You get used to different things in different places. That’s the US Magazine take on a Scientific American concept. (The Cat Fancy version, while insightful, dwells too long on the eating habits of calicos to be relevant for our purposes). Perhaps this phenomenon exemplifies object permanence, or possibly people are just that self-centered. Whatever the psychological underpinning, the brain has a notable tendency to imprint on your specific location, as if all other locations are less real than yours. Like, if you frequent a diner in Bowling Green, Ohio, although logic dictates that other diners in other places exist, your Bowling Green diner for you, exemplifies the essential dinerness of a diner. It’s your default diner, the one you picture when someone says, “Hey guys, I could really go for some home fries. Let’s hit the diner!” It is, in some irrational way, the only diner. This single-mindedness, this diner-vision if you will, is not solely eatery-associated. Rather, it indicates an inability to think outside of one’s specific circumstances, and it can happen with relation to virtually anything.

Remember that time when you were shopping at Anthropologie? Even though the flimsy silk cargo pants you tried on cost $500 and in truth were less than flattering, as you examined your ass in the three-way mirror, your brain jittered and stalled, and in some illogical way you truly believed you were in the only clothing store and those pants were the only option.  Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to narrow-mindedness.” He meant that if you move from Ohio to Florida, no doubt you will find a new diner and your perception of the word will expand. He meant, for God’s sake, don’t buy the pants! This column is not about diners, nor is it about a hipster-frequented, mass-market pseudo-boutique that inexplicably sells both faux vintage switch plates and haute couture petticoats. This column is about my gym. Trust me, there’s a connection.

Before I moved to LA the idea of belonging to a gym was anathema to me. However, since daily workouts are absolutely essential to managing my sex drive and ensuring that individuals other than canines and methamphetamine addicts can hear me when I talk, I’ve developed a program that incorporates outdoor activities as well as maneuvers that can be carried out in the privacy of my own home. It isn’t only that I find sweating in public distasteful; the concept behind gyms vexes me. Why? Here’s the Anthropology Today explanation. The need for a workout facility essentially arises from the advent of the remote control. As a species, we were designed to walk ten miles a day, minimum. However, our modern incarnation finds us so far removed from our origin that we’ve had to create a segregated space in which to undertake the activities that were an integral aspect of our ancestor’s daily existence. In essence, we’ve made our lives so convenient that we’re dying of it.

Unfortunately, in a small apartment in car-centric, gang-riddled Silver Lake, California, if I attempted to work out in my usual ways, I might die of it. Sadly, repeated triple back flips are not advisable in a low-ceilinged one bedroom. My signature blend of core stretches, stair sprints, and the flashing of gang symbols when performed in the open air as they are meant to be, is also quite risky, although for different reasons. These exercises have always been my faithful fat-burning fallbacks. I call them Pilates/Gang War Fusion and I’m thinking of teaching a class. Unable to perform them, I was at something of a loss.

Still, my anti-gym sentiments were reinforced during my first week in LA. Here’s the Existential Angst Hourly reason. Merging onto the 101 freeway, my eyes rose from the half mile of thickly packed cars, break lights glowing red in the dusk, to a glistening glass building slashed with pink from the last rays of the dying sun. On some arbitrary upper floor, silhouetted against the deepening night, were rows of treadmills on which faceless figures ran without destination. This vision of desolate disconnection still danced behind my eyelids a week later when I broke down and joined my girlfriend’s gym. Strongly held convictions are all very well and good, but at the end of the day what’s more important, personal integrity or getting thin?

I’m not going to spend an overabundance of time describing LA gym culture, although believe me, I could tell you stories. Back to US Weekly, I could tell you about sharing a spinning class with Chuny, the Latino nurse from ER (her body in bike pants and sports bra is tan and muscular—but I’m a stronger spinner). I could tell you about the spindly personal trainer who, fully nude, would bend to pull on her knee socks, sliding the green striped cotton over her smooth calves bit by excruciating bit, then would begin a frantic prancing dance around the locker room putting on makeup, blow drying her hair, excitedly hailing acquaintances before coming to stillness in front of the full length mirror at which point she would carefully separate her bare pussy lips and gaze, rapt, at the glistening pink within, as if searching for something she might have lost. It was all I could do not to approach her with a tube of lip gloss or a set of car keys. “Excuse me Miss,” I imagined saying, “Is this what you’re looking for?” And of course I could tell you about BenchSlut.

With the exception of the small fleet of swimming Koreans, (See Asian Fitness) nearly all of the women at Gold’s were…how to put this delicately… hobags.  Decked out in jeweled thongs, with less pubic hair than your average Bratz doll, they primped in front of the mirrors like a high maintenance conga line. I was temped to sell tickets. BenchSlut however, took personal hygiene, most specifically lotion application, to a new and disconcerting level. On a daily basis, she would lie back on a locker-room bench, lotion-filmed hands dancing over her breasts, breathy moans escaping her half open lips, legs splayed open like an ecstatic pornstar.

The first time it happened, my girlfriend at the time was so amazed that she hauled me off the Stairmaster and into the locker room to see. We puzzled over BenchSlut’s possible motives. Was she suffering from a compulsive public moisturizing disorder? Did her therapist have her on some sort of self-love regime? Or most pathetically, did she actually think anyone cared? My girlfriend, an LA native, was repulsed by BenchSlut but unruffled by the other gym goers’ behavior.  I, on the other hand, was scandalized by all of it. Keep in mind that I am from taciturn Wisconsin where a quiet grunt and a distant gaze is as good as a marriage proposal. But LA does things to a person, or maybe I’m just especially impressionable. By the time I left not only had my concept of appropriate small talk been inexorably altered (Me: “So I was convinced it was genital warts but it turned out to be an ingrown hair!” Barista: OMG! I have so been there! Did you want whip cream on that?”) but I was also accustomed to unabashed nudity. Imagine my surprise then when I moved to Andersonville and joined Cheetah gym.

Within days I realized that Cheetah was not, for its own distinctive reasons, what I had come to expect a gym to be. Once again, my norms were different from my fellow gym goers. Perhaps I should pick up a copy of Midwestern Gym, because I’m still not sure if it’s me, the specific gym, or Chicago as a city. Although I had become more brazen during my tenure in LA, my soul was still prudently midwestern. While I was now sufficiently comfortable walking nude to the shower and back to my locker I still lotioned myself discreetly and slipped gratefully back into underwear that had not been Bedazzled within an inch of its life. Imagine my shock then when I became aware that I was by far the most brash gym member. As I dropped my wet towel at my feet and thrust my legs into my jeans, I noticed that around me women huddled self-consciously in front of open lockers, changing cloths underneath their towels like awkward adolescent girls. More frequently they didn’t bother to change at all. Not only did no one walk across the locker room naked; but the women of Cheetah didn’t even shower. In what universe, I wondered, was this acceptable?

Cheetah is a neighborhood gym, I reasoned, fastening my bra, maybe everyone showers at home. Mid-westerners are prudes, I hypothesized, pulling my tank top over my head, maybe public nudity is an understood taboo and the showers are here because of some city ordinance. This gym is full of lesbians, I theorized, shouldering my backpack, maybe no one wants her naked ass rated. Briefly I considered sidling up to some sweat-soaked woman and interrogating her about her hygiene habits, but I can’t even tell a friend she has something stuck in her teeth without feeling dizzy. I figured I would never know which one was odder, the stranger or the land. Then, one day as I was toweling off, a pointy-featured woman with a glittering nose ring glanced at me and blurted, “Oh, I’m so glad someone else showers!” My first impulse was to pretend I hadn’t heard her (You can take the girl out of Wisconsin....).  However, my Los Angelinian compulsion towards effusive self-disclosure and faux-cheer interceded and I responded, “I know right?! Back in LA people spend more time in the locker room than they do on the treadmills!”

“Well!” She rasped, “I am from Germany so you can imagine how this looks to me.” Her eyes roved disapprovingly over stacks of untouched clean towels, pristine shower curtains and moist women gathering up purses and hastily pulling coats over sweaty work-out clothes, before returning to me. “I’m just so glad to see that you showered.”  I successfully stifled the urge to point out that her people have historically been overly concerned with my people’s showering habits, said goodbye and left, my norms, for the moment validated.

Outside Clark Street was sun strewn and breezy in the mid-morning light. My work out had been strenuous and I had a sudden ravenous craving for home fries.     “Excuse me,” I asked a lumbering lesbian who happened to be passing. “Is there a diner around here?”

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Sarah Terez Rosenblum spent the last four years of her life in Los Angeles and plans to return even though she hated it.  She will be thirty in two years. Thank God she’ll have received her MFA in Creative Writing by then. That way, even though she’ll still be lacking any real idea of what she wants to do with her life, at least she’ll be massively in debt. You can contact her at or visit her at myspace.com/raininariver. You can also buy her a pony. She’s always wanted one.