I can ruin someone's life with a single look!

EDIT: 03/092010 You can now listen as you read along with my partner in crime and collaboration, Peeteer Smith, narrating in his special way!

Don't you hate it when you settle in to do your situps in the gym and the situp space is free so you are able to contort your body into embarrassing positions without feeling like a dick, but just as you start your moves and you look not unlike a jungle animal presenting and ready to be mounted, a large sweaty man comes and plonks himself next to you? Its not right and its not ok!

This happened to me yesterday (among an ever growing amount of other days) but yesterday was spectacularly and disturbingly different. Rotund man in tiny shorts and sweaty t-shirt lumbered over and splodged onto the mat next to me. I tried in vain to pick up the pace so that I could escape from the what had now become very smelly mat area. He had begun his routine which included yoga, which I'm sorry but is just UNACCEPTABLE in a communal gym area. Yoga requires the removal of shoes and socks, and in gyms this means, more often than not, sweaty pongy foots.

Foots are disgusting at the best of times, but this is pretty criminal. I don't want random people's fetid foot juice on mats where I may well be prostrate doing my floor routine before they've been sterilised. Not to mention the kind of foot boogers that could come into contact with my skin at any moment. Its vom inducing.

Anyway so this beast begins honking and snorting as the situps begin and I'm doing double time and nearly giving myself an aneurysm (one of the rare times when its not a tumour) in order to get out of there as quickly as possible. For some unknown reason that shall no doubt haunt me for years to come, I stole a sideways glance and noticed his silky smooth hair free legs. GROSS. I like my men to have hair where they are meant to have hair. Not saying that I would have liked this dude if he had hairy legs, but men are supposed to have hairy legs and men who don't have hairy legs are weird.

But it was then that, completely horrified, I realised this great hulking brick shithouse of a man was a woman.

You know when you're walking down the street minding your own business glancing here and there and all of a sudden your glance falls on someone with a really unfortunate and obvious growth on their face, and you really were just glancing randomly but then it looks like you're staring at their growth and you think 'FUUUUUCK they think I'm staring at their growth and that I think their growth is disgusting and therefore I'm a disgusting human being for not being more open-minded about growths' so you smile over-enthusiastically to make up for your faux-pas, only your over-enthusiasm makes your smile really creepy and then they're looking at you as if you're some kind of growth-fetishist and they just want to get the hell away from you because you're clearly mentally unhinged and weird? That's kind of how I felt when I saw that gross foot yoga man was actually a woman.

Only it was worse because at least growths are undoubtedly unusual. This lady was just broader, musclier and stockier than your average lady, and I'd been so narrow-minded as to assume that such a hulky constitution equalled man parts. So on this occasion I thought 'FUUUUUCK she can see the shock on my face and she knows that I thought she was a man and now my facial expression of obvious surprise has given the game away and prompted her to live the rest of her life as a bag of neuroses and low self-esteem, all because some bitch in the gym looked at her in a way that obviously meant that she was a disgusting gross foot yoga man but actually a woman and she'll need years of therapy for the incident when someone looked at her with an indeterminable yet undeniable look of surprise and she'll probably never leave the house again because of ME and I've DESTROYED HER LIFE and she knows all this!'

I'm pretty sure that's what she was thinking. And that's how I'm pretty sure I've managed to ruin someone's life with an innocent, yet unwittingly dangerous, look.

20/05/10 UPDATE: I just saw gross foot yoga woman who I thought was man - she's back! I haven't ruined her life! Yet...