picture a serial killer to look while working out.  He wears black jeans, no shirt, and has glossy black hair in a bowl cut ala Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.  He makes terrifying noises while he lifts weights and then will ask me in a quiet Southern voice if it’s okay that he wants to change the TV to FoxNews.  Occasionally a Lolita-like girl of indeterminate age (I don’t want to know what’s going on there), shows up and mocks him for a while he exercises which he largely seems to ignore.  In short, he’s completely bizarre and would never cut it at a normal gym. 

Crazy Southern Weightlifter is so weird that sometimes I have to wonder if he’s not even a real person, but instead some sort of bizarre social experiment put in the gym to amaze and confound me.  Seriously, how does someone like this exsist?  What is the deal wih the bowl cut?  Why does he scream like that?  While my gym is semi-disgusting, smelly, and dark, it does give me questions like this to ponder while I sweat, which just may make it better than all the other gyms I have at my disposal combined. 

 ”You eat bagels more often than pretty much anyone else I have ever met,” someone recently said to me.  Whether this statement that makes me disgusting or just eccentric is up for debate, but the fact that I eat a lot of bagel is not.  I love bagels (specifically everything bagels with cream cheese).  Now when I lived in New York, this was not an issue since everyone else is also addict and there were plenty of bagel shops every few feet.  Here in San Diego, however, there is only once place within 5 miles of my house for me to get my twice weekly everything bagel and I hate it.  A lot.

It speaks volumes about my addiction to bagels that I continue to go to the bagel store down the street, since going there is an excruciatingly annoying experience on par with anything Dante would have been able to dream up for the Inferno.  I mean, most stores have annoying components, slow salespeople, pushy customers, weird, excessively loud music, etc.  But all of these things have joined together at my local bagel store to make it the perfect storm of irritation. 

For starters, the store is staffed by a bizarre crew of social outcasts who, if they were in a sports movie where they formed a baseball team that eventually took on the champs would be likeable, but since they make my bagels are not.  Manning the bagel-toasting machine, they have world’s oldest man, who I am pretty sure is an ex-pirate that was thrown off the boat for not doing his pirate duties quickly enough.  His massive arm tattoo and deeply lined face stop me from ever saying anything to him but in addition to being incredibly slow, he consistently gets my order wrong.  At this point, I think we may be playing some sort of game I haven’t been clued in on where I tell him what I want, and he in some comical way tries to trick me.  Whole wheat bagel with lox…?  How about an onion bagel with a giant slice of tomato that looks enough like lox that I don’t question it until I get home.  Seriously.  At the cash register is a mid-forties goth woman who is always carrying on a conversation (screamed) with some who’s in the back of the store making the bagels.  I have never seen this man, but I can only imagine (I imagine him with a Mohawk and a pet parrot in case you were wondering).  In between these two are an endless array of unmotivated teenagers. 

I could tolerate the staff, I guess, and write it off to “local color” but the customers that happen to frequent it also seem to be a special level of weird and infuriating.  For starters, I have never been behind anyone in line there that could ever add to 13 (a baker’s dozen), and when ordering a “baker’s dozen” didn’t act surprised that they then had to choose which bagels went in it.  Hours of my life have passed while I stood behind someone picking out bagels, one at a time and taking forever to reach 13 (“and an onion bagel… how many is that???  3???  Okay…. and an everything bagel… how many is that???).  There are also frequently very loud high school kids at the bagel store (I think mentioned in a previous post that I live near a high school), people from the local retirement village who seem nice enough but have a hard time choosing what smear they want on their bagel, and a knitting club on Thursdays (I think they annoy me most of all). 

I complain constantly to anyone that will listen about how much I hate my bagel store.  I fume to the point of punching a wall every time I get the wrong order or pull a charred bagel from the bag.  I stand in line between people ordering a dozen and mutter.  But I keep going back.  Although it is the psychological equivalent of putting my hand on the warm burner I do it… It’s the only bagel shop nearby, I really love bagels, and besides, it gives me something to blog about.