A la recherche du feet perdu

This evening I was exhausted.  We had some seriously dull lectures today at uni.  I appreciate the time and effort that the busy doctors put in to prepare these classes... no wait, I don't, because they are incredibly dull.  One guy made me really angry because he kept peppering us with questions and then complaining when no-one answered them.  But his questions were either incomprehensible or totally ambiguous.  It was impossible to answer them!  Meanwhile he was swinging this big old stick around like a 19th century schoolmistress.  I didn't want to get involved so I shut down my cortex and couldn't wake it up again.

Anyway, that was completely tangential.  I was exhausted.  I knew that if I went to the gym I would feel better but I really just wanted to lie down and sleep.  Fortunately, years earlier I had had the great foresight to marry my Smaller Half who, amongst her many virtues (but by no means chiefly), is adept at getting me off my lazy arse and off to the gym.

I whined and moaned on the way there in order to secure a firm 30-minute cap on our attendence.  That went right out the window immediately on our arrival when the instructor from the punchy-kicky class came downstairs and started press-ganging people into doing it since only one person had volunteered. 

I actually haven't done the class since I wrote about it in July so I didn't have my Pirate Ninja costume on hand, which was tragic.  What was on hand was the stench from those gloves.  Both hands.  About 10 minutes in, when I and they were all warmed up, I started to notice the pong.  At first I thought it was the other guy in the class, but then I realized it was coming from my gloves.

Back in the old days when I was a penniless student in Brisbane with poor personal hygiene and a liking for vigorous exercise, I used to remove my shoes in my maths lectures as a practical joke.  My feet smelled so bad that my friends would hold their breath and give me dead-arms to force me to put my shoes back on.  Ever since I realized that it wasn't exactly a chick-puller to have feet like that I've been careful to change my socks weekly, so those days are long gone.  Until now.  Those boxing gloves I carelessly selected from the Big Box Of Tinea reeked.  REEKED.  It was like corked wine poured through an old sock into a durian that an orangutan had been getting up close and personal with last week.

I was so paranoid that somebody (not least my Smaller Half) would think that it was me that smelled that bad that I found myself walking around during the halftime break saying, "Boy these gloves stink!  Whoo!  No sir, not me - the gloves!  The gloves, I say!"  In hindsight I think I would have been better off just changing gloves rather than attempting to manage the PR issue.  Remember the autopsy scene in Silence Of The Lambs, where they put something like Tiger Balm under their nostrils?  Next time, I'm right there.