Putting the tramp in trampoline. . .

We set up a trampoline for the kids this weekend, and guess what? I've already jumped on it two days in a row.

I don't mean I gave it a little bounce to try it out. I've done a full-on trampoline workout.

I plan to do it every day for the next few weeks and see how it works out for me. In short, I'm on an exercise kick.

I sense that if I add some music to the equation, it'll be an even more joyous occupation.

Perhaps I'll even jump along with Paul Simon's "Graceland," where he says at one point, "There's a girl in New York city who calls herself a human trampoline."

I don't like to run. Everything on my body bounces and jounces and I feel hot and angry at gravity.
Not on a trampoline, however. Its buoyancy seems to say, at every turn, "Let me help you with that."

And it's fun.

I have many self-diagnoses, having concluded that, among other afflictions, I'm an INFJ, an HSP and an empath. Another is that I am, emotionally speaking, perennially 12 years old. And so, if I'm going to trick myself into exercising, the activity at hand has to be a blast, a gas, a game.

In this case, the name of the game is to jump my way to some bodily tone-age (not tonnage) and, dare I say, the greater secretion and absorbance of serotonin.

It isn't easy.

My job—writing, on my ass, at a computer keyboard—is beyond sedentary. And one of the trending topics I keep seeing on the Internet is that "Sitting is the new smoking." No really, though. People don't glare at you and judge you if you sit.

But now that I have a trampoline in my backyard, I really have no excuse not to give myself a lift every day. It just takes a minute.

Because spring is here. I haven't yet dared to don a bathing suit, but I expect it will go like this at best. . .

And like this at worst. . .

I know. It's neither feminist or nice to give yourself a hard time for having the bod you have. And I've seen the body-acceptance memes that seek to fight the patriarchy.

I get it and I like it.

But it's hard to get a grip sometimes on the fat-shamer inside of me.

I know that I need to get a grip on my inner critic before I pass those dreaded body issues onto my 2-year-old daughter. The same daughter that is thus far taking after her thin 6'6" father.

So I'm going to put it all on black this time, by which I mean the wondrous surface of the trampoline. I'm going to put all my eggs in one basket by zipping up that netting and catching some air.

And if I'm good enough, I might just run away and join the circus. At least it's not a sedentary job.