Day Seven - Project 2

  I can't feel my toes.

  I am now able to touch my toes in a standing posture.  In order to do this, I stretched and stretched and held position and stretched and breathed and stretched and hurt and stretched.  I felt my feet falling asleep at the end.  I wasn't sitting on them in some difficult meditative posture or anything. I can touch my toes.  I just can't feel them.

  Is this some kind of cosmic lesson, or just painful (and worrying to a diabetic) irony?  And the worst thing, the WORST thing, is knowing that when I wake up tomorrow, I'll have to do it all over again just to keep at this level, this takes-nearly-thirty-seconds-to-slowly-agonizingly-slowly-touch-my-toes-for-like-five-seconds level of almost flexibility.  I dunno.

  Still worth it.  I have to say, this project isn't really for me.  That is to say, 37 year old me.  This one is for 6 year old me, who desperately wanted to do gymnastics and didn't have the guts to say it out loud to my parents.  Parents who TOTALLY would have supported me in it.  I just couldn't shake that stupid, outdated, suburban-wasteland of gender stratification that surrounded and permeated my childhood.

  I just wanted to be able to do a backflip, get noticed by some wise avuncular neighbour from a distant land who would then proceed to train me to be a ninja.  Oh, heck, I just wanted to DO A BACKFLIP.

  I know that is probably impossible at this point.  But there have to be a number of things that aren't, even for a guy like me.  So, yes, still worth it.  And for 6 year old me, I just want to say, "Okay, here are the winning lottery numbers for 2013.  Be patient.  And would you toughen up and take gymnastics?  Jeez kid, you're not even gonna remember the bullies' names in 20 years."

-Mike