There was a woman at the gym today with inkblot sweat patterns. When she first got onto the elliptical machine in the row ahead of me there were two fairly large circles of sweat on her shoulder blades and one (and I don’t know how this works) donut-shaped sweat mark on the middle of her back. All together it looked like a surprised emoticon.

I zoned out for a little as I crosstrained, and when I looked back ten or fifteen minutes later the donut-shaped mark had filled in and expanded to a very large circle covering the entire middle portion of her back. The two circles on her shoulder blades had expanded upward and downward, transforming into ovals which now connected to the large circle below. A giant bunny rabbit’s head was now dominating the back of her shirt.

While that woman’s sweat was metamorphizing into different Rorschach patterns, the woman directly to my left was busy performing her own little personal Broadway dance routine. You know how you can kind of tell when someone near you is moving even if you can’t actually see them? Well I could feel her doing something on the machine next to me, so I glanced over to scope out the situation. Sure enough, she was striding along at a brisk! pace to what I can only imagine was a 1999 Jock Jams CD she had ripped onto her iPod nano.

You have two sets of handles to choose from when using the elliptical machine - an unmoving horizontal set directly in front of you that comes up about waist-high, and a set of vertical bars on the sides of the machine that move with the rhythm of your movement. This woman was taking advantage of neither option, opting instead to pump her arms at her sides. This works just fine on a treadmill. On the elliptical, because there is no impact, you appear as though you are running atop a field of clouds. Or cotton candy. Or fiber glass. I wish in this case it were fiber glass.

But wait! Lest we forget the jazz hands.

Some people choose to run with their hands balled up into fists. Others prefer the open-palmed method. You could say this woman was utilizing a “modified” version of the open-palm. Her hands were indeed open, but she was shaking them and twisting her wrists as if at any moment she might just jump off the machine, triumphantly throw her iPod to the ground and burst into a solo rendition of “And All That Jazz!”

I wanted to either

a.) Politely tap her on the shoulder and ask her to ” kindly stop because you are distracting me from my simulated no-impact crosstraining routine”

b.) Punch her on the shoulder and yell loudly over my iPod, her iPod, everyone else’s iPod, The Price is Right playing on five of the twenty nearby televisions, and The View playing on the remaining fifteen, “STOP WITH THE DAMN JAZZ HANDS! YOU’RE A HUNDRED YARDS PAST THE HILL YOU CLIMBED OVER TEN YEARS AGO, YOU’LL NEVER BREAK INTO SHOW BUSINESS WITH EPILEPTIC EXTREMITIES OH AND BY THE WAY YOUR CELLULITE IS SCARING THE CHILDREN.”

c.) Kill her and stash the body behind the vitamin display because no one ever buys vitamins at a gym because last time I checked thirty vitamins don’t cost sixty goddamn dollars.

By the time I had entertained option C to the satisfaction of my sadistic imagination, the sweat stains on the woman ahead of me had morphed into an animated GIF that was moving along jerkily to the awkward syncopations of Bob Barker’s bombastic barritone.