Fitness

Written 54-F28 [2023-01-04], Edited 54-F28 [2023-01-04]

Image credit: Twitter Twemoji

“So what do you do outside of work?” asked Greg, sipping from a can of diet ginger ale. If you must know, I was sipping from the original, thank you very much.

He was the youngest person in the company, a co-op from University of Toronto. Or maybe they don’t refer to their internships as co-ops, I don’t know, I’m barely a Torontonian.

“Oh not much to be honest,” I said. I looked past Greg for a moment to take in the scenes of the office Christmas party. God this party was boring, bunch of middle-aged couples in wearing ‘business casual’ talking about their mortgage and their kids. This so-called party took forever to get to. I strongly considered not showing up next year.

“I’ve been playing a lot of tennis,” said Greg. “Well, at least I’m going to see a tennis coach.”

“That’s pretty interesting,” I said, uninterested. But at least Greg was roughly my age, if you count decade by decade. I kind of knew where he was coming from most of the time. But sometimes I just had to play pretend.

“What can I say? Gotta stay fit somehow,” said Greg. “Either this or my mom would march me to a gym.”

Would my mom march me to a gym if I still lived with her? Perhaps, but if I stayed on her continent then I would have missed out on this amazing party. Amazing, measured by the amount of boredom produced.

“So you don’t do any sports or anything like that?” asked Greg.

Damnit Greg, how do I communicate to you that I’d prefer to talk about something else, without just blurting that out? I thought.

And then I wondered what I was so worried about. The other employees of the company? Would they even care? Would they even care, if I typed out all their precious Unicode characters and generated their binaries to manipulate binary, their symbols to generate symbols.

No, that feeling of dread and emptiness was not from them.

It was from me.

“Maybe I should do something like that,” I told Greg. “I don’t right now, but you’re absolutely right.”

You’re absolutely right. It stung like a needle, admitting that there was something wrong with me and right about Greg.

“Is your tennis coach any good?” I asked.

Notes

This was written in 15 minutes during a Joy of Writing meetup.