Damn, I hate Latin Dance Aerobics. I spent all of yesterday’s class hating it in a deep, wide, broad, richly textured way. I hate the new bright white horrifically ugly shoes I got to wear to it. I hate that everyone in the class is twenty. I hate that I am the only one who wears glasses and that I have the worst hair of the whole class. I hate that Kristy! looks sort of like my friend Joey and so I get lulled into believing that she is nice and sweet and good and pure and true, when really, Kristy! is none of those things in the world of Latin Dance Aerobics.
I mean, it would be one thing if she were a benevolent dictator type of a person, you know, like if you hated the workout in a good way, in a way that was more of a “This is kicking my ASS but it is completely AWESOME” and less of a “I can’t even DO this and she won’t show me HOW.” She doesn’t count the beat. She has this crazy stereotypical aerobics-instructor voice. She doesn’t ever ask if anyone has any questions, and the music is always turned up to eleven, and…I don’t know. I stand there or jog in place (“KEEEEEEEEP MOOOOOOVINNNNGG!!”) and I move my legs and my arms and I do lunges and I bend my knees and straighten up and I think about how much I hate my new ugly shoes and how thin most of the other girls are and how I can’t do plank position very well, nor any of the rather abstruse ab work she demonstrates perfectly at the front of the class. I lay there and try to do the crunches and I wish she would tell us modifications we could make if we are too wimpy to do the whole thing, so that I didn’t have to lay there and feel like a complete ass for believing I could make it through an eight week series. I try to get up into a bridge position, while Kristy! looks at herself in the mirror and screams above the music (“TIGHTEN THOSE CHEEEEEEEKS!”), and I write letters to the management in my head: “To Whom It May Concern, I regret to inform you that I am not sure if I didn’t know what I was getting into, never having taken any sort of aerobics before, let alone the Latin Dance variety, or if I am just too weak to do this kind of conditioning, or if it’s all Kristy!’s fault, or what, but I feel compelled to alert you that this class is NOT MEETING MY NEEDS at the present time.”
Sometimes I think about real salsa dancing and how you never wear horrid white shoes with black yoga pants and how it’s very fun and sexy and cool and how you feel sometimes that you could float away on the salsa or meringue music and never come back to the real world ever again, and how that feeling is pretty much in direct opposition to how I feel in that class. And while I am grimacing and rolling my eyes and feeling terrible about myself, my mind inexorably drifts back to bellydance, to which I cannot help comparing Latin Dance Aerobics. I think about…and I say this with as little ego as I can…how gorgeous I look in my long skirt and my choli top. I think about how Monday my teacher Sharon complimented my bicycle shimmy in front of the whole class, and how she takes us so seriously that she will go around the room correcting people’s wrist motions. I think about when we dance in chorus or in duets and how people get worried frowns sometimes because they’re trying to remember the cues and the moves but how we all sort of smile anyway and even if you forget your cue or to stop waving your arms around as if you are directing traffic on a busy thoroughfare in a country where they don’t have the concept of right-of-way. I guess I am spoiled because I love going to bellydance and I never miss if I can help it and I don’t even really think of it as a workout and I somehow think that it should all be that fun, when in reality we know that exercise has to be boring and joyless and bland, as is everything that is good for your body and mind: muesli, public radio, long underwear.
Oh, and you know what else? I hate that I’m doing this stupid class because I want to lose weight and look better and more in line with that ideal version of womanhood thing. I need to exercise so I don’t die of Type II diabetes the way my nonna did, yes. But really I’m doing it because I’m unhappy with my body’s appearance and I have a stupid need to be perceived as desirable by the rest of the world, and of course women who wear my size of pants can’t ever be attractive, right? And so there I am at Latin Dance Aerobics on Tuesdays at 4:30, cursing myself for caring about what I look like, cursing myself for paying actual money and spending actual time in something I don’t enjoy, all because I want to look hotter than I do. That feels so pathetic. I feel like a terrible feminist and a terrible person for caring. Maybe if I were better at the class it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but…and I just figured this out right this second as I was typing…doing this class where I feel incompetent and ugly feels like punishment. Bellydance is what I do because I am awesome and I love to dance; Latin Dance Aerobics is all about mortifying my flesh.
Pounding my head against the wall aside, I’m going to keep doing it for the next five weeks anyway. I imagine I will continue to hate it during those weeks and that I will roll my eyes harder and that I will still have a hard time doing the different kinds of crunches (although probably I will still be good at sitting in butterfly position and putting my forehead on the floor). I imagine I will continue to criticize Kristy! in my head when really, if I’m that freaked out about her teaching style, I should just talk to her about it. I will go and try and do my best and kind of hate myself for trying and hate myself even more for not trying harder and then it will be spring and maybe I can ride my bike more often and maybe even one day I’ll be able to do something simple like attend an exercise class without getting all bent out of shape about it.