Dancing into the New Year

-
Went to Zumba today and am getting better at it, though I still mess up. The teacher is named Pam, and I guess it's a Zumba thing that they have to wear gear with the word "Zumba" somewhere on it, because all of them do. She never puts her hair in a ponytail. She is good about leading and offering options. She is always late, so the class is more like 50 minutes long. We do dance-y moves and also arm exercises. Lots of jumping up and down and going in opposite directions. I imagine I am auditioning for a Broadway show. I also imagine that the teacher will one day take me aside and ask me if I have had dance lessons (I have not). She will say, "Look, have you ever thought about becoming a Zumba teacher? You're a natural." As I'm day-dreaming about this happening, I often realize I am moving in the opposite direction of everyone in the class. I am always proud of myself when I get both the hand motions and the steps coordinated, which happens about 75% of the time.  Most of the women in the class are my age or older. In the strength training class, that's also true. Am I getting stronger? I feel like my triceps are weak, and when Linda Fan makes us do tricep push ups, I still kneel. I'm waiting to see muscle development, but there's so much arm fat jiggling around that it's difficult to tell if underneath that, my arms are rock hard. After class, I try to recreate the moves for Dan, and one time, I fell while doing it ad hurt my knee.  I forgot that you aren't supposed to wear socks and attempt to sashay. The gym also offers a ballet-type class, but I've not taken it. I imagine it's quite a lot of plie-ing, since that's the only thing I know about ballet. The other day at the gym, I saw an old man on a machine where you have to mostly move your arms. His head was down, and he had a wheelchair parked next to him. He also had a huge bandage around his right hand.  He continued to turn the lever thing with the bandaged hand, and something might have been wrong with his leg too. Later, I figured out that his wife was using the machine next to him, but for a while, I thought someone had just parked him there indefinitely and couldn't imagine how he was going to escape. They have this other machine that allows you to do lower abdominal crunches while standing up (I can't explain it any better than that. I would have to draw a picture). I watched at least five different people do it so that I wouldn't get on the machine and embarrass myself.  They would do a few lifts and then rest. It looked super easy. I tried it yesterday. It is not easy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more