Random Things Strangers Say to Me

As an introvert, I spend a lot of time down in the mineshaft of my own head, even when I'm out in public. Oftentimes I will have no idea what is going on around me until I realize a random stranger is talking to me. (Obviously it's a stranger -- no one who actually knows me would mistake me for approachable. But I digress.) The best example of this phenomenon is the time I prayed in SuperLo in front of the spaghetti sauce with a lady who was going to have to decide whether to euthanize her dog.

So, anyway, I've been frequenting the YMCA here lately, following the workouts as prescribed in The New Rules of Lifting for Women. This involves the free weight section of the fitness center, where men doing eleventy-bazillion bicep curls look at me all askance. Not really, everybody's looking at themselves, but I'm paranoid and that's why I take the Zoloft. Here are three random things said to me at the gym over the past week:

1. Sixty-something man tells his personal trainer he needs to take me home so he'll have someone to "work out with." He's been there every time I've been back.

2. Forty-something man tells me I look "fit." "I just wanted to tell you that." He gestures to his face as if it's my countenance that makes me look fit, and not the jelly roll around my middle. I hate to tell him, but that's the Bella Bamba. (I'm grateful that he waited until after my warm-up set but before I started dragging 95# up my legs to tell me this.)

3. And the bestest of the week: Street man/potential panhandler (now, I'm not one to judge based on appearance, but I've lived in downtown Memphis for 12 years) approaches at the trolley stop and I get all ready to tell him that I don't give out money but I'll buy him a sandwich from across the street, but instead of telling me that he just got out of jail AND the hospital and just needs enough money to get to West Memphis, he says, "You need to go back and work out some more because you don't have a thong. You need a thong." He didn't even stop, just kept walking by.

I know people say crazy stuff to people all the time, but it's always a surprise for me to be jolted out of my own thoughts by strangers with something to say. Can I get a witness?