When I am not baking cookies, my two left feet and I can be found attempting to not trip over one another at the gymnasium down the street. When I met NakedDave five years ago, I was in the best shape of my adult life. I was going to water aerobics, jazzercise and running two miles with Clyde every morning before work.
Sadly, Clyde can no longer manage a morning run. He can barely manage a morning walk some days and while I know that he’s still trucking along the best that he can the walks that we take each day are a far cry from aerobic. Snails are often honking at us to get out of their way. The grass grows tall underneath our feet. We’re not going anywhere fast.
As we all know, an evil company also employed me until Thanksgiving of last year. An unwritten requirement of my job was to often work sixty or seventy hours a week and gobble down lunch at my desk. Lunch at my desk often consisted of whatever snack food was available in the break room. There were always evil snacks (goldfish) available from Costco. Or maybe it was a pre-made sandwich from the Beacon gas station half a block away. The gas station was in close enough proximity that you could literally dash there and back in the same time you might take for a bathroom break, thus not missing too much of the important work day. If I were lucky, they’d have a smoked Gouda and tofu sandwich still lurking about on their refrigerator shelves. If I was unlucky, they’d be completely out of sandwiches all together and not wanting to have dashed for naught, I’d purchase the big bag of Cheetos and make that my very nutritious lunch.
You can all tell where this is going, can’t you? Well, you’re exactly right.
I am now thirty pounds heavier than I was five years ago when I met NakedDave. Lack of exercise and poor eating choices are certainly to blame. However, I have worked out diligently with a personal trainer for the last year and the scale has not budged. Not one measly pound. Well, that’s not entirely true. It keeps going back and forth between the same three or four pounds. I maintain that I’m thirty pounds heavier.
Now I do have more muscles. And I’m able to still fit in my jeans from high school. The jeans from high school are my personal talismans. If they don’t fit, I’m definitely too heavy. They still fit, but that number on the scale, while I know it is a number that no one else can see, still bothers me.
Which is why I found myself today back at Jazzercise. Now, I am dyslexic. I have absolutely no concept of left and right. None. In order for me to give a person direction, I have to feel my fingers. If there is a bump on the ring finger, that’s the right hand. Even having the wedding rings on my left hand hasn’t seemed to really help. I look at my hands and think, “Wedding rings…hmmm…what hand do wedding rings go on?” The bump on my right ring finger seems to be my only real clue.
Now Jazzercise is a group exercise activity that usually includes a bunch of women of various degrees of both fitness and age dancing to pop music to burn away calories. Each song has its own routine. There’s usually a very fit woman on a stage barking out directions. “Jazz hands, right!” “Grapevine, left!” “Lunge forward and then two steps right, four steps left, lunge back!”
America’s Funniest Home Videos should come and film me at Jazzercise class. I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever gotten through a class without crashing into someone and either falling down myself or making someone else fall down. When the instructor says LEFT, I go RIGHT. She yells FORWARD, I go BACKWARD. It doesn’t help matters that when she says, RIGHT she herself goes LEFT because she’s trying to be a mirror image for those of us on the floor. The way my brain works, I actually seem to put myself in HER shoes and go the direction she is going. And then crash right into the very elderly lady next to me sending us both spiraling to the floor.
Today, I think I even jarred the poor woman's teeth loose. Which made it even more embarrassing. Little old ladies, trying to move their arthritic bones through a grapevine, do not need to be worrying about whether their teeth will be intact when they get to the kick at the end.
It’s no wonder that there are often loads of space surrounding me. People have learned that I am a moving hazard. But because I’m so directionally challenged, I somehow manage to find my way into their comfort zones anyway and inevitably screw the entire routine all up.
Perhaps I should start wearing bright orange gym clothes that warn everyone else to PROCEED WITH CAUTION. It’s either that or learn my left from my right and I think after forty years, I can safely say that’s never going to happen.
Right. So where does one order wearable hazard signs?
