it’s tuesday so i go to my yoga class a few minutes early, hoping for an illicit chance to stick my mat in the zapper. but hey! the sign that says “for authorized staff use only” is gone, and in its place is this:

it looks kind of fake, the way it’s just sort of stuck on, but i’m sure it will suck the dollar out of your credit card just fine. now that the management has pointed out the need for ultra-sanitation-to-the-max, they want to charge money to achieve it. smacks of some kind of twisted yoga philosophy, not surprisingly. oh sacrilege!

an “E-normous” mat zapper has suddenly appeared—happy 2010—in the hallway at my local yoga place, and around the corner near the tank tops and herbal tea is its companion, a 50-gallon bucket of Purell wipes. The mat zapper says it’s an “Ultra-Violet yoga mat sanitizer” for authorized personnel only, but the Purell wipes are free.

with the appearance of these large objects dedicated to squashing bacteria the message that is highlighted (way more than breathe/surrender/peace/namaste) is just how gross and dirty yoga places really must be. in other words, it gets you looking. before the mat zapper, the ropes were simply “dark,” the corners of the rooms “well-shellacked,” and the mats “just a little sticky.” now the bar has been raised. something “sanitized” this way comes and now everything must be measured against that. yeah, think about ole zappy before you put your face in that blanket.

and talk about single-usage appliances… i can’t figure out how to get even a chopstick UV’d on that thing.