Zumba

I have been reading the blog "Hyperbole and a Half" all day at work and it inspired this post. I wanted to write about this and wished I had a way to show people exactly what I meant...and I thought, if that Allison chick can do it...I sure can! I only have one reader anyway!

So here it goes.

Last night I tried my first gym-oriented workout class ever: Zumba. I was the only person in there who had never done it before [though some old lady (who was talking about punching jerks when she came in) made me feel stupid because she raised her hand as a joke. Bitch.]. I didn't know anyone in the class. Our teacher was this exotic looking girl who was probably pretty close to my age. She was very dark brown, had beautiful wavy black hair and dark features. Basically she was exotically gorgeous. She wasn't a stick; she had curvy hips and though she wasn't thin, her body was proportioned and pulled in. She had beautiful calves and ankles. [I studied her the whole hour because I had to watch her moves closely throughout the entire class to be able to follow along since I was the only newbie.] Not only was her body beautiful but she moved beautifully. She had dancers grace and rhythm. Her very bones seemed to bend and sway.

Half of the walls are covered in mirrors. One wall is all windows and one is a wall with a clear glass door. We faced the longer wall covered in mirrors for 90% of the class. In this mirror I saw something very pathetic.

There was this white girl trying to follow the moves. Her limbs were very long and gangly. When we all raised our arms like ballerinas her arms bent awkwardly at her pointy elbows and bendy wrists. Her legs were undefined. You could only tell where her calf was because it was below a knee. She was wearing light green running shorts, bright white running shoes and a shapeless gray cutoff.

She actually followed along pretty well except for a couple times when she had to just bounce a little bit to catch up with the instructor and get the moves right. When she shook and rolled her hips [which was often because that's one of the most common moves in Zumba, along with my personal fave: pelvic thrusting] it looked like her joints were square pegs instead of balls in sockets. She stuck her tongue out when she was really concentrating or getting into a move.

Seeing this girl and the instructor simultaneously in the mirror was awkward. The gangly girl had too much extra limb to imitate the instructor fully. What's more is she didn't seem to know where to put it all.

Yes. That girl was me. Zumba was a super fun workout that combined two of my fave things [the pelvic-thrusting dance moves and exercise] and the music was perky, the ladies were varied, and all that jazz. But watching the instructor 95% of the time and then myself for 5% was unhealthy for my self-esteem. But I'm going back! Maybe doing Zumba will make me look like that girl...magically give me curves and shrink my limbs to normal proportions.....

Luckily, to boost my self-esteem, the guard who works with me said, "Take it from a black man. You have a nice body." He just said that because I'm wearing the most fitted pencil skirt money could buy and heels that make anyone's legs look fabulous, but it was nice of him to say. Haha. (He said this because I told him I still wanted to lose weight so that this pencil skirt that I bought over a year ago would fit more like it did when I bought it.)
But after [black] Tom told me my body looked good, [white] Tom (another coworker) asked me to carry some heavy boxes upstairs. When I stared back and asked if he was joking because I chose to wear my tightest skirt with some heels today [it's hard to tell with white Tom sometimes], he said he was just kidding because he didn't think my "chicken arms" could handle that. Put right back in my place. Thanks Tom^2!