Going to the gym with a single 17 year old girl on a regular basis is quite the experience. We have had boys follow us from machine to machine, run on the treadmills next to us even though the rest are free and one even asked my kid if she was double jointed?! WTF! But now it’s going both ways. Today we walked in and both started giggling like morons because a giant, muscle man, covered in tattoos was the first thing we saw. The gym is reducing me to a teenage girl and it’s not okay. I’m so self conscious about doing certain exercises, because I feel I’m being watched, that I avoid them. Or creepily find a dark corner to do my squats and eyeball everyone to make sure they are not seeing my unattractive sitting down on a pretend toilet move.

I convinced Hennie to go with me to the gym one day so I could see what his program is like. I felt very much like it was take your kid to work day. Tall, muscular Hennie lifting 100 lb weights next to me, trying to lift 10 lb weights was hilarious. I was the only girl in the free weight section too. Hennie was making all kinds of working hard noises while weight lifting while I dicked around with my soup can weights. The most comical of all of it was when Hennie asked me to help him put the 46lb weights onto the leg pushy machine thing. I grabbed one and started falling over. I couldn’t even lift it to the rod it needed to go on. Good times. I’m sure all the other gym dudes were snickering at the dude who has to deal with his weakling wifey at the gym… 

I watched a whole football match on the treadmill last weekend at the gym. I totally made stupid faces to myself and threw my hands up like a crazy fan when Chelsea scored! The game was shown with subtitles because there was no sound and I knew a Brit must be announcing because the description kept reading futbol. Yes, British futbol.

I was waiting for my kid at the TANNING SALON, not something I agree with but whatever. And I overheard the lady working there saying to someone else that a particular oil should not be used by white people. And she totally meant pale people. She was so dark she had forgot that she also was once a white person.  It was so Jersey Shore in there y’all. 

I met the new kid I will be working with on Monday. I said I would never look after a 6 year old boy again but here I am. I saw this kid and thought, wow, he looks familiar. I tried talking to him but I am NOT as exciting as Minecraft and I get that. But his mannerisms, his face, his jaw line all looked familiar. And then I thought, oh my god, he looks exactly like a guy I used to date. Oh my god, I only met the Mom. Omg, am I doing glorified babysitting respite for a child of a dude I used to date? Holy shit balls. I looked up the contact info, the Dad’s name was the same as the guy I used to date. OH GOD! I started looking all over the walls searching for family pictures. FINALLY I found a photo, whew not him. Close call. That would have been epic. 

I have been bored lately. I think this happens every year. I pump myself up with a new year, tons of new excitement, big changes and two weeks later, when nothing has happened, I am disappointed. I like brainstorming ways of making my life more exciting, perhaps doing a course, maybe learn something new, maybe becoming a kleptomaniac for a week just to see if the thrill is all that or maybe removing my public speaking filter and just swear openly, like the pirate I truly am all the time, at all my jobs. Or what about dabbling in some hardcore street drugs. Nothing says keeping up with our exciting youth then knowing what they are talking about when they speak of doing Molly on the weekend. I totally thought the first million times I heard about Molly that this was just some magical person that everyone knew. And a bit of a village bicycle because people kept doing her. But no, it’s more along the lines of Mary Jane btw in a lady name drug cover up. Eventually, I figured out what was missing from my life, high intensity drama. An intense tv show to sink my teeth into a la Sons of Anarchy. So to remedy by boring life I will not do cocaine benders or start stealing shit, I have started watching Homeland and renting a lot of action movies, weee life skills! 

So I decided, with much hesitation, that it would be ok for my friend Rob to borrow Tina, my car. I had some reservations but a friend was in need and I knew it was the right thing to do. The only time I had ever been driving with Rob previously, he had backed into a giant yellow post in a Tim Horton’s parking lot, so my reservations were not without merit. So I handed the keys over, told him all the funny character traits Tina had and then asked him to please, please, please not fuck up my car. I was feeling like a really good person and the best friend anyone could ever have when, about an hour later, I got a call from the cops. A man driving a car, registered to me, had just stolen some gas. The cop must have thought I was insane because I actually started laughing and told him how funny I thought that was. We agreed it must have been a misunderstanding, I said I would pay for the gas after I got off my shift. What actually had happened it Rob payed at the pump AFTER he pumped the gas which is not the correct sequence in which that occurs and therefore it didn’t actually go through. But getting a call from the cops an hour after lending someone my car for the first time was pretty darned amusing. 

I feel disgusted in myself. I feel dirty. I feel like I have let the world down and should just go have a picnic in traffic. It happened. I heard it. The new Avril Lavigne and Chad Kroeger single. The worst musically inclined couple to ever hook up. The couple that could, in theory, produce a child that could be Canada’s worst music nightmare, comparable to Celine even. A satanic offspring of catchy, angsty terrible pop tunes and dirty red neck rock. But more embarrassingly was that I heard the song….and didn’t hate it. I was mortified that after thirty seconds that I hadn’t projectile vomited, because in my head that was exactly how that was going to play out. I actually listened to half the song before deciding that it was my 100% duty to switch the station. What the hell? My world of everything I thought I ever knew is all upside down!
Well I just watched the music video and it’s all good everyone, I hate the song. Whew, thank god. My favourite part of the video is that they try to act, it’s golden. Anyhoo, everything in my world is back to normal. Carry on.

We decided to watch Thor yesterday. Ben and Hennie said it was a great movie. After about twenty minutes I decided I would list the reasons I was going to retire to the room to read my terrible smut book. I cannot watch a movie…

a) where people wear plastic horn helmets and I am supposed to take it seriously
b) where the lead character sounds a little Aussie when everyone else is British
c) where they would go out of their way to hide the face of Idris Elba, an obvious mistake
where Anthony Hopkins’ eye patch has no strings holding it in place! What the hell? So distracting…
I would have been more lenient on the ridiculousness if, say, Channing Tatum was the lead. But he wasn’t. Just saying.

I feel completely ripped off. I invested too much time into a series of smut romance books that have too much storyline and not enough smut. I swear to god. Do not put it in the erotic romance section if half the book the main character goes into hiding and then when the couple finally meet up again they decide to wait until marriage to have sex?! Honest to god…

I went shopping at Bayshore with the kid I work with. It’s these times, in public, that I practice my parenting skills and embarrass her as much as I possibly can. I grabbed a crop top and yelled to the sales lady that there was something wrong with it. Half of it was missing and I hoped this meant it was fifty percent off. I asked my kid why all the shirts were see through. I wasn’t planning a career as a stripper so I wasn’t sure why I was required to be so exposed. She said I need a bandeau underneath it. I yelled that I would never wear a banjo and that seemed ridiculous. I explained to her that it is quite a clever marketing trick though…selling overpriced see through t-shirts that REQUIRE you to buy a separate accessory just so you can wear it. Clever marketing capitalist whores.

I often wonder why I can’t keep up to date with the most recent news headlines. I think it’s because, online, I am bombarded with SO MUCH news that I prioritize and for me that generally means choosing the weirdest and most stupid things ever to read. I just scrolled through quite a bit a few headlines including upbeat and inspirational, but the only one that caught my attention was the piece on the Pastafarian. Yes, a politician in New York State was sworn into office wearing a colander on his because he is indeed a minister of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. That, my friends, is fucking awesome. Religious freedom at it’s best…(and I know it’s wrong that most of my newsworthy headlines come from Gawker…)

So like every other human being in January I have started back to the gym. The second I am there it all comes rushing back to me why I don’t particularly love the gym. People you know watching you sweat, being ogled by old men while you sweat and my favourite, getting stuck in weight machines that look relatively easy but when you get in and then can’t get out, you look like a circus freak contorting yourself out of it not so gracefully, while you sweat. I also critically injured my pectorals by not wearing a sports bra while on the treadmill. Ouch.

I have realized lately that when I am alone I make faces to myself as if I was with another person. Like today at the gym I started a machine at a way too heavy weight, did the “woahhh” face to no one but myself and then gave myself a little self nudge and wink and put the weight at a lower number. I did this while walking through the parking lot too get to the gym too as I almost slipped on the ice. I again did the “woahhh” face, steadied myself and then laughed at myself out loud, vowing that on the next ice storm I would put a video camera on my head and record all my falls to laugh at for years to come. I have taken my dramatic inner monologue to a whole new level that requires me to facially act out what I’m thinking. Which probably, to the rest of the world, makes me look like I have a weird tick or many personalities, which may not be totally incorrect. So feel free to creep me at the gym now making stupid faces and lodging myself in machines, weeee!

Every time they are on, I say I am going to boycott the olympics for political reasons, especially when they are in places like China and Russia. But for some reason I always end up watching, it’s like tv crack. I feel like I have no control over it. Everyone makes such a big deal, the build up is intense, you get to cheer for your favourite countries just to hate on the countries you dislike for no particular reason. And there is always that amazing chance that something ridiculous will happen like epic wipe outs or major upsets from countries you have never heard of. These are the true reasons I tune in. Basically I want Cool Runnings to happen every time I watch.