The Brit left this past weekend for a two week business trip to Asia, leaving me alone to contemplate the subtle layer of blubber that crept up behind me and latched onto my arse these last few months. Not that I was surprised to find it there…one should expect these things when one makes the administrative decision to respond to stress by wrapping every edible thing in sight in prosciutto and pan frying it in olive oil. It didn’t strike me as problematic until I considered wrapping prosciutto in prosciutto and pan frying it in olive oil. Delicious, yes…but only worth it if I commit to elastic banded pants for the rest of my life.
So I decided to suppress the prosciutto habit by replacing it with another one – Yoga. It’d been a few years since my days of Bikram Yoga, but how hard could it be, am I right? Surely it’s just like getting’ back in the ol’ saddle…or in this case, a long, narrow, poorly ventilated studio with a bunch of half naked, hairy hippies all striving to achieve inner peace by way of assuming the Downward Facing Dog position. Weeee!
There’s a yoga studio right in my barrio, around the corner, in fact, so I went. Anticipating that I’d embarrass myself by sweating and grunting like a greased-up pig penned in for the big pig-chase event at the county fair …I got there early enough to get a place at the back. And then proceeded to enter through the door at the front of the studio. This boded poorly. I ended up front and center, directly under the loving gaze of our radiant instructor whose slender, chiseled body seemed backlit in an ethereal glow that I imagine is bestowed only upon those who’ve achieved the yogic strength and flexibility to fellate themselves. I’d probably glow too.
She asked those of us who weren’t regulars to raise our hands and introduce ourselves.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m La Cubana Gringa.” And I have a Prosciutto Problem.
What transpired thereafter remains hazy. Suffice it to say that two Ommmm’s, five downward facing dogs, and one “here, let me help push you a little deeper into that stretch by placing my surprisingly strong hands on the small of your back and forcing together two surfaces of your body that Mother Nature never intended to come into contact with each other” later, I became acutely aware of the room closing in around me and the voice of God telling me to move toward the light. He didn’t outright say it but I got the distinct impression that if I followed the light, I’d be rewarded with fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. I regained consciousness in the downward facing dog position. No chocolate chip cookies in sight. Clearly the hand of Satan was at work there.
I limped home in a post-ictal state and then came to the realization that all the light and the voice of God and the warm cookie business wasn’t so much a delusion as it was a prophecy. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that within my pantry cabinets were all the necessary ingredients for chocolate chip cookies. Which I then made.
Namaste.
