And there's the rub

I've always really liked this phrase, but I only just learned it comes from Hamlet (some movie I watched recently explained it). I've read most of Shakespeare, and I've even seen this movie (Gary Oldman + Tim Roth = goodness). But the classics are not really my thing. I'm currently reading this book, and probably will be until the end of eternity because it's so damn long.

Anyway, back to the rub. The rub is always there, nothing is ever perfect, we all know this. You can meet what seems to be a great girl, everything is going well, and then she lights a cigarette (I don't know how many people cannot stand smoking, but I'm one of them). Or maybe she turns out to be completely insane. Or ... I could on about this particular subject for days, and that could get depressing.

Or maybe you just start a new job, and everything is going great with the people and the work but then you get stuck on a team that needs to illustrate the company's "core values" on a bulletin board and to make it worse, get stuck in office politics along the way (the preceding is not a plot for The Office, it just happened to me and will be explained further soon). The point is, no matter where you are and what is going on, there's always something. The negative people focus on the bad stuff and forget about all the good things going on. The positive people accept that those little annoyances are part of life and aren't worth obsessing over. I try to be positive, but sometimes you just can't help it. Exhibit A: My first trip to my new gym.

I don't expect much out of a gym. Give mean a decent selection of machines and free weights and not too many people so I don't have to wait, and everything else is no big deal. Or so I thought. When I started the new job one of my first goals was to find a gym to join. The gym I belonged to during my last Jersey stint is a little too pricey for me right now and relatively far away from work so it wasn't a great option. Within the first week of the new job, however, I found out that not only is there a gym right across the street, but the company subsidizes memberships. This is perfect. I go visit about a week later. At about 6:15 on a Tuesday night, the place is dead. Awesome. They have all sorts of machines and free weights and treadmills, etc. Super Bonus. The price is about half of what I would be paying at the other gym. I'm fully expecting the bathrooms to be staffed with unicorns at this point. Nothing could go wrong ...

Until I showed up today and actually signed up. Still not too busy. Still plenty of equipment. Still cheap. But then I finished my workout and went to the locker room to shower. I don't always find showering at the gym completely necessary, but I had gotten used to it in the NYC. Well here I walk towards the showers, when we get the rub. Showers suggest plural, multiple showering spaces. This shower had many shower heads, but only one room where 8-10 people could shower at once ... together.

If somebody wants to say I'm not comfortable in my manhood, fine, whatever. But I'm not 15 anymore and this isn't high school gym class (see the Freaks and Geeks episode where the nerdy kids don't want to shower). But even if it were high school gym class, my high school gym class was never full of 70+ year old retirees who just played tennis for an hour.

So there's the rub. I'm going to leave the gym not smelling too good for the foreseeable future. And it doesn't just hurt me, it hurts everyone who has to be around me until I get myself cleaned up. Hopefully sometime soon membership will get increase to the point that I'm not expected to shower like I have to run to History class right after I'm done with dodgeball.