Perfect: 23 years later

I joined a gym on Saturday.

Yeah, it's still sinking in for me too. A big, shiny box of a place. I never thought that I'd be the type to join such an establishment. It's full of highly sculpted machines and people. That's so not me. But I'm determined - sort of - to at least give it a shot. The impetus of the change was the dissolution of the bootcamp I've been attending for a year and a half.

I didn't think that I'd be as distressed as I'm finding myself at the closure of this chapter of my life. I wasn't an original "bootie" but feel I've earned equal member status with the rest of the remarkable women who have dedicated themselves to arising at an inhuman hour to work out. We exercised and bitched and moaned (sometimes all at once) together. We became a family - in ways that are understandable, really, only if you have a uterus.

So this group is picking up and moving to the gym. We took a tour on Saturday - given by the lovely and self-depricatingly skinny, young sales manager - and the five of us all signed on the dotted line. Some with more reservations than others.
We are trying out the early (5:15... that's AM, people!) classes this week as a trial run. Yesterday, we did our own improvised workout in the yoga room that no one was using. (Well, the one gal did come in to jump rope and watch herself in the mirror. We just ran around her...) Today was the horrendous torture of step class. A fad I missed in the 80's and 90's: I was not at all prepared for the combinations of steps.

I felt like a moron. I don't like to feel like a moron. I like to think of myself as a fairly coordinated person with some sense of rythem. Not so today, friends. I left disgusted. The only saving grace was the friends I was with: at least I wasn't alone. We all had difficulties (and obviously all of them handled it much better than I...) and I was convinced (?) to give it a few more tries before giving up. Maybe. The next class of torture will be the spin class, which I'm already warned hurts your crotch.
Those are my choices: feel like a moron, or have a sore hoo-ha. Yeah, it'll be great!

So I'm taking out my unsettled feelings on Edward, Bella and Jacob and the greatness that is Twilight. Bought the soundtrack today. Fabulous stuff. It's helping with some of the difficulty I have with change.

NB: Found banned (by me) book number four in the Twilight series "hidden" on Aidan's desk. He went behind my back and checked it out from the junior high school (!) library so he could finish reading the series. I don't know whether to be angry or impressed that he was so resourceful... And really, all my credibility went out the door when I let him read The DaVinci Code instead of Breaking Dawn. So much for trying to shield him from mature (sex) themes. Says the woman who read Forever in the 6th grade...