Eat the Damn Cake

We go around the room, introducing ourselves and sharing how long we have “practiced.”

“Nine years.”

“Five years.”

“Twenty.”

“Four days.”

That’s me.

And that is one of the reasons I am not good at yoga. Also, I am not flexible (does this make me less sexy? I’m pretty sure it does). Also, I have scoliosis. Not in a serious way. Just in a “Your spine is a little too curved” way. It makes my lower back look especially cute, the doctor said I looked like a dancer (a dancer! I must be pretty!). It makes my upper back and shoulders look not cute at all– more like a turtle (a dancing turtle!). It’s hard for me to put my shoulders back. Which means it’s hard for me to look like a queen. Which is a major disappointment.

So the hardest pose for me is the one where you sit with your legs straight in front of you and then bend over them, from the waist. My back won’t let me bend. I’m sitting straight up, and everyone is touching their toes. Even the pregnant woman in the back. How is that even possible? Even the seventy-year-old dude in the very tight pants.

I am also bad at downward facing dog, which feels shameful. Downward facing dog is clearly the most important pose. They keep coming back to it. Everything ends in it. No matter what you do, you end up in downward facing dog, contemplating the fickle, meandering course of your life.

(have you noticed that the mats are always in soothing colors? source)

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I have a giant pimple on my face. It is on my chin, positioned above a slightly smaller pimple.

I have decided this is a blessing in disguise. Blessings in disguise are always decisions. It can go two ways: it’s a blessing in disguise or it sucks a lot. I’ve decided it doesn’t suck a lot.

It’s a blessing in disguise because when I got up and checked the weather report to decide how much clothing to wear, it said, “INCREDIBLY FRIGGIN’ COLD. YOU WILL PROBABLY DIE.” At least, that was my interpretation. And I still don’t have one of those giant down coats because I don’t like the way they look (this is a terrible reason not to have the only article of clothing guaranteed to save your life during a New York winter). So it was either look cute and die or put on every piece of clothing I own. I looked in the mirror.

“Goddamn it, that is the biggest, meanest pimple in the world.” It wasn’t even the popping kind. Those at least are satisfying. Nope. This is the deep-under-the-surface, angry-red-mountain-rising, will-take-weeks-to-subside, maximum-surface-area, painful kind. The worst. It occurred to me that no cute outfit could save my face. The pimple was too dominant. It was controlling the situation.

So whatever– I put on a million things and waddled out the door.

(I was wearing a little more than this much clothing. source)

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Occasionally, I like being reminded of how unimportant I am. Because otherwise, I start to think I’m really important.

And then I start to think that other people are probably paying pretty close attention to me, because I’m really important. They are definitely judging me. They are thinking things like “How come she doesn’t have a normal job?” They are thinking, “Wait, that girl got plastic surgery? How come her nose is still so big?” And they might also think, “Why is it that that girl can’t move her leg in one direction while her arm is going in the other direction?”

This is true, and it’s embarrassing. I know, because I once took a Zumba class with my bonus mom (MIL). She is training to be an instructor. As in, she is awesome at it. I am out of shape. In addition to having to sit down between dances, wheezing and gulping water, I think I hit the woman next to me at some point, with an incorrect and overenthusiastic leg motion. “Was she OK?” asked Bear, when I told him. “I don’t know!” I said. “I had to try to catch up with the next move!”

But because I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll die a young, terrible death if I don’t get some exercise soon, I tried to follow one of those dance exercise DVD routines on Netflix last night.

You know, the ones where the really fun woman in half a shirt and tight pants is doing fifty things at once while she chirps, “You’ve got it, ladies! Shake that booty! Here we go now! Four, three, two, one! To the left! And back! And front and right! And now left and front and back and right and arms up! You’ve got it now! When your legs go left your arms go right! When your legs go back your arms go front! Alright now! Turn it up! It’s gonna get a little hotter now!”

(source)

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There are a couple big reasons why I don’t do yoga.

1. Everyone else does it

2. I know already that I’m bad at it

3. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that people should actually be able to be really bad at

(4. It has this spirituality edge that makes me uncomfortable)

#4 isn’t as big. I can deal with that.

(source)

My mom’s back is messed up. She got a scary diagnosis. She is one of those people who isn’t good at talking about it when something’s wrong. For most of my life, I can’t remember her being sick, because she was so good at not being sick. Even when she was actually sick, she kept going like nothing was wrong, and I only knew when Dad said, “Mom’s not feeling good today.”

“Wait– what?”

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