Nina In New York: No Shirt, No Shoes...No Pants, No Nothing, No Service
A young professional's take on the trials and tribulations of everyday life in New York City.
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By Nina Pajak
Now that I've been spending so much quality time at the gym, I find myself spending quite a bit more time in the gym locker room.
Back in high school, we all perfected the art of changing clothes without ever actually taking our clothes off. There was an unspoken agreement among all students—cool, uncool, athletes and ball-phobes alike—when putting on and taking off one's gym uniform, one must take care not to expose oneself unnecessarily. As a self-conscious young teenager, this worked for me. I had no problems with this system at all. I learned all the shirt-under-the-shirt tricks like a pro.
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Today, I'm no longer afraid to change in front of other women. However, that does not mean that I take any particular pleasure in standing around stark naked and having a casual conversation amid thirty total strangers. And yet, based on the locker room behavior at my new health club, it seems that I'm in the minority on this. Or at least, part of a very silent majority.
Listen, same-sex nudity doesn't have to be a big deal. We're all adults, we all have the same parts, no one's flashing anything anyone hasn't seen before. I get it. We're women. Solidarity, sisterhood, blahblahblah.
Listen, girls: I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU NAKED.
I find nothing wrong with being in the room with nudity, as long as said nudity is mostly a transitional state. But I just cannot understand these women who practically refuse to put their clothes on. They're yakking away with a friend or they're drying their hair or futzing with a necklace or brushing their teeth or inspecting their cuticles. Honestly, they spend more time wandering around au naturel than it takes me to shower and change and get completely ready to leave. Don't they have places to be? Back to the nudist colony with you! Call me a prude if you want, but just stop shoving it in my face (so to speak).
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Some of these ladies have great, enviable bodies. But to be frank, most of them do not. And that's putting it kindly. And I'm not trying to look, but it's instinctual to take a pan and scan of the people around you no matter where you are, and especially when you're lined up like sardines in a cramped aisle of lockers. Everyone is all elbows and knees and apologies, bumping into each other as we try to go about the business of getting ready and getting out of there. That is, everyone but those who choose not to don even underwear in order to bend over and apply lotion to their legs, arms, face, fingers, toes, neck, stomach, back, ears for the love of pizza put your pants on I mean seriously where do you think you are? If you were just getting dressed I would naturally ignore you. But now you're forcing me to focus on deliberately ignoring you, and this is extremely annoying.
A friend recently voiced his opinion to me that everyone who chooses to get a dog in the city is choosing to make their pet someone's problem. He feels there should be some legislation passed to address this public imposition, similar to what's been done with smoking, intoxication, noise pollution and the like. At the time, I balked and compared him to various nefarious totalitarian overlords. But perhaps his theory applies here. Not everyone likes dogs, but they have to put up with Gus if we happen to cross paths and he decides to spontaneously give them a kiss as we walk past (d'awwwww). And along those lines, these bare naked ladies are making their clotheslessness my problem. Unfortunately, no matter what the situation, we all must come back to the same answer.
Tough. Luck.
Or in this particular case, tough ti——
Too easy. Let's stick with tough luck.
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Dear Readers: While I am rarely at a loss for words, I'm always grateful for column ideas. Please feel free to e-mail me your suggestions.
Nina Pajak is a writer and publishing professional living with her husband on the Upper West Side.
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