"Stretch"

Sometimes we have to reach outside our comfort zones.  We have to stretch our minds, stretch our bodies, stretch our openness to the extraordinary – except I don’t like that whole thing about stretching my body because that sounds an awful lot like exercising, which I oppose on principle. 

My exercise program consists of trying to master the corpse pose in yoga.  Mom taught it to me when I was about 5, and if it worked then, I figure it ought to be working for me now.  Dad used to do handstands against the door and do pushups in that position.  He also liked to do pushups with as many kids as possible on his back for more resistance.  I certainly wasn’t ever going to accomplish that, so why bother?  Besides, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to have kids to create exercise equipment.

I’m not a complete slug.  I do physical things.  I’m even considering raking my leaves since I’ve successfully postponed that task into December, and still haven’t gotten enough snow to justify forgetting about them until spring.  It’s just that I really can’t see the point of doing unnecessary work or counting.  A friend told me about her new exercise routine.  She likes 17, so she’s doing 17 repetitions of each of her exercises.  I’m sure I’d lose track after about 3 or 4, and that means I could accidently do more than 17 leg lifts or crunches.

I was listening to the news and heard President Obama sent Jason Mraz to Myanmar/Burma, “the first international artist to perform… in the country since the end of military rule… and the second Western act to perform in the country in decades” according to Huff Post.  I like Jason, so I turned on youtube and danced my dog around the room.  This had the unfortunate result of getting Jason stuck in my head for 3 days, which just goes to show exercise is dangerous.  You can listen to Jason here  or here, but be warned; just looking up these links made me burst into a new round of singing, chair dancing, and toe tapping.

I recently found this little booklet.  For a mere 25 cents, you could learn how to develop a new personality.  Unfortunately, Joe Bonomo seemed to think exercise was part of the plan, and obviously women needed a new personality far more than men.  No matter how much I might be willing to stretch in theory, I don’t think I can go with his program.  Besides exercise, Joe said “The girl who is too self-sufficient… or gives the appearance of being so… can drive a guy away.  He’ll think she’s perfectly capable… too capable… of taking care of herself and her own problems.”

Hmm… I knew I was doing something wrong.  I should’ve learned how to swoon on cue so the man could catch me like in the picture, but wouldn’t you think with all that exercising that the woman couldn’t faint because of all that excess healthiness?

Joe seemed to know a lot about fixing women.  Some of his other books included “Lovelier after 40”, “Simplify your Housekeeping”, “Figure Ritual for Beautiful Bust Contour”, and “How to Give Successful Parties”.

I figure I got enough exercise today just looking for my sketchbook.  That involved climbing stairs, bending, squats…

I had a simple idea when I started this project today, but PhotoShop gives me too many toys to play with.  I ended up wasting a heck of a lot of time for what ended up being a pretty simple idea, no matter how many options I tried.  Even so, all of us should experiment with options in our software.  Sometimes we end up with a new favorite.