The double-helix of my DNA must have twisted a little too tight, because I’ve looked and acted differently than the other girls in my all-American family. My two cousins had long, flaxen hair that their mother ironed pin-straight, while I sat with my super-short, mousy-brown curls, itching with envy. While they had stonewashed jean jackets I had a magenta sweatsuit. When they were sneaking out to date boys, I read books and tried out for theater productions. While their medical emergencies resulted in pink casts covered in signatures, mine concluded with an asthma inhaler that the pack of popular girls liked to steal during recess.

My cousins were the closest thing I had to sisters, but they were so different from me that I was transfixed to the point of nearly objectifying them. Between the two, Vicky was the one I looked up to most. Two years older than me, and the baby of my uncle’s family, she was born with naturally blonde hair and a perfect face. Every family get-together was punctuated by my tantrums about the way that genetics wasn’t fair, until my exasperated aunt quietly explained to me that "some get the looks, others get the brains." I would have traded my A- average for Vicky’s social life in a heartbeat, even if she thought that cheese grew on trees and that electricity was an animal. When we both had crushes on Luke Perry on 90210 I lived in fear, because if he ever met Vicky he’d certainly wind up with her.  

When we got older the polarity of us remained. While I learned to play bass guitar alone in my room she started dating a football coach with a Nike "swoosh" tattoo. (No joke.) My first job was as a secretary for a photographer, hers was as a waitress at Hooters. I got health insurance and overtime, while she made nearly $1,200 a shift, and was given gifts that included a diamond bracelet and a watch.

Though my family wasn’t proud, it was safe to say that Vicky had learned to work with what God gave her, capitalizing on her whiplash-causing good looks and attitude. Even if we didn’t understand each other we remained tight, though nearly everything I did she regarded as though it were a joke. ("No, really, I competitively recite poetry. I’m serious.") I was sort of like the family mascot, a little cute, a little silly, and never really capable of much more than entertaining a crowd. All I wanted was for Vicky to respect me, because even if I couldn’t look like her or be as powerful, or powerfully blonde, to gain her acceptance would mean that I had come close. My friends with older same-sex siblings have described a similar sense of wanting to belong when it came to spending time with their seemingly-almighty kin. Even though I’m in my late twenties I still look at Vicky’s approval as that final plateau, that never-to-be-achieved medal of normalcy. Every time she laughed at me and not with me was another piece of evidence that, yup, I really am that weird.

Needless to say, gift shopping for my family has always presented a bit of a challenge. I’m too self-centered to truly be good at getting people gifts that I wouldn’t want. Fortunately this year Vicky suggested a grab-bag, a game that Simon remembered being called "Dirty Santa" when he was in high-school. There were five of us: Vicky, myself, Simon, my other cousin Stephanie, and her husband. The parameters were simple, we couldn’t exceed $25, and we couldn’t tell anyone what we had gotten. While browsing for a pair of earrings online, I impulsively picked up a bunch of crap from Urban Outfitters: meatball bubblegum, Astronaut Ice Cream, a miniature unicorn, a hardcover blank book, and The Incredible Toy Stick. For those of you smart enough to shop in stores that aren’t bastions of irony, The Incredible Toy Stick is one of those gag gifts that UO has become notorious for.  It’s a brown plastic stick in a cardboard box, and it comes with an instruction manual listing its facetious "200 uses.” It was $8, and rounded my grab bag up to a respectable, if heavy-handed, twenty-seven bucks.

 
As a sidenote that begs to be illuminated: Urban Outfitters knows what they’re doing. In their corporate statement they say that they look to provide, "a lifestyle-specific shopping experience" to create "an emotional bond with the 18 to 30 year old target customer we serve." Meaning that they are playing us like a cheap slide-whistle, friends. They’re marketing sentimentality, often to kids who don’t even realize what they’re forking over cash for. If I see one more pimply boy under the age of 18 wearing an Atari tee-shirt I’ll scream. So when I was buying my aunt a pair of purple dangling earrings for Christmas, and decided to purchase a bunch of junk for the grab-bag, it wasn’t ’cause Urban Outfitters had plucked my heartstrings the right way. Nuh-uh. I didn’t fall for it, they were simply an impulse buy. Because I’m not one to be toyed with like that. Even as I sit here in my vintage letter jacket and skinny jeans, I am no lemming. My apathy is sincere.

This tirade aside, I can say with great confidence that Vicky has never shopped at Urban Outfitters. She is usually clad in head-to-toe BEBE, wearing at least one item with the logo bejeweled in rhinestones. She has never owned an ironic tee-shirt or an item of clothing that is not considered "in season." I hate to be redundant but, truly, she is my physical opposite. So when she was duped by her own devices in the game of Dirty Santa and wound up with my gift, I cringed. There was my goddess-like cousin with my cheesy, weirdo gift. At least she could use the box for something, right?
She opened it up and looked at the meatball gum and the tiny, plastic unicorn, puzzled. "This one’s yours, Ains?" I nodded sheepishly. 

She pulled out the ice cream. "Oh my God, Steph, look, it’s the ice cream we used to get at the planetarium," she said to her sister, laughing. Good, I thought. Even blondes can feel nostalgia.

She opened the journal and read the cover out-loud, "The Young Lady & Gentleman’s Guide To Misconduct." Oh no. This was not going to end well. She doesn’t even read books, let alone write in them, I thought. "I could use this," she said to me, in the all-too-obvious tone of trying-not-to-be-rude. I knew that tone well. I had just used it when I’d opened my grab-bag pick, a digital photo keychain.

Then Vicky opened the last trinket, The Incredible Toy Stick.

 
At first she was confused. "It’s a stick?" Then she opened it further, pulling out the list of instructions and, much to my surprise, she started to read. That’s when she started laughing in earnest, the kind of laughter that was silent it was so hard, then growing in volume to a near-shriek. She read the copy out loud.

"Use it to dial telephone numbers from far away! Use it to play golf!" She was hysterical, acting out each of the instructions one by one. I had never seen her so silly. It was good enough to know that she liked my gift, but it was even better to know  why.

Products like that are only as successful as their packaging. It was expertly thought-out and well-written. In short, my line of work is what helped to craft the best gift I’d ever given my hard-to-please cousin. Without the tongue-in-cheek instructions, and the over-the-top and somewhat sarcastic box, she would have only gotten a plastic stick that made little sense and served even less of a purpose. And even though I can’t say it was the true meaning of Christmas, seeing what I do in action was a nice gift. The nature of copy is to sell products in a convincing and compelling manner, just like how Urban Outfitters looks for their company to connect with their customers on an emotional level on a whole. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like that’s slimy, but as I watched my cousin pretend to use her Incredible Toy Stick as a unibrow, I felt good that I write words to make money. And I suddenly felt a familiar pang of jealousy, only this time it was for some unknown copywriter who bought their Christmas gifts with money made from writing about a plastic toy stick.

For the record, Simon pulled the Snuggie on his grab-bag turn. It was pink for breast cancer awareness. My cousins thought the image of him in a Snuggie holding a toy stick was hilarious, while I thought the glorified blanket-with-sleeves smelled really funny when he took it out of the package.

(Simon, Snuggie, and The Incredible Toy Stick)

The other day a miraculous thing happened. No, I didn’t grow four inches, Sarah Palin didn’t have her tongue (painlessly) ripped out by an orange-breasted falcon, and Tool did not play a concert in the empty living room of my mother’s house, but close. I was able to convince Simon to come to the gym with me.

To clarify: I am not a gym bunny. I do not wear Lycra and I don’t have a fancy arm-band contraption that would hold my iPod and protect it from sweat or the spit of strangers. I like the gym because it allows me to feel like I’m doing something healthier for my body than sitting on my ass while typing, and because I get to watch televised gems like For The Love Of Ray-J 2 and pretend it was an accident that I just happened to arrive when it started and serendipitously selected the machine right in front of the television. Going to the gym has become a hobby, but one that I’m ashamed to talk about with strangers, much like cat ownership or BDSM, lest I be judged as one of "those" girls. For the record, I do not own a cat.

Simon is not an athletic guy per se. Crafted by God to be the perfect height and weight ratio for yours truly, he’s not the largest man you’ll ever meet. Growing up skinny and small in Oklahoma led him to be called "fag" more often than he was picked to be on a dodgeball team, and the result was that he had a vehement hatred of sports until he started dating me. Two years of being exposed to my stereotypically dykey fanaticism for nearly all sporting events has infected him to the point that he can now even watch OU games without expecting empty beer cans to be lobbed at his face. But other than being exceptionally talented at riding his bicycle and bouldering (and an often unmentioned stint with a Boys’ State swim team,) he’s never been into alpha-male tomfoolery that may or may not involve steroids. All of which is fine by me, because big-necked meatheads with Nike "swoosh" tattoos — the likes of which lurk inside every Long Island saloon, shopping center, and sports car — make my labia snap shut like a defensive freshwater clam. Skinny, tattooed boys with glasses are what get my bell ready for ringing, bonus points if they can appreciate LeBron’s insanity from the perimeter.

That said, I’ve been teased by my better half for my frequent gym visits. This is because I’m also blessed with a boyfriend who would find me irresistible if I just gained ten pounds, and who fears the day when I walk in the door, built like an oily, veiny competitive weight lifter, with a blond ponytail and a hankering for diamonds mixed with male flesh. Fortunately, I only use the place for mild cardio, coupled with weights when I’m feeling pissed off. Which means that I do weights every time I’m teased about going to the gym. Which makes Simon’s nightmare that much closer to becoming a reality.

My gym membership, which was a gift of unprecedented awesomeness from a family member in light of my relocation to care for my mom before she died, is pretty nuts. The gym itself is in immaculate condition and smells like a eucalyptus field. The people there aren’t douchey, the staff is super friendly and attractive, and I often find that the song being played on the universal speakers matches the song that’s up next in my iPod playlist, no joke. They also provide guest passes in order to ensnare other potential clients. With a gym this nice, it was hard not to think that I could possibly convince my sedentary significant other to change his tune and maybe undo some of the damage caused by cigarette smoking. [Note: If you own a pack of cigarettes and smoke them, you are a smoker. It doesn't matter if you're "planning on" quitting or smoke a number that vacillates between 0 and 5 a day, you are still a smoker. You are a smoker until you no longer own, purchase, or consume cigarettes. And there's your spiteful semantics lesson for the day.]

After some cajoling, and a fight that rendered him on the giving end of the favor spectrum, Simon suited up in sweatpants and headed for the gym, guest pass and skipping girlfriend in hand. While I assumed my position on the stairway to nowhere, Chris arrived on the scene. Gorgeous, gallant, and gay, Chris has been a personal trainer at the gym for years. After two complimentary sessions with him, where we listened to La Roux and joked about lesbian bed death, I decided that he was my new best friend and last best hope for Simon’s cardiovascular system. Though it might seem perhaps like a staged sabotage, or an intervention, it really was just happenstance that Chris had a free hour to teach Simon about the joys of working out.

Personal training is a career calling. Much like freelance copywriting, you need to have equal parts talent and hustle. Unlike freelance copywriting, you need an accredited certification program to ensure that you’re not going to kill anyone. Most personal trainers start out by working at a gym in some capacity. At my favorite field house they have a ranking program that allows fledgling trainers to be employed on the floor supervising. This gives them the opportunity to become a part of the team while learning from the experienced trainers on staff and working towards their PT certification from legit organizations like the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Council on Exercise. There are tests on anatomy and exercises, trainers are taught how to measure BMI and a person’s fitness level, they’re instructed in the methods of crafting specific activity regimens for different individuals, and often they’re also taught about nutrition.

All of this education doesn’t ensure a job on the spot, though. Most trainers have to build up a client base in order to make money, which is why so many people who attend gyms find ripped men (and women) swaggering around like Creatine-swilling vultures looking for their next prey. It’s a tough industry, and one that isn’t forgiving to people who lack confidence, people skills, and, I’m assuming, a strong stomach when it comes to touching sweaty skin.

Celebrity trainers like The Biggest Loser‘s Jillian Michaels make more money than they can carry, and that’s saying a lot, but the average income for a non-famous personal trainer is between 34K and 43K a year, depending on experience and location. Hourly rates can vary, from starting out at $10, to raking in up to $35 an hour  if you’re among the most elite exercise specialists. Trainers can also increase their paychecks by becoming certified in various specialties, such as kettle-bells or kickboxing. There are also a ton of places that require personal trainers, like cruise ships, resorts, and even corporate fitness facilities. Aside from working for yourself or working for a health club, there are other options.  All of them require spunk, smarts, and savvy when it comes to knowing your stamina from your suppleness. (Those are two of the three different "components of fitness," the third being the obvious one, strength. Speed is sometimes factored in as a component, too.)

Watching Simon’s session was like watching Raging Bull spliced with The Seventh Seal. There was sweat, pallor, and the cursing of God. Chris remained chipper, cheering him by name, and adapting the exercises to coincide with Simon’s diminishing stamina. After about fifteen minutes, two medicine ball drills, and a handful of bench-presses, Chris gently instructed Simon to clamber back on the elliptical to cool down. Then he walked over to me.

"I told him it’s a matter of doing it every day," he said to me, in a manner that indicated he thought I could convince the boy to come back to the gym after this fiasco. "He needs to build up stamina over time, but a lot of that is just repetition. Low weights, many reps. Cardio five times a week. And quitting smoking. I don’t think he’ll be having a cigarette after that."

We glanced over to where, next to the elliptical, the puddle of my boyfriend lay on the floor, catching his breath and waving, mouthing "I’m good." Maybe it was just the endorphins clouding my vision, but suddenly I was able to see how personal training resembles copywriting. You have to inspire the client, and teach them without making them feel stupid. Most importantly, without compassion, the job would suck, and turn into a sadistic demonstration of machismo and expertise. Although I’m now convinced that Simon will begin comfort-eating in order to block out the memory of his personal training experience, and that in five years I’ll be dating a 5’7" manatee, it’s good to know that there are always people around who get paid to pump you up.