grammardog

I just went to the gym for the first time in months. YESSSSSS! I won't lie; it was rough. The Biggest Loser was on more than one television. I tried to just close my eyes and focus on my music, but then my mp3 player batteries conked out and I was left with screens full of people trying to run around a track while being tempted with giant platters of pancakes and french fries and I wanted to murder everyone. So I went over to the desk and asked the lady there to please switch the channel to anything that didn't bank on me hating my body. She was mystified.

I finished up three little baby quilts this morning that I made from scraps leftover from Sally's quilt. They used all the scraps up perfectly!





I went to an old camp friend's wedding on Saturday. We had a fantastic time. Here I am with four of my best gals, enjoying the king sized bed in the executive suite:



Also, somehow I ended up with a shovelful of popcorn between my breasts and flashed my bra for a nearby camera. Pretty standard fare.

The worst thing about going to a women's gym is that most of the televisions are tuned into really shitty channels, such as the Women's Television Network, Country Music Television, something called Slice, and other atrocities. I generally listen to my mp3 player, but most of the televisions have the closed captioning on, so it's hard to escape without actually closing your eyes. Here's a little sample of what I've seen since I've started there:

- Dr. Phil, day in, day out
- a half-hour program called Bulging Brides, which seems to be entirely about women trying to fit into wedding dresses that are too small for them
- a commercial featuring a bunch of women eating cookies and being mean to each other, with the tagline "cookies so good for you you'll have to find other ways to be bad"
- an ad for Mitt Romney complaining about the foreigners taking the jobs of hard-working red-blooded Americans
- Beverly Hills 90210, including an episode where an intervention is staged to get Luke Perry off the junk
- a preview for the next season of The Biggest Loser showing the contestants in moments of clear distress, with thought bubbles superimposed above their heads containing pizza slices, ice cream sundaes, and fried chicken, which made me so angry while I ran on that fucking treadmill, sweating, aching, puffing, trying to nurture my body and not hate it as much as other people do, that I just started crying on the spot
- several seemingly different programs all about how terrible men are at child care, usually involving a wife watching her hapless husband manage her children by video and laughing knowingly

It's all very discouraging/enraging/boring. Faced with these choices, my eyes usually drift over to the country music video channel, which, when the sound is off and the closed captioning on, is far more entertaining than you'd ever guess. There's one video with a homely guitar player that comes on at the same time every day that absolutely kills me. The lyrics pop up like this on the screen:

7 to 3, 3 to 11, 11 to 7
talkin' 'bout a bunch of shift work
a big ol' pile of shift work

It is the only joy in my gym television watching experience, and I laugh so hard I can barely lift my feet to run, and pray every day that it'll come on again.

In other news, this makes me really sad.

In more other news, this makes me REALLY happy:



Mamma Mia is the kind of movie I feel comfortable saying I love before I see it. No haters.