Doe normaal!
a Dutch expression that parents typically tell their kids when they are behaving obnoxiously.
In my circle of friends in Amsterdam we overuse it in irony mode, mocking the undescribable concept of "normal". Because maybe you can try to do normal, but being normal is a more complex thing.
I think am doing normal these last weeks. It is interesting, here some normal doings:
I wake up in the morning Monday to Friday. I commute in public transport. I overuse senseless sentences that have morning, weather, Mondays, Fridays or weekends as a subject. On the weekends I feel I have to go out and drink (something I haven't craved since last time I did normal back in 2015). I do hang out at parks with kids at times. We do sand castles. Life is normal.
The most normal thing I am doing is spectacular: I have incorporated an activity I have refused to undertake in my 20 years of very active lifestyle:
I go to the gym.
Well, I found a discount on a site to join the barrio's gym, because of its swimming pool (a place I like to go in winter).
Since I was going to do normal for a while, I thought I would blend in beautifully if I also did the dreaded indoor exercises.
It was a very interesting experience and I am sure it will still providea lot of anthropologic material.
I was late to one of these group classes and I had a 40 minute gap to fill, sporty dressed and all. I thought I'd go to the fitness room and see what goes on in there.
I am no stranger to weight exercises, but I am to machine-filled rooms.
I do regularly follow very primitive exercises on vintage videos in my laptop and they help me start the day. I split the screen between a muted 80's exercise video, with John Oliver or Late Motiv volume on. The habbit has gotten to a point that I can't see Buenafuente, Broncano or Berto Romero without lifting dumbells or doing donkey kicks. Pavlov's bitch big time!
But that was before doing normal. It was when I didn't know the day of the week, when I woke up when my body felt like it, where I could take 20 minutes to have a coffee, and a smoothie, hang around and wait for the first bowel moves and then set myself in the living room to watch videos of the School of Life while wearing ankle weights in my pajamas.
I knew doing normal would help me appreciate my life much more. Thank you, normalcy.
Today the experience is called: "normal things that happen in a gym".
I have always said I dislike gyms, a lot. I couldn't provide empirical information, it was just a gut feeling from past experiences. I never quite embraced the idea of groupalry doing exercises going nowhere like hamsters in a mill. In my beloved Sydney, for instance there is 1 fitness trainer every 2 citizens. In a city you can actually run on the beach sand as soft as flour or do outdoors exercises with views of the whales in the horizon. True story Christiansen Park!
Anyway, with the experience fresh in my senses I can state from a non-empirical point of view why I dislike gyms:
It has a lot of the things hypersensitive beeings find gross combined:
- Smelly people - check!
- annoying music - check!
- excessive vanity - check!
- television screens - check!
- superficial interactions - check!
- scarce intellect - check!
- unnatural bodies - check!
I started feeling a bit visually disturbed by those guys so pumped they can't hang their arms on both sides of their body. I call it the inverted croissant effect.
To me, muscly guys are unsexy, because they use their biceps to lift a lot of weight, but they don't seem to have lifted a book (and/or read it).
As I came closer to them the initial assumtion confirmed itself when I accidentally eavesdropped the guys on my left: they were talking passionately about the great atmosphere at Pacha and who could get them cheap tickets. They were in their 30's, mind you, I would turn a blind eye on 15 year olds. Don't judge. Dios los cría y ellos entran gratis en Pachá.
I suddenly had the impulse of running out of the room in sheer confusion and convinced that it couldn't be possible I shared DNA with those walking croissants of muscle, product of hamster-like exercise, that tissue-damaging protein powder that reeks of turtle guano and perhaps good old steroids, steroids+testosterone: the rapist-maker.
As my mind wandered to the view of bumpy bodies, I thought, as I always think: "if you saw yourselves in my eyes..." All to the rythm of repetitive boom boom music, that was really fogging my mind.
And I also though, as I always think, if any female in the world finds that pumped, ballooned, shaved, shiny, smelly, bumpy, veiny body sexually appealing.
In order to escape the horror in front of me my mind needed to fantasise with chubby guys, not the flubby ones, the naturally "big boned", with arms like my legs, a protubering tummy to lay on, some body hair, those you can fall on to and never hurt yourself, sinking a bit in a feast of warm flesh (hmmm)
I was so horrified by the scenario and my thoughts that I started to fancy the idea of getting out of the building and join the parents outside watching the swimmers for the 30 minutes I had left until the yoga class.
But, oh serendipity made a plot twist, as I put my hand in my pocket and I found I had my mp3 inside. Block my ears, hit play... and suddenly the idea of listening to "Flashback" from Fat Freddy's Drop calmed me down (that intro...) and gave me strength to resist.
I had an atypical rush of courage, of positivity, thinking: "I paid for this, and I will use these machines to get the hardest, roundest, slap-a-best 40-year old-arse in the district of Horta-Guinardó and maybe even Nou Barris."
The music in my player continued to "Over and Over" from Morcheeba and it gave me new energy to look forward to coming back home and practising the picking on the guitar. Awwwww
The idea of coming home to my guitar cheered me up a bit. And then I remembered a dear friend who once confessed she liked working out because she gets micro orgasms when she hangs from a bar and does sit ups.
Slightly panty-moisted by the idea of coming home to the guitar, I remembered that doing butt-exercises does not exactly make me calieeeente, but the moves have a positive effect on my crotch. Maybe if I work on it I can manage to reach a few microorgasms and get something out of the situation other than sore muscles. Challenge accepted, purrr.
I went to talk to the monitor. My first question was, in Catalan: "haig de portar la meva pròpia màrfega?" Em contesta: "l'alfumbrilla? No, no la tens que portar, hi han aquí"
Penso en el Yeral i l'Àfrica. Sona Eurythmics: "there must be an angel (playing with my heart)" I laugh like a mad woman at the randomness of my playlist.
I don't know if I'll follow on. I have thought that I can load the mp3 player with audiobooks while working out and focusing on reaching some sort of a similar climax to my friend's while working on my abductors, glutes, adductors, hamstrings... I can bypass the odd smell by focusing on familiar scents. The perks of looking into the bright side, woohoo!
I'll keep track of changes and maybe get over the idea that uploading pictures is vain and just try to make something out of being a work in progress in the oh-not-so-fresh years and my normal doing stage.
I've never had a gym-butt.
Say hello to the yummiest gym-butt to be, yeaaaahh, yessss, yessss, YEEEAAAAAAHHH
Ik ga normaal doen, hurra!
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