Gym-Time Struggle

So in the last week I have read something like 5 women's magazines in as many days. I'm not particularly proud of this, but it's something I've been up to. I read these in the gym, on the stair-stepping machine, and if I don't have a magazine I go a little nuts. I tried to read Ibsen's classic mythical play Peer Gynt on the elliptical and it did not go particularly well. After a particularly strange passage in this surreal Scandinavian epic when the protagonist Peer is chased through a bog by his troll girlfriend/baby mama I promptly fell off the machine. Luckily, the gym was full and lots of people saw. So I'm sticking with these women's magazines, even though I now have 5 different opinions on what is wrong with my body. I'm planning on believing them all.

But the most troubling thing about these magazines isn't their advice on men and dieting, though I now am aware just how to please my man on every possible level and improve his orgasms, because the male orgasm is just that tough to achieve. No, the worst thing coming out of these magazines is undoubtedly the fashion advice. For example, one magazine has a section called "Lust/Must" pairing similar items of different prices and having the reader guess which item is more expensive. Which, well, the difference is usually about fifty bucks, so I'm sorry to both the prada booties and the gucci booties but I wont be buying either of you this season, mostly because booties is something unacceptable to be wearing past the age of two. The strangest thing about these sections is that they try and convince me that I want either of these items when I patently do not. This month a magazine I will call not-Allure tried to order me to adore purple python as a pattern. Which frankly to me sounds like nonsense because that's not a real thing. Purple python doesn't exist, it's not real, you can't find that in nature. There's regular python, that's around, it's brownish green. I'm sure there's even white somewhere, isn't that what Britney Spears was wearing in one of her thousand come-backs from insanity? But no purple. Somewhere a python is like, "What, will nothing I do be good enough for you people? No, no, I will NOT let this make me eat".

The point is, I can deal with the other advice, ludicrous as it is, because it seems to want what is best for me. Ultimately, I do want to be happy and healthy and hey, if I can someday look like Heidi Klum, well, that's just awesome, let's be honest. I would like to "snag a man" (Thanks, not-Cosmo!) and "perfect the smoky eye" (Thanks, not-Glamour!) and I'd be lying if I said I didn't. But I don't want to look like an idiot, and that's the only way I see me in purple python going. Also, apparently glittery clothing is in, which I can't support at all either.

As I exited the gym, proud of my new-found confidence in rejecting the sage advice of the good people at not-Allure I was smacked in the head by the moving arm of a nearby elliptical machine. If that's a sign, I'm not planning on paying attention to it.