The Stairmaster Scoop
By Nicole Cook
Humor
The gym visit. It is the hackneyed symbol of modern man's crisis--the ceaseless running, biking, stepping, rowing, grunting, pilating and contorting...all to a non-existent destination that you must simultaneously travel towards and away from. Others will do the same, but you alone must depend on your inner gamemaster to drive you across the steep inclines of alienation and rolling hills of ennui. You are solitary in this battle, you have submitted, and you...are wearing spandex.
In the midst of this self-imposed absurdity, there's nothing quite like the refuge offered by the magazine rack. It seems only fitting that your mind should be processing vacuous, out-of-date information while your body is performing senseless acts of repetition. For some, it is our only connection to the grande monde--flipping through a People or New Yorker magazine to the pulse of the latest pop/R&B travesty emanating from the boom box at the Stevenson gymnasium. This is not the time to read Nietzsche. It is a time for one to reconnect to the real world--to refamiliarize oneself with the emblems that connect humanity, to understand the latest global crisis in three propagandized sentences or less, to marvel at the latest mountain-climbing feat to the North Pole (complete with pictures of snow), to learn tips on how to tame your man (and also how to unleash the sex beast within), to affirm your suspicions that Britney Spears has indeed gotten breast implants. Like the path of Sisyphus, the list is endless. And the wonderful thing about The Outside World is that, like a good soap opera, you can easily catch up, even if you haven't watched in a while.
Here's a sampling of some of the things one could learn about while breaking a sweat:
In the "latest" issue of the New Yorker (April 26 1999) there is (after the usual 40 pages or so of theater listings) an exhortation that the U.S. deploy ground troops in Yugoslavia. The "town talker" says: "As long as we are not beating Milosevic's forces into submission, they are beating us." On the lighter side, a flip of the page will reward the loyal reader with a piece on a Serbian nationalist/zookeeper named Bojovic, who reads poetry to his dog Moshe on television. The zookeeper, who also has snakes named after Madeline Albright and Warren Christopher is quoted as saying "Moshe particularly likes the Russian poets...they are very soothing for him, especially now, during such a terrible crisis."
On to Good Housekeeping, the one with Cindy Crawford on the cover. (Surely, she is a wonderful housekeeper). The first article longer than a tube of lipstick is about how to sharpen up your memory. Also, a woman describes how she takes twenty minutes to focus all of her senses on a yellow raisin, as a way of mental relaxation. But I forget the rest. What I do remember is countless cosmetic ads using some form or other of the word "luminous" to describe how their product will make your face reflect more light. Also, GH has a new "red hot sex" section geared to some of the feistier housekeepers out there. One of the columns on how to trick your mate into better foreplay advises you to make "him lie still while you stroke, kiss, and caress him for 30 minutes." Ooh, the duplicity.
Finally, one cannot neglect what is perhaps the most universally appealing of the magazines, Bicycling. My favorite section in this issue is entitled "Moments that Matter." In it there is not only a list of "acts of intimacy" ("Find a nick. Touch it. Remember the day it happened"), but also "four things that make cold rides worthwhile," which undeniably warrants reprinting:
Seeing yourself as hardcore in other people's eyes.
Cold, cold air tastes like nothing else on earth.
Deep into the ride, feeling hot, you look out at snow and ice and wonder how anything can be frozen.
Climbing off the bike, steaming and heroic. Take your gloves off. Touch your bike. So cold.
So cold, indeed.