Equal parts drill sargeant, Evangelical Preacher and Crackhead

Today I will tackle that ever so American phenomenon, the exercise class.  I have been "Workin on my fitness" lately, to quote Fergie, and in so doing, have been taking an exercise class named, weirdly enough, "Body Pump".

Now, body pump, for the uninitiated, is basically weight lifting set to really loud, oftentimes a tad obnoxious music, with someone yelling at you to go slower/faster/harder/longer which makes the weight lifting itself harder/more annoying/less thought provoking.  Some days I like it more than others.  The instructors vary, and this, my friends is where it gets interesting. I am a people watcher, and they are really the only ones to watch while you're a captive audience  sweating away the delicious pastrami you ate for lunch. There are quite a few varieties when it comes to exercise instructors.  There is the Former Cheerleader ( think "Ready, OK!  More SQUATS!!"), the Real Weightlifter ("Make sure you use your heaviest weight for this set now..."), the I'm Really a Kindergarten Teacher but I Needed a Job, ("OK guys!  Today we're going to really do our BEST!"), the I'm Too Old For This But Have No Other Skill Set ( OK.  Now we're moving on to lunges... sigh..."), the I Love Fitness and You Should TOO! ( "Don't you just love CRUNCHES!!??') and... you get the picture.  However, it was not until yesterday that I encountered the ever so entertaining Complete Whack job variety.

Equal Parts Drill Sergeant , Evangelical Preacher, and Crackhead,  this woman was quite a specimen.  Relatively muscular, and slightly androgynous, she was a middle aged black lady with a somewhat fanatical gleam in her eye.  I originally thought she was the aforementioned I Love Fitness and You Should TOO! variety, but no.  I was in for a treat.  As we began our dead lifts to slightly slowed down CASCADA, I began to notice some things.  First, I noticed that she wasn't so much speaking into the microphone (duh, they have a microphone so they can be heard over the rhythmic beats of the fantastic tunes) as she was screaming at it.  Screaming in such a way as to make her words less clear instead of more clear.  Oh well I thought, maybe she's new.  Right about then is when I began to notice the facial expressions, and the head bobbing and the strangely improper weightlifting form.  Like some sort of bobble head turtle person, our lovely lady lead us through all of the regular stuff all the while shouting unintelligible things at us through her headset.  She had a lot of head and shoulder movement going on all the time. Like, sort of a shrug, head bob, head bob, shrug combo.  Like she was exaggerating her movements for teaching purposes, but forgot what she was trying to convey. I caught more than one fellow class attendee uneasily sliding their eyes left and right to see if they were the only ones thinking this lady was completely cracked.  I didn't completely lose it, however, until the bicep curls. It was one of those moments where the laughter bubbling up from within my sarcastic inappropriate soul was completely, well, inappropriate.  She was getting louder and louder, and she was bobbing, and curling, and shrugging and bobbing,  and any minute I expected her to say either "Hallelujah!!" or " Drop and Give me 20!" or even to perhaps coo like the pigeon she was apparently imitating.   After said curls, I actually left the room to collect myself.   There is sometimes only one cure for inappropriate laughter - and that is to go laugh manically in the ladies locker room.  After that, we did our requisite stretching and she did some more bobbing and I hastened away to consider why I attend this class, and how I am going to make all of that pie for Thanksgiving...

The Cake of Wonder

For my second momentous posting, I will rely on an incident at my job.  Perhaps incident is the wrong word, perhaps incidence of idiocy is more apt.

First, some background. I work at a restaurant, and we do private parties frequently.  Sometime in June or July, there was a woman, lets call her DeAndra, who wanted to have a private party in our private dining room in October, for her baby shower.  ( This was to be the first odd thing about the situation - shouldn't your friends be doing this for you?)  She also wanted to order a cake, from yours truly, the cake lady.  She did not want just any cake however, she wanted a very special cake.  The word special can be defined here as - I'm a whacko, and I have no idea what I want, so I am going to micro-manage every aspect of this freakin' cake as though my life depended on it.  I did not however, know this going into the situation.  I received an email from her, and was mildly annoyed because she wanted to do a cake tasting, which I do not usually do.  The cake needs of my restaurant are relatively simple and can usually be met by regular, well decorated, yet not super customized cakes.  The people choose a cake flavor, an icing flavor, and a filling flavor, and what they want it to say on the top, and ta daaa - a cake is born.
                 DeAndra however, would  not be thus satisfied.  So, we plan a cake tasting.  She seems to place a lot of undue importance on this, going back and forth between flavors, asking her husband (who she had dragged along to an 8 am cake tasting) what he thought, saying how moist this was, or did he think this one was too sweet.  At this point, I am all ready thinking... this is why I work with pastry, not with the people.    So, I made it through this tasting without throttling her, and I think, ok, we're good - by the end of the week or so, she'll email me a picture, and a flavor and we're done.  She decides upon a cake that looks like building blocks, will take me forever to make, and balks at the quoted price.  And yet, I still think that this ordeal is pretty much over with until I make said cake.
            Oh how wrong was I?  Oh I was very wrong indeed ladies and gents.  She then proceeded to email me not once, not twice, but somewhere in the neighborhood of whatever two times the number of weeks between July and October is.  I, of course, become progressively more annoyed, and do my best not to write emails ending in "F**k off Lady!".  Somewhere around the first of September, she wants another tasting.  At which point she changes the flavor she previously wanted from something I offered, to something she made up, and basically continues to imply that this cake is not going to be decorated to her liking.  So, while I do not want to lose my job at this point I desperately need to vent, and therefore penned the following, never to be sent email, in response to her "you didn't respond to my last email" email:

 

Dear DeAndra,

 

Kindly get over yourself and your freakin cake please.  If you don't trust me to make this thing, good luck finding someone else, somewhere else to mollycoddle you long enough to get out of you what the heck you actually want, because it has now taken me approximately 4 1/2 months.  It should not take half of the gestation period of your unborn child to figure out what you want the cake, to celebrate his/her impending birth, to look like.  You know why?  Because it really not that freakin important that's why.  I'm sorry your wedding cake did not meet your exacting standards.  And this cake won't either, because you're impossible.  I feel sorry for your husband and your fetus, because they are going to be the most henpecked individuals ever.  And good luck with all those birthday parties for that kid.  Good freakin luck with that - because if you're this concerned about what the cake looks like and this child is as yet unborn - i can't imagine how nuts you'll be by the time the 1st birthday rolls around.  I didn't email you back because there is absolutely nothing left to discuss.  Nothing.  And from my dealings with you, I am 100% certain that you will insure that this child will basically be wrapped in cotton batting from the moment it pops out.  He/she will never play contact sports, or learn to drive, or do anything really except perhaps take piano lessons, and eat organic foods.  And turn in perfect homework assignments.  Meticulous. 

 

Have a nice life, and please don't plan any more parties with cake here.  Please.

 

Sincerely,

The Jingo

The best/worst part of all of this is - this crazy be-yotch actually loved the damn cake!  She even sent me a hand written thank you note.  In which she stated she wishes I could make all of her future cakes.  I desperately hope she moves across the country sometime soon.   Because the next time I may have to kill her, and don't really want that on my conscience.

For my first tale, allow me to regale you with the story of the Parking Lot Holla.  Now,  just to clarify, people, men in this instance, tend to regard me as a, and I quote "halfway decent lookin' woman".  I tend to be pretty psyched about this in general, and on occasion wear clothes to celebrate this fact.  On one such occasion, I was walking to use my nearby branch of public transit, carrying a giant gift-wrapped package.  During this trek, I cut through a parking lot that services a ghetto clothing wholesale store and a now defunct safeway.  So, at this point, I'm truckin' along, listening to some music, etc.  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a large black SUV cutting though the parking lot, somewhat towards me.  I don't think much of it, keep walking, boppin' to my tunes.

Then I hear, "Scuse me Miss," and I try the ignore.  No dice.
                   " Scuse me Miss, I saw you walkin' when you were down on the street...( at this point I'm like what?  Can I go now?  Who are you ? and then he finishes up with:) and I was wondering if there was any way we could keep in touch?"

                    "Well, you could come and try to hit me up in the ghetto safeway parking lot again sometime," I say.

At this point he says 'scuse me' again in a confused way.  He continues to try and seal the deal.
                   " I mean, isn't there any way for us to keep in touch, email?" he suggests.
His final attempt was asking if I wanted a ride to the metro.  I thought to myself, I would get in that car only if I wanted my friends and relatives to be looking for my remains later.

Here's my problem with all of this.  Did this guy feel like this strategy would work?  How is is that normal looking guys, with or without giant black SUV's, don't come up to me in, say, a social situation like a bar and ask for my number, but some random guy who has never seen me before and is just driving along the freakin road will go out of his way to offer me a ride to the metro when it's not all that far away.

Normal guys, feel free to respond here.