Downward-facing Dog

I have a love/hate relationship with my Wii. I love that I can exercise in my living room when no one else is home. I hate pretty much everything else about exercising, including the Wii. So there you go.

Still, I’ve been doing around twenty minutes of Wii Fit every morning for the past few weeks and yeah, yeah, it’s been good for me.

After each exercise you’re scored and ranked, and then the Wii trainer offers you helpful advice along the lines of—“If you did this more often, you’d be in better shape, Dummy!”

I’m obsessed with duping my Wii trainer. So much so that I will cheat and hold onto things to keep my yoga poses steady. When the instructor, Miss Perfect Yoga Body, claps for me, I feel an evil satisfaction at having fooled her empty head.

But our new dog is messing with my cheating yoga routine. Like most young children, she thinks that any movement more vigorous than reaching for a coffee cup is an invitation to play.

So as soon as I step on the Wii board, she shows up, stub wagging, ready to have fun. She circles around me as I breathe deeply.

A side note: I REALLY hate it when I score low on breathing. Come on! Are you kidding me? I can breathe! I’ve been doing it for twenty-nine years, give or take a couple.

Where was I? The dog. So the dog comes and plops her head on the Wii board next to my foot, and Miss Perfect Yoga Body tells me, “You’re a little shaky. Try to stabilize your back and legs.”

I say nasty things about her leotard while trying to stabilize my back and legs.

When the exercise is over, I nudge the dog away and move on to the next pose.

But it gets really bad when I try to work on the floor. The other day, I wrangled my body into the cobra pose, which is suppose to look kinda like Ariel up on that rock in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. But with my body it looks more like The Little Orca. I’ve got my tummy, hips, and legs on the floor and am raising my torso up with my arms when Willie (the DOG, not the gardener, or the mailman, or the UPS guy—this needs to be clear) trots over and starts licking my neck.

I squirm and giggle and squeal for Willie to stop. Yoga Body says something really helpful like, “You’re a little unbalanced.” To which I respond, “You’re an anorexic pixel with gray skin and unnaturally shifting boobies.”

Of course, the witch gives me a low score for that and a lecture on doing yoga every day to improve my form and posture. But I’m starting to think maybe I need more interaction with the outside world. I’m picking fights with an avatar for crying out loud.