The gym is almost exactly a seven minute walk from my house. The gym has yoga and weight lifting classes every morning. It is an extremely true fact that I need to get out of the house during the day and talk to human beings, or I will go absolutely batshit, and I need to build some muscle, or my cat will start beating me up for kibble. These two facts mean that if I didn't go and take a yoga class yesterday morning, I would have proven once and for all that I really am kind of a dumbass.

Do you know, I lived in San Francisco for about seven years and I never managed to take a yoga class? Not once? Every single apartment I lived in, even the ones in the crappy neighborhoods, there was a yoga studio within walking distance. My last apartment, there were three. Every gym I belonged to had yoga classes, and every third person I knew loved the yoga, and the yoga loved them back. I knew all about the healthy benefits of yoga, spiritually and mentally and physically and how it cures cancer and is the secret to world peace. Which is exactly why I never took a class, because forget that noise. They will stop making American Gladiator in a peaceful world.

But here I am feeling unhealthy and needing something, and needing to do something, and there is the gym schedule I brought home, after the first night I went running, and the idea of yoga just suddenly appealed to me. Something good for me, something I'd never done before so bonus points for horizon-expanding, something, frankly, I thought would be kind of easy.

Hi, yoga's not easy. It hurts. It hurts good. I did Downward Facing Dog and Plank pose and some other poses with the business and the stuff, and my arms, and I am still feeling the work they did, the muscles in my belly and my thighs and this is what I was looking for, in my body. This feeling that it still works, and can do what it needs to do, and I can push it and it will push back and it will feel so good, and I don't have to give up. Walking down there, I was nervous, and felt sick, and feeble, and a little nauseous, and completely terrified. I was too uncoordinated, too wimpy, too tired, hadn't taken enough vitamins, would fail terribly and look like a fool and I didn't want to do it, because it is so much easier to just sink into complacency and not think too much. It's so much easier to be weak than it is to be strong. It is so not easy to sink from Downward Facing Dog into Plank and then Mumble pose and then do one of those other ones and then ow, but it is such a grand thing.

This morning, the plan is to try something called Water Pump, which sounds vaguely sinister and as if it will involve winches and wrenches and claw hammers, but they call it a weight conditioning class. Don't the weights sink to the bottom of the pool? Are they trying to kill us? In my ongoing efforts to keep myself from killing me, I am going to find out.