The music started, and our teacher, a boisterous woman who was wearing a sports bra and a noisy coin skirt whose constant jangling set my molars on fire, started shouting and dancing and pointing out people who sucked as we tried desperately to follow along. I was winded after the first song, and twenty minutes in I told the woman struggling next to me to call me an ambulance. I was sweating in the grossest possible way, sweat dripping from my hair into my eyelashes before rolling down my nose. Your mom is pretty good at Zumba, but thank goodness she ain’t got no rhythm. The only thing that kept me from looking like a complete moron was my blackness, which kicked in right when I needed it most. I might not have gotten every single step, but at least I wasn’t clapping on the one and the three.
Despite the fact that I really did almost keel over and die, I was hooked. It is physically impossible for me to smile while skipping and jumping and fist pumping, but I loved it. Thumping, loud music at nine thirty on a Sunday morning in a room full of WASPs who are coming down off a chardonnay bender? More, please! These ladies yelled and whooped and screamed for an hour, then they toweled off and hopped in their Lexus SUVs to congregate over skinny lattes at the Starbucks two streets over. The minute that first class was finished, I vomited my right lung onto the locker room floor, then went downstairs and signed over half my paycheck to become an official member of the gym. It was “fun,” my heart rate was high enough to make me feel like an actual sentient human being, and, for your information, Ricky Martin made a lot of good dance music, so bite your hateful tongue. And it’s lame knowing that I need the withering gaze of your hot-flashed, perimenopausal mother to get me to samba my way to maybe living past the age of thirty-nine, but admitting defeat is the first step, right? I live in fear of the day I go flying off a moving treadmill, but pretending I can bachata to Gloria Estefan for an hour is something I can do. Plus your mom said she would bake me gluten-free cookies and give me the number to her masseuse next week. And that girl has a tight ass. I’ve been noticing.
I texted THE RUSSIAN a couple of weeks ago to rub my newfound dedication to working out in her skinny face.
ME: I’m into Zumba now. It’s super fun.
THE RUSSIAN: What is that? Some new thing you eat?
ME: …
THE RUSSIAN: Sounds fattening, whatever it is.
ME: I hate you.
“Maybe I Can Just Eat Plants?”
I am a sucker for a headline screaming “How I lost the weight and kept it off!” or “200 pounds down and counting!” from the cover of a magazine in the checkout line at Walgreens. But then I buy the magazine, only to find out the big secret was SlimFast or bypass surgery and that is totally fine, for real, but who ever got full off a “shake,” and United HealthCare is like YEAH RIGHT, TUBBY, so I guess I’m stuck throwing these deck chairs off the Titanic one at a goddamn time. Right now I am sporadically trying to be vegan, because I love animals and being a good steward of the environment. LOL JK. I have inflammatory bowel disease and nothing is more inflammatory than meat and milk, but wow oh wow, I’ve never tried anything so difficult in my life and I was homeless before.
Eating with any sort of intention is terrible, especially when you (1) work hard all week, and (2) have trouble with plebeian tasks like grocery shopping and basic caring for yourself. Mavis is a health person, but she lives two-plus hours away. And that’s good for, say, not wanting her to know how much Family Feud I actually cry tears of joy while watching? But bad for wanting to holler “Let me get one of them wheatgrass spirulina drinks you’re making!” from the comfort of my bed while burning one calorie distractedly scratching at a patch of dandruff.
Fail to plan, plan to fail: I know, I know. And I am the queen of excuses, so let’s just run through a few of them so I can prove to those of you who doubt me that there’s really no possible way for me to be good at this:
1. I get up too early in the morning.
My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there’s nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all. I can hardly muster the strength to take a bird bath and pull on my yoga pants that have never seen the inside of a gym, let alone cook steel-cut oats and make a kale smoothie.
2. I work with people who eat their feelings, too.
This sisterhood understands that the solution to a dreary morning/a shitty interaction with a petulant dog mom/gloopy, crampy menstruation/a disappointing season finale you stayed up late to watch is a delicious, overpriced lunch delivered by a young bicycle messenger with a hot beard and muscular calves. I never want to spend fifteen dollars on a meal I will eat on the toilet because there’s no place else to get some peace and quiet, but I always do, because I am a stunted adolescent who was never taught constructive ways to deal with her emotions. I wish, more than a person has ever wished for anything, that a piece of rye melba toast with a smear of almond butter provided the temporary happiness found at the bottom of a carton of massaman curry, but, alas, it simply does not.
3. My joints still hurt.
After much halfhearted consumption of every legume, sprouted grain, cheese made from nuts, and root vegetable snatched from the loving clutches of the earth, I know that the degenerative disease currently snacking on my sacroiliac joint will maybe hold off for an hour so I could stand in front of the stage and get sweated on by Drake, but I’M SO SAD and THIS IS AMERICA so I WANT MY BONES TO STOP HURTING while I EAT CHEESE. I have an $800 tiny robot computer that can tell me the weather in Tokyo and knows to suggest “hoe” when I finish typing the phrase “yeah right,” but science can’t figure out a way for me to have a little yogurt without my having to rely on a walker the next day?! Pffft.
4. Staying committed to things is hard.
I have seven different body washes lining the edge of my bathtub right now.
5. The list of trash foods you can apparently still eat while trying to be vegan:
? spicy sweet chili Doritos
? Nutter Butters
? Swedish Fish
? Fritos
? Goya flan
? unfrosted Pop-Tarts
? Snyder’s of Hanover jalape?o pretzels
? Pringles
? Oreos