My Facebook page is full of offers to sign up for online exercise courses pointedly aiming at those of us who are categorized as “mature.”
I have my own descriptives for this group, particularly those who have followed life’s path as I have. Among those descriptives are words like “hopelessly out of shape,” “decidedly decrepit,” “looking for a pain doc,” etc.
The last ad that I encountered was a video of a mature woman. You could tell this by the color of her hair and the way that her underarm skin moved in the breeze. This gal was doing a very energetic version of jumping jacks. Now, I know that there are those in this age category, mostly at the lower end of it, who have retained the ability to do such things. They might even be able to get down on the floor and get up again without aid. Who knows? Anything is possible, given the way that variation occurs in any context, but for a lot of us, jumping jacks is about the same as doing a triple axel in figure skates in the living room. Are you kidding? I consider it a win if I can turn around while on a staircase.
There are ads for gentle yoga, chair yoga and even something called hand yoga. I am an unabashed advocate of chair yoga for those of us who aren’t of the nimbler set. For me, it has offered as much relief as a steroid shot. So, investigating the offerings for chair yoga, I get … now remember I am originally from Brooklyn … suspicious of those that peg their price high and then tell you that if you sign up now, you can get the whole course for $7.28. It does seem fishy, since you have no idea what the contents of the course are. A list of practice titles reveals little about what you can be expected to do.
Ok, maybe I am a bit too skeptical, but I also wondered why I don’t receive ads for regular yoga courses – you know, hot yoga, goat yoga (whatever that is,) basically the kind that requires the ability to get up and down on a yoga mat. There is a bit of cache attached to carrying a yoga mat. It says “healthy,” “sincere,” “able to move through space while breathing without hurting yourself.”
How does the algorithm determine that the person on this Facebook page is “mature” or that she is interested in chair yoga? My sister and I were discussing this the other day and we have determined that if you search for anything on the internet, you will get ads for related items, services, etc. across all of the sites that you visit.
I was reading a recipe for a chocolate cobbler yesterday and had to navigate around ads for yarn, Honda cars, compression stockings and Louis Vuitton. I recently bought yarn, looked up the phone number of Lamacchia Honda, did research on socks and, with my ham-fingered approach to keyboarding, accidentally typed in something that came close to Vuitton. So the artificial intelligence that stores this stuff throws it back at me like hurdles to jump over while I check my mail, my Facebook page or search on Google. This is almost more physical activity than I am used to. I’ll have to be on the lookout for things related to chocolate cobbler.
I have an idea, though. What would happen if I searched for information about Burning Man, reservations at the Waldorf in New York, the Ritz in Paris or a plane ticket to Borneo? Would my ads be classier, more adventurous? What if I searched for how to eliminate ads on the internet? Hmm.
I think I’ll try that for a fun experiment, but in the interim, I am going to take a big risk and sign up for one of those chair yoga classes … or scope out the free stuff on Youtube, where, if you didn’t know this, you can learn how to replace a hip. Yup!
I have to do something to keep myself flexible enough to keep typing this column.
I may buy a yoga mat just for appearances.
