California (fitness) blues, Hong Kong

Well, that was fairly depressing. I went along to California Fitness after work today, for my induction/personal training session/fear-uncertainty-and-doubt indoctrination. This consisted of another go on the scientology e-meter, with different results to last time: now I'm fatter than average and with low muscle mass. It's like my own body has helped them to perform a bait-and-switch manouvre.

I suppose nobody likes being told that they have bad posture. And as a long time veteran of the cubicle warfare that is the modern office environment, I know that I hunch my shoulders too much and don't stand up straight. But to have to do a bunch of exercises that demonstrate you're not actually that good at standing up straight (and then having them played back to you on a video) is a harsh blow to the ego.

Damn you, Steve Jobs, and damn your iphone and its ability to give personal trainers the chance to zero in on your every flaw and display it back to you in near-real-time. I bet the only reason they added video to the iphone was because they knew the potential to embarrass me.

That's right, the iphone was only ever constructed and sold across the world so that it would be more likely that I would develop a complex about one of my shoulders being higher than the other.

I'm not paranoid.

And I'd be a lot more healthy mentally if all those people weren't saying I was paranoid behind my back.

I know who they are. I've got a list.

Persecution complex aside, a common theme of my time in Hong Kong is people saying nasty things about me, and then I give them money. First it was my tailor telling me my neck was bigger than I expected, and saying my left shoulder was higher than my right. Now it's the guy who wants to be my personal trainer doing the same. What's next? I'll go to deposit some cash at the bank, and the ATM will point out I could do with a hair cut.

And the problem is, they're all correct. My neck is bigger than it used to be, and I do have poor posture, and my hair is now well over the bottom of my shirt collar. It's just I'd rather ignore some of these problems, in the hope they'd go away.

Most problems do go away if you ignore them, eventually. Say, in about seventy or eighty years.

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.  Prostate cancer? Stick it up your arse.¹

However, in the short term I'm presented with a quandary. Do I go and sign up for a course of being told how wonky my body is, and grow gloomier with each session, in the hope that this does something for my posture and I end up standing straight and tall?  Or do I follow my generally accepted plan of rowing until I vomit, like I always meant to? Even three weeks of the personal trainer would be 3,300 dollars, and 3,300 dollars is a lot of cake I could otherwise be throwing up all over the rowing machines of California Fitness.

What to do, indeed?

¹ Yes, I'm not a doctor. But I'd be fairly surprised if I read this in eighty years time and I had prostate issues, mainly because I'll be a good thirty-plus years past my best-before date...