that's it for me. the other day was my last day with that overly loquacious yoga teacher i had been suffering under for the past three months. what really irked me most with this guy was not so much that he had this intractable verbal diarrhea that he unleashed on us during mat time. it was more of his atrocious vocabulary.
this was the last straw for me. we were doing the triangles, right? then, without the slightest hint of some tongue-in-cheek attempt at humor, he cajoled us to "go open up your chests wide to the universe. open up your pectorials (sic) to the possibilities that the world is offering you."
ugh. major ugh. for real. gots to have my calm, rhythmic breathing during my precious yoga time. i definitely don't need this aggravation from, of all people, my instructor.
but maybe he had an inkling that someone was not coming back to his classes because during the corpse stance (the relaxation stance after all of those Elastigirl asanas), he was thanking us profusely.
"Thank you so much for showing up," his voice sounded more like he was the one who decided to jump ship and not I. "You are all heroes."
heroes? now that's way too cloying a marketing ploy to hold on to one's students crazy enough to pay the extortionate gym fees in this north Manhattan gym. in a fitness crazy city like the Big Apple, it is not a stretch to claim that most New Yorkers shell out more for their gym dues than their grocery in a month.
there also is no gainsaying that here at ground zero city, after 9/11, the currency of this word (i.e.heroism) reached an all time nadir. the word is just bandied around all the time that even Salvation Army volunteers on their holiday begging spree have deleted the word in their cajoling, i mean caroling repertoire. hey look, when even a mundane milk shake is being marketed as a divine drink for heroes, how in the world can one take in this word with much deserved gravitas?
times like these makes me long for the good old Greek time when flawed but clearly one of a kind characters like the forever fulminatingly mad Achilles and the quick witted Odysseus had their aristeias to prove for their (well, you may call it dubious) heroism in those two extant Homeric epics.
but no, no, no. our modern world would not have anything to do with this undemocratic concept. everyone is a hero. we can't stand to worship the olympian heroes anymore, we wanted a reflection of our own plebian selves in our modern myths, say Mr. Willy Loman, perhaps (the "hero" of Arthur Miller's play Death of A Salesman). all he had to do was just thrust that fedora in his balding pate and get out of that door day after day, rain, sleet, snow or shine. to just get out of there, it's heroism enough.
and hey, if modern white folks can be heroes, then brown folks can't be, rather should not be, too far behind, right? whatever's the rage in the occident has got to be the it thing back in the orient also, right? (man, don't i just love to use these two un-pc adjectives. orient, occident. man where are the days of the rapacious western colonizers? charing lang.)
i mean, since we can't find Lapu-Lapu clones anymore back home, hey why can't we nominate any pedestrian guy out there and, by the grace of a tropical-storm-spewing god, prostrate ourselves before him, our very own modern hero, too. or better yet, why can't we have guys who, on a regular basis, send money back home from their expat work and call them the new heroes. makes for an al dente sound bite. thus, the genesis of one of the most patronizing labels our modern Pinoy society has ever come up with--calling overseas expat workers the new heroes--mga bagong bayani.
this branding, though, clearly exposes the more philistine streak of our society. first, it's only the guys who are momentarily awash in hard earned dollars who are fit to be called heroes. secondly, and i guess highlights a more sinister vein in our national psyche, makes for a case that only those who have the spunk to get out of the rut of local life and live and work preferably in the USA, can be called heroes.
heroes schmeiros. that's it for me. i have enough of this word and that yoga instructor. now, if only i would know what to squeeze into that big chunk of free time that i got?