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Anyone who used to read my blog is well aware that I’ve been gone for a while. Why? Because some asshole decided he should hijack my website. So I just said eff it.
Then I realized something. People like this blog. Several months after I stopped, people would ask when it would come back. I was shocked and humbled at the same time. A lot of these people were the movers and shakers around Hollywood.
Enough of that. Let’s move on.
When I was in high school and college I was a football player. As many know, football is a competitive sport. You practice hard, come together as a team, you put your neck on the line and play as hard as you can. There’s more to the sport than meets the eye. They need spectators. It’s almost as much as a comedian needs audience participation for a good show.
That’s why there’s such thing as cheerleaders. They have two jobs: where a skimpy outfit (which sexualizes them) and lead the fans in cheers. It’s all designed to help their team win.
That’s the way it was when I was growing up. But not anymore.
Cheerleaders now have their own competitions. They compete locally, regionally and nationally. In most cases, these girls couldn’t give a rat’s ass about their football team or even the school. Sure, there’s a mascot. They create cheers around it. But that’s about it. They don’t care if the team wins, loses or draws. They want to win in their sport. It’s created some sort of quasi disconnect.
I told you that to tell you this.
If you are a past reader of this blog, you know I have a lot to say about yoga. My feeling has always been that it’s a a great way to get flexible. It cannot and will not get you into shape. In the interest of full disclosure, when I have time on my hands (which is not often), I hit a class around L.A. But I digress.
My friend Steve sent me an article that he knew would infuriate me. It was in the New York Times. They talked about competitive yoga.
Really, folks? Competitive yoga? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Isn’t the whole thing about not competing?
Then I started thinking about it. Yoga was always competitive. Every time I’m in a yoga class, everyone is trying to one-up each other. If a person is standing on their head, another is trying stand on their hand. Then a third person is trying to levitate. If a guy is in a half pretzel, another guy is in a double pretzel. The third jerkoff is trying for a double pretzel with his shirt off so everyone can see his hot body.
After the hour-long stretch fest in a room that smells like feet, everyone puts their hands together and whispers the word “Namaste.” In loose translation, this is an Indian valediction upon parting.
Then they roll up their mats with their new-found self righteousness on the world and walk out to their Land Rover or Mercedes to start cutting people off and flipping them the one-finger salute in traffic.
Sophia Loren, the world’s greatest cheerleader