If I was going to do a word cloud of my life
over these last few weeks, it would have the word WORK in giant letters,
surrounded by a medium-sized “gym” a medium-sized “range,” and not much else.
Every year around this time, I reference the Big Stressy Event I do for work
once a year, and it’s looming again, necessitating a few weekend days in my
office trying to get caught up on the avalanche of my regular work, and make
sure that I didn’t leave someone off the recognition list. In between obsessing
over which exact shade of gold the napkin holders should be and going
seventy-four rounds with our circuitous AP department to make sure my musician gets
paid, most days I’ve managed to grind out the lower-body exercises my trainer
gave me. I have a balance ball and a yoga mat in my office that have lain dormant
for the last three years and have been recruited back into service, so the
lower body is easier to get in. My arm situation is a different thing. There is
a very specific machine at the gym that I have to use for Arms, and it’s hard
to get to since it’s very popular. I marched off to the gym a few days ago,
naively thinking it would be wide open, and ended up sitting awkwardly the
weight area while one after another grunting hard-body loaded up the weight and
proceeded to build their slick-muscled meat castles, their eyes glassy with concentration
and their jaws set in a grimace. It was very intimidating back there. Even the
women were scary, with their tanned, flat-tummied hyper-crunches and side…thingies.
I tried to blend in by pretending to lift on some of the machines that were
open, but they were either too bewildering to figure out, or I was literally
too weak to do anything on them. Eventually I just left.
That’s the thing with trainers. I don’t think
that they fully understand that some people actually do completely lack
athletic ability and don’t how the machines work, or how their own bodies work.
I like my trainer a lot—he’s patient and he explains things well—but I’ve
always harbored a sneaking suspicion that trainers go into that line of work because
they’ve been naturally athletic their whole lives and fully believe that
everyone else could be too, if they just worked at it, which is not true. This
whole working-out-with-a-trainer thing has dredged up a lot of pain about my
own lack of athleticism, and never finding any sport that I was any good at. I
was a very tall kid, so for a while people thought I would be good as
basketball, but I was not, and I hated every second of it. I don’t like
any sport where people are next to me. I’m
hearing a lot of people lately extol the virtues of Jiu-jitsu, but I’ve
watched videos and it looks horrifying to me. I took Tai-chi in college but the
instructor kept yelling at me about my sub-standard Cloudy Hand, so I lost
interest pretty fast. Yoga never took. The only thing I really like to do is fast-walk
and dance. I am good at fast-walking and terrible at dancing. (Some theorize
that tall people are bad at dancing because their limbs are too far from their
brains.) But…I did get okay at it when I was taking NIA classes. Maybe I will
take another NIA class.
But I’m not going to do anything until the Big
Stressy Event is to put to bed for another year and I can breathe again. Don’t
get me wrong; I love doing the BSE. It brings me a lot of joy. I take a great
deal of care to make sure everything is beautiful, and I love fussing over the
shade of the napkin holders. I get to indulge my inner artist and think about
beautiful things and the beautiful people I am throwing this glittery shindig
for. But, it is big and stressy. And afterwards I will be taking vacation time,
during which I will edge my way into the weight area and work on building my
own meat castle…although at this point it’s really more of a shed. Or perhaps a
bird house.
Or maybe I’ll try my hand at this:
--Kristen McHenry
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