The comedy left turn

I've been working in the fitness field for nearly a year and a half now and I've seen and dealt with a lot. Now in my case most of these experiences come from one severely dysfunctional gym member, but today I will not talk about that giant ball of madness.

Today, I will talk about this giant ball of madness: a woman comes into the gym today to cancel her membership due in part to reasons I will talk about in full soon in this blog. The short version is that the gym I work at is closing in a few days and a different gym already bought up everyone's memberships. This woman was a member at the gym that bought said memberships and she is absolutely not going to go back to that gym for personal reasons. I give her the phone number to make the call to cancel and she gives me an endless run of shit saying she's been trying to cancel that way for a week now and she just can't get ahold of anyone. That's always a red flag in the customer service world because trying for a week usually means spent five minutes on the phone, if that, and didn't get the immediate result she wanted. So I pretty much called her on it and delved deeper into why she's so adamant about not going back to that gym. She says the people there are crazy and she can't be since she is blonde and looks like an Italian leather boot. I asked her to explain what she meant by crazy since I've been at that gym several times lately and haven't run into any of the silliness she claims is going on, so I'm absolutely positive this woman is the problem and not everyone else around her. And the answer I got knocked me on my ass. The short version is that this woman is racist, she hears all those other people talking in other languages and it absolutely must be all about her. She thinks black people are gross. So she's just going to join the women's only gym because she is so sure it will only be filled with the whitest folk around because she deserves at least that because she's white, you know.

I've heard a lot of reasons people want to cancel their gym memberships but racism is an entirely new one on me.

Murder By Death

I spoke so far of the skateboard demo that pretty much made me realize that I needed to evolve and embrace weightlifting. And the video game that made me realize I need to put that stuff down and focus on more important things such as my health.

For a while, I had been struggling with the fact that my ideologies will not lead me to personal happiness and since the group of people I ran with largely shared the same ideologies, I realized that I was stuck in a rut. But the fruition of that realization hit me while waiting in line for a show.

The band was Murder by Death, a band I had not heard of but knew was popular within the punk/indie scene so I was interested in checking them out. They were playing in Bloomington at a theater so I got there about ten minutes early and waited in a very short line. Within a couple minutes, the line grew very quickly and was largely made of of people dressed in their punk costumes - their black dyed hair, jackets with patches everywhere, that sort of thing. After one long look at the line, I decided not to attend this show. I stepped out and walked home.

Punk is fun for a few years but if you choose to become educated you realize you are always angry for the sake of being angry. Something will always keep you in a pissy mood. The idea of standing against for the sake of standing against becomes old.

As for the way of dress, why still dress like an early 80s punk rocker? Why show the world you and your ideologies refuse to evolve no matter how far you get left behind?

I still have never seen Murder by Death, nor have I even bothered to search them out on the internet to hear some of their stuff. Not really sure if it matters.

R.I.P. Cardinal Fitness

Very recently, it was announced that Cardinal Fitness has closed several locations without notice with the remaining locations closing at the end of the year. L.A. Fitness bought out all their member contracts and are setting up Cardinal's member base within L.A.'s clubs. Now I am not a fan of L.A. Fitness as I feel they are not kept clean, very disorganized, and nothing more than a selling atmosphere. So to have canceled my membership when I did meant I dodged a bullet since my membership wouldn't be transferred to L.A.

Oddly enough this affected me. I planned on returning to Cardinal as a member should things go badly at the gym I work for, but I can't do that anymore. Additionally, this is the gym I joined after college and got to know everyone there. So while I am devolving to blathering, I just need to say that I will miss this place.