Eat My Dust, Dragon Lady!

I think I mentioned in passing that I'm planning to start working with a personal trainer again, right? I've been thinking about it, checking out the gym, stuff like that, and it brought to mind the Dragon Lady.

When Slayer and I first moved in together, we lived in a high rise right off of Lake Erie. Great lakefront view, nice sized apartment, and plenty of amenities in the place including our very own drug dealer right across the hallway. One of the other amenities which I actually USED was an exercise room in the basement. The room was key carded, so you had to swipe to enter. And one early evening, I went downstairs to avail myself of the treadmill and E! cable station, because they were playing one of those top 100 lists that crack me up.

That's another guilty pleasure. E! network. It's so bad that it's good.

I enter the room and trip over someone else's keycard. Because strips of plastic the size of credit cards are major tripping hazards to someone as graceful as me. Yes, I am a former dancer. No, not the kind of dancer that wears a lot of tassels. So I pick it up and look around. There's only one person in the place: it's the Dragon Lady, and she's on one of the treadmills.

Now, I'm not exactly with it when it comes to the whole makeup thing. I still don't quite understand how to put on eyeshadow without looking like a raccoon-in-training or Carla the Captivating Clown. And I don't see the logic in putting on makeup to go to the gym because, durr, it's the gym.

The Dragon Lady does not adhere to the same philosophy I do. She was all tarted up in a purple jogging outfit with low cleavage, full makeup including purple eyeshadow all the way up to her overplucked brows, and those long fingernails that make it impossible to do anything with your hands except sit around and get your nails done over and over again.

Well, we may have different philosophies on how to dress for the gym, and her keycard may have tried to kill me, but I am a good samaritan. I walked over, held up the card, and asked her if she dropped it.

She gave me the look of death. My heart skipped a beat, because I was afraid she was going to tear off her fingernails and throw them at me. Instead of answering me, she very deliberately turned up the volume of her sound-making device. I can't remember if it was an IPod or what. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Walkman, because I'm not that old.

Now I'm pissed. I just tried to do something nice for the hooker in training, and she's not being nice back. She's not following the rules, and I don't mean the rules about not wearing scary eye makeup to the gym. So I get on the treadmill next to her and start it. She's watching some show about the stock market, which means that I don't get my E! television, and that only makes me angrier. So I very deliberately look over at her speed and set mine one notch higher.

At this point, I'm thinking something like: Eat my dust, Dragon Lady! Only there was no dust because we were on treadmills.

So I'm running, and feeling absurdly vindicated when she looks over to see my speed and immediately ratchets hers to one notch over MINE. You see where this is going. I can safely say that I have never gone so fast on a treadmill in my entire life.

But I won. Finally, purple rivulets of makeup running down her face, Dragon Lady gave me a disgusted look and turned off her machine. At this point, I was running for my life and concentrating on not getting thrown back into the wall, but I did manage to give her a smug look as she collected her things and left.

Not two seconds after the door closed behind her, I fell off. And my legs hurt for about two weeks afterwards. But it's okay. I scored a point for no-makeup-in-the-gym girls everywhere.