And then I looked at the girl next to me and said "People do this for fun?!"

Apparently one of the things that I wasn't aware of, was that I, Anna Gray, am a glutton for punishment. For some reason I thought it would be beneficial to me to go to 'Power Yoga' on Monday night.

Let me start off by saying that I'm not big on all the hippy mushiness of yoga and breathing and blah blah blah. But I heard my spin instructor talking about what a good class it is and since I'm trying to look like her I figured, What the hey? It can't be too bad right? I mean I did do ballet for 13 years and I'm one of the more flexible people I know.

I was wrong. Yoga is evil. It is Wednesday and my hamstrings still scream at me when I even think about using the stairs or proceed up a gentle slope or graduated incline. Granted I went to spin class before yoga but I figure at this point my legs are used to spinning for 50 minutes. That's no biggie, but this yoga class. Yeouza.

Anyways this was the narrative of yoga class:

Breathe, hold, exhale,

fold, 

standing dog, 

lower, 

exhale (Somehow I missed inhaling. I don't know.), hold, 

whisper down, 

low dog, 

hold, breathe,

warrior king,

exhale, hold, breathe,

retching rabbit,

hold, exhale, breathe,

skipping shrimp,

hold, exhale, breathe,

'This is a tough one!'

Pimply Penguins Punching Pineapples,

hold,

'For my arm balancers, here we go'

(There are yahoos out there that can balance their whole body weight on 2 fingers of their left hand and the thumb of their right. For serious?)

hold, hold, hold, Exhale,

whisper down,

low dog, 

fold, 

come up, 

standing dog,

. . .    . . .

and on and on in a similar fashion in rapid succession for an HOUR.

At some point she came by to hold me up. I believe this was during the exercise where we grabbed our big toe on the opposite foot behind our back with the first two fingers of whatever hand wasn't on the floor. I'm not sure if you've ever tried this but I was not aware that it was humanly possible to fall over 14 times in less than 60 seconds and it's called something asinine and self-reassuring like: relaxing swan. I figured that at some point my body would yield and I could do this. Nooooooooo. Not at all. In fact the only thing that my body was doing was having a dialogue with me I cannot publish here because it is simply too vulgar and profane.

I felt muscles burn like they had never burned before, and I did 13 years of ballet mind you. I wanted to be a ballerina. Professional ballerina. Granted that all went way when I hit puberty and it was apparent that I was never again going to be able to pirouette without tipping over, but still the point is that I put myself through some grueling shit. And none of it compares to the flim-flam of yoga and the anthropomorphic animal poses that really should be called 'Go ahead and cry now because you'll need to save your energy to get out of the ridiculous pose you get yourself into later.' Things that accurately portray whats going on like:

Sweat-drenched Pretzel

Sobbing Adult

Just Go Ahead and Remove Your Leg From Your Hip Socket

Repeat above exercise with your arms

Dead Warrior

and 

Paralyzed Person

It was halfway through the class when we were standing on one arm and one leg with the others flying in the breeze somewhere that I looked over at my spin instructor and asked two questions:

'People do this for fun?'

and

'Make sure they take me to Forsyth. Will you?'