Primal With A Side Of FABULOUS page 546

[Gay Panda]

PART ONE: Gay Panda has no sense of direction.

If we were taking a road trip together and became lost, you would soon learn that I am the very last panda on this planet you should ask to inspect the map and set us to rights. Lady Friend has learned this lesson many, many times, yet still she holds out a most desperate hope that next time, surely next time Gay Panda will get it right.* But I have a difficult time applying what I see in 2-D to 3-D. On a side note, I also can’t look at a sofa and a doorway and tell you if the sofa will fit through it. And this is why you do not want to take a road trip (or move furniture) with Gay Panda.

Years ago, I decided to take some classes at Saint Gigantor Junior College just north of the Magical Bamboo Forest. Saint Gigantor was a massive place of towering trees and looming buildings, birds crying down ominously from invisible perches high overhead and white, wisping chemtrails always slicing through the sky over campus to sprinkle us with intelligence-enhancing properties**. I signed up for the Tuesday/Thursday sections of Giving A Good Speech and The Dying Art Of Journalism, paired with the exercise class Rump Begone. Speech was first, and I was unnerved by the teacher’s tattoo. Like everything else at Saint Gigantor, it was massive. Her perilously low-cut T-shirt revealed a life-sized bald and bluish head located just a tad north of her boobs, and its creepy green cat-like eyes stared at me all through the lecture. Feathered wings extended away from the head to her shoulders. It was the most bizarre tattoo I have ever seen. You could not look at it. You could not not look at it. And it was always, always looking at you.***

The first meeting of Giving A Good Speech consisted of the dreaded Name Game and the equally dreadful Reading Of A Very Long Syllabus. The tattoo leered at me for ninety minutes and then it was time for The Dying Art Of Journalism. The whole of Saint Gigantor had to be crossed in order to reach it and I stopped at every map of the school along the way to make sure I was going in the right direction. Not very many people were enrolled in Journalism, since it is soon to join Latin under a veil of cobwebs in the attic study of subjects that have no purpose. The teacher laughed grimly about our prospects in making it in the field. Again we read the syllabus**** and engaged in some writing activity that eludes my memory, and it was time for Rump Begone. Once more I crossed that sprawling campus in pursuit of Gigantic Gym Room 500.

And there I hit a snag. Saint Gigantor was so gigantic that it had multiple locations for its dozens of P.E. classes. There was Gigantic Field and Supremely Gigantic Field and two Mini-Giant Fields and then the Modestly Gigantic Field outside Gigantic Gym itself. A brisk walk from Gigantic Gym was the Supremely Gigantic Gym that housed the locker rooms and pool and dance classes; another hop-skip-and-stumble led one to the Mini-Giant Gym. I stared at the map at the intersection of all this and eventually just began canvassing buildings. Exactly none of them held a Gym Room 500.

[Gay Panda]

PART TWO: In time, I became aware that many other bewildered looking people were canvassing these buildings with me. It turned out we were all hunting for Rump Begone, and so we hunted together. Ten minutes after the class period started, we found it. Gigantic Gym Room 500 was the school’s code for classes outside of Gigantic Gym. Our coach had not wanted to take attendance outside in the cold, so she plopped down in a dark, unused hallway at the back of one of these buildings and waited for us to find her. Gay Panda, being a stickler for punctuality, was not amused.

The coach was not a bad sort, just someone who knows to the very center of her being that it is she the sun and stars and planets orbit. Since she knew where she was, ensconced in an unlit hallway at the back of a building most of us had never set foot inside, naturally we would gravitate to her. And since we did (in time) our complaints were thus invalidated. And so the semester kicked off with a bang, a teacher with a second head between her boobs, a teacher who spoke mournfully of being the last standard bearer of a dying art, and a teacher who was the center of the universe.

In the last case, it was not Coach Universe that bothered me most about the class. Nor was it even the exercise, although I loathed that thoroughly and completely. It was her two most enthusiastic students. The coach’s gravitational pull had exerted a particularly strong influence on this pair, moving them in a set of three throughout our sweat sessions on the field. One was tall and lovely and unnerving, one of those people who is both drawing you under a spell and setting off your alarm bells at the same instant. She was loud, dear Valhalla, she was loud. There was no quiet setting on this young woman, who exploded to our class period and exploded out of it and exploded all through it. Every command from Coach Universe as to our next exercise was met by a hearty, “WOOOOO!!! LET’S GO!!! WOOOOO!!!” And she dove into action, squatting and stretching and jumping with ear-splitting gusto.

It was echoed by her noisy sidekick, a shorter and squatter young woman in her late teens. “WOOOO!!! YEAH!!! WOOOOOO!!!” They were ever partners through the period, comparing their biceps and smacking each other's bottoms, creating a ninety-minute feedback loop of WOOOO WOOOO WOOOOO and shouting merry encouragement to everyone else in the class. I dreaded the day they would add my name to the repertoire. It did not matter to these two that nobody else ever joined in, nor did anyone respond to being included in the cheerobics. Weeks of classes passed in their meltdowns of happiness. Squats? Did Coach Universe say squats? WOOOO!!! I LOVE SQUATS!!! WOOOO!!! C’MON, MITCH!!! PULL IN YOUR BUTT!!! C’MON DARCY!!! TIGHTEN THOSE THIGHS!!! WOOOO!!! FEEL THE BURN!!! ARE YOU FEELING IT, GAY PANDA??? I BET YOU EAT SQUATS FOR BREAKFAST!!! GO, GAY PANDA!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Gay Panda hated these two with every fiber of the panda being.

[Gay Panda]

PART THREE: Nothing stopped them, nothing muted them, and when it rained, they carried on in this fashion inside the gymnasium. Their WOOOOOs bounced off the walls and echoed around the room. Gay Panda loves a good dreary rain and a gray, depressing day, but was thrilled when the sun came out so we could return outside for class. I practically WOOOOOOed myself just to put some distance between us.

But both exploded out on my heels and the shorter one cried to the taller one, “Did you lose weight?”
“BET I DID! FIVE POUNDS!” roared the taller one. “WOOOO!”
“WOOOO!” echoed the shorter one.
“WOOOOO! I RAN FIVE MILES YESTERDAY AND NEARLY BLEW OUT MY CALVES!”
“WOOOO! Did it burn?”
“YEAH, BUT I’M NOT GOING TO FEEL THE BURN IN THESE SIZE NINE JEANS! WOOOOOO!!!” the taller one bellowed. She smoothed her arms down her sides, stuck out her rump and shook it cheerfully while trying to look over her shoulder to admire.

They wooed during warm-ups and wooed running laps, they wooed in line for the water fountain and wooed during push-ups. They wooed during ladders and wooed holding each other’s ankles for sit-ups and wooed for no reason at all. The taller one was a mother, and I wondered if at her ultrasound, she wooed at the fetus and if the fetus wooed back.***** Seven weeks into the semester and I was exhausted of their endless ruckus, and then one day I went to class and it was silent.

I examined the students, finding the shorter one present but not the taller one. She’d dropped out, having discovered that six classes, a job, a marriage, and parenthood had depleted her of woos. And without the taller one, the shorter had no echo. Her woos were less hearty and in time, less frequent and more tentative. Then they stopped altogether.

And perversely, I missed them.

[Gay Panda]

UPDATE: (in explanation of *, **, ***, ****, and *****)

* Note to Lady Friend: I won’t.

** Judging from the student body and the faculty both, they were ineffective.

*** I also sat next to a most amiable Burning Man aficionado who found an array of colorful pipe cleaners on the sidewalk somewhere on campus. He brought them to class, twisted them up, and wore them in his hair and around his ears for months. And no, he did not take them out to wash up. He just didn’t wash at all.

**** Every. Damn. Word.

***** Or if it covered its face in despair and thought oh f*ck.

[Gay Panda]

Give back my file, Benign Poltergeist!!! How in the world did you manage to hide one of my Microsoft Word files?!?!

I NEED MY FILE OR I CAN'T WRITE THIS BOOK.

[Gay Panda]

Oh, there it is.

Never mind.

[phigment]

whooo, gay panda, wooo.

[Gay Panda]

Indeed. WOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

[equineaddict]

Hi Gay Panda, I am still in the beginning of your journal but felt compelled to write a brief hello. Otherwise I feel too voyeurish. So I am new to MDA, and your journal. (I think it is so cool you found mine, btw!) I am still back in December 2011. So far Lady Friend has no knowledge of this journal. I am still waiting to see if she gets a copy of it for her birthday. It is odd being a year in the past. It sounds like you were Rocking the primal diet. As you are still here, I think you must still be.

As for me, I have completed one week of primal. Your journal is great. I think I am spending too much time reading it. Your post #745 moved me deeply.

Well I hope I gave you a nice trip down memory lane. Grok on, Panda!

[cori93437]

Hi Gay Panda, I am still in the beginning of your journal but felt compelled to write a brief hello. Otherwise I feel too voyeurish. So I am new to MDA, and your journal. (I
think it is so cool you found mine, btw!) I am still back in December 2011. So far Lady Friend has no knowledge of this journal. I am still waiting to see if she gets a copy of it for Christmas. It is odd being a year in the past. It sounds like you were Rocking the primal diet. As you are still here, I think you must still be.

As for me, I have completed one week of primal. Your journal is great. I think I am spending too much time reading it. Your post #745 moved me deeply.

Well I hope I gave you a nice trip down memory lane. Grok on, Panda!

By the time you finish... you will laugh, you will probably cry, and you will never walk by a stuffed Panda in a store and not smile again. Ever.

Welcome to the Gay Panda Adoration Club. (GPAC)
WOOOOOOOOO!!!