Dilemma at the Gym.

I was working out on Tuesday, and I picked an elliptical trainer thingy that had a good view of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire with captions because, well, it's trivia and if it's trivia then I can be entertained for that entire time and so that with my wee little iPod shuffle (that's orange! I love this wee little thing! It's so wee, I'm destined to lose it in about 90 days, but it's perfect for working out! can't you tell by my exclamation points?) piping my workout music into my ears and the trivia, ye gods, the trivia for my eyes (although some of it--yikes, "Finish this phrase: a good man is hard to..." seriously?) I would hardly notice the half hour passing and I don't need to worry about accidentally being introspective or dwelling on anything and it's like this perfect storm of how to get Kari to actually like (or maybe just Hate Less) working out.

Except there was one teeeeeny flaw in this plan: commercials. And it really felt like it would be question, and then we'll be right back to see if she can answer another dumb-shit question! question, and then stay tuned! question and then Febreeze for all your things with surfaces! So my attention would wander just a bit.

I purposely put a little hand towel over the readout when I'm on one of those torture devices machines because if I pay attention to the time as it passes, that's all I pay attention to, and then I barely make it to 15 minutes. If, however, I can not notice? I can easily make it to thirty or even forty minutes. It's awesome. So distracting me is a very big priority for me.

So there I am, annoyed by the ads broken up by wanna-be trivia, desperately searching or something to pay attention to that wouldn't make me the Creepy Person at the Gym. Focusing on the ass in front of you? Someone will eventually notice. So eyes up! at the TV! at all times! is the unspoken rule.

My eyes are scanning the TVs, and it's like, afternoon news (car crashes! and a fire! and a car crash! and guess what, it might rain tomorrow), ESPN (hey, I hear there's something about basketball going on?), local news, Scarborough Country (even though we're in a super-liberal town in a pretty liberal part of it, so really, wtf? I mean, Trader Joe's is across the street!), and then... Oprah.

How bad could it be?

It just so happened to be showing an episode on thirteen families in Charlotte who adopted twenty-eight different children--teenagers!--from an orphanage. In Liberia. And then a gay couple who had fostered twenty one different kids and adopted four of them and were in the process of adopting, like, sixteen more (that poor kid who was left out...). And then. Then. Then it was of the family who had a set of identical quadruplets, without fertility drugs, just pow! bang! bang! bang! four beautiful daughters. The family's name would make a fiction editor's eyes roll until they could see their own brain: Breedlove.

It's not weird to be snibbling on the elliptical trainer thingy, is it? People would just think I was having a really good workout, right?

Right?

Shit. Next time I'm plopping my fat jiggly ass in front of the VH1 television screen, wherever it happens to be. I don't care if that means I have to use the rower or if it means I have to watch thirty minutes of Paris Hilton: Misunderstood, Skank, or Just Really Shallow? because that must suck less.