I’ve mentioned before, I’m not the friendliest at the gym. I also don’t hide my emotions well in my life in general. Luckily for all of us, I’m a pretty happy person so I don’t go around scaring people all the time.

So it’s no surprise to me that an older man in the weight room commented on my expression the other day. He looked at me, started laughing (not the first time this has happened to me…) then said, “Looks like you got your game face on.”

I looked in the mirror. I was scowling. Big time.

I laughed and said, “Yeah, I get in the zone.” I said it too loud. I had headphones in. I didn’t want to take my headphones out because I didn’t actually want to have a conversation with this guy. I wasn’t actually listening to music, I was listening to nerdy podcasts. So I didn’t actually have to talk loud. I could hear him fine and had complete control of the tone of voice. But I wanted to pretend like I was listening to loud music. So that I didn’t have to converse with him. Because I didn’t want to converse with him. But I’m midwestern, so if he continued the conversation, I would have had to continue talking to him.

He didn’t. He shrugged and moved on.

A little while later, I’d moved to a different machine and he was near me again. He looked over at me and I couldn’t help myself. I’m a ham. I made a really intense scowl at him then started giggling. He started laughing.

You guys… if you give me an audience, I’m going to put on a show. It’s how I’m hard-wired, dammit.

You can take the girl off the stage, but you can’t take the stage out of the girl.

So now I just added another person to the list of people to avoid at the gym in a constant effort to remain anonymous. Dagnabbit.