On the rare occasions that I do drag my ass to the gym, I usually follow a fairly simple routine…

1) Insert headphones.

2) Turn on music

3) Begin movement on elliptical machine

4) Glance at the clock every minute in complete shock that it’s only been a minute since I last glanced at the clock, and

5) Wish the entire time that I was sitting on my bed watching Millionaire Matchmaker and eating a snickers bar.
    Well, today I got there and realized that I had forgotten my IPOD. I SERIOUSLY considered turning around and leaving. But, since my clothes have gotten deceptively tighter the last few weeks, I resolved to stay. Go me. I thought it would be pure agony (even more than usual) without having Britney’s thumping beat underneath me, but it was actually kind of amusing. Instead of zoning out to “I’m a Slaaaaave….for you” remembering the days Britney wasn’t completely bat-shit-crazy performing on MTV with a giant Python around her neck and making even the most flat-ab’d 20-something female feel like an over-the-hill sumo wrestler, I got a chance to really look around my gym for the first time. I had no idea NY gyms could be so hilarious.
    In one corner, there are the “I am short but I am going to overcompensate by making my muscles really really giant so that my arms don’t touch my sides” men. I love these pint size He-men….watching them is simply fascinating. Every single one lifts a GARGANTUAN barbell, grunts enthusiastically, sets the weight down, immediately goes to the mirror to and flexes their too-giant-for-my-tiny-body muscles, sighs proudly, then goes back and does it all again. Poor bastards….I fear they may be compensating for other….um….shortcomings (no pun intended).
    Then on the opposite corner you have the “too cool for school” girls who walk on the treadmill so slowly my 99 year-old grandfather could breeze past, while wearing black aviator sunglasses (my gym is in a basement….and has no windows), sipping on a grande triple shot mocha latte, reading Usweekly, and talking on their bedazzled blackberries. I giggled when I saw that one of them was wearing huge gold hoop earrings and repeatedly saying, “Shut up!!! No YOU shut up!!!” into her iphone as she “worked out”.
    Then you have the gays blatantly cruising one another while bopping up and down on stair-masters (my gym is in the theater district…nuff said). I love watching homos eye-f*** each other with the subtlety of a 350 lb. woman at a nudist colony. I mean…..it’s actually kind of refreshing. There’s none of that “does he like me?/Is he looking my way” bullshit that most women have to deal with. With them it’s more like, “I am mentally putting your dingaling in my mouth and ***content censored because my mother reads this***. I kind of envy their oddly aggressive dating behavior, although I always think it’s nasty when guys hit on me at the gym when I am sweating like a whore in church.
    And since my gym is blessed with tanning beds, you have the constant stream of tanorexics hoping to turn their brown/orange leathery skin just one shade darker to achieve the perfect I-live-in-Sub-Sahara-Africa tan….in new york. In march.

    So next time you are caught at the gym without your IPOD, open your eyes and look around….there is a whole gym full of weird crazy people just BEGGING to be seen.