more disturbing things

No update on the cat yet. That's not until this afternoon. But I'm waiting on a patient who is eight minutes late even as we speak, so I will tell you a couple things. First of all, Ubaldo is not a 20 game winner and the Rockies, having made a lovely run at it for awhile there, have pretty much blown their chances of going to the playoffs. And such is life and beisbol.

But what I had forgotten to mention to you is another disturbing encounter at the gym (which is turning out to have as many interesting happenings as the prison bus, apparently.) The other day I was on the mats, stretching after my workout. I do some of my yin yoga hip openers and those, as I may have mentioned, require hanging out in the same position for a few minutes, letting my fascia unglue itself. I was in "butterfly" which is a seated forward bend. Basically that means my head was down around my feet. My eyes were closed, but if I opened them, all I could see basically was my own stomach and crotch. Hence the closure. I tell you all that to make the point that I could hear this conversation before I could see the participants, okay?

A man gets down on the mats, a bit away from me, and he starts doing situps or crunches, whatever, and he is grunting through them. He finishes his set and I hear him speak to someone on the mats, further away from me. He says "You go to the high school, right? I saw you there. I was setting up for the elections--you know, they had the voting there?--and I saw you. I said to myself, oh, I see that girl at the Y." The girl makes a polite, sorta shy, sorta giggly response, and the guy keeps talking to her. I pull myself up into sitting to get a look at this, and I swear, the guy has to be fucking 40. He starts talking about his girlfriend, in what is probably a fairly transparent attempt to not appear to be a creeper, and how she is younger than he is, so he needs to be in shape for her. Which, frankly, adds to the flashing creeper sign over his head. My motherly protective instincts kick in, especially when I see the girl is probably no older than 15. Forty year old men have no business ever striking up conversations with strange 15 year old girls, unless to warn them if they're about to step in front of a bus or something. Amirite? They especially do not need to strike up conversations that indicate they've been noticing said 15 year old girl working out at the gym.

So I decide I will make a feeble attempt to distract the creeper's attention by going into "saddle", a position which I am sometimes slightly embarrassed to attempt at the gym. I won't say it looks obscene, but it's kinda vaguely sexual. It's also fairly impressive when you get all the way down into it, so you do also get some "oh, wow, how's she doing that?" sorts of glances. Alas, the creeper was not at all interested in my old woman bodily contortions (go figure!) and continued speaking to the girl. Thankfully, she soon left the mat area, and after grunting through another set of situps, so did he.

I felt kind of weird about the whole thing. He didn't say anything overtly inappropriate to her, and certainly you are allowed to chat with the person working out next to you if they don't indicate they want you to shut up. So it wasn't like I could report him to the management. But if I were that girl's mother, I wouldn't like it. I'm not that girl's mother and I didn't like it.

In short, men suck. And I cannot take care of all the children of the world, no matter how much I would like to.

xoxo