what I know today

Wednesday night found me on the mat in my living room, with a brand-new and very intense music mix on my iPod, playing as loud as I wanted it to since no one was going to be home until D&D was over. I ended up doing almost all intuitive flow, and dancing (I came up with something called dancing dog that I can’t wait to share), and very little strict yoga. It was so wonderful, but it also led to intimacy with my body I haven’t felt in a couple of weeks.

This showed me that a lot of things have shifted. My hips have opened even more, my hamstrings are going to keep causing me grief for a long time, and my back is a little less flexy than I expected it to be. There was more – my right-side full pigeon wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the left (attention! there is a quadricep in my right leg!), which is the opposite of the way it used to be; leaning into the very uppermost hip flexors during regular pigeon felt unbelievable, when I’d never really even tried it before; and removing nearly all static holding of poses made my practice seem fresh at every moment.

The thing that I thought of was Tommy Lee Jones.

“1500 years ago, everybody knew the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew the earth was flat, and 15 minutes ago you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.“

I knew abstractly that my body was different on every day of my life, but I never saw it in action before now. It was very interesting.

The other thing that occurred to me…Up until now I’ve been trying to lengthen and stretch out so that I can do poses more easily and comfortably. A natural consequence is that I get more flexible, and hence more advanced, and that means I can do more and more difficult poses. I realized suddenly, as I was working into hanuman over my new bolster (SO love having a bolster at home), that at this rate I will…run out of things to try. I mean, it’s impossible to “run out” of yoga, or to discover every lineage and every style, or to “master”…well, anything. But being at the point when I can pretzel up into any kind of pose I want – where’s the fun in that? Where’s the challenge and the reward? Is that really what I want?

Before I left for teacher training, I did a home practice that gave me a discovery that was somewhat the opposite. I was doing (surprise) pigeon, and really, the amount of growth I’ve seen in that pose in 18 months is just astonishing. I practiced it regularly, trying hard at it, striving to get myself into it, and eventually the tight muscles loosened and I found comfort in it rather than tightness and strain. Comfort in the pose led to relaxation of all the surrounding muscles, which led to even greater opening. This meant that I had the luxury of breathing in the pose, allowing my mind to be tranquil in the pose, feeling all of its subtleties, instead of just thinking OH CHRIST THIS IS A TIGHT SQUEEZE IS IT OVER YET?

So I realized that it wasn’t so much about advancing as it was about finding that sweet spot, the place where you’re comfortable enough in the pose that you can really learn it, find all of its nooks and crannies. The thing is, you pretty much have to advance in order to find it, because if you’re tight and inflexible it will be hard to concentrate on the pose rather than your own unhappiness at being in the squeeze. But advancing for the sake of achieving the pose is a whole different thing, I believe, than advancing to find comfort in the pose. The first is competitive; the second is reflective of sthira sukham asanam.

You know, maybe those discoveries aren’t so opposite after all.

asana: shoulderstand (salamba sarvangasana)

Shoulderstand is known as the Queen of Yoga, and it is a pose that many traditions claim has more benefits than any other. Three minutes in shoulderstand every day, saith Iyengar, will cure all your ills.

And, to be honest, it’s not a pose I’ve really enjoyed since I was a little girl and did it for fun.

It’s tricky on the neck, and the best way to do it is with a blanket or two under your shoulders (with your head on the floor, off the blanket). There are people whose neck anatomy prohibits them from being comfortable without five or six or ten blankets, and a particularly pointy C7 vertebra will be even less comfortable.

I don’t really know where to start with instructing this pose, because there are so many points to remember. A lot of people just galumph up into it, and I can’t help but think that’s bad for the spine. You want to make sure your elbows aren’t bowing out, so your back doesn’t sag. You want to try and make your spine straight. You want to see that the weight of the pose is on the tips of the shoulders and down into the upper arms, which are on the floor, with little weight on the head and none on the neck. This model here has her feet activated, pushing through the big toe mound, which is great to keep your legs active in the pose, so you’re not just dumping all the weight of your legs into your hands. You can keep gathering flesh from your upper back and pushing it upward with your hands to try and keep the spine straight. Your hands should be as far up your back (towards the floor) as possible for a good fulcrum point.

I had a teacher tell me once that the head, neck, and shoulders are like the heel, arch, and ball of the foot, pushing into the “toes”, and allowing the head to support the pose a little bit. Sven at teacher training wasn’t sure about this, and neither am I, because it puts actual weight into the head when there really shouldn’t be. So if a teacher tells you this, feel free to ignore her.

This is one of those poses where you should listen to your body and use as maaaaany blankets as will make you comfortable, do half-shoulderstand instead (although that’s not such a hot idea if you have wrist issues), or just not go into the pose. Messing with the health of your neck is a really, really bad idea. Maybe it’s because I know this that I’m so uncomfortable in the pose, bringing tension into my neck to try and stay “safer” – which is ironically less safe, all that tension – but I always feel compressed and shitty, no matter how I try to enjoy the draining feeling in my legs.

One of the things that has occurred to me via teacher training is that I really don’t have to do poses that make me feel bad. There are so many of them that feel good, and maybe eventually my body would grow into a pose that is bad for now, but why risk injury? This is how I’ve been approaching shoulderstand for the last couple of weeks – I’ve been just not doing it, and trying to do a different inversion instead, headstand if I have time. Shoulderstand is such a foundational pose in so many traditions that previously I would just suck it up and be uncomfortable, but I don’t feel the need to do this anymore. I always feel pressure in my neck and head, and thin pains running all over my skull. If I use two blankets I feel more comfortable, but they’re not always available to me and I still don’t feel completely good about it. So I think it’s just not a good idea for me to do it.

But in Jennifer’s class the other night, she workshopped with me, and had me put five blankets under my neck to see if that made the pose feel less compressed. It definitely felt like a different pose, but I felt silly with so many blankets, and getting out of it safely from such a great height was challenging.

I’m sure I’ll struggle with shoulderstand for a long time. I don’t know how I’ll feel about teaching it when I haven’t really experienced long-term benefits from it. Near as I can tell, it’s the anatomy of my neck, not its muscles, that is compressing in it. And I’m about 27 years too old to change my bone structure.

My advice is to do shoulderstand three minutes a day and see if it makes you feel as good as the old masters claim that it will. But if it doesn’t, hell, don’t. It’s your body and you can do whatever poses you want with it.

nearly wordless wednesday

I failed to get to bed as early as I wanted on Monday night, so tonight (Tuesday night) I am REALLY SERIOUSLY RESOLVING to go to bed early, so this will be a stupid post.

A catalog from this retailer came in the mail yesterday and I spent a good 20 minutes leafing through it. There was something cool on literally every page. I especially covet this. If they have a browse feature on their site, you should definitely browse. It’s all overpriced, of course, but it’s all awesome.

Sowwy. I honestly don’t know when I’m going to have a decent post – this is a tough week and this weekend I leave for the great Thanksgiving jaunt and when I will blog I do not know. Forgive me?

GUESS WHAT??

I went to yoga with Paul last night, and it was pretty okay. But before that, I managed to finally introduce myself to the owner of that studio. I told her I was interested in getting on her substitute list, and that I taught vinyasa and was interested in doing classes themed to powerful music. She had a schedule in front of her that she was working on changing for December, and she actually started to look for spots for me to start a new class. I noticed that the first class on Sundays was at 10:00, and mentioned that the 8:00 classes on Sundays at one of the other studios in town was always packed. We chitchatted a little about it, and she asked me if I wanted to give it a try teaching at that time at the beginning of December!

A regular class, a regular time slot!

I’ve heard from other teachers that the owner can be a little…scattered, so I’m not 100% sure it’s going to work out so soon, so perfectly, but IF IT DOES…oh, my goodness, I’m so incredibly excited! Getting a turnout like the 8 AM Prana class does would be a major coup for someone as inexperienced as I am.

BF and I went out to dinner at the Mexican place to celebrate, and I had delicious nummy chimichangas. (I can go back to tofu tomorrow.) All in all, a good evening.

This was an early night for me, which is why this post is so short.

I’m so pleased!!

half-asleep

I forgot to write last night to post this morning, so only a couple of things today.

–No Butts post wot I wrote.

–I can’t believe how much I wanted to stay in bed and call in sick this morning.

–Watched 3:10 to Yuma last night (2007). Have all manner of lofty interesting thoughts about Westerns, and have decided that there are early Westerns, 70’s Westerns, and modern Westerns (i.e. everything made after Unforgiven). In any case, see this one, it’s really goddamned good.

–Yoga tonight with Paul, mostly to see if I can talk to the studio coordinator to find out if she has any space for me to teach. Honestly not looking forward to it, but I could be wrong.

–Made truly awful soy stroganoff thing last night that BF struggled through with fairly good humor. There is a point where too much tofu can go in a single dish.

Well, gotta go. Hopefully Chris Brown will wake me up in the car. Happy Monday…

haiku because I am out of ideas

Naps; cooking; cleaning;
Last night’s social noise and beer;
This is the weekend.

thoughtful Saturday

This is a very interesting post to me.

I still haven’t really worked out all the messy psychology of blogging and commenting and whether it even resembles a normal way of communicating with other humans, or…not. I’m leaning towards not, and I’m trying to figure out whether the way that Laurie has managed to evolve into thinking about her emails and commenters is the right way, the wrong way, or whether you should give up blogging before you’re ever in a position to decide this question.

I don’t generally have this problem at the magnitude that she does, because when she opens comments on her posts she gets hundreds and I’m sure she receives tens of thousands of emails every year, where I get a couple of comments per post and virtually no email. This is okay. I like attention, but having attention at the level she describes here may not be something I’m ready for. But I have dealt with this problem at a small level, and have had to figure out what to do about comments which have insulted me, or rubbed me the wrong way, or were just out-and-out baffling. The answer so far seems to be just to let them go, ignore them, don’t worry about them, and keep writing. Keep writing exactly the way you want to. I guess that’s probably the best way to deal with bad reviews if you’re a professional writer as well, come to think of it.

Also, the video she posted did not make me cry, but the one below makes me cry every goddamn time I watch it. Not the ugly cry, but the uncontrollable-streaming cry. There’s something about bringing joy to this commitment, pure dancing joy, rather than tradition and pomp, that really hits me and touches my heart. I just wish I could figure out something this creative and this much fun for my own wedding, which will have a significantly smaller wedding party than these lucky folks.

—

This morning I went to a free Lululemon class, and to my surprise, Jennifer was there. The class was frustrating and no fun for both of us, and we spent an hour over tea at Whole Foods afterward talking about why. The teacher was unsafe, we decided, and she spoke so quietly that I could barely hear her and I was only a mat’s length from her. She also went  s o  s l o w l y  that both of us were antsy by a third of the way through it. I kept going back and forth about whether it’s my problem or the teacher’s problem when she teaches a class that I have absolutely no fun in. Sometimes you can tell the person is just a crummy teacher, but in this case it was the style that I really didn’t dig, which is theoretically my problem. But she’s teaching a free class at Lululemon; in my opinion, these people were expecting something a little more flashy, a little more mainstream, than old-school yoga.

But does that mean you should teach solely to the audience you expect, rather than teaching the style of yoga that is you? Or should you not whore out to your locale and just teach the way you want to, and hope that people will come as they enjoy your class rather than coming because you do what’s popular? There are so many intriciacies to this problem.

Jennifer and I also chatted a little bit about me growing out of Paul’s instruction, and why he’s been sort of cold to me in the past few months, and Jennifer pointed out something that never occurred to me – he feels jealous and insecure. He’s never been to teacher training, and I figured that was a choice that he comfortably made; at this point in his teaching career he hardly needs it. But Jennifer said no, he feels intimidated by the idea of teacher training and doesn’t want to rearrange his life to do it, so he’s put up a wall around the idea, and is jealous of people who’ve managed to get beyond it. This might be why I perceive that he doesn’t like me: for him, he’s 50 and growth is done (or at least, as he sees it, growth is done), where I’m just starting this journey. That can be a major kink in the ego.

This same thing has happened to me at jobs before and I’ve been totally oblivious to it, because I may appear young and fresh and talented and full of opportunity to someone who’s 55 and bitter about the curving tail of their career, but to me I’m just working and not making enough money and jealous of people who have a long enough arc that they can command a decent salary. I’m not sure I can let this other perspective inform my life too much without my own ego getting out of hand, but it’s kind of nice to have it pointed out to me when it’s necessary.

Finally, here’s an interesting little personal essay for you. This is the question I struggle with when I think about my big dreams, and when I wonder about what Gandhi’s wife felt when he stopped eating for peace. I remember reading an article about Obama talking to his wife before he began the run for President, asking her if it was okay with her, and it occurred to me that for four or eight years, his marriage would essentially be on hold while he ran the free world. I never thought of how the decision to run for President could be one that you would decide not to make for the sake of your family…or the decision to be a world-changer. But if you care at all about the people around you, you consult them, as Obama did. Interesting.

1011 words about music

I spent one of my college summers living in Newport, Rhode Island with my father. I got a full-time job at a local packaging and mailing store. I ended up making about $3,000 that summer, and I spent pretty much every dollar of it at Strawberries, the music store in town.

I probably still have most of the CDs I bought that summer. It was the beginning of a collection that at one time included about 600 CDs. I lost a good number of them to FBF when he failed to get all my stuff out of the basement where we lived (and kept plenty more for himself), and I sold a bunch more, but I still have about 350-400.

I also wrote music reviews for the college newspaper, worked at the college radio station, devoured every issue of Rolling Stone from 1996-2002, and visited allmusic.com more than Google. I was a music hound.

But for years, pretty much between the end of college and now, the whole music thing fell by the wayside. I stopped keeping up with my favorite bands, I stopped looking for new things to listen to, and I quit trying to learn and make connections from here to there (i.e. without “Paint It Black”, there’d be no “Head Like a Hole”; without “Kashmir”, there’d be no Metallica). The reason for this was money, and the crackdown of the U.S. government on free internet music, and also trying to keep my life together and then build a new one.

And then, a week or so ago, BF taught me how to use BitTorrent. This was a giant mistake on his part; I think we’re probably going to have to buy another hard drive just for all the things I want to download. I’ve missed so much in the last 6-7 years, and there’s so much yet to learn about the past. (I know virtually nothing about Zepp. How sad is that? I just downloaded “Whole Lotta Love”, the first song of theirs I’ve ever taken the trouble to listen to rather than just hearing, and it cracks me up that Plant so obviously meant “dick” every time he said “love”.)

I like most styles of music, except music that is brutally stupid, country, and very heavy metal and rap. I especially like oldies, from 20’s jazz to absurd 70’s pop. The problem is, most of what’s popular seems to be in the brutally stupid category. I went to high school during the Blink-182 years, and I personally remember the summer when “Semi-Charmed Life” was so everywhere that you couldn’t go to the bathroom, possibly in your own home, without hearing it. Because of that I don’t really have much faith in pop music.

There’s been good stuff happening all this time, though, and I’m starting to see it. Behind Disturbed and Fuel, and the entire emo crowd (many of whom are imitating Blink-182’s vocal style for some reason I totally fail to understand), there’s music going on that’s really worth something. And I heard some of it last night: I discovered Muse, and their album of this year, The Resistance.

Although I previously dismissed Muse because they sounded quite a lot like Starsailor (particularly the lead singer – it’s sort of uncanny to me, but thus far no one in the business has mentioned it that I know of), I was totally wrong to do so. This record made me excited, the way I felt when I heard the White Stripes for the first time, as if music was fresh and new again.

All the old language of music journalism came back to me. I found myself wanting to write rapturously about how, in one song, there was Queen, Dr. Who, Danny Elfman’s score for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a big helping of New Wave. In one song! I wanted to write about the rock opera and how to distinguish it from the concept album, about Coldplay’s interesting influence on pop music, about how to be a producer in a post-Timbaland studio, about why Britain churns out white boys who can make thoughtful, interesting music decade after decade (I actually don’t know the answer to that last one). But the thing that interests me most about this is the syncretic quality of it, the soup pot of a vast number of influences that makes for a sweet, spicy, emotionally effective piece of pop.

It reminds me a little of when I heard Blue October’s “Into the Ocean” a few years back, and briefly flirted with pop through that one album: I thought, wow, there’s all kinds of time periods all mixed together here. There’s 80’s synth and disco percussion and all-new vocals all stirred together for this song. How cool!

This has been true all along, of course; you can’t have Prince without the Isley Brothers, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the Beatles, and the Marquis de Sade. But taking cues from a dozen places all over the spectrum and blending them directly together – rather than merely being influenced by them – into something that makes sense, that’s actually mainstream, is progressing forward in a way not seen since David Bowie. There’s a lot more to say about this, including how delightful I find New Wave influence and whether genuine creativity is dead, but I’m running out of space here.

If this is the direction of pop music, count me in. I’m sort of piqued by the thorough takeover of Top 40 by R&B, and don’t know exactly how much more sex we can cram down the throats of teenagers before there’s a backlash, but it’s pushing the angry rap-rock out of the way entirely, which to me can only be a good thing. (Still wish Lady Gaga would go back to whatever planet she came from, though.)

So, if you want to find me in the next couple of months, look on BitTorrent. I could easily spend my whole salary on iTunes, just like I did that summer almost a decade ago…but there’s a whole computer to fill up for free this time around.

cooking to Nirvana, starring me

Last night I spent like an hour and a half making this recipe for a “Tunisian pepper and potato couscous.” This was another of the recipes in Deb’s book – there are 1600, so God knows if I’ll ever try them all - and while I had fun cooking since BF wasn’t home and I’m not particularly good with sock puppets, it was a difficult and unusual recipe to cook, with many stops and starts. Since I can’t just reprint the recipe here without Deb’s permission, I’ll tell you what I did in steps. I did all of this while listening to Nevermind, which put an ah-memories smile on my face. (Ironic, perhaps.) Such a great record.

• Peeled and sliced boiling potatoes into sixths, for some reason.
• Chopped up four cloves of garlic. The recipe called for six, but I automatically adjust the recipe down, always, because the garlic they sell at our Giant is for some reason more potent than that on any cooking show or in any recipe book, and I’ve finally figured out how to compensate for it.
• Gathered mint and red pepper flake.
• Chopped an onion, of course, and put olive oil in a pan, of course.
• Threw all that stuff in there with two tablespoons of tomato paste, thus FINALLY USING UP the jam jar full of tomato paste that’s been in the fridge getting used up since I stupidly bought a giant can of tomato paste thinking it was tomato sauce and we had to use it bit by bit. And you can’t keep tomato anything inside a metal can, so it migrated to the jam jar and that brings us to now.

When that started to cook, the smell was un. believable. Never had I smelled anything quite like that combination before. Mint is so awesome. It had to cook for about ten minutes, and meanwhile I

• Chopped up five bell peppers of different colors,
• Drained and rinsed a can of chickpeas,
• Attempted to seed and chop four tomatoes which I’d blanched and peeled. I am not very good at seeding tomatoes. I’ve yet to meet someone who cares about errant tomato seeds here and there, though, so I guess it’s okay for now,
• And gathered couscous and jarred harissa. Everyone says you have to make your own harissa, but the flavor in this jar of it that I got from Whole Foods is so distinctive and wonderful that I don’t know if I ever will. Also, there are preservatives in this jar; since you can’t use up a batch of harissa in a month, I’m perfectly happy for those preservatives to keep my jar fresh in the fridge for as long as it keeps not growing mold.

I added the chickpeas, peppers, and some salt, and turned up the heat to saute for a couple of minutes. I had to watch it closely to see that it didn’t stick; some of the potatoes and onions had browned and stuck to the bottom of the pan during their own private saute (which added a little bit of breakfast hash brown smell to the other flavors, slobber), and there was a little yumminess building in the bottom of the pan.

When the saute was done, I added the tomatoes and 3 cups of water. The heat went down to low (eeeeventually) and it simmered for 20 minutes, while I cleaned up and checked my email and got the couscous assembly ready. I was getting ready to toast the couscous in oil, which I’d never done with couscous.

Then, said the recipe, “remove 2 cups of the liquid for the couscous and set the vegetables aside.” Oh. Okay. Have you ever tried to “remove” two cups of liquid from a simmering pan full of vegetables without getting any little bits of onion or garlic or tomato in there? Yeah, neither have I. (It was way too much in the pan to think about straining or anything like that.)

I muddled through it, without burning myself too badly, and combined the broth with the harissa in a little pan, which simmered while I toasted the couscous, and then the broth went in the couscous and on went the lid. There was fluffing, further water-adding, and then it was READY.

You guys, it was totally worth it. Delicious, flavorful, spicy, perfectly tender peppers and nice soft potatoes, unbelievably tasty couscous, just an amazing meal.

The problem is, I have enough of it to feed all of you. Of course it’ll do for lunches, but vegetable dishes are usually best right then and there…especially those with peppers in them.

While we’re on the subject of food, have you ever tried Kombucha? It’s a kind of fermented tea, Chinese, and I learned after buying a bottle of it at the health food store the other day that it’s GODDAMNED DISGUSTING. I drank it all throughout preparing this anyway because (according to the bottle, but not Wikipedia) it’s stupidly good for you, but I will be quite glad when the bottle’s gone and I never have to drink it again.

brain not home just now

Yesterday:
–Slept, luxuriously, until 5:25 
–Worked
–Was snafued by ridiculous, reasonless traffic
–Got home, made tofu and vegetables, ate them, was reasonably satisfied
–Had a glass of wine
–Saluted another day breezing by

Today:
–Don’t have the day off, can’t honor the veterans
–WILL write back to Maleesha (does that count as honoring a veteran?)
–Hopefully, will have something to blog about and won’t be so cranky about it

Sorry. It was just one of those 24 hours when there’s nothing I can write about.