let's dialogue, shall we?

This is sort of a cop-out entry. A call for attention. A call for comments.

What do you, dear reader, run your eyes along during your time on the treadmill? Or the stationary bike? Or the elliptical whats-it-do?

I went to a gym tonight, and I was surrounded by people reading Us or whatever cheap mag they picked up in the grocery line before going to the gym. That is, if they weren't staring vacantly straight ahead.

(It's the vacant starers, the ones hooked up to their iPods, who freak me out most at gyms. I'm not going to pretend they are the reason I avoid gyms or anything. I avoid gyms because I don't particularly like to work out. But I always get a titch paranoid and wonder if the vacant starers are laughing on the inside at my total misuse of the spinning bike. Or if they somehow know I'm lolling my time on the stepper at level 2 rather than 12 or 16 or 20.)

When I was in university, I spent hours at the gym reading excellent texts for my English classes. (Okay, one hour. A week. And it was just one first-year English class, so.....)

Today, I brought a Philippa Gregory novel -- the book is a welcome break from the last book club book I didn't finish. And a welcome break from the real world, which, as the days get shorter and I find myself going to work and coming home in the dark, is very necessary.

But I'm thinking it just doesn't look right to haul around a fat romance novel at the gym.

(Side note: I think I didn't enjoy The Tudors as much as I expected because the mini-series is not nearly as rich as Gregory's books covering the same period. Also, I have to agree with my father -- Jonathan Rhys Meyers doesn't really have the gravity necessary in Henry VIII. Now, if he would only be cast as another Henry altogether....)