potpourri

Still no call from the therapist’s office.

I wish that I’d managed to write over the weekend. I was busy doing NOTHING, and it was fabulous. BF spent the whole weekend at home. On Saturday morning we took the old TV and the old Sony DVD player, the failed-gift one, along with a bunch of other stuff, to the Goodwill in Severna Park. Hoo boy did it feel good to get rid of that stuff. Free from stuff and its demands on my time, space, and mind. Naturally there’s half a garage full of stuff left, much of which I should be able to get rid of, but that’s to come. We did some more errands after the Goodwill trip, which left us largely free for fun for the rest of the weekend. BF played through the entirety of the first episode of Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, and it was hilarious, and I found a lot to enjoy about the mechanics of the game (even though I wasn’t the one playing it, so I could be wrong). He also played a lot of GTA, some of which I watched, some of which I didn’t. I went to yoga on Sunday, and Kathleen taught because Jeannine was still away. It was sort of disappointing for this reason, but still good.

Yesterday I spent writing HTML and then posting pages. I finished the second issue of 10X10X10 and published it. SORTED. I felt lots and lots better about it – but of course I still have the third issue to go, which I plan to post on Saturday. While we’re speaking of writing, two good things happened for my story “Fucked” this week: it was very favorably reviewed in a blog, and it was accepted for publication in Route, a UK magazine. (Please forgive the lack of links; my real name is obviously discoverable if I link to these sites.) I have been thinking that I want to send my tree story to Weird Tales, send my LA story to JMWW, and find an agent to send my book to, but that I’m not going to push back to a full-time thing just yet – just those three things for now. I may also start casually putting together a bunch of stories to see if they make something vaguely book-length, and if they do…but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself there. I guess the summer is making me frisky. I miss writing. Specifically I miss writing for hours on end, getting hung up on something and then finding a way out of it, getting absorbed. Writing for an hour here and there strikes me as far less satisfying and I’m unlikely to do it for now. I greatly look forward to a time when I can afford to work part-time.

Over the weekend, BF and I watched Barton Fink, which is one of my favorite Coen movies (of course this is not saying much, as I have about 7 favorite Coen movies), and BF liked it. This is terrific – he is quite hit-or-miss with the Coens. I watched about 30 minutes of Newsies before I figured out that I was wasting time and turned it off. (One of three movies in my whole life that I have turned off/walked out of. I think if I wanted another Annie in my life I would have liked it, but I like Annie for itself and don’t need another.) BF FINALLY watched Waking Life, and I think he liked it a lot better than I did when I watched it a couple of years ago. Which is to say, not much. (I thought the style portrayed the beauty of human movement so wonderfully and failed to retain any of that magic in its storytelling, dialogue, structure, purpose. I was disappointed at this disconnect. I was also disappointed that the philosophy didn’t go any deeper than a scene or a sequence, that it stopped there; in this way its final effect was confusing rather than thought-provoking. I am somewhat ashamed of this response, since after all my major in college was an integration of film studies and philosophy, but it’s possible that it’s too black-beret a film for me to really enjoy without standing back and thinking “pretentious…pretentious…please shut up.”)

I logged on to my online summer courses today, and I’m sort of worried at the amount of material I have to absorb over the next seven weeks. I mean, YIKES. Criminal Law seems exceedingly well-organized and I look forward to it (even if it does seem like a lot of work), but Criminal Evidence and Procedure looks less structured. On the other hand, boy is it a relief to read people’s words on a forum rather than looking at them as they talk during the first session. I can’t believe it, really, what a relief it is. No eyes to be afraid of, no meeting times to fret over whether I’m too early or too late, no teacher to impress and then feel ashamed that I’m trying to impress.

Speaking of shame, I have managed not to write back both KJJ and SBR. I hope to fix this tomorrow.

And now something (else) that I have discovered about yoga. When I took my first yoga classes in college, we did relaxation at the beginning of the class in a seated pose. End of the class was savasana, but beginning was seated, Darth Vader breathing, and attempted meditation. I got a taste for this and started doing it in my home practice; the studio I attend now does savasana at both beginning and end of class and no real extended period in a seated pose. Yesterday I had finished a pretty tough workout – I came a lot closer to balancing without a wall in a headstand, although nowhere near there (still, go me!) – and I sat in half-lotus breathing like Darth Vader and clearing my mind. Somewhere in the breath I realized something essential that I hadn’t realized before. Since the beginning I have had the notion that yoga poses feel “better” somehow if I hold my breath - more perfect, more exact. If I am motionless and I hold the pose, I am succeeding; total motionlessness includes holding my breath. But in my breath yesterday I realized that this is not just wrong, but totally wrong. Motionlessness is anathema to yoga. Breath is life – this I understood – but movement, dynamism, continual flow – this is life, this is yoga. To hold a pose motionless is completely not what I should be doing; muscle vibration, arms wavering to find balance, lungs filling, heart beating…these things are what create the pose. Obviously this will not take away my instinct to hold my breath, but I hope that it’ll help me further along the path to I Am Okay and I Am A Yogini.

I did aerobics and a tidbit of yoga today. Blood test for cholesterol is on Friday, so I’m going to try to be ultra-super-ridiculous-healthy for the whole week. Cross your fingers for me; this has come to really matter to me because I have worked so hard at it for three months.

I better either do homework, or watch some MST. Both at once would be nice.