Namastinkers

A herd of trendy exercise-buffs, similar to the likes of those found in Brooklyn...

Twenty years ago, I'm sure if a businessman (or woman) would have pitched an idea involving grown people paying lots of money to get together with groups of strangers, being forced to get into ridiculous and sometimes painful positions for prolonged periods of time while either being publicly half-naked or clad in bizarrely over-priced outfits, the aforementioned individual would have been thought to be describing a common and recurring nightmare rather than a cogent business opportunity. Now this adolescent nightmare is a billion dollar industry known as Yoga, and it's hit New York like a malignant cancer...

It's hard to walk a few blocks in the city without seeing some sort of yoga studio, even if on the 3rd floor of a condemned building with a string of Tibetan prayer flags hanging out the window. When you can walk down a crummy street in the Bronx and see posters for Bikram Yoga, you know that gentrification has extended its grasp and soon middle-class white people with baby carriages and small dogs will be roaming about the streets talking on their iPhones about fair trade coffee and the trials of knowing what's best for everyone else. This in no way is meant to imply that I'm denying the inalienable rights of bourgeois people to overtake distressed neighborhoods, strip out all the unique cultural characteristics, raise the rent, and push all the original residents out in the name of affordable "re-purposed" loft apartments. Luckily, in many such neighborhoods, there are already well established yoga studios waiting for these folks upon arrival.

On the weekends, I work at the front desk in a very posh and swanky yoga studio in Manhattan. It's a rather pricey and very exclusive studio open to members only. My job is to calmly and soothingly check people in and direct them to their yoga classes while wearing a T shirt with the word "namaste" printed in Helvetica Bold on the front. "Namaste" is an ancient Sanskrit word which originally had very important spiritual meanings for several cultures. Now it's been diluted to a trendy salutation that is commonly screen printed on mass-produced plastic objects for consumer cultures in order to make people feel alternative and spiritual. Our clients tend to be folks who don't really need worry about money, but do anyway. In fact, many of them seem to manufacture a great deal of unnecessary things to worry about as a way of keeping themselves occupied, and then using Yoga as a method of coping with self-induced stress and tension. Sometimes, this coping process involves maltreatment of unsuspecting customer service professionals, such as myself.

For some folks, there is no amount of combined stretching and breathing exercises in existence that would turn them into agreeable human beings. We have our favorites that make all of the employees brace for impact upon arrival at the front desk. For some people the studios are never the right temperature, for others the towels in the steam rooms aren't white enough, for others the scheduling of their favorite class is always inconvenient and for a select group, there is nothing remotely pleasant about their experience at all, and their masochistic tendencies must be why they insist on coming back, time after time, and prolonging their misery. I'm sure anyone who has ever worked with the public in any capacity has similar observations. It's always something...

One night when I had been working an extended shift to cover for a friend, one of my favorite clients showed up, in a huff, as usual. This lady could be described as the Upper West Side picture of pretension from her frail leathery figure, to her absurdly stretched facial skin causing a look of eminent surprise to be ever present on her sour face. She plodded down the stairs complaining to someone on the phone about the difficulty of catching a taxi, which had obviously placed her out of sorts. She set her giant Louis Vuitton bag on the counter, took out half of its contents until she finally found her membership card, and shoved it in my face (all this while continuing her phone conversation). I checked her in for her class, which usually gets people on their way, but she decided to linger in front of me while finishing up her phone call. When she finally told "Peg, darling" goodbye, she asked to buy a bottle of water, as she commonly had done before. She seemed rather annoyed when I asked for the $2.50 we charge for luxury bottled water, rummaged through her over-sized bag some more and then, for the first time since coming into the studio, she stopped and looked at me. I knew this was not a good sign. "Look," she said, "here's the deal, all I have is two bucks, I can't find the fifty cents, so you're just gonna need to figure this out..." as she tried to grab the bottle from my hand. I pulled the bottle back and felt like saying "what, figure out that you're a wretched awful person?" but I let that go by. Her sense of entitlement had superseded any shred of social propriety she may have had, and she kept on acting like I was the one who was causing the problem by asking her to pay for her water. Begrudgingly, she rummaged through her bag some more and miraculously found the change she needed for the water, slammed it down on the counter and snatched the water bottle from my fingers. As she walked away I muttered "namaste to you too" under my breath.

In general, I do like working at the yoga studio, in spite of the some of the crazy people who come in for healing, relaxation and rejuvenation. I suppose it's a good thing we are part of their lives, especially when contemplating how much worse they may be without the aid of costly non-religious spiritual direction. At the end of the day, without them, who would I have to write about?