It wasn’t until I got a Nintendo Wii and bought the game Wii Fit that I first encountered the strange world of Yoga. My first impression of yoga was that it was a bunch of weird hippies twisting themselves into pretzels for no reason. All the poses had strange sounding names like downward facing dog, half lord of the fishes pose, and the cat-cow stretch. It sounded like new-age bull crap to me, so I avoided it like the mosquito vomit. I was a basketball enthusiast, an athlete, after all. I didn’t need some weirdly named poses to help me get fit.

When I actually tried it on the Wii Board, I realized yoga wasn’t a joke. Before I tell you why, I first have to explain that the Wii Board was a brutal, yet “objective” jerk that caused “Fit Shaming”. If you haven’t had the pleasure, the Wii Board weighs you…and tells you how overweight you are. It even shows your avatar getting fatter after the weigh in. It put me in the morbidly obese category, which I thought was rude. I admit that I’m not the rail skinny, all-world athlete that I was in college. I’m sport more of a dad bod, which should be fine since I have two really ungrateful kids. But the Wii board didn’t care that I had a job, and two little gremlins to raise, it was a jerk with the excuse of “I’m just a game” and “I’m just trying to help you get healthy”.

The funny thing was that for my height, 6’1, it said that the “healthy range for me” should have been 140 pounds, which is such a bunch of crap. When I was at my healthiest, in my freshman year of college, I weighed 160 and I only had 4% body fat (the only reason I know that is because I took a fitness for life class and they made us measure ourselves). If I was 140 at 6’1, people would have mistaken me for an impoverished starving kid that could have slipped down the shower drain.

After the Wii Board called me morbidly obese, it made me want to use it as a frisbee in a game of catch with the forest. On the other hand, it deviously and underhandedly made me want to get in better shape, if only as a middle finger to it for calling me obese.

I hated most of the games on it, since it required me to move my hips in a certain way to walk across a ropes course, or balance balls so they didn’t fall down a hole, so I chose to do yoga, since I figured it was easy.

Yoga isn’t near as easy as I thought it would be. It’s about balance and breathing, neither of which I’m very good at. The stupid board would use a dot to show you how off-balance and shaky you were. You had to focus the dot on the center of two intersecting lines in the middle. I clearly had balance issues, because my dot flitted nervously across the screen like a hyena with anxiety that had too much coffee.

Then you had your Wii Fit trainer who would always encourage you to stretch before you started, because if you didn’t, you would feel tightness all over. I didn’t listen to her, so now when I wake up, I’m just a walking joint cracker. I still think about stretching, but then I think about something else. Besides, who has time to stretch? I’m so busy laying on the couch, watching TV, that I don’t have time to stretch. So I don’t stretch, no matter how much I know it’s good for me.

Everyone says I should stretch my skills too. These “people” that I know actually suggest I try to talk to other people out loud, with my mouth, that I don’t know. That’s a terrible idea, because my mom told me that I should never talk to strangers. So far, it’s worked, because no one has ever taken me into their unmarked van and drove me to the river. Nor have I ever met anyone new in 20 years. I have enough problems without having to deal with people.

Besides, when you stretch, you grow. My body stopped growing taller when I was in seventh grade. Now the only grows on me now is my belly and my ear hair, and I’m trying to prevent that.

I haven’t learned anything new since kindergarten. According to the book “All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten”, by Robert Fulghum, everything I needed to know, I already learned in Kindergarten Cop. I need to eat frequent snacks, other people should clean up after me, I should always let my parents pay for everything, and I need frequent naps throughout the day. Also, if someone takes my toy, I should hit them and take it back. Stuff like that. Thus, proving that stretching is a farce, unnecessary and mostly just really painful.

You know what else is unnecessary and painful? Bitter Friday Giftures. At the end, you will learn nothing new, and you won’t have stretched your imagination at all. Just the same old stuff, week after week, and you don’t even need to talk to anyone out loud. Just like nature intended it…

For the first time ever…

The Wii Fit…

Yoga has ridiculously named poses…

The Cow face…

And the Cobra…

The Wii Board…

The Wii Fit Board…

Especially since I was once skinny enough…

I was ready to play catch with the forest…

The only stretching does…

Everything I learned about bitterness in life…

My favorite of which is…

ARRGGGHHHHH

Bitter Stretching It Ben

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