At the Y

Part of my New Year's resolution is to resume exercising, so I did so yesterday, just one day into the New Year. (I've decided I am now Chinese. Or Vietnamese. That works too.)

The problem with excercise is that I seem to be coming apart at the seams. I do want to exercise, I really do, and I actually enjoy it, well, some forms of it. . . can't stand team sports which totally negate one of the best things about exercising--the opportunity to withdraw completely into yourself--and bring back horrific memories of junior high and high school P.E. classes. Dear God, those volleyball drills, surely now condemned as a violation of human rights.

Anyway, team sports aside, and also any of those extreme activities that involve actual agony, I do like physical action. It's just that my body doesn't. I used to run, and really, truly, I enjoyed it; then my knee gave out. OK, I walked. I love walking but since my botched foot surgery I can hardly get through an hour's stand-up lecture without limping out of the classroom. So swim! say well-meaning friends. Great idea, say I, except I can't swim because, well, I can't swim, I can only do a kind of awkward dog paddle, and also chronic vulvadynia ensures that after just a few minutes in chlorine, my nether parts burst into metaphorical flames. So that leaves bicycling, which is totally groovy, if you ignore the Helmet Hair and the fact that because of my wrist problems my hands go completely numb within fifteen minutes, plus bike seats and tender vulvas don't always harmonize well. The weak wrists make tennis a no-go area. They also problematize yoga (all those doggy poses involve a lot of wrist action ) but that's ok as I can't stand yoga. I know it's a moral fault, I know Good People Do Yoga, but all that omming and centering. Gah. It's just so boring.

Which brings me to the Y and the weight room. It seems a good option. I can sit. Careful selection of machines reduces wrist pain. No teammates. No pressure on the old vulva.  No omming (tho' an enormous amount of huffing and panting and grunting from the He-Man crowd).

So there I was in the Y, at the start of the Chinese New Year, ready to conquer my body and the world. I straddle the machine, I push up the weights--and oh my! At every machine, every repetition, such a crunching and popping and snapping and crackling. I kept waiting for those three little elves from the Rice Krispies commercial to show up and pour milk all over me, or for the He-Men to tell me I needed to take my old-lady rickety-rackety-causing-such-a-ruckus joints up and outa there. But they were kind. They just smiled, grunted, and moved out of range.