N.B.: For the next few days, in addition to this blog, I’m going to be guest blogging at Upside-down Hippopotamus, so if you want even more of me, check me out there.
After getting home last night from the Gay and Lesbian Business Expo, I wasn’t sure whether the seven hours I’d spent cheerleading counted as my cardio for the day, so I decided to go to the gym, just in case. Unfortunately, I decided this at 9:47, and my gym closes at 10:00. Since I’m trying really hard to make daily exercise a habit, I thought, okay, well, it’s nice out, I’ll just go jogging.
So I got dressed in my too-tight shorts, picked up my walkman, inserted the Best of Debbie Gibson CD I’d bought the day before for exercise purposes, and headed out the door to Riverside Park.
Where the strangest thing started happening.
As Debbie Gibson sang “as real as it may seem, it was only in my dreams,” bringing me back to those halcyon days in the 80s before I had any real problems, I looked around and saw that the park was deserted, which made sense, it being 10:00 on a Saturday night. So I stopped jogging and danced for half a second and started jogging again.
Let me hasten to assure you that I am not a dancer. I often feel so uncomfortable and graceless in my own body that I wonder if in fact I really belong there at all. But that half second of dancing, during which I’m positive I looked utterly ridiculous, felt wonderful. So I did it again, for a little longer.
By the time twenty minutes had gone by, I looked like a scene from a movie starring Kirsten Dunst or Reese Witherspoon—specifically, the scene in which the heroine decides she’s going to turn her life around and there’s a montage showing her having all sorts of fun while doing life-turning-around things, like playing air guitar with a mop as she cleans her heretofore filthy apartment, or collapsing in hysterical laughter as she misunderstands how to use the weights at the gym. Anyway, I looked like that. I was twirling around, jumping up onto benches and doing funky dance steps on them and jumping back off them, and singing along with “Electric Youth.”
I looked like a moron and I don’t remember the last time I felt so fucking good.
Except, of course, for the agonizing pain caused by a half hour of jogging.
There’s got to be a way around that somehow.
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