SMILE LIKE YOU'RE WINNING

Never trust a smiler.

They’re either hiding something, high on something, or crazy as a coconut.

I used to have this girlfriend with a bedside message-to-self, which read:

‘Smile…it makes other people wonder what you’re up to’. Too right. After 5 months of being dazzled by her unicorn-white teeth, I was convinced she’d cheated on me. Smilers are liars.

I’m not talking about the occasional innocent smile at a bounding puppy or a stumbling granny. I’m talking about the perma-smilers, the rictus grin of the psychologically unstable. Like that woman from ‘Misery’, a children’s TV presenter, or any Christian.  

So it was a strange day indeed when I signed up to the ultimate cult of smiling - yoga. On the other hand, it made perfect sense. Years earlier, my mother had instilled in me a paranoia that my upper body ‘needed work’, and after much mirror-dodging I had to confess that she was right. My shoulders were decent enough but the rest was just kind of hanging there, joining my legs to my head. Something had to be done. And it wasn’t going to be real exercise.

Boxing was out of the question. Some people can afford to get uglier. I am not one of them. As for army training, well, bullying is only fun if you’re the one doing it, so I parked that too. And, as anyone who has ever been to the gym with me will attest, I pull my cum face every time I lift more than 10 kg. Everyone loses. No, if I was going to do this, I was going to do it the way of lycra-clad lady bits, whale sounds and 3^rd eyes. Just don’t expect me to join in with the smiling shit. Laugh inside yes, but not smile with you.

From the first minute of the first class, it became clear that yoga is a refuge for broken souls with big smiles. The wider the smile, the deeper the fissures in their hearts. If you didn’t empathise, you’d be a monster. Likewise, if you didn’t hold back a snigger, you’d be missing more than half the fun. Like in an old folk’s home.

In one particularly punishing class, I remember a woman smiling so hard I thought her facial skin would tear. While I stood, shaking in a pose that I’m sure contravenes every international torture law, this weirdo tried to out-smile her reflection. She won. My face a stony grimace, I laughed inside. How silly these people were. How very silly indeed.

Then there are the moaners. Full-on sex moans, in front of a room of strangers. Close your eyes (or black out from the exertion, which I regularly do), and you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were at an orgy with all your mum’s friends. I’m not saying this is good or bad. I don’t know your mum’s friends. All I’m saying is that I never silent-laughed so hard while simultaneously being turned on before or since. 

 

Which brings us to the botty burps. As anyone who has done yoga will know, it’s not somewhere you want to be farting, for three good reasons. First - it’s silent, so your crime will stand out like a dropped plate in a restaurant. You know those looks you get. Second, it’s as tightly packed as a rush-hour tube, so any dirty bombs will incur maximum casualties. And thirdly, and most importantly - you’re only allowed to breath through your nose. It’s the perfect storm of bad fart conditions; the olfactory heart of darkness.

I remember the incident well. 10 broken souls and me, gathered in a circle,

mulling over the benefits of pickling our own seaweed, when from nowhere, something exploded. To say it was a sound isn’t doing it justice. It was an event. A moving of tectonic plates, deep underground. A shattering of the time-space continuum. Seconds later, just as the world was making sense of itself again, another explosion blew the group apart. Dizzy with empathy, I almost fired off a sympathy fart, but thought better of it. 3 wrongs don’t make a right. What a terrible time. Bit also, a hilarious one. Me: 1, broken farting yoga people: 0.

 

And so I continued, smugly tittering away in the corner at these unfortunate souls trying to grin themselves better. After all, I was separate from them. I was here for my upper body; they were here for healing. They were broken souls. I wasn’t. The only thing I was breaking was my chin-up bar. Weeks turned to months. Seasons passed. I learnt how to do a handstand but not to smile. And then one day, I broke too, and I stopped laughing inside. Which isn’t to say I’ve started smiling.  I’m still 6 cans short of a 6-pack, which is no laughing matter.