Social Workout

Workout

3 workouts in 1! Buy this blog now!!!

Hi!

So, I still haven't blogged about my workout with Brian Schneider! And I'm not going to now because it's a lot of long awesomeness! Now on to the blog!!!

Someday. It might've been Thursday. I walked to the gym, my third set of iPod headphones fritzing on me, the world a blurred vision of dismal, late afternoon gray. I'd just visited the optomotrist and discussed the likelihood of Lakers winning the finals, and the chances of the Rockets ever ending a season with an entirely healthy team. (I also was fitted for new glasses, and am expecting to pick them up shortly after I finish posting this.)

A cold gripped my throat, my nose reddened in the unseasonably blustery June day. For weeks I had been negotiating fits of ennui and enthusiasm: the summer was unfolding before me, yet many of my dearest friends were departing for different shores, leaving me stranded with the companion of solitude. I was not penniless, but certainly not wealthy enough to puruse the New York city social scene in search for suitably company, a situation that made me at times forcibly animated out of agitation, and others listless, aggravated, abrasive.

I made my way to the gym, which could serve itself as a metaphor for my current state of mind. I joined in January, influenced by a kinesthetic-driven lover that had since moved to San Diego. Trapped in a yearly contract, I occasionally ventured in to lift weights and admire other patrons, and only recently began frequenting it regularly. The gym was a metropolis of individual social activity: a place where one's isolation was joined by others' isolation, in such a way that rarely were people coupled off for more than a few minutes of conversation, where after they proceeded to separate areas of the gym to continue their workout routines alone. In this way I felt disconcertingly at home: alone among people, I stretched, lifted, practiced boxing with weights, then without gloves, and so on... letting the rhythm of punching the bag seap into me, distill my personality in a way similar to alcohol, that slipping of self and surrounding into a merged, new entity: I and my workout, my sweat, my pain, my loneliness no longer my own.

***

The Friday day snuck past me. I remembering eating a Jamaican salad, and walking all through midtown. I remember spending hours walking, walking, carrying black slacks and a black button-down, my backpack slung over my shoulder, pressing sweat against my spine. The heat of one day and the chill of the next was affecting my sinuses; my throat was swollen and sensitive, my voice less like an adult male's and more like a chain smoking grandmother's. I remember working at the president of Columbia's abode, bussing drinks for hours, on my feet for hours, my fever interrupted only with bouts of small chatter and glasses of sink water. Then there was the sound of breaking glass... people clapping... I was sweating, had I fallen?

Leaving around eleven... met up with roommate. I remember going to Korea town. I remember meeting 3 girls in cocktail dresses, fresh from Korean. Potatoe vodka. My friend texting me: Come to his party!!! Arriving at the party... why is everyone dressed like a sailor?

***

Saturday. Got home at 5:30. Woke up again at 11. BBQ in Manhattan, then barbacking from 8-5. Made 60 dollars. Bus ride home. People admired my V-neck shirt, my man cleavage, my fedora. Girls asked if I was gay. Went to bed at 5:30 again.

***

Sunday. Another fit of ennui, the weekend weighing on my shoulders like Baudelaire's Chimera. I finished the third Harry Potter and stayed the eff home! I also did 200 skate board push ups.