Gymnos and lesbos: a lesson in Greek

I woke up in my bed with aching limbs and a lesbian.

There’s currently a trend of high-flier and executives promoting the ladder-climbing mantra never lunch alone.  The concept of seeking out colleagues and industry-fellows to share the precious hour of freedom my contract grants me for networking purposes makes me physically sick. It is, however, quite lonely pounding the treadmill in the gym day after day with no company, as one of my colleagues is looking for a new gym to join, I suggested he come with me.

The guy in question, Zac, is a little in awe of me, I think. This is probably due to my made knowledge of Fixed Income Bonds and Derivatives, my ability to google his questions and give him the answer quickly enough to seem like I knew it all along, and the fact that he has on several occasions found me doing the times crossword while walking to work. As soon as we donned our vests and slacks¹ and stepped out of the changing room, the whole thing flipped.

Apparently, until yesterday I didn’t know how to ‘do the gym’. I’m a little bit of the mentality that if I’ve managed to muster the willpower to actually go to the gym, then I should at least reward myself by not doing any real exercise. Now, with a second entity watching and judging I had to actually work, and had to finally start doing things the correct way. Under Zac’s tutelage I learned the following things: 

1.  Those pleasant bars of metal which I’ve been enthusiastically pumping are in fact Fisher Price’s My First Dumbbell set.
2.  The comically large ones which I assumed were only there for Samson, The Hulk, and all the other unfeasibly large men who hang out in the weight section and drink protein shakes are actually liftable by mere mortals who are roughly my size (Zac)
3. Attempting to do shoulder presses with the correctly sized weights transforms me from an enthusiastic 80s exercise video into a straining Atlas.
4. There is a small and little known muscle group located somewhere near the bottom of the shoulder-blades whose express purpose is to hurt lots after exercise.

Apparently the endolphins I thought had been careening through my bloodstream after my former pseudo-exercise was just an unjustified sense of self satisfaction. Not that I was flooded with them after this; my pain centres were providing pretty much all my post-workout entertainment.

* * *

As a flat, we are pretty bad at getting parties arranged. Usually what will happen is that someone will tentatively make a bare-bones Facebook event, and then be unable to think of something amusing and witty to right, because apparently sending a straightforward invitation is far too fucking earnest for our hipster sensibilities². It was therefore quite pleasing that despite the fact that we never invited anyone, three independent sets of people descended on our flat with voluminous quantities of alcohol.

I blame my mother for the terrible state I ended up in. She has inculcated me with the crazy idea that a dry martini—effectively just pure gin with a nominal amount of vermouth³—is an appropriate cocktail to drink, and can be downed as fast as normal cocktails where all the ingredients are not 40% alcohol. This inescapably ended up with me flirting inappropriately with the only cute single girl, whom I have now been informed is ‘pretty much a lesbian’. I woke up in bed with her, but we were both far too clothed for sex to have happened. It didn’t seem right to ask her if anything went down, so the dregs of that night are swilled down the plughole of alcoholic amnesia.

Oh, and we very nearly finally went to our local grimy nightclub. We tried really hard. One day, Fez, one day.

— Dusk

¹ Getting naked in the changing room with a colleague – awkward?

² “The residents of [our flat] are all pleased that shades of party are in again this season. To celebrate, we're throwing a party. With a classic twist on the super details, this is the perfect trans-seasonal investment; team your vintage party experiences with fun South London designs for this season's timelessness.”

³ Noël Coward claimed that the perfect martini should be made by “filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy”