Hold Me Accountable, Tiny Dancer

I can never go to the gym again. There are many good reasons why, two of which are:

1) Working out affects one's metabolism. I have the metabolism of a 24-year-old. To mess with that would clearly be akin to looking a gift horse in the mouth.

2) I never sweat. Ever. On my several attempts at working out, I have been a reluctant witness to the fact that it does, in fact, cause people to sweat. Sometimes profusely. Apparently it even activates sweat glands in people who normally don't sweat, so clearly I would be opening up quite a can of worms, the thought of which makes me nervous, but thankfully, not sweaty.

But most importantly, the following story illustrates why I can never go the gym again (and should probably avoid anything even mildly strenuous, just for good measure). The last time I was at the gym, I was participating in a hip hop dance class. I say "participating" in the sense that I was there and following along with the spotty comprehension of a tourist asking for directions in a foreign language, and I was definitely putting in enough effort to look ridiculously white, middle class, and straight. This is not the look you're going for in a hip hop dance class. But its the gym, and who cares what you look like, right? Anyone who looks okay looks out of place anyway (see bullet point #2). So I didn't think much about it until the next day at work when a guy who I'll call "Elton" said to me, "Hey, didn't I see you at the gym last night?" Now, statistically speaking, the odds of running into me at the gym are right up there with seeing Bigfoot, so my automatic response was "No, that wasn't me." But then of course I remembered my rendez-vous with Terrence-the-gay-dance-instructor. Unfortunately Elton continued with "Yeah, I saw you in an erotic dance class!" Now, I can't for the life of me think what Elton could have possibly considered erotic about anything I did in a class which included a move the instructor called "the retarded hula." So in a knee-jerk reaction, I blurted out, "It wasn't an erotic dance class! It was hip hop! Hip hop!!" "Aha!" he said. "So it was you." Damn. Immediately I flashed back to memories of my much-too-retarded Retarded Hula, girly pushups, and the move where the whole class spun clockwise and I, the lone left-hander, naturally spun counter-clockwise and nearly took out my neighbor's eye. Erotic?? How was someone supposed to take me seriously in the business world after witnessing that? Thankfully, Elton was headed out of the office, but not without a sly "See ya later, Tiny Dancer!" I am never going back to the gym. And possibly work.