I haven't been writing here because I'm teaching a night class at Rutgers and we have a class blog that I write in a couple of times a week. It's called Diaries of Jane Err , which I thought was clever, but now it seems like the students must secretly be calling it the "Diarrhea of Jane Err," which is certainly what I would do if I were in their shoes. The class meets once a week from 4:30 to 7:30--really a good time for me because I don't have to miss work to teach, it's only once a week, and the class doesn't go late. My colleague teaches too, but her course meets from 6 to 9 p.m. Most of the blog content includes suggestions for assignments, or embedded content I want to use in class, so it saves me the time of having to Google something in the middle of teaching. There's nothing really personal, and so I have been trying to write in my 750 words journal, but that's sporadic too. My new idea is to post here, so that the blog doesn't ...
For those of you who don't have access to a gym that provides classes and find your exercise in less costly ways such as jogging, riding your bike, or sprinting away from danger, pilates is a practice of exercise that involves doing 7,000 sit-ups in varying ways for one hour. You'd be surprised at the number of moves that require you to use your abdominal muscles. Almost all of them are done while lying flat on your back with your legs in the air. Which means that most of the time you're exercising, you're not trying really hard because you want a good work-out, you're trying really hard because you don't want to embarrass yourself by passing gas. Celia and I went to pilates after work today. I put my mat in the back of the class as I always do--in part, because I don't want anyone behind me to follow my lead and end up spranging his or her back (there was actually only one "his" in the entire class). I am fine for most of the class because it's the kind of exercise that is very individual. You can either try or you can fake trying and no one can tell. The one exercise I can never do is the roll over. That's when you push your legs over your head with the sheer strength of your lower abs. For me to accomplish this, I have to basically vault backwards from a standing position, hoping that the force of movement will tip me over. Meanwhile, everyone else in the room is able to do no problem; they don't even break a sweat. They are able to hold the pose for, oh, thirty minutes while also filing their nails. But we made it through the class without embarrassing ourselves and we may even return.
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