In which I sink to my lowest point and mock the elderly

I guess I have your regular string of fears for a quasi-[ex]professional young person. I can lay claim to the obvious ones, fear of economic demise, creative failure, getting the cubicle version of bedsores and the like. But I have a unique cultural paranoia to throw into the mix, one which occurred to me last night as I attempted to do yoga (!). I’m rather afraid of becoming a hippie.

And the real cincher is that I like hippies! I have plenty of friends who are, or who convincingly imitate, hippies. Your stereotypical hippie, in my estimation, believes in these things: peace, love, recreational use of the ‘softer’ drugs, and nature. What’s not to love about all that? As a nearly confirmed pacifist I can think of little in their ideology that is off-putting. Sure, there are some hippies that could use a shower, but the same can be said about most children and practically all of the elderly, regardless of whether they are metaphorical draft-dodgers.

To leave off making fun of the elderly (a level I thought that I would never sink to), I will return to the tale of my yoga experience. I have been considering yoga as a possible countermeasure to stress for some time, but was deterred by the mental image the practice provoked. Alarmingly, this image was not of some bare-chested hippie on a cleanly mowed lawn, but rather of your average soccer mom or Uggs-girl, clad in black work out pants and with a yoga mat swinging casually over their arm.

These yoga mats have the same alienating quality that portfolio folders give to art students; these items provide a sense of purpose and accomplishment that those of us without props can’t exude. But unlike art students, these yoga ladies did not impress me. Instead I began to see yoga mats as a yuppie identifier, a sort of hyper-visible fondness for Jack Johnson.

“Yuppies,” I would think, laughing to myself. “Yuppies and their silly fitness.”

But recent discussions about yoga with various parties dissuaded me from this imagery so I decided to give it a go. I will spare you all of the gory details about my lack of balance, strength, and coordination, and get straight to the point of interest (should one indeed exist). Last night around eleven, alone in my front room, I was almost too embarrassed to try to sense any “energy” moving through my body. Because in my small and provincial mind, this was too hippie-like for a sensible, anti-spiritual person like myself.

Scope this dated reference out: In describing this, I feel like Robin Williams in Hook, when he can’t eat the imaginary food because he is a stodgy lawyer who doesn’t believe in imagination. This is, as a matter of pure trivia, my favorite scene from that movie owing to the complete ridiculousness of the food when it does appear. When dinner is left to the imagination, it would appear that the result is merely colored goo.