4 this is hot.

let me paint you a picture...

bikram is an hour and a half of yoga practiced in a 105 degree room.

that's hot. really, really hot. as in, if that room were a person it would be delirious or, quite possibly, dead.

so it should come as no surprise that when i leave bikram at 7:30 a.m., after embarrassingly few hours of sleep and having sweated for a solid 90 minutes, i'm not at my beautiful best.

my face is flushed. everything on me is soaked through, including all the towels i'm carrying. i'm guzzling down a liter of water as i walk home and tottering like a newborn lamb.

oh, and i'm wearing a sweatband.

A SWEATBAND.

i am recoiling over this admission and i imagine you are recoiling at this news. because if you know me at all you have to know i would not be caught dead wearing a sweatband. i would never be so unladylike as to own, much less wear, a garment whose sole purpose is to delare to all the world that i do, in fact, perspire.

so this bikram is a serious business. it requires the wearing of sweatbands, and it leaves one both feeling eurphoric and looking like the living dead.

you've got the visual now, right? sweaty oline wearing a sweatband, mainlining water while carting a mountain of wet towels and a yoga mat.

i'm doing this very thing- walking past the playground of an elementary school where, just last week, two five-year-old girls pointed in my direction and laughed, exponentially increasing my sympathy for pig-pen from the peanuts comic strip- when a car pulls up beside me and the window rolls down.

i am literally rubbing beads of sweat from my sweaty brow as the driver says, excuse me, but are you a teacher here?