thanks for all the fish

My little blogsters, do you know what today is? Today is the 365th day in a row that I have put a post up on this here blog. Yes, indeed, I have posted…something…every single day for a year.

And do you know what? I am TIRED. I am running on empty. I am sick to death of posting every day. It has turned into a major chore over the last few months, as my life has become ever more exhausting and difficult and hard to write about. There’s been a lot that I’ve had to muzzle myself about and I am sick of that, too.

So I’m taking a break. I promised myself a break after I’d managed to post every day for a year, and I am HAPPILY TAKING ONE. I think I’ll be out for about a week, but it might be shorter than that, since weekend posts are always a lot easier for me to manage. After that you can expect posts a few times a week, but I’m definitely, definitely not holding myself to every-day posts. It is just too fucking hard with my job and my class and trying to fit everything else in.

This next bit might be egotistical, and I apologize. I know that for a couple of you (at least two), reading my posts has become part of your daily routine, and I am sorry to fuck it up. I really am sorry, I’m not just saying that. But I am feeling like the little wagon in Oregon Trail that’s going at a grueling pace – pioneers are going to start dying of dysentery around here, seriously. Is that what you want so your routine can stay not-fucked up? For me to die of dysentery and be a little pixellated tombstone somewhere in the lonely frontier between here and Oregon? No, I didn’t think so.

For those of you who are a bit tired of hearing me ramble or reading sub-quality posts, I’m glad to oblige you with a break. Enjoy it while it lasts; since I’m posting less frequently, I’m betting my posts are going to be longer and more squicky. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to it.

Bye for now. Love y’all.

evolving beyond yang

My practice has changed a lot lately. A lot of the change has been mental and emotional, and the biggest part of the physical change has been that I’ve dropped back to barely doing yoga at all. I teach my classes, and I do 20 minutes or so of yin when I need to relax after a challenging day, and sometimes I get home early enough and make dinner quickly enough that I can do a whole practice one day a week, but I have been to a single class in about two months, and I do a real practice less than once a week.

This has caused other physical changes, which I’ve complained about recently on the blog. The tone on the sides of my waist is gone. My manly delts are gone. Some of the strength of my hamstrings is fading. My good posture is mostly gone and my leg pain has intermittently returned.

What remains: my balance, a good deal of my flexibility (although my shoulders are suffering), and all the knowledge and confidence that came with teacher training. My hips seem to limitlessly open even as my hamstrings shrink. My back is a little less flexible but feels a lot stabler (which is actually a relief). The exactness with which I do the poses has not changed, and this is the quality that I would pin down as the thing I’m proudest of about my practice.

But the way I feel about all this is…fine. I feel fine. Although I’m not content with the situations that have led me to do less and less yoga every week, and not content with doing it so infrequently, I seem to have lost the obsessive drive that took me through nearly the first two years of this practice. Suddenly I’m not so sure that it matters whether I can put my leg behind my head, whether I can do arm balances that elude me, whether I’m the most flexible or strong yogini in any given room.

I think what’s changed is that I somehow don’t care if my practice is impressive, even to myself. I admit that the person I was trying most to impress with my yoga was myself, to show myself that I was capable of doing all the things I wanted to do. But what others thought of my yoga mattered, too. Where I was in the strata of students, and then later of teachers; whether I looked awkward in poses because of a lack of flexibility, whether I was straining because of a lack of strength. But I think that’s starting to matter less to me.

The reflective yoga class I went to a couple of weeks ago was taught by a woman who was very low on the scale for both strength and flexibility. She would never have been on the cover of Yoga Journal. But she still taught beautifully, and she had an inner light and strength that was wonderful to see. For a while, in that class, I felt proud of my own abilities (as I usually do), but soon I saw they didn’t really matter much there. It was just about what you could enjoy, not how far you could go.

This has always been an attitude that I knew was there in yoga, and that I knew was extremely valuable, even as I scoffed at it just a tiny bit. I loved the peace and sweetness and energy that yoga gave me, but a small part of me wondered what the point was if you weren’t turning your body into rubber bands. That may sound terrible to those of you who are enlightened, but that’s what I thought, and yes, I still feel that way just a little. They say that the point is to find inner peace, but if that’s the case, why integrate a physical practice? Why not just meditate? You can be as fat as you want to meditate. Just ask Buddha.

But in beginning a small, inexpert yin practice, I’ve embraced a style of yoga that I never thought I would. Yin has always seemed unbalanced to me – way over on the side of flexibility, and without any strength. I also didn’t think my prana could flow particularly well if I just sat in paschimottanasana for a million years. I worried that I’d be thinking too much for the practice, that I wouldn’t be able to sit still either physically or mentally, and that the noise would intrude on the practice.

The thing is, it’s gone the other way, and the practice has intruded on the noise. Yin suits me perfectly at this very yang time in my life. And I’ve started to question all of my attitudes about yoga, started to wonder if how strong and fit I can make my body makes any difference at all. If I can enjoy a quiet, calm practice this much, and if I don’t need to be able to do jumpthroughs to feel good about myself, why on earth should I work as hard as I’ve been working in the last two years to get even better, even stronger? If I can still do yoga, and still teach, what the hell difference does it make if I can’t pike up into a handstand?

I still want to be able to do those things, of course. I still have goal poses in yoga. But to be very frank, I’ve met the goal that mattered most to me: full king pigeon pose. I can do it even semi-warm now. I am proud of that. But even that matters less than the happiness that doing yoga brings me when I get the chance to do it – even as I see my muscles shrinking, my flexibility waning. I still feel content. Because – even despite the fact that I gained those muscles once, and can gain them again in time, since life is long – I can still breathe, I can still move my limbs and feel the blood and the life coursing through them. If I have that, do I really need to impress anyone with my practice?

I think the answer is no. I think the path to contentedness lies in that no. And although it’s brought me a lot of instability and fear, because that is not how I was taught to live my life, I am so glad that I’ve found it.

I was talking to BF about this and many other things on Saturday afternoon. He told me that I have many paths at my feet right now, and it’s very hard for me to choose the one that’s going to make me happy. I’m confused. So the yin practice is teaching me to sit down by the river, under a tree, and enjoy where I am. Rather than climbing up a hill, or crashing through the woods, or striving in any other way as I have been, it is time to sit. And rest. And prepare for what’s next, so that I can make a genuine choice rather than picking the path of most resistance.

some pictures from the snow

All these pictures were taken Saturday evening. After we opened the garage door, we found that the snow had piled up nicely outside.

Here is BF’s blurry leg, showing that the snow buildup was knee-high. I believe we may have gotten over two feet, all told. (This is goddamn unheard of in this part of Maryland.)

This is my car. See the rearview mirror? The drift on top was taller than me and, I believe, taller than BF. Who is 6′2″.

And this is our neighborhood, from inside the garage. The lumpy thing in the foreground is a bush that basically opened its branches apart from the weight of the snow. Can you pick out the cars across the way, with wipers sticking out?

Yeah. It was a Big Blow. And shoveling today was a pretty big blow too. Despite all this we had a lovely cabined-in weekend. I slept and read. I didn’t get done the things I wished I had. I hope, one day, either to be less of a lazyass or just to stop feeling guilty about it.

For those of you watching the Super Bowl, good on ya. I think I’ll do my taxes instead.

It be snowin’.

Pictures of this mess outside my windows would not communicate things as well as the picture above. I’m still not convinced that panicking is really necessary; it’s going to stop before tomorrow and, hopefully, will get cleaned up before Monday. Hopefully.

That’s sort of all that’s going on. I slept in and am not teaching MD this morning. BF is not going to Florida; Southwest cancelled all their flights today. So he’s playing Mass Effect and I’m discovering, yet again, that there ain’t nothin’ for me on television. Although I have learned that the anchors on Headline News have started including valley-girl lifts at the ends of their sentences, in with the normal journalist delivery.

Oh! And I watched Idlewild last night. I thought it was great. It got mixed reviews, apparently because the critics thought it was sloppy and anachronistic. These things are true, but it’s also delightful, with great music and terrific filmmaking tricks. Calling it the African-American Moulin Rouge! would not be inaccurate, although its story is actually a bit more creative. Really liked it.

We also watched War, which I liked significantly less. I mean, who makes a Jet Li movie and has Jet Li throw about four punches? Really poorly written with a nonsensical plot twist. But very stylish, with supercars and such.

TTYL. I have to make breakfast. And yes, I do have enough food.

porcelain and trash

Okay, so here’s another buncha stuff, because I can’t get my head together enough to write a real post. (Although not in the 60’s sense of getting my head together.)

I fell victim to the charms of beautiful porcelain rings on Etsy again. I have to remember to look there if I’m ever looking for a nice gift for anyone, ever. I just can’t believe the stuff that’s there. So gorgeous and so plentiful.

I have things to say about yoga. I’ll have to come up with the time and energy and thoughtful writing to say them. Somehow.

After complaining about not finding anything I wanted to read, I gave in and started My Sweet Audrina again. (V.C. Andrews, her only standalone book, and one she wrote herself before she died.) It’s so good and so terrible. I don’t think I’ll be reading it from top to tail this time, more as a before-bed book, but maybe I’ll get caught up in it. Unexpectedly, of course.

BF and I attempted to watch The Spirit last week, and failed to make it through the first 40 minutes without chapter-skipping. We skipped on to the end, in disbelief. It was truly, astonishingly awful. I mean, really. Avoid it at all costs. No one is more disappointed than me, but there it is.

The large deltoid muscles I built up before and during teacher training are almost entirely gone, because I haven’t been able to practice consistently at all in the last three months. I am trying hard not to be upset about this. Because in reality, I don’t need to be that strong to enjoy yoga; I don’t need to be proud of my muscles to be proud of my body.

But I want them back. I do.

It’ll just have to wait.

Wednesday night I said to BF that I thought if I’d heard one more person mention the weather at work that day I was going to slug ‘em. And then there was Thursday. I would have been arrested as drunk and disorderly if I’d slugged as often as I wanted to yesterday. I said to BF last night that, no matter what falls from the sky or how much of it, today will certainly be interesting.

I am exceedingly glad that it’s Friday…and that this Saturday is my last one teaching MD. I’m going to sleep and read a lot this weekend. I’ll try to read something other than trash, but I plan to read some of my own work, so I might not have any luck.

my brain at present, in list form

1. This week I read Pastoralia, by George Saunders, and it was so good that I was reading it at stoplights. I felt the same way about the other book of his I read, In Persuasion Nation, and let’s not even get me started on The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. In Pastoralia he explored the topography of the American loser, which was sad but interesting. I’m looking around my house for other books to read because I’ve managed to get on a reading kick despite all the other things that are going on. I have plenty of unread books sitting around, but all of them seem so serious. I’m certainly not going all Dan Brown on y’all, but The O. Henry Prize Stories just isn’t doing it for me right now. Something in between would be nice.

2. I am having a period of emotional instability. It’s freaking me out such that I am not sure I can write about it – I am starting to be uncomfortable making myself vulnerable here. Everything seems to be turning inside out.

3. A woman at work has a son named Adonis. She named her son Adonis. Jesus fucking Christ.

4. This weekend BF and MD and MB are supposed to be going to Florida to watch the space shuttle launch. But BF has work colleagues who are apparently giant weather nerds, who know of sites far more sophisticated than weather.com, and they have told him that we’re supposed to get a winter storm this weekend of proportions not seen since 1958. Although I would miss BF’s company if the weather nerds are wrong and he manages to make it out, I would actually be more sad if he and his dad and brother didn’t get the opportunity to see the launch. Apparently it’s something his dad has always wanted to do, and apparently there will not be another chance in our lifetimes to see it. I was originally invited along, but after examining it carefully, I discovered that there was absolutely nothing appealing about the idea. Two flights in two days, having to ride a bus for several hours in the middle of the night with a big group of strangers, and then, okay, watching a shuttle launch into space, that part’s pretty cool. But also spending lots of time with MD. So I declined with thanks.

5. Speaking of MD, there was an incident with him and MM last night and a phone call that made me so upset I could not continue to drive, which is what I was doing when they called. I pulled over, and desperately wanted to talk to someone, to bitch and moan and ask an opinion. I could not call BF; these are his parents, and anyway he was out with a friend. I could not call my mother; she would tell me it’s my own fault and I should be grateful for their attention and love. I sat there for several minutes trying to think of a friend I could call. I started to feel despair piled on top of the other upsetness that I didn’t have a single friend to call. Finally I thought of one, and called him. He did not answer. It was okay; at least the panic of the thought that I didn’t have a friend in the world abated. And eventually I did confess to BF, and he was as reticent and supportive as he usually is, and although I love him dearly and admire him for his steadfastness in the face of awful criticism of his parents, I ached for a friend who would gossip and break it down and discuss like crazy with me.

6. I am late for work. Bye.

petty and not-so-petty bothers

Silly little annoyances have gotten the better of me in recent days. Like my Sallie Mae account(s). Irritating enough that there are two accounts, one that was sold to the government and one that wasn’t, so I have to sign in twice and make two miniscule payments instead of one smallish lump, but every time I sign in they send me through a screen gently inquiring if I want to enroll in electronic billing statements. No, I don’t, in fact, because I have not yet been able to tell the difference between actual emails from Sallie Mae and spam emails that claim to be from Sallie Mae. Until they sort that out, I want paper statements. But I haven’t gotten any of those, either. Way to be on the ball with that, guys. Especially since you’re the only kind of debtor in the country that’s still going to be OK with the piles of bankruptcies and foreclosures out there.

And this snow thing. One of my co-workers was born and raised in northern Virginia, and for some reason he thinks this makes him exotic, an oddity, since he’s not from this area. I mean, technically this is true, but it’s not like he’s from Fiji; he’s from about two hours west of here. And for what seems to be the same mysterious reason he thinks that he understands what Real Snow is like. The area is going a little crazy over this week of snow; we had a nice storm over the weekend that dropped about 8 inches of fluff, which meant it was probably four or five inches to clean up in reality (it’s like wind chill, see), and they’re predicting another couple of inches overnight (update on Wednesday morning: we did get a few inches overnight, but it was a snap to clean up, even Maryland managed it), and then this weekend (according to what BF heard, but not backed up by weather.com just yet) we’re supposed to get a Krazy Killer Storm, the kind we hardly ever get (except when we got one in December), about 20 inches. OH NOES. I am dubious.

I am also spluttery about how much the weatherpeople and the school people and the state highway people and so on overreact and mispredict and miscalculate about winter weather. I have bitched about this numerous times, but I swear I’m not just getting at the same old thing here. Today this co-worker commiserated with me (as it was in public, I was being mild), and said he also just couldn’t believe how these people acted with winter weather.

I understand. When I moved to Massachusetts, I thought I knew what snow was about because I had lived in central Virginia, up in the mountains, where there is quite a bit of snow and enough winter to have actual ski slopes. But trust me: it is not the same thing at all. Not. The same thing. At all. The fact that the coworker has lived in northern Virginia and thinks he can commiserate about how silly Maryland acts about snow is just irritating. Because he can’t. Because he doesn’t know. Does not. Know.

I know I sound like an ass. Oh well.

And then there’s a big annoyance on my plate, as well. Monday night my mom called me while I was in class, and she left a message telling me excitedly that she had won a grant to work in DC for most of 2011.

Yaaaaaaay.

Okay, not that I’m not happy for her – this is a grant she has wanted for a LONG time and is a top ten grant and a very big deal and all and she loves being in DC – but I am not very happy for me. Presumably she will want to spend all kinds of time with me, and do fun things and have mother/daughter shopping, and all that stupid crap that makes me so grateful that she lives 14 hours away from me, but all that will be mitigated by the fact that she has to work like crazy over the course of this fellowship, and she will be constantly making excuses about why she has to cut it short or why she can’t come all the way out to where I live rather than me going into hated DC. Which just brings me straight back to being 12 again, and not nearly as important as her job. I was talking to BF about this on Monday and I said that I don’t think I’ve ever really stopped hurting from that whole period of our relationship, which I realized was true as I said it. I also haven’t been able to forgive her.

So while this combination of events stirs up all kinds of delicious emotional stew, I also am not looking forward to the plain fact of her being close enough to call me up and ask me out to dinner on the weekend. I don’t want to go to dinner with her. I want to live my own life.

What is wrong with me? Why can’t I see this as an opportunity to see more of my mom, whom I hardly ever see?

For the same reason schools cancel over two inches of snow here: no capacity to see outside the boundaries of a single reality. If only I had access to a quantum singularity, Maryland could learn how to plow snow and I could forgive my mother. I guess that’ll have to wait until NASA’s no longer grounded.

memory: a chill on my skin

From time to time, I think on this incident from my college years, and wonder what the heck was happening in my head.

I was walking out by the lake near Ham and MacGregor, and there was nobody else around. It was a clear, thoroughly cold winter’s day, and I was as bundled as I could be. I took the walk, as I recall, because I wanted some fresh air after being cooped up inside for a while, but I really don’t remember.

I also don’t remember what month it was – whether it was deepest, darkest winter, and the glimmering sun was endangered, only fully up for an hour or so in the late morning before it began to slant again, the earth’s axis tipping us away from that precious warmth. There were so few people around that it could have been January term, the campus empty except for me, the international students, and a few other souls who similarly couldn’t go home or didn’t want to stay home. It might have been getting towards spring, with snow still stubbornly fixed to the ground and refusing to melt, nothing betraying the approaching thaw except the temperatures inching towards 30. It might have even been melting, and I might have heard dripping sounds from everywhere into the swollen lake as I walked. I simply do not know. But I know that it was cold, and I had on my long black coat, two layers beneath, a scarf (of course), and probably my beloved snow boots.

I walked, wrapped up in my own thoughts, until halfway around the lake I stopped in my tracks and listened. It was utterly still. Except for the melting snow, drip-dripping, unless it wasn’t. The lake was calm, and the air was so clear and sharp and cold that I feared my cheeks would slice open and bleed if I kept walking. Not a rustle came from the leaves between the trees that lined the lake; not a car passed by on the sloping road to my right, on the other side of the water. The waterfall was a quiet hiss behind me, a faint crowd applauding.

For some reason, and all at once, the cold felt good on my face. Winter never feels good to me, not ever, but that day, that one moment, it did. I started to wonder what I was so afraid of, with the cold, what always kept me hunched and shivering as I walked to class and what I screamed and moaned about when I went outside on a 15-degree night, the wind a punch to my sternum. This cold refreshed me, opened my eyes, made my mind clear.

I breathed in and breathed out, steam curling. Slowly, deliberately, I removed my coat. The inner warmth from my core kept me comfortable; the cold did not encroach on me just yet. I hung my coat over my arm and kept walking. I breathed in and breathed out, feeling alive.

It wasn’t enough. My sweater was next, tied around my waist. And then I found a mountain of courage heaped somewhere inside, a place I’ve only barely been able to tap since that day, and I took off my shirt, too. I looked around wildly, but there were no townies walking their dogs, no curtains pulled open in the dorms, no cars passing, no one, no one, no one but me and the cold knifing into every square millimeter of my skin now that I was shirtless. I walked in jubilation: I wasn’t afraid! The cold hadn’t stolen the whole warmth of me, and I was refreshed and alive in the winter air.

I kept walking for a few minutes, exhilarated and grinning in my bra and jeans, but I started to get worried that someone would see me – or that I would start to feel the sensations that come with being almost naked on a 22-degree day – and I put my clothes back on. I left my coat open, though, as I walked home; let the chill swirl around my core and up over my neck. Never again have I had a day like that one – the cold has never felt good to me since. But for one afternoon, one short stretch of my life, I wasn’t afraid of it.

Monday Meme: let’s finish each others’ sentences

1. My ex…is a total mystery. Where he is, what he’s doing.

2. Maybe I should…slow down.

3. I love…BF. Gosh, does that ever matter to me.

4. People would say that…you should never match wits with a Sicilian when death is on the line.

5. I don’t understand…calculus. At all.

6. When I wake up in the morning…I turn off my alarm and go back to bed for about 20 precious minutes.

7. I lost…my class ring once, when I was still in high school. That ring mattered a FUCK of a lot to me then. (I am not sure why, now, except perhaps that it was the first piece of jewelry I’d owned that was designed the way I wanted it.) I finally found it under a piece of carpet in my room, and the feeling of relief that flooded through me has rarely been matched since. I still have it in my jewelry box, upstairs right now.

8. Life is full of…surprises.

9. My past is…extremely important to me.

10. I get annoyed when…people refuse to listen.

11. Parties are…not really much fun for me anymore. I am such a fuddy-duddy. (And totally pleased to be one.)

12. I wish…I had $50,000.

13. Dogs…are so appealing to me, and I’ve never had one.

14. Cats…are a mild allergy of mine, and I never thought I wanted one anyway, but there have been cats in my life that I’ve loved. Maybe someday.

15. Tomorrow…tomorrow…I love ya…tomorrow. You’re only a day away.

16. I have low tolerance…for alcohol, since I started this crazy pure lifestyle with no caffeine and lots of healthy food.

17. If I had a million dollars…I’d try very hard not to start living at those means, buying $400 pairs of jeans and such. I hope I’d still shop mostly at Target.

18. I’m totally terrified…of what the next two years hold for me. And exhilarated. And terrifed.

19. My mission is…to watch all the movies ever made in the world. What? That’s totally not an impossible mission!

20. When I die…I hope no one will be sad for me. They can be sad to lose me, but I hope to be happy to go on the next journey.

sleep in heavenly peace

Aaaahhh.

The Thai massage workshop was cancelled due to the snow. I was and am really disappointed about this – not just because I’ve been looking forward to it so much, but because I really did not feel this amount of snow was worth cancelling anything. I also hate how people tend to cancel for snow before considering what the roads will look like the next day – they always, always look better in the morning than they do the night before. But I’m not in Arlington, I’m 30 miles east, so I guess things could be different out there. Either way, the next session is in March, which sucks, but I will just have to wait until then.

I think this might have been a little kick from the universe to tell me to slow down and relax a little. Not everything needs to be done now now now. Supposedly.

Since I planned everything this weekend to have this day unavailable, I now have a sort of free day, and I decided to spend it doing almost nothing. We went this morning and got a 1200-calorie breakfast at Bob Evans, and then I came back, parked myself on the couch with Specials, and drifted in and out of sleep for about four hours. I’m awake again, now, but I feel rested and warm. And happy. My disappointment about the workshop’s cancellation has certainly been mitigated by all this sleep.

I ordered $130 worth of books and DVDs from Amazon yesterday. Some of them are required or recommended for the yin workshop I’ve definitely decided to go to in June – J is going too and I am mooching off her for her hotel room – but others were just there and looked good. I don’t think I’ve ever made such a large Amazon order just for myself before, and I feel guilty about it. I tend to order $5 used DVDs, one or two at a time, or to make big orders if it’s Christmas or I have things to get for other people, but it’s rare for me to get a lot of new stuff for myself at once.

For the rest of the afternoon I’m going to cook next week’s lunches, hopefully talk myself into cleaning up the house, play around with a Reiki kit I ordered, and maybe even nap some more. It’s a free day, after all. Napping is allowed.

I heart the weekend.