I really can't go back to this gym again. For real this time.

You guys.

There's a gym right next to my office so most days I take some time in the afternoon to go workout and get all swole and gainzzz and stuff. A lot of the people I work with do the same so it's sort of like a sweaty office party every afternoon, but with lots of other offices as well.

So today I walked over to the gym at my usual time. It was full of everyone I know. I changed into my gym clothes. I was wearing bike shorts and a t-shirt that used to fit me back when I was young and cute and desirable.

The workout I did was one I do often. I bike a little and run a little and lift weights a little and not always in that order. I don't have any science or results to validate this as an effective routine. It's just a thing I do until I get tired because I don't care enough about exercise to actually look up a training program and follow it.

If you follow my program, you can look like *this*, too! [sucks in stomach and feels bad about self]

So there I was, minding my business, listening to a podcast about TV because it is no longer enough for me to just watch TV, I now have to spend time listening to people talk about watching TV. I biked a little. I ran on the treadmill a little. I lifted weights a little. Not necessarily in that order.

I was in the middle of some nonsensical weight-lifting routine when suddenly I felt someone tap my shoulder.

It was a man I don't know, but whom I see frequently at the gym. I pulled one earphone out, curious as to what he could possibly want.

"You probably don't care, and I'm sure other people have told you this by now," he started.

I braced myself for that sentence to end with "but you look exactly like Zac Efron/you have the most beautiful singing voice I've ever heard/I loved you in Thunder Down Under."

But no.

"there's a huge hole in the middle of your butt."

Ok, look. I don't know why my mind immediately went there. I don't know what on Earth caused me to assume this. But for some reason, I thought this man had approached me just to make a very strange and obvious observation/joke about human anatomy so I responded to "there's a huge hole in the middle of your butt" by shouting, "I SURE HOPE SO!"

The man. This nearly complete stranger. He just stared at me for a few seconds, puzzled, said "ok," and then went back to what he was doing.

It took me a full 30 seconds to realize that he was trying to tell me that there was a huge hole in the back of my bike shorts that I had been parading around in for the better part of an hour at my sweaty office party.

A panic suddenly rushed through me. I quickly walked into the locker room and pulled my juicy booty in front a mirror, where I saw this:

That's obviously not my actual butt. If it was, we would have much more serious problems to talk about than the hole. I put my shorts on a watermelon to demonstrate what it looked like because this is a family show and I don't want to get kicked off the internet.

And actually since the hole was pretty much in the middle of my butt, it looked more like this:

That's supposed to be a drawing of my butt but now that I'm looking at that picture I can see that it just looks like a watermelon with a line drawn on it.

Here. Maybe this is better:

The point is I was absolutely not wearing underwear because underwear is a scam created by China to get us to buy more clothes than we need.

Ok, I do normally wear underwear, but not under my bike shorts. So sue me.

I'm now realizing that maybe I should have waited until pumpkin season for the above demonstration. But here we are.

Also, bless his heart, when I asked Skylar to go to the grocery store to pick up a watermelon for me he didn't ask why I needed one, nor did he ask any questions when he walked into the kitchen an hour ago and saw that I had drawn a line and written "Butt" on it.

Anyway, as I stood in the locker room and stared at my voluptuous bottom poking through my raggedy bike shorts, all I could think about was what on Earth about me would make this man think I wouldn't care about this information.

He had started the whole thing off by saying "You probably don't care but . . ."

Do I look like the kind of person who would flaunt butt cleavage at the gym? Like some militant nudist just daring someone to say something?

Sometimes you think you're hot stuff, biking a little, running a little, and lifting weights a little. And then you find out everyone has been looking at your watermelon butt.

~It Just Gets Stranger