I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I used to do bikram yoga. Not like once or twice, oh no, I mean like 4 times a week, for two plus years. Indeed, despite all my anti-corporate ranting, I was addicted to corporate yoga. The studio I went to is only a block from our apartment, it’s got an environmentally friendly heating system, has rubber floors (why all other bikram studios are carpeted I’ll never understand) and the teachers and owner are all very friendly. But still, despite the special touches, it is corporate yoga. And even though part of me, the scientist part, would laugh at their exclamations that yoga (but, naturally, only this particular yoga) would cure everything from acne to liver disease as long as you went to enough classes, the part of me that reveled in having toned arms for the first time ever was convinced that it would, and even more, that if jon would just start going, his thrice broken knee would be good as new. The kicker though, the thing that kept me there for so long, was one teacher that I had who was almost run over while riding her bicycle. Somehow she saw the car out of the corner of her eye, realized it didn’t see her, and in the split second before it would have crushed her, she leapt straight up into the air, bounced off the hood and landed on her feet, while the car plowed down her bike and dragged it a block before stopping. Bike: totaled, superhero yoga teacher: grumpy but otherwise fine. Surely with enough classes, I could be a superhero too. But it turns out it doesn’t work that way. Maybe it’s because I switched over to iyengar a couple years back and 10 minute headstands are not the path to flashy superpowers, or, more likely it’s because I have the natural agility of a sleepy turtle and at this point nothing is going to change that. Case in point. Today we were walking on 16th street in the mission. I was multi-tasking: chatting with isaac about some mediocre Italian place we were passing, reading some signs on the sidewalk, and mentally noting the strange trail of blood that we appeared to be following and thinking that there often seems to be a strange trail of blood on 16th and wasn’t that weird, when a bicycle zipped past us on the sidewalk. I looked back to be sure that it hadn’t run over jon or toby and as I turned back around, I saw the panicked face of a 10 year old kid, inches from my own. His mouth was open, his eyes were wide, and he was moving really, really fast. Yes, today I was run over by a 10 year old on a bicycle while walking on the sidewalk. Fortunately I was wearing our incredibly dorky diaper bag backpack, which provided some cushioning as I was knocked flat on my back. And very fortunately I was not carrying toby either in the front or as a backpack. I was mostly alright, a little scraped and bruised. But, my superhero dreams were dashed, unless there is a plan in the works to create a comic book series about a flexible but extremely slow, sleepy, and distractible turtle that saves the world, perhaps by remembering obscure and meaningless details. Maybe that should be my new dream.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
toby of the day, 7.20.2008
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I used to do bikram yoga. Not like once or twice, oh no, I mean like 4 times a week, for two plus years. Indeed, despite all my anti-corporate ranting, I was addicted to corporate yoga. The studio I went to is only a block from our apartment, it’s got an environmentally friendly heating system, has rubber floors (why all other bikram studios are carpeted I’ll never understand) and the teachers and owner are all very friendly. But still, despite the special touches, it is corporate yoga. And even though part of me, the scientist part, would laugh at their exclamations that yoga (but, naturally, only this particular yoga) would cure everything from acne to liver disease as long as you went to enough classes, the part of me that reveled in having toned arms for the first time ever was convinced that it would, and even more, that if jon would just start going, his thrice broken knee would be good as new. The kicker though, the thing that kept me there for so long, was one teacher that I had who was almost run over while riding her bicycle. Somehow she saw the car out of the corner of her eye, realized it didn’t see her, and in the split second before it would have crushed her, she leapt straight up into the air, bounced off the hood and landed on her feet, while the car plowed down her bike and dragged it a block before stopping. Bike: totaled, superhero yoga teacher: grumpy but otherwise fine. Surely with enough classes, I could be a superhero too. But it turns out it doesn’t work that way. Maybe it’s because I switched over to iyengar a couple years back and 10 minute headstands are not the path to flashy superpowers, or, more likely it’s because I have the natural agility of a sleepy turtle and at this point nothing is going to change that. Case in point. Today we were walking on 16th street in the mission. I was multi-tasking: chatting with isaac about some mediocre Italian place we were passing, reading some signs on the sidewalk, and mentally noting the strange trail of blood that we appeared to be following and thinking that there often seems to be a strange trail of blood on 16th and wasn’t that weird, when a bicycle zipped past us on the sidewalk. I looked back to be sure that it hadn’t run over jon or toby and as I turned back around, I saw the panicked face of a 10 year old kid, inches from my own. His mouth was open, his eyes were wide, and he was moving really, really fast. Yes, today I was run over by a 10 year old on a bicycle while walking on the sidewalk. Fortunately I was wearing our incredibly dorky diaper bag backpack, which provided some cushioning as I was knocked flat on my back. And very fortunately I was not carrying toby either in the front or as a backpack. I was mostly alright, a little scraped and bruised. But, my superhero dreams were dashed, unless there is a plan in the works to create a comic book series about a flexible but extremely slow, sleepy, and distractible turtle that saves the world, perhaps by remembering obscure and meaningless details. Maybe that should be my new dream.
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1 comment:
That was super scary. I credit that experience - my frustrating inability to leap in between you and the flying 10 year old - for spurring me to grab Jim Smith when he nearly fell off a mountain in Yosemite a couple weeks ago. He was very casual about it, of course, but it was pretty crazy.
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