Despite
my protestations about the high prices and lack of selection, I did manage to use up my Gap gift certificate this week. The Gap at the mall near my apt is tiny and useless, as described in that previous post. There's a far larger one about 8 miles down 101 in the super-bougie
Corte Madera mall, and I met the IG there Tuesday, on a joint Xmas gift cert mission. She had virtual money to blow at Banana Republic, and after she found nothing to her liking in that deceptively non-tropical clothier, we adjourned to the Gap, and were pleasantly surprised to find the store occupied two stories, with substantially more merchandise on both the lower and upper levels than we found in the entire store in the thoroughly inadequate Northgate mall.
Downstairs was all women's stuff, plus there was a Gap Body adjoined to the main store, with sub-Victoria's Secret quality undergarments galore. I didn't know Gap sold such things, and when I failed in my efforts to persuade the IG to model some for me, I turned to their website to satisfy my curiosity. It's women's underwear; look if you enjoy that sort of thing. I will give them props for the technology; you click on an item and
a new page opens up where you can see the panties or bra on a fetching model, plus there's a nifty little perv-o-cam square viewing box, which you can drag around to magnify the view as you hunt for stray hairs and/or labial indentations. Basement dwellers are jerking off to this
right now.
As for the Gap store, the entire downstairs was women's stuff, including a whole wall of clearance/sale stuff of all types. The IG nearly got swallowed up in it, but came to her senses and remembered that we were there to use my gift cert. So up the stairs we went, to find that the upper level was about half the size of the downstairs, and that half of that was devoted to very overpriced kids clothing. The men's stuff was off in the back corner, and as is usually the case in non-discount clothing stores, the women's section was busy with female customers, and the men's section was less busy... with women customers. Most men would wear the same jeans and t-shirt they got last Xmas, every day, until it rotted away. And yes, I've got some nerve making that claim after my last Gap-related bitch-fest. And yes, I was there... looking for jeans and a t-shirt for an Xmas present.
At any rate, we moved past the "I bet this would look good on my son/husband" females, and dove in. The IG made suggestions, I demurred with the illogic that distinguishes my "fashion" sense, and we made our way through the selection merrily enough. Though the quarter or fifth of the store that housed menswear wasn't huge, it still had far more variety than other Gap stores I've been in, and while it was all still basically jeans, khakis, belts, and polos, I eyed some black slacks, before picking out a chocolate brown, semi-shiny button up shirt that I didn't hate. It cost $40, and I would never have paid more than $16 for it at my usual Ross/Marshalls shopping destinations, but I didn't want to carry around that gift cert forever. So I hypnotized myself into believing that the item was actually $10, ignoring the fact that the $30 on the card was real money, and left with a new shirt in a plastic bag, for $12 after tax. What a deal!
More enjoyable was our next stop at the mall, when the IG pulled me into a J Crew store, and picked out a miniskirt and hoodie, which she eventually modeled for me, accessorized with knee-high stripper boots, courtesy of a cell phone cam shot. And no, you can't see it. Hell, I can hardly see it; when will flashes become standard equipment on cell phone cams?
In other news, I did something new on Friday. I guest lectured in a friend's college course. She's teaching a class on online communities via computer games, and I spoke to her class of game freaks and geeks about fansites, internet communities, the history of MMORPGs, and (my senior project topic) storytelling in videogames. I was scheduled to speak for at lest an hour, and wasn't sure I could go that long, but ended up doing 90 minutes, including some questions and discussion. It was fun. I'd never "lectured" on anything in an even semi-formal setting, and while I had (to take) a Speech/Rhetoric class as part of my General Education requirements to earn my degree, and we gave five speeches in that class, they were all limited to 5 minutes. A ridiculously short time that I regularly crashed past in my effort to relay some actual content, but even my last speech, on the historical context of religion as a man-made meme, only went 8 minutes. From there to 60 is quite a leap, much less to 90, and I'm surprised how easy it was to make.
Of course my lecture was pretty crap; I knew the material very well, from living it these last 10 years and having written several research papers on it in the last 2 years, but I had never presented it all at once before, and my organization was all over the place. I kept forgetting points and going back to them 10 minutes later, I talked way too fast as I usually do (thank god the class was young and still sharp-eared; I might as well be a dog whistle to old people when I get going on a topic), and I should have prepared more with specific names and dates and quotes, since I kept alluding to things that I couldn't remember well enough to cite specifically. I have no idea how Hitchens does that in all of his speeches and interviews; how he keeps exact quotes in memory, along with who wrote/said them, in which book, etc. I'm more like, "I read this in a book somewhere. By someone. Let me clumsily paraphrase it for you."
When I told the IG about the guest lecturing gig, she was excited and said the expected, "Do you think you might want to be a teacher? I think you'd like it and be good at it!" I shuddered then, as I always have when someone suggests that. I would not make a good teacher, and even if I would, I don't want to be one. I don't like kids, and I don't like putting up with their chattering bullshit. I hated attending school; I certainly don't want to return there now.
That being said, I could probably refrain from slitting my wrists if I were a college professor. Yeah, it would suck talking at the disinterested 13th graders in all the intro classes, but there's no presumption that I'm supposed to care about them, or be a role model, and when they don't pay attention and bomb their tests I can flunk them and teach them the lesson their coddling parents never did. (Well, once I have tenure, anyway). Plus, the 10% of students who are bright and engaged and taking some interest in their $40k a year education are worth interacting with, and as for the rest, well we're still some decades away from fully automated gas stations and fast food restaurants, so the ones who can't get a job from in daddy's business will have something to fall back on. The ones not wise enough to work as bloggers/fansite webmasters/perpetually aspiring novelists, I mean.
Lastly, I joined a gym. A big 24 Hour Fitness in Larkspur (even the town's name is bougie), about 5 miles down the freeway from me. It's in a very rich area and the gym isn't cheap; $52 a month on top of the membership fee and one of those "fuck you" one time fees. Those amount to something like $160 to put your name into their computer, and then you get to pay $624 a year for membership. Or, you can take the 12 months for just that club for $300, with no signup fee at all. Better yet, they had a New Year's special with the 12 months for $199. So, $16.58 a month it is, then.
I've enjoyed all the mountain biking I've been doing in the nearby semi-mountains, and my legs and cardio are great, but it rains about 20 days a month from now until May, and it's cold, and I miss lifting weights. I've got the 30 pound, "
sometimes, things are heavy" dumbbells here, and if I were self motivated and spent 20 minutes a day doing various lifts with those, I wouldn't need the gym. I'm not, 5 minutes every other day isn't getting it done, and using a variety of weight lifting machines is much more fun. Plus, gyms are sometimes known to contain attractive, physical fit, tight pants-wearing females, and I would not at all object to the regular presence of one, or more, such creatures in my life.
I do have to wonder about the necessity of the 24 hour nature of this gym, though. It was one of the main reasons I signed up; along with the price. I'm a night owl and have long longed for the option of heading off to the gym at 2am. Especially since I prefer to avoid the crowd and not have to wait for machines. However, my first late night visit to the gym was not only solitary, it was downright creepy. I went late night Friday, and I was literally the only person there. Well, me and muscles at the front desk, but he hardly appeared alert/alive enough to register on an EKG, so it was just me in the vast fitness warehouse for about 45 minutes. I can't complain; I was the one who wanted no waiting, after all, but it was a bit like some place Will Smith might have worked out with a German Shepherd and an assault rifle.
Eventually a creepy old guy came in; but he just talked to the guy at the front desk. The old guy was wearing a puffy vest over a shiny running jacket, a ski cap, running shoes, and short jogging shorts. All the better to show off his veiny, hairy, knobby-kneed old man legs. Because what else would you wear to the gym on a rainy night, in 50 degree weather, in January, at 3am?
Update: I made another less-late night visit to the gym this evening, and found about 6 people there at midnight. Only 2 were left by the time I departed at 1:30, and I've got a photo to (not really) prove it.
You can tell it's a manly gym by the mega-heavy dumbbells they've got stacked up. These boys run the entire end of the gym, and they're not very wisely arranged. On the top row they start at 50lbs (23kg) and go all the way up to about 120 lbs (55kg). I haven't been to this new gym that many times, but I've never seen any of the dumbbells missing from the racks on the top row. The lower row has dumbbells from 20-45lbs, (lighter ones are in racks to the side and in another back room) and all of the 20 and 25s are usually scattered all around the weight room, with fewer of the 30s and heavier missing.
The question then, is why are there a million weights heavier than any sub-bodybuilder needs, and why are they displayed on the top row where they're always visible, while the weights people actually use are down below and harder to reach? Even if some football team someday comes to the gym and uses the big ones, they'll probably leave them lying all over the place, and then someone on the staff will throw out their back having to lift all of those weights up to more than waist height to put them back in their appropriate slots.
My old gym near Malaya's condo was not a manly gym. There were a lot fewer dumbbells, and most of them were from 5-20 pounds. Of the heavier ones, there were only like one pair each of 25, 30, and 35, with the masters of them all, a pair of 42.5 pound juggernauts. Logically, all the lighter weights went on the top row of the storage rack, and the heavy ones that none of the mostly-female clientèle could lift squatted on the bottom row, where dirty, sweaty, smelly men like myself had to hunker down and drag them out, like really heavy sex toys from that box you think no one knows you've got under one side of your bed.
Inconvenient storage aside, I like that there are big dumbbells sitting there, staring. Taunting. They give me motivation to bulk up enough to need them. I use 30 pounders now, but I do a fair number of reps in different positions. I could probably do some curls with 50 or 55lbs now, to save my life, but I'd make like one rep and need a break and possibly a nap, and what's the point in that? There is no point; at least not at night, when there aren't any spandex-pantsed bunnies to hurt myself trying to impress.
Labels: college, fashion, fitness
