Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

Living with your ex because you’re both unemployed and can’t afford your own place sucks for pursuing a new love.

That’s why my gym affords me more than a place to work out. Nothing beats hearing the guys grunt when they lift a 150-pound barbell from a squat. The sound makes me think of the good times I’ve had. I like to close my eyes and remember.

But my vision of love is usually blown away by a maintenance worker who turns on a vacuum cleaner. Cleaning comes early at my gym, and I can’t go later because I’ve changed my membership to mornings only. Saves me about 40 bucks a month.

Most of the guys at my gym are gay. Yes, I have “gadar.” I have nothing against gay guys, but they’re not dating material for me and vice versa. I long for a rich lawyer to hail down the stairs, or the CNN silver fox, Anderson Cooper, who belongs to my gym but works out at another location. As for the lawyers, I would think they need to relieve stress from keeping banks out of bankruptcy after all that bailout money I’ve paid them. Even if lawyers don’t have a conscience, I could forgive them to listen to a good grunt.

Somehow, workouts for women don’t yield the same Meg Ryan-style release I remember from the movie When Harry Met Sally. I try my hand at the hip abduction machine to keep my hips agile. That’s where you place the outer side of your knees against pads and push them apart against resistance weights. You can also do the hip adduction where you push the pads together, but I haven’t figured that one out, and I’m too embarrassed to ask.