Everybody Hurts. Especially in February.

OK, February, you win. It’s become clear to me now that absolutely EVERYTHING I try to do this month is doomed to epic failure, so I’m just going to go back to bed until March, OK? Actually, wait: make that May. I’ll get up when it’s Spring and not before…

So, I haven’t been to the gym this month, other than one Body Pump class that was so long ago I’ve almost forgotten doing it. This has been particularly annoying to me, because on the last day of January, I went out and bought a bunch of brand new gym clothes. I figured it was the only way I’d be able to motivate myself to actually go to the gym because, OK, they were exercise clothes, and therefore ugly by nature, but beggars can’t be choosers, and if new gym clothes were all that was on offer for the month, then by God, I would be taking full advantage of them!

Except I wouldn’t, because the day after I bought them, the snow came. And stayed for a week. During that time, not only was it dangerous to drive (Well, dangerous for ME to drive, I mean), the horrendous weather forced me to curl up into a tight little ball and not move. Just in case I haven’t made myself clear enough the million or so other times I’ve mentioned this: I DON’T “DO” COLD.

The week after that (last week), I caught the cold. Oh, and it snowed. Again. So all gym-going was put on hold that week too, making this week the first time this month that I haven’t had an excuse not to go to the gym. Yesterday, though… well, yesterday was Monday, and we visit Terry’s mum on a Monday, which leaves me with less time to do my actual work for the day, so I decided to let myself off the hook when I woke up at the appointed time and then totally failed to get up and go to the gym.

Which brings us to today.

Today was Body Combat. It’s my favourite class, so last night I prepared for it by laying out my gym clothes in preparation for the morning, and then lying awake all night. I didn’t do the last bit deliberately, you understand: it’s just that my brain likes to do this thing whereby if it knows I have to get up early the next day it will keep me awake, purely so it can go, “Ooh! Not long now! Just a few, short hours until you have to get up, in fact! Man, you’re going to feel like CRAP. You hate getting up early, don’t you? Don’t blame you: you should really have been asleep HOURS ago if you wanted to feel anything like “awake” when that alarm goes off. Seriously, you’re going to feel SO BAD you’re going to pray for the sweet release of death. Even if you go to sleep RIGHT NOW, you’ll still not get enough sleep, and you’ll feel TERRIBLE, like absolutely HORRENDOUS. Man, this going to SUCK!” And so on and so forth.

All of this internal chatter, however, meant that I was awake a good hour and a half before my alarm went off, and even although I sank into the deepest and most blissful sleep imaginable minutes before it did, by that point I had spent so much time thinking about how I was going to get up and go to the gym that there was no way in hell I wasn’t going to actually do it. Seriously, I had even dreamt about that Body Combat class during the short periods of sleep I managed to snatch. I wish I was joking.

Anyway. I dragged myself out of bed, pulled on my (Shiny! New!) gym clothes and headed out to the car.

Which was, of course, totally frozen solid, with both locks impenetrable. %$£^&&”^*&!!!!!!

This was mostly my fault. You see, this is now the THIRD time this has happened to me this month. It happened for the second time on Saturday morning, when I tried to go to my optician’s appointment, and found the car locks frozen solid. That night we went to visit my parents, and I whined so much about my passenger-side entry, and trips up and down the driveway with a mug of hot water, that my dad went out to his garage and returned with a can of “LOCKS NOT FREEZE!” or something, which he gave me with instructions to spray it on the locks.

(Aside: where does my dad GET all this stuff? Seriously, you could go round there and say, “Damn, I really wish I had a flux capacitor,” and my dad will get this thoughtful look on his face and say, “You know, I think I may have one of those in the garage…” And he WILL. It’s amazing. Sadly, this doesn’t work for Christian Louboutin shoes and ponies, though: I’ve checked.)

Obviously, I brought the LOCKS NOT FREEZE! home with me, put it carefully away in the spare room wardrobe, and forgot all about it. Until this morning, when I once again was forced to enter the car via the passenger side, having first of all travelled up and down the driveway three times with a mug of hot water. GOD.

(Yes, dad, I have sprayed the locks now. Thanks!)

Luckily for me, I now have the whole “Mug/hot water/passenger side entry” down to such a fine art that I’ll probably still be getting into the car via the passenger side by June, out of sheer force of habit, so by the time I finally pulled out of the driveway, I was still in plenty of time for my Body Combat class, and feeling not a little bit smug about it, let me tell you. At last, I was following through on a promise I had made to myself! I was going to the gym, and even although it would hurt, I knew that by the time I got home I would be feeling even MORE smug, and so it would all have been worthwhile.

Of course, I had forgotten an important fact here: I had forgotten that, last I checked, I was still Amber, and things just don’t tend to work out like that for me.

That’s probably why, after having driven for approximately three minutes, I encountered a traffic jam. And I sat in that traffic jam, almost without moving, for the next 25 minutes. When the time came for my class to start, and I was still sitting in the same place, still a good 15 – 20 minutes away from the gym, I accepted the inevitable, got out of the car and started walking amongst the stationery traffic, singing “Everybody Hurts” to the sky. Whoops, no, that was just in my own head. What I actually did, was turn the car around and return home*, taking a curiously circuitous route that was only vaguely familiar to me, on account of all of the stationery traffic that was just littered around the roads, going nowhere. It was like a scene out of one of those “End of the world, OMG, only Will Smith can save us now!” movies, honestly.

And this is why I try not to ever leave the house, if I can possibly help it. Every time I do, it’s just all stressstressstress, failfailfail, and I normally end up buying something I don’t actually need, into the bargain. (Not today, though. Because I would’ve needed to actually GO somewhere to have been able to buy something, and instead I just drove around, wasting my precious, precious, heart-breakingly expensive fuel instead. AAAARGH!)

I’m going back to bed now. Wake me up when it’s Spring, would you?

* Yes, I know, I could’ve just gone to the gym anyway. But it would probably have taken me another 30 minutes to get there, God knows how long to get back, and anyway: by that point? I just didn’t want to.