Muscle Memory

After a year’s break, Amanda recently took up yoga again at her gym. She said was a toss-up between senior aerobics, aqua-aerobics and yoga.

“It was like ‘Sophie’s Choice’, lemme tell ya!” she told us.

Saffy stopped slurping her laksa and looked up, frowning at Amanda over the top of her steaming bowl. “What, you mean senior aerobics was actually in contention?”

“If you saw who the teacher is, sure! It’s Joseph!”

Saffy put her down her chopsticks. Clearly, this required her full, undivided attention.

“Joseph takes the senior aerobics class?” she said, her bosom beginning to shake. “Hot blonde Joseph who looks like Jamie Lannister?”

Amanda nodded in satisfaction.

“But…but…” Saffy looked confused.

“But why would anyone waste that hotness on senior people doing senior aerobics?” Amanda asked.

I coughed. “Uhm, that’s not very…”

“Oh lighten up!” Amanda snapped. “I had a look at the class. They’re all over 90 and they all have cataracts. They can’t see more than one metre in front of them! They have no right to be having Joseph wasting all that precious hotness on them!”

“Although,” Saffy said, picking up her chopsticks again, “someone on Facebook just posted a preview of this movie called ‘Gerontophilia’ about a young gorgeous guy who works in a hospital and has this thing for old people. So, maybe that’s Joseph’s thing!”

One thing you have to say about Amanda, she’s a die-hard realist, a champion for minority rights of every persuasion, and an equal opportunist who has never really believed in crying over spilt milk. “Huh,” she said. “I never thought of it that way. If he’s into old people, I never would have stood a chance anyway. Well, that was a near thing, I guess.”

“Attagirl,” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of beansprouts and red-tinged soup.

Poor Joseph, I thought to myself. He was probably taking the senior aerobics class because that was just how the gym schedule had worked out, and now, he was officially, in Amanda’s non-judgmental mind at least, a committed gerontophiliac.

“So, anyway,” Amanda went on, “I checked out the aqua-aerobics class and there were so many screaming kids in the next lane and all I could think of was how much pee there must be in that pool!”

“Ugh,” said Saffy. “And it’s not just the kids. I’ll never forget my eighty-two year old grandmother telling me about the time she was in her aqua-aerobics class and the teacher was making them do these twisting side-bends and she peed a little in the pool.”

“That’s going to be us in about two seconds,” Amanda said gloomily. “Before we know it, we’ll be eighty-two years old, sad and single, and peeing in a pool!”

“Well, she wasn’t actually peeing as in emptying her bladder into a thirty metre pool!” Saffy said loyally by way of clarification. “Because that would just be, like, tragic! She said she peed a little!”

“Seriously, do you mind?” I said. “We’re eating!”

“Oh, relax,” Saffy said. “It’s a normal biological event. It’s going to happen to all of us eventually. Just not too eventually, I hope!”

Amanda says that’s one of the reasons she’s taking yoga up again. She says she’s hoping that one of the asanas will involve strengthening her pelvic floor muscles. “The ones that control our bladder!” she informed us, momentarily forgetting she was talking to two hypochondriacs who are on intimate terms with all the things that could possibly go wrong with every single one of our major organs.

“When you learn that one, be sure to tell me!” Saffy said. “I was giving a presentation the other day to the board and I drank three cups of coffee before because I was so nervous and halfway through I had to pee so badly. I swear I thought I was going to die!”

Amanda sucked in her breath. “Oh my God, so what happened?”

“I was very gentle in my movements for starters!” Saffy told us. “And I basically rushed through the presentation and marched out of the boardroom without even saying ‘Thank you’. I nearly didn’t make it to the loo. The chairman later told me how impressed he was by my sense of urgency about my proposals for HR reform in the company!” Saffy snorted. “Just goes to show what an idiot he is!”

“I saw on the gym schedule a pole dancing class, too,” Amanda went on. “That’s supposed to be really good for your pelvic muscles!”

Sharyn says she should join that class. “Ever since I have my chil-ren, hor, I just laugh and I pee a little! So suay!”

According to Saffy, if that’s not a great argument for never dating, she doesn’t know what is.