Day in the Life of an Idiot

Having Mason off school this week has made concentrating on anything serious really difficult. At least, I made it to hula hooping last night. I didn't really want to go. Despite having a lovely time with the ladies at our usual Wednesday gathering, I had been in an off-kilter mood all day. I think it's because I still feel so very aimless, regarding my writing. I wanted to stay home and sulk. But, I decided to push through the feeling and go. I'm glad I did. Hula hooping remains somewhat elusive for me, but I find trying to do it a lot of fun.

Fun, for me, is the operative word, if I want to excercise. If it's not fun, I don't do it.

The downside to all this weirdness is that I need to spend sometime today and/or tomorrow working on my Loft class. As someone who is used to teaching off-the-cuff, the preparation required to do an on-line class frustrates me deeply. Oh, for the days when I could walk into a room full of fresh, eager faces and just start talking.... Alas! I must actually have things ready for these folks to read... AHEAD OF TIME. Gah. With Mason prancing around shouting at me in Japanese, making two words go together has been hard enough. I'm actually hiding in the bathroom at this moment in order to write this. For whatever reason, he's been much more needy this vacation and has been glommed on me from morning to night.

Well, I'm going to take him out to lunch. Hopefully, being out will help him burn off some energy. Then I just need to get him to focus on some PROJECT! I'd really hoped that yesterday, when we went to the library, and robbed them of almost every HARDY BOYS title they owned that would keep him occupied. It really hasn't. He's been picking through them rather than his usual plowing through...

I can't win.

Hula hooping looks much easier than it is. I had my first class last night, and I have to say this: hula hoop = fail; KSW = for the win. The reason my martial arts won over the hooping is that I could not get through the class without "yes, ma'am"ing my instructor more than once. Also, at one point when I was concentrating on trying to get the back-and-forth (not round and round!) rhythm down, I found that I had my hands up in front of my face, as if blocking for sparring.

I must have looked quite the sight.

What was funny too, is that when she suggested that the proper stance for hula hooping was with one foot forward I had a hard time not just going into "ready position" for the KSW forms.

So sads.

Luckily, about two-thirds of the way through the class, I realized that hooping was less of a "sport" and more of a dance. I almost got it going several times. I did, at least, rule the two hand twirls she taught us, because the motion needed to keep the hoop spinning was exactly like twirling nunchucks (which we call jool bong.)

I was certainly the only lesbian in class (though there was another woman "of a certain age" with comfortable shoes, but whom I suspect of being the kind of butch certain grandmas decide to be when they're done doing all that stuff straight women do.) There was one guy. Frank? Who was, sadly for him, not gay. He had all the grace and poise of a dorky white boy. Thus, I felt a certain affinity with him instantly. It helped that we were both so uncoordinated that we flung our hoops at one another from time to time.

The rest of my classmates were divided among the teen to twenty-somethings girls who could already hula hoop like pros, and the super-skinny-stay-at-home-mom types who came dressed for a fashion show.

Another reason KSW wins. I never feel like quite such an oddball there.

Still, there's only a half dozen classes or so. My goal is to actually figure out how to keep the stupid hoop going around my waist before class is over. I purchased a hoop from the instructor which I'll get next time and so I can continue to hoop as an "at home" excercise. I will say, given the state of my stomach muscles already, I suspect hooping is very good for "the core," as people say. (I say "already" because my experience with KSW is that I don't usually wake up with muscle soreness the morning after a hard workout, but that it comes on closer to twenty-four hours later. If that's still coming from hooping, I'm going to need to take Advil BEFORE class next time.)