What was up with this week? I felt sort of worn out nearly every night, even when I hadn’t worked out that day.  My guess is that I’ve spent the last few weeks shoving myself along through all the  snowing and the souping, all the while I kept telling myself: this is as hard as it gets; it gets easier after this; if I can do this now just think what a breeze it’ll be in the spring; go me go. And so on.

And then it got warm, and the snow started to melt, and there I was all bundled up tight in my own resolve, which suddenly felt heavy and uncomfortable. I suppose I needed to relax. I skipped a gym night. I got in bed early the other night and read a bunch of East Village Inkys that Chris had gotten me. I think that helped.

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We’re still doing the Lifting Weights to Hateful Pop Remixes class (heretofore called Weights & Hates). Wrongy Lady stopped coming to the class a long time ago, as I knew she would. But now we have Crazy Pants. Crazy Pants wears plaid flannel pajama pants and is in his forties, I think. In the class we all use plain old bars and plates specially made for the class, but Crazy Pants brings in a pile of extra stuff from the free-weight area: ankle weights, two pairs of massive iron dumbbells, a big honking 50 lb thingy. It’s all strewn out on the floor next to his step platform. It looks like he’s building a fucking robot. He could keep all this stuff in front of his bench, where it would be more out of everyone’s way, and surely with his strength he could reach a little farther for the seven extra weights his crazy muscles crave, yes? But this is not the way of the Crazy Pants.

He doesn’t come to class to do the class, really. He does a special parallel universe-version of Weights & Hates involving higher weights and fewer reps and lots of random flailing around. Sometimes when we’re between songs and the rest of us are adjusting our bars, he’ll grab his special crazy weights and toss off a quick set of curls or extensions or deadlifts or rows or squats triple axels or lindys or bootyclaps or whatever the hell it is he does. But perhaps he knows what he is doing. And actually, if he came to class every Monday and Wednesday morning like most of the rest of us do, I would have a great deal more respect for him and his manic muscle ways. But he only shows up every now and then, and he’s all, look at me! Gaaarrr! I am working so haarrrd!

Chris has a theory that Crazy Pants puts his pants on in the morning and they tell him what do to and where to go, and he doesn’t get a say in any of it. What if he belongs to several gyms and his pants march him to a different one every day? If so, perhaps you’ve seen him. Tell him we say hello.

Last night at the yoga class we were sitting with our backs upright and the soles of our feet pressed together. “Now, this is the tailor pose,” said the yoga lady. She keeps up a bright but rambling monologue about the various poses, and what their Indian names are, and what they’re good for, and what you should be doing with your belly button, and how, at the same time, you should be keeping that imaginary hundred-dollar-bill clenched in your heinie, to paraphrase her old dance instructor, who used to dance on Broadway, and so on. It might sound annoying, but really it’s very nice. Anyway, the tailor pose. “This is a very good pose to keep the urinary tract healthy,” says the yoga lady. “And it’s called the Tailor Pose because tailors in India used to do it. You know, to keep from getting urinary infections. There’s an old legend, actually, about tailors using this pose to keep their urinary tracts healthy. A lot of the poses in yoga have legends about them, actually.”

First I just listened. Then I thought, “she’s making this up.” Then I considered giving her the benefit of the doubt, because maybe this stuff IS true, or, at the very least, there are true things about it. I like thinking that perhaps there’s Hindu folklore about the village tailor who made the straightest seams and, alas, the crookedest streams. If anyone cares to enlighten me on the subject, please do so!

I think I have lost another two pounds finally. Oh, goody, my metabolism woke up and now I can stop poking it with a stick.

We went to the Brookfield Zoo again on Sunday, for the holiday lights as well as for more traumatic video moments like this one. And for the Mold–A–Ramas, which are much happier ways to see animals being born. (And doesn’t “Mold-A-Rama” sound like the name of a yoga pose? Something where you press your hands together and visualize a warm plastic object between your palms?) Anyway, since the zoo can’t exactly stick Santa hats on all the meerkats and shrews and pygmy hippos, they had special holiday lights projected on the walls of some of the outdoor habitats—these red and green and snowflake-shaped things that turned slowly in kaleidoscopic patterns. It was hard not to imagine the Kodiak bears passing a bong back and forth, but it was very pretty all the same. And, yes, very Christmasy. I’m beginning to feel it.