I began working out again several years ago when my younger brother came to live with us for a few years while he transitioned from life in the USA to life in Southeast Asia. In return for room and board, he attended Church services once a week and encouraged my wife and me to go to the gym three times a week to lift weights. For that we are indebted to him. Interestingly, when I first met my wife forty-one years ago she was a regular at the South Bay Gym in Lomita, an old-fashioned sweaty male-dominated free weight gym where women who were willing to brave the alpha male environment were rare. She was willing, and she held her own. Back in the gym after all those years, wifey once again showed herself to be a beast in the gym. She does not mess around when she is pushing and pulling steel.
Now that my younger brother has moved on and our schedules make it inconvenient for wifey and me to work out together, we still hit the gym three times a week, me in the morning and her in the afternoons. All of this brings me to today's workout.
Those of you who work out at the gym know full well that it is a combination of experiences for an old codger like me since my brother's applied expertise demands that I stay away from exercises I used to excel at for fear of overextending certain joints and doing serious damage. Okay. I willingly comply with his instructions and am only too delighted to avoid cardio. After all, I anticipate running no marathons, but I do have every intention of making sure I am strong enough to push myself out of the recliner as I walk the ever-darkening tunnel of old age.
Every time I go to the gym I have to put up with young men showing off by their excessive grunting, by their needless clanging of too-heavy weights they are trying to lift with improper technique, and by their absolute refusal to put weights and dumbbells back in their proper places on the racks. One learns so much about a guy's mother by watching him work out poorly. However, today's experience was with the modern woman.
I had finished with my dumbbell curls, my dumbbell rowing, and my MTS rowing and was standing out of sight and at a comfortable distance behind a woman seated at the lat machine. No problem at this point as I watched her through one set, rest, second set, rest, and third set. Then she pulled her smartphone from a private storage area on her person available only to women and began swiping through emails. One minute passed. Two minutes passed. Three minutes passed. A gymnasium full of mostly men, yet she makes no move to vacate the machine, a comfortable place for her to sit while casually reviewing emails, or the news, or blogs, or whatever.
After about five minutes of this nonuseful use of the lat machine I stepped up and said (in a pleasant voice, mind you), "Are you finished on this machine?" She indicated that she was, stood up to move away, and then demanded, "What's your problem?" I did not answer her because anything I said would be used against me in a feminist court of law.
Thus began today's interactions with the female products of modern feminism. I find it astonishing as I age that I did not see it when I was younger, this incredibly deleterious consequence of feminism's blight on women. Unless touched by the grace of God, women today seem to have lost interpersonal skills that most women used to possess back in the day, skills most useful in dealing with someone unlike women in every way, an actual adult male like me.
Don't get me wrong. I am thankful for those women I deal with whose lives have been wonderfully influenced by God's grace, by God's Word, and by God's men and women who implicitly understand that men are not women, should not be dealt with the way they deal with women, and that there are dire consequences in the lives of women who never seem to recognize this reality. But such women are a rarity these days, even in our Churches.
Sad.
Now that my younger brother has moved on and our schedules make it inconvenient for wifey and me to work out together, we still hit the gym three times a week, me in the morning and her in the afternoons. All of this brings me to today's workout.
Those of you who work out at the gym know full well that it is a combination of experiences for an old codger like me since my brother's applied expertise demands that I stay away from exercises I used to excel at for fear of overextending certain joints and doing serious damage. Okay. I willingly comply with his instructions and am only too delighted to avoid cardio. After all, I anticipate running no marathons, but I do have every intention of making sure I am strong enough to push myself out of the recliner as I walk the ever-darkening tunnel of old age.
Every time I go to the gym I have to put up with young men showing off by their excessive grunting, by their needless clanging of too-heavy weights they are trying to lift with improper technique, and by their absolute refusal to put weights and dumbbells back in their proper places on the racks. One learns so much about a guy's mother by watching him work out poorly. However, today's experience was with the modern woman.
I had finished with my dumbbell curls, my dumbbell rowing, and my MTS rowing and was standing out of sight and at a comfortable distance behind a woman seated at the lat machine. No problem at this point as I watched her through one set, rest, second set, rest, and third set. Then she pulled her smartphone from a private storage area on her person available only to women and began swiping through emails. One minute passed. Two minutes passed. Three minutes passed. A gymnasium full of mostly men, yet she makes no move to vacate the machine, a comfortable place for her to sit while casually reviewing emails, or the news, or blogs, or whatever.
After about five minutes of this nonuseful use of the lat machine I stepped up and said (in a pleasant voice, mind you), "Are you finished on this machine?" She indicated that she was, stood up to move away, and then demanded, "What's your problem?" I did not answer her because anything I said would be used against me in a feminist court of law.
Thus began today's interactions with the female products of modern feminism. I find it astonishing as I age that I did not see it when I was younger, this incredibly deleterious consequence of feminism's blight on women. Unless touched by the grace of God, women today seem to have lost interpersonal skills that most women used to possess back in the day, skills most useful in dealing with someone unlike women in every way, an actual adult male like me.
Don't get me wrong. I am thankful for those women I deal with whose lives have been wonderfully influenced by God's grace, by God's Word, and by God's men and women who implicitly understand that men are not women, should not be dealt with the way they deal with women, and that there are dire consequences in the lives of women who never seem to recognize this reality. But such women are a rarity these days, even in our Churches.
Sad.
