Wednesday, March 09, 2005

butt of course

It’s been a heavy few days, in so many ways.  Oh look, a little poem!  This is the attitude that is getting me through this week.  After I put in a very full day of work and etc yesterday, my dear brother-in-law* Phil showed up for a conference that runs through the week; we met downtown and rode home together on my ol’ reliable 38L and he’s staying here through Sunday.  Once home, we quickly changed clothes and then dashed out with Kel (just arrived home herself) for Tuesday Night Yoga Blowout - the class that takes two full days of workplace tension that’s built up since the weekend ended, and blows it right out your third eye.  Nina, the instructor, has a lot of personality and likes to make sound effects as she helps people into poses; she sometimes breaks into a little a capella R&B, well-punctuated with self-aware laughter.  I have really come to rely on these weekly rejuvenation sessions. 

*okay, sister-in-law’s husband.  so sue me.

After class was over, Phil, Kelly, and I sat around eating burritos and discussing our respective experiences in class.  Phil noted that Nina used the word “bootie” a lot.  “Shift your bootie to the left.  Push your bootie straight back.  Stretch out right through your bootie.” He thought it was a fun word to use in that context; one of his instructors back up in the greater Puget Sound region refers to that region as “your sitting flesh.” This circumlocution totally cracked (heh) Kel and me up.  How tortured is that?  “Sitting flesh.” It’s almost existential.  It sounds dead, cold. If I heard that in class I’d totally laugh out loud, but I don’t think I’d gain any deeper apprecation for that part of my anatomy.  So to speak.

- Which just made me think that there must be better ways to give instructions to large groups of people with regard to their derrieres - phrases that inspire and invite, without objectivizing or diminishing.  These phrases, moreover, should offer a range of shades, from the coldly scientific to the aggressively athletic to the brazenly voluptuous.  These phrases could have the power to bring a sophisticated, affirmative somatic sensibility to all mankind, or at least, that share of mankind that takes group exercise classes in english.  But that’s still a critical slice of the pie.  These people are worth saving.  They need help understanding their own physical bodies, and existing linguistic conditions just are not giving them what they need. 

Ever the humanitarian, I leapt in to fulfill this desparate, if heretofore unrecognized, demand.  Here, then, are the fruits of my labor, the output of my efforts.  Here are TEN WAYS TO REFER TO BUTTS WHILE TEACHING EXERCISE CLASSES, in no order:

moon globes
walnut cracker
posterior protruberances
bottomses
supraperianal musculature
“slappy” and “spanky”
j-lobes
mr tushiebutt
the back 40
thunder mountain

you’re welcome.