How are your knees? Mine feel like a base-model 1989 Ford Escort.
I’m getting older, as are you I imagine, and yet I don’t feel that strongly about it. I’m a big fan of the wisdom and self-awareness I’ve earned. I’m a big fan of whatever alchemy has brought me to a place where the number of great friends I have is in inverse proportion to the FOMO I don’t usually feel. I’m a big fan of having the confidence to write embarrassing things about myself and put them on the internet.
Of course, I’m not a fan of the relentless grinding soreness in my knees. I started busting them up when I was about 15 or 16. First the right one, then a little later, the left one. At some point, in my early twenties, I had my right one pulled apart and rebuilt with after-market parts (I was really hoping to permanently be able to set off metal detectors, but alas, the parts are ceramic). The actual procedure was called a Tibial Tubercle Transfer. Anyway…
I’m also not a huge fan of the fact that I no longer have any whiskers that come in the original color. I know that to most people it’s a small thing, but not really for me. See, I grew a beard when I was about 21, maybe 22. A couple years later, when She and I were about to get married, She asked if I’d be willing to shave off my beard and cut my hair for our wedding. Of course I was willing, it’s just hair.
But here’s the thing, we graduated college on May 8th, and got married on May 15th. That week in between was a long, blurry mashup of bachelor/bachelorette parties, graduation parties, and going away parties. I’d played many games of basketball, and many rounds of golf that week. I was very, very sunburned. Cutting my hair was easy. Shaving the beard was not going to happen. My head would’ve looked like a bobber. So the beard stayed.
And I haven’t been clean shaven since. I’ve not seen my chin since 1991. Who knows what it looks like now. Without a beard, I’m certain I’d look like a weird, soft, fat old baby. Besides, I think it’d be awesome to throw a wicked 50th birthday party for my facial hair, don’t you?
Getting back to the point, I know I’m getting older. I feel it, I see it. I want to slow it down the best I can. I need to stay active. For a bit now, She and I have worked out with a trainer a couple times a week. While important and helpful, I also can’t escape the notion that what those two days a week also seem to do is give me an excuse to not do much the other 5 days.
In what I hate to think of as a New Year’s Resolution, I made a couple promises to my better self, even though that guy is a smug, preachy asshole. I don’t like making New Year’s Resolutions because my worse half just likes to give those the finger and do something ill-advised (and I like that guy, even if he’s kind of a clown). So I swore to a dry January. That should be pretty easy for me, as an exclusively social drinker, to pull off, though time will tell. (I also negotiated a couple Exception Days)
The second “resolution” is to do a half-hour of yoga every day in January. So far, so good. I’ve decided I love it while simultaneously hating it. The “Letting The Joyful Air Drift Into My Glorious Intentions” stuff makes me want to “Gently Internalize My Smile While Slowly Pushing My Fist Through An iPad Screen”. Seriously though, the meditative parts of yoga are comforting, and helpful.
The physical components of yoga, however, are hard. I’m pointedly, aggressively inflexible. Not intellectually or emotionally mind you, but physically. My joints are practically vestigial. I’m quite coordinated, but coordination is useless in a block of wood. After 14 straight days of yoga, my transitions from Cat/Cow to Downward Dog to Warrior 1 to Warrior 2 must look like I should be wearing a football helmet and an oxygen tank.
But I’ve already seen improvements, and can feel a difference. Besides, I need to keep doing it since I so, so badly don’t want to. I mean, my XBOX is right there.
I wonder if I can play Halo from Child’s Pose…
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