Last night, i fulfilled a long-running prophecy that i would one day hire a personal trainer.

Personal trainers are for very wealthy people. In return for doing whatever it is they do, they take forty dollars of your money. They take it from your pocket and put it into their pockets. i usually like to spend forty dollars on other things, including toys, video games, mortgage, and food.

This is why i need a personal trainer.

The trouble is that i’m not a very wealthy person. i despise the idea of letting someone take forty dollars from my pocket for every hour that they do whatever it is they do - this goes for personal trainers, prostitutes, gangsters, people who mug you for your forty dollars - anyone. But if you’ve been reading the stuff i write long enough, you’ll know that i have a problem.

My problem, in a nutshell, is that i don’t have what other people have. i don’t have that undescribable quality, that je ne sais quoi (parce-ce que je ne parle pas bien le francais) … i don’t have that mysterious ability that other people have to NOT BE A FATASS.

Some people are born with the ability to not be a fatass. Others learn it, through commitment, conditioning, or life experience. Some people seek out the ability to not be a fatass, while for others it comes naturally. Not being a fatass does not come naturally to me.

So when eyebrows are raised when i mention i hired a personal trainer, i get my back up a little. It’s kind of like a race of people who can all blink their eyes, except for this one guy who can’t, no matter what kind of food he eats or what he does in his spare time. So he lets someone take forty dollars from his pocket to teach him how to blink. Is that an extravagant way to spend money you don’t have? i think not. Imagine how dry that guy’s eyes must have been! Mercy! He probably had lint and all kinds of airborne fuzzies stuck to his eyeballs. You know when you walk by a construction site and the wind blows all that dust all over the place? That guy probably had to wash his eyeballs with a sponge to get them clean after that. Everybody else just blinks.

So i wanna blink. But it’s gonna cost me.

Last month, my wife pressured me into signing us up for a membership at the YMCA, a community fitness club that charges you no money if you’re poor, and stupid kinds of money if you’re not. A family membership at the Metro Central Y is 80 bucks a month. i pleaded with my wife to just pay the daily fee whenever she wanted to. She could use the pool, i could stay home and eat corn chips … it was perfect. But she insisted she’d need to use the pool a million times a month now that she was pregnant, and that getting a family membership was just the thing. “But honey,” i said, “there aren’t even a million days in a m…”

Friends, there’s no arguing with a pregnant woman. They’re cranky. They will take you down.

So, as it was written, we signed up for a membership, and eighty dollars left my pocket. During the month of October, we went to the gym once. i told her that if she didn’t go more often in November, i’d cancel the membership. She gave me a look, as if to imply that i just drowned a bag of puppies.

i did not just drown a bag of puppies.

Now, in November, she’s gone to the gym exactly nunce. i counted. So that means it’s time to throttle the painful hemorrhage or eighty dollarses from my slowly bleeding pocket. But before i sounded the death knell, i thought i’d pay my respects to the Y and at least get my month’s money’s worth.

i took the pilates class. Pilates was designed by The Hated. i believe i’ve mentioned this. It hasn’t improved much since i stopped taking the classes at work. The various gruelling excercises and embarrassingly unnatural stretches remain as demoralizing and impossible as ever. Allow me to convey my mortification with another ridiculous analogy:

Picture yourself in an excercise class where the instructor very softly, very calmly drones “and now we’re going to lift our left foot … straight up to our mouths … thhhhhrrooooough our oral cavity, straaaaaaight out the backs of our heads … braaaaaaid our first and second toes in a French twist, and explooooode our gall bladders out through our nostrils.”

So you struggle a little with your left foot, and realize you can’t even lean far enough forward on the mat to get ahold of it. Meanwhile, the room fills with the sporadic popping sounds of people’s gall bladders exploding out through their nostrils, and you’re the only one who didn’t manage it.

Sigh. Such is pilates.

The gentleman softly intoning at the front of the room set me at peace. i felt very much at ease with him. i introduced myself to him at the end of the class, and asked if he did any personal training. He sure did. Also, he is gay.

He is gay. i mention it because i feel it’s somehow important. i mention it because last night, i gave my phone number and the promise of forty dollars to a gay man who’s going to come to my house and exercise with me. That’s a whole lotta gayness for a guy like me. That’s like spontaneous gay overload. That’s like you’re straight, you’re straight, you’re straight, you’re straight, FOSSE!!!

JAZZ HANDS!

That’s gay.

Mind you, i don’t know for sure he’s gay. My gaydar needle is swollen and throbbing, but i’ve been wrong before. For one thing, he doesn’t have the gay accent. You know - the one that kind of makes you sound like you’re from the South, but that’s not why you’re wearing those leather chaps? He’s definitely effeminate, but he’s not FAAABULOUS. i simply cannot abide men who are FAAABULOUS. i want to thlap them thilly. But despite that, i still think he’s gay.

Here are my clues: he is a professional dancer. He teaches pilates at the Metro Central YMCA. He has a little pouff of hair on his forehead. And also, he is gay.

i put those subtle, circumstantial clues together and surmised that he’s probably gay.

Begin controversy:

Being a Christian, i object to gayness. i believe that homosexuality is wrong. But as a Christian, i believe that a lot of stuff is wrong. i make friends of liars, thieves, druggies, and Mac users (most of whom, by association, are honorarily gay). A problem would only arise if my friends lied, thieved, druggied, or used a Mac while i was around. i am a sinner, just as my friends are sinners. When i sin around my friends - by gossiping or swearing or being an all-around jerk like i’m prone to - it puts a strain on my relationships with those friends.

Christians, especially the fabled Right Wing Bible Belt Fundies (an entertaining crowd if ever there was), put too much of an emphasis on certain sins. They looooove to condemn homosexuality while letting other sins slide. That’s why no one likes a Fundy.

Here’s how i see it: i am a sinner. Being a Christian, and by the overwhelming grace of God alone, i’m forgiven of my sins, and i need to devote the rest of my life to sinning less and less. Other people, non-Christians, are also sinners. Ideally, they’ll come to know the same forgiving power of Christ that i know now. i really hope for that, because Christianity is supergreat. But in the meantime, if my non-Christian acquiantances are not practicing or planning or boasting about their sins while they’re in my company, we’re all okay.

So! By that logic, if my personal trainer comes over and shows me how to stretch and lift weights and eat good food and develop lean muscle mass, it’s all good.

If he does all of that stuff while having sexual intercourse with a man in his bottom and singing show tunes, i’m going to ask for my forty dollars back.

The bathroom at work smells like creamsicles - and lo, i crave them.

It wasn’t always this way. For the longest time, the bathroom at work smelled like any bathroom should, full of the unpleasant scents from the varied and nasty things people like to do in bathrooms. This particular bathroom had the added disadvantage of sporting a broken peeflap. i’m no plumber, but i imagine there is some kind of flap that fits in the pipe coming from a urinal where all the pee goes. When the flap is closed, you don’t get ancient pee smell coming up out of the urinal pipe and into the bathroom. i imagine such a flap exists because it was most definitely broken in the bathroom at work.

So the whole bathroom smelled like pee - old pee - and you’d have to hold your nose when you used the urinal. This posed a (literal) handful of problems for me, because i’m so poorly co-ordinated and physically gifted that i require two hands on the job at all times, and if one of those hands is otherwise occupied with holding my nose, there are problems. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s an awfully good thing i’m not a fireman.

So just recently, the facilities team at work installed a little device that, while not quite repairing the broken peeflap, did the next best thing. It masked the bathroom odors by excreting a pleasant scent every 15-20 seconds. For some strange reason, facilities decided the best spot to install this little device was directly above the urinal, prompting our art director to emerge from the bathroom one day and ask “Why does the top of my head smell like pina colada?”

The scents, we learned, are many and varied. After pina colada came summer blossom, and after summer blossom came lilac breath, and after lilac breath came ginger spit-up, and after ginger spit-up came fruity mai tai asplosion, and after fruity mai tai asplosion came grape ape, and then purplesaurus rex, and then new car smell, and then nacho breeze, until finally facilities replaced the scent cartridge with what i can only describe as creamsicle.

Fantasy. … Creamsicle fantasy.

Funny that, because after a few trips to the bathroom, i started to get this wicked craving for creamsicles. i actually spent one lunch hour scouring the neighbourhood stores for an extreme creamsicle (so named because it is 2 times larger than a regular creamsicle and costs 5 times more than a regular creamsicle, making it an “extreme” rip-off. … Also, i skateboard and hang-glide while i eat it). None of the neighbourhood stores were prepared to sell me an extreme creamsicle so, ironically, i settled for a pina colada frozen fruit bar, which redoubled my desire.

My creamsicle urges grew so overpowering that when we finally went grocery shopping last week, i convinced my wife to let me buy an entire box of creamsicles, 30 in all.

And then - oh, yes - there were creamsicles.

When the ancient jews of the Old Testament fled Egypt and wandered around in the desert, they complained that they didn’t have anything to eat, and so God made bread rain down from heaven. Then they eventually started complaining that they had no meat, and so God said he’d give them so much meat it would come out their noses.

My friends? i have creamsicles coming out my nose.

i’m far too lazy to cook food for myself or to order anything healthy, or even to pick up a lousy bag of grapes or baby carrots on my way home from work, and so now, nearly my entire diet consists of creamsicles. i eat them in the morning while i dream about toast. i eat them after work when i need to take a load off. i eat them in the evening when i’ve forgotten about dinner. i eat them to take the edge off. To put the edge on. i eat them because they’re there.

i’m sated now. My desire for creamsicles has abided, but i still have this half-eaten box of them in my freezer. And, like heroes of yore, i feel it incumbent upon me to singlehandedly slay the remainder of them with my all-consuming jaws. Like Heracles and the mighty hydra, i sense that my quest has brought me to my freezer to destroy the creamy-orange blight that has blackened my household. Only then can i be free.

The wise thing, of course, would be to toss them in the garbage, but … starving kids in Africa, if you don’t finish your dinner you can’t stay up to watch the Incredible Hulk, why would you waste all that food i bought / we’re not made of money …

They don’t call it an eating disorder for nothing.

i went to the dentist a few days ago, which is awesome because it makes me feel like the richest man in the world.

i mean, i am so wealthy, and i live in a country so opulent, that i can pay somebody to root around in my mouth with a metal pick and scrape off all the garbage. It reminds me a little of that Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America, where the prince finishes using the bathroom and his vizier summons the royal wipers.

My mouth usually hurts like Hell after i visit the dentist, which is a bit of a buzzkill for that super-wealthy feeling. The hygienist tells me that the reason my mouth hurts like Hell is that i don’t floss regularly enough. i asked her how often i’m supposed to floss, and she said “every day.” Oh man. What a drag.

Flossing is a drag. It really is. i don’t enjoy it because i’m the kind of person who likes to get things accomplished. If i neglect to floss for a few months, which is my norm, then when i finally take the piano wire to my craggy, yellowed teeth and start sawing through the gaps like two men cutting down a tree, chunks start flying. i mean, actual fragments of mouth garbage and plaque shrapnel start flying out of my mouth, making a mess of the carpet and hitting my cats in the head. It’s satisfying. i’ve set out to remove trash from my face, and it’s obvious i’m getting something done.

Contrast that gory affair with flossing every day. There’s no real build-up on your teeth, so you’re just going through the motions of putting a piece of string down between your chompers and wiggling it around. It’s like vacuuming. When i vacuum, i wanna see the kind of thing they promise on TV commercials for industrial wetvacs: i wanna see my grey, mouldy carpet come richly to life with every stripe. Maybe some animated tingles and sparkly spots. “AHA!” i’d say. “i’m really getting something accomplished here.

So the bottom line is that things need to get really filthy before i can take any satisfaction in cleaning them. This is a problem for me, because it leads to a painful mouth after i visit the dentist. And the occasional itch down below.

But, if i may, i’ll hit you with a second mediocre movie reference: the sad old man in Prelude to a Kiss, on giving a lifetime’s worth of advice to a young married couple, simply says “floss.” This brings to mind my second objection to daily flossing.

Flossing, along with recycling, is something that atheists do to feel justified. It’s part of the pointless busy work of everyday life that provides meaning to people who otherwise have no reason to live. i am a Christian. i know i’m going to heaven. The fact that i may arrive there with a filthy mouth and irreversable tooth decay is inconsequential. i hope they provide mints at the front gates. And if they do, since it’s heaven, you’re probably allowed to take more than one. And i’ll probably have to.

No one in heaven will be angry that i didn’t floss every day, because there’s no anger in heaven. They’ll all probably be very tactful in avoiding me, or in breathing through their mouths when they talk to me so they don’t catch a whiff of the unholy stench wafting out of my stanky orifice. They’ll all be very polite. Perhaps God will take me aside one day and gently recommend that i start flossing?

Perhaps He wants me to do that now?

i thought about it long and hard on my way back from the dentist, and i came to a decision. i will floss every day. i will floss every single day from now until my next dentist appointment in three months. Then, if the hygienist cleans me up and asks skeptically how often i floss, and my mouth still hurts on the way home, i’ll know it’s all bupkiss. i’ll know it’s just a scheme by the Man to sell me mouth rope and prey on my fears that i’ll be stinky in heaven if i don’t use it every day.

But there is the outside chance that flossing every day will actually improve matters in my mouth, which would be miraculous. i’m leaving myself open to that possibility. i’m ready to believe in miracles. i’m going to lie in bed every night, floss in hand, and imagine the huge flakes of trash i’m scrubbing off my teefs at a microscopic level, to appease the industrious side of me.

Will all of this effort make my mouth a better person? Update in three months. Until then, mouthnotony.