hot locker room action…run awaaay!

In the past it’s been my policy that every comment I get deserves a reply – except in obvious cases, like the congrats comments on my bloggiversary post. New blog-year, new policy: I may not comment on everything anymore. I’ve found myself at sort of a loss for things to say in reply to comments that I agree with but that need no further discussion, or to comments that I don’t agree with but don’t have the space or energy to argue over. So, there we are. Doesn’t mean I love them, or y’all, any less.

On Sunday morning I went to a Bikram class, with the same teacher that I actually liked the last time. The thing I like best about her is that she’s not obsessive about the little details, and she doesn’t jump on me like a nun with a ruler if I rest my aching arms for a moment before putting them back up. My yoga is restless, constantly in motion, and while this puts me at odds with the Bikram style in general (and let’s not even talk about Iyengar!), it’s a lot harder to fit into the iron maiden at all if I don’t have at least a little wiggle room. She also is much more encouraging than the other ones I’ve had – consistently saying you’ll get there, if you can’t do it it’s really okay, it took me a long time to manage this and that piece of the pose, etc. The other instructors kept giving me the impression that they talked the talk of “if you can’t do it it’s okay” but didn’t really buy it, and in fact thought you were a wuss if you couldn’t do it.

Hopefully I can find other instructors with the same friendliness and sane level of laxity, but since I’m only batting .33, I’m loath to try again.

The class itself went okay. I had serious trouble with the standing series – I think I ate too soon before class, and brought nausea on myself – but the floor series went off without a hitch. It was a far less crowded class than any I’ve been to before, with far fewer long-term practitioners, which made me feel a LOT better. Yet I felt the same vanity and superiority creeping back that I always feel when I’m in front of those mirrors. I’m a little afraid of what 30 straight days of those mirrors could do to inflate my ego. And you know what’s funny? The heat in the room is supposed to make your muscles more flexible than they would be otherwise, but I’ve never found as much flexibility in a Bikram class as I do in almost any class or home practice when I’m good and warmed up. I think it’s the lack of lunges that makes the difference in my hams, but it might be the lengthy holds rather than the usual flow movement that does it in general.

I had the same headache in the afternoon and general sick feelings in the evening that I have every time after a Bikram class so far, and I no longer think it’s a coincidence. I suspect that ditching these symptoms may just be a matter of getting used to evacuating that much water from my body in such a short time.

Also? I went in the locker room before class for the first time. OH GOD. THE NAKEDNESS. The whole locker room was about the size of my own bathroom at home, and there were about ten women jammed in there, half of them completely bare-assed. Two women were actually talking face-to-face, stark naked. I’ve changed in locker rooms before, of course, but I’m used to the nakedness being sort of hasty and rapidly disposed of, and I’ve never seen women take their underwear off in front of each other in a locker room. I had no idea where to look or how to arrange my face. I swear I’m not a prude – it was just a surprise to see so much nudity all at once in a context I didn’t expect it.

Despite all these things, I still really want to do a challenge sometime this year. One of these days I swear I’m actually going to try the Baltimore studio – to see if they have a locker room larger than a postage stamp, and to see if their instructors are more like Sue and less like Zach. I’m afraid if I do a challenge here, one day I’ll just snap and yell at Zach to leave me the hell alone and let me do the pose as best I can. That would be, um…improper.

Last night I slept very, very poorly, and luckily I was able to catch another 20 minutes of sleep because I have my primary care appointment this morning and it’s not until 9:50. Then I have an MRI at 12:30, and then I’m going into the office to get my check and sit there for another three hours waiting for the day to be over so I can deposit it. I had been feeling quite hurt that I mentioned I was having an MRI in the email I sent around saying I wouldn’t be in the office until this afternoon, and no one asked me what was wrong or if I was okay, but OG did yesterday and gave me some MRI advice. Restores my faith in the notion that my officemates care whether I live or die. Or at least OG does.

And, finally, an amusement to share with you. BF and I really love watching the A&E-made Hercule Poirot episodes, the ones with David Suchet, and the other night we watched one where the murder victim was having an affair with a ridiculous snob. After she was killed, the police questioned him, and he mentioned, through curls of smoke from a fussily-held cigarette, that she and he had used timing to “facilitate their assignation.” I paused the DVD and turned to BF and said, in a poor Cockney, “It was a way wot we could bonk.” Both of us burst out laughing. I’ve amused myself with this sentence several times since then.

Wish me luck with the dreaded speculum. And, of course, the MRI.

toooo much blabbing

This post is a bit of an emotional mess about my mom and BF.

Asana: Eka Pada Rajakapotasana

“Eka pada” = one-legged. “Raja” = king. “Kapotasana” = pigeon pose.

Here is the pose:

Now, there is a lot of confusion for newer students (in my view) about what exactly pigeon pose is. Near as I can tell, this is pigeon pose:

You can see for yourself how one-legged king pigeon pose is distinguished from this one. The gal above has slightly bad form in that her back foot is bent; it should be straight, one long line starting at the hip.  There is also this one, which I learned as king cobra pose, and which came up in an image search as king pigeon:

I believe that’s Patricia Walden modeling. This might look like it’s a sort of double pigeon pose, but because you’re using your back muscles to pull much more strongly than in one-legged king pigeon, and because there’s pushing action from your hands and there’s less of a balance requirement, I prefer to think of it as king cobra (regular cobra pose is here).  There is also this variation on one-legged king pigeon that is both harder and easier, with one leg in a lunge of sorts:

This is actually one of the most open and lovely modelings of this pose I’ve ever seen. The balance in this variation is much, much easier if you bend the front knee and ankle quite a lot more, so you’re sort of squatting over that front calf. Any way you slice it, this variation takes openness in the hips and in those long, strong thigh muscles that may just be impossible, so on-the-ground might be a good deal easier. Or not; depends on your body.

There is also kapotasana, which translates to “pigeon pose”:

I learned this as “little thunderbolt”, but it turns out that little thunderbolt (or laghu vajrasana) is an ever-so-slightly different pose than this: the hands are on the thighs instead. I am not actually sure if you get into these two poses differently, but I don’t think so. You can see that this is the upside-down version of king cobra above, so I suppose it makes sense that it’s pigeon pose. I don’t know. I don’t know why any of these are called pigeon pose in the first place. The standard line is that pigeon pose has its name because the chest is all puffed out like a strutting pigeon, but I just don’t see it.

So! Now that we’ve settled that the name of this pose is thoroughly confusing, let’s talk about how to get into it and my own experiences with it.

This pose is very hard on people with tight hips. Teachers encourage you to use padding under one or both hips, padding the back-leg hip more to make sure you can keep your balance. Padding has only made this pose more awkward for me, so although my back-leg hip is still off the ground, I’ve found good balance that way.

Bend your front leg as much as you need to in order to be comfortable. The eventual goal is to have the calf parallel to the short edge of the mat, but I have found that focusing on that piece of the pose only adds to my discomfort, and stretching yourself elsewhere will lead to better results. You want to make sure that your back leg isn’t veering inward, that the hip and ankle joints are straight. Most of the time that this pose is taught, in my experience, the sitting-up is the smallest part of it, and bending all the way over your front leg and resting your hands, forearms, or forehead on the mat is the real pigeon pose. This is a great hip opener, and can be very relaxing if you already have open hips.

Plenty of people are content to stay in “plain” pigeon pose for the entire lifetime of their yoga practice, without even adding the backbend, but I am not one of them, which is why this post is about eka pada rajakapotasana instead of “plain” pigeon pose.

Bending the back knee to lift the foot and calf is a hell of a lot harder than you think it will be. It pains in the quadriceps, in the hips, and in little pinchy feelings all up the front of the thigh. This part of the pose goes in stages: first you try to reach back with your hand to grab your foot, and then you hook your wrist around, and then your elbow. Then you hook your foot with your elbow, raise the other arm up and over, and join your hands. Like this:

This is the stage I’m at. While you’re doing all these stages, of course, you’re trying to puff your chest out and lean your head back and push both hips to the floor and keep your balance. Eventually you will lift your arms up and over and grab the foot with them both. (I despair of ever doing this, but I’ll talk about that shortly). This is an extremely intense backbend – in fact every stage of this pose, other than leaning forward, is a pretty damn intense backbend – and tucking your tailbone may seem impossible but it will help the health of your lumbar spine.

Being able to put your foot on your head in this pose is a combination of back, leg, hip, and neck flexibility, not just one or the other. This is part of what’s frustrating about the pose, because just when you think you’re doing backbends that are so insanely deep that you must be able to touch your head with your foot, you realize that your quads are still too tight to bend the knee far enough, and so on.

I LOVE backbends. They are the joy of my practice. I often hear about “trigger poses” from other yogis and yoginis – the pose that inspires them to start or to keep doing yoga, like, forever. For one of my teachers it was king dancer pose, and for me it was eka pada rajakapotasana. I saw it and I instantly wanted to be able to do it. I actually asked a teacher to help me find my way into it in June of 2008, and since I started doing yoga seriously in April of 2008, I was way, way premature. She tried to tell me that she hadn’t even tried one-legged king pigeon until she’d been doing yoga for two or three years, but naturally I didn’t listen and she gave me a few tips anyway.

For the first several months of trying to do this pose, the awkwardness and the inflexibility of my body was positively painful. The pose itself did not actually cause much pain per se, but my joints and muscles felt so much tighter than they did in other poses, and I hated the feeling of not being able to get comfortable just by nature of what I was trying to do, if you know what I mean.

Yet, one of the life lessons I have not absorbed well enough in my first 27 years (and which yoga is finally banging into my stubborn skull) is that if you practice, and practice, and practice, the most difficult tasks will eventually become easier. Over the months, I watched my body transform, and to me, one-legged king pigeon was one of the most visible reminders that slowly, gently, I was making progress. Throughout my journey so far, one of the key mindsets I’ve had to let go of is the idea that my body is fighting me, that it’s resisting my attempts to bend this way and that, and realize that there is no struggle except the one in my head. My hamstrings are taking forever to lengthen because that’s the nature of gigantic muscles that have never been stretched; finding my way into pigeon is awkward as hell because it’s an awkward pose. My quadriceps are not my enemy. My rush-rush mindset is.

This pose is still challenging for me, of course, but its awkwardness, the feeling of being stiff and unoiled, has receded. I still can’t lift my arms up and over to grab my foot, even if I start by reaching back, grabbing the foot, and then trying to flip my elbow upwards. This seems to be a problem with my shoulder or upper back flexibility, because I can’t do it in other similar poses either, but I haven’t spoken to a teacher about it yet.

I’m a lot more patient about the evolution of the pose (and my practice in general) than I used to be, in part because the pose has taught me that this is, provably, a road that’s moving forward and not just a treadmill. I am open to the possibility of further advancement in the pose, but I’m not pushing it like I have for so many months. All it took to find this change in attitude was some visible progress. If only I had stuck with those piano lessons when I was ten, I might have learned this lesson a lot sooner.

miscellaneous, part 87,332,904

My dad gave me a gift during his short visit last weekend: a kashmir scarf (really a sort of wrap, like the pashminas they sell on the streets of London for ten quid) he brought back from Afghanistan. NW had apparently told him that she thought I liked earth tones, and it’s a sort of browny-beigy pattern. It’s soft, and quite pretty, but I have no idea where either of them got the idea that I like earth tones. I like cool colors and also fiery reds, and while I think brown has its place it’s far from the first thing I’d choose.

Yet last week, I wore a ninja-esque black outfit to work that wasn’t quite warm enough for the weather, and I put the scarf on around my neck like a bohemian. And all day I felt better with it around my neck than not. It felt comforting, soothing. I didn’t want to take it off. I wore it today around the house with the same results. I can’t explain this, since the source of the gift is hardly a source of soothing happiness. I wonder if perhaps the woman who wove it was very, very happy.

My car recently hit 100,000 miles, and it has never yet had a tune-up. Since I am well and fully aware that routine maintenance is what will keep my car running without more than the usual issues for another 100,000 miles, I felt that it was time to give it a major service. Which I did, and I dropped just over $400 on it. This is not small potatoes for me. But I swear I’ve never felt so good spending so much money in my life, because I knew my car needed the work, and I knew I was doing something positive for the future of my finances and my mobility. It’s actually given me something of a lift to think about it.

On Saturday morning I felt restless. For the first time…ever, I think, I felt like the weekend was almost too long, and how would I fill all that time? I had chores to do, and I had homework to do, and I had plenty of things to watch, cross-stitch, and read, but I didn’t really want to do any of that. I’m not really sure what would have made me happy. I felt the urge to go into the garage and start going through more of my stuff to see what I could get rid of, or try the same thing with what covers the surfaces in the rest of our house (I had watched Clean House in the morning, pretty much the only reality-ish shows that I enjoy, and it made me want to get all Mary Poppins on my own house), but I already have boxes of stuff to give to charity and don’t have room to do more cleaning-out until those boxes are gone. And we really don’t have that much clutter to speak of. Just a lot of books. It was a weird feeling to be restless on the weekend instead of feeling panicky about the lack of time to relax and enjoy myself.

I had gotten up so early on Saturday to take my car in to the mechanic that by 11:00 I really just wanted to go back to bed. I had been dizzy most of the morning – a sign I haven’t slept enough – and this made me cranky and tired. In the late afternoon I gave in to this feeling, put on a really funny MST (The Deadly Bees) and dozed off. BF went into the bedroom and slept too, and we didn’t wake up for two hours. It felt great to sleep but no fun to get up; the longer the nap is past about 40 minutes, the less fun it is to revive oneself, I find.

Something else we did on Saturday was roll pennies. I haven’t rolled money for years, and it was actually one of my favorite activities when I was a child. Stacking the coins in neat piles and stuffing them into their rolls, and then lining up the rolls and knowing they could be exchanged for real, paper money…oh, I loved it. My parents used to let me keep the nickels and pennies that I rolled (they kept the dimes and the quarters), which was just icing on the cake. Today we ended up with $2.98 in pennies. I’ll have to exchange one of our nickels to make it $3 even (plus $0.03).

I tend to plan things down to the last detail. I failed to do this well when considering the homework assignment that’s due on Tuesday, and I was worried for a short time this weekend that I would have to miss work to complete the assignment. Luckily I found a trapdoor that will help me do the assignment tomorrow, but that and the complicated budget planning I’ve had to do to pay for the car service plus all these stupid copays for my appointments lately has made me realize that the planning I do is an amazingly strong part of my personality. Planning things in pieces, slotting them in where they belong like the wedges in a Trivial Pursuit pie, is how I live my life, in the big picture and the small. I admit this is part of the reason my social life is so unsuccessful – I tend not to be able to do things spontaneously without calculating exactly how much time it’s going to take and realizing I won’t have time to do the other things I’d planned. It’s a meticulous lifestyle. Why is this so necessary for me? Why can’t I let go of the spreadsheet-tidy structure of my brain and live a bit more unstructuredly? It’s too vague a problem (with too few negative consequences) for me to worry about it more than vaguely, but it’s still something I think about.

Asana column tomorrow. See you then.

happy bloggiversary to me!

Today it’s a year since I started this blog. Good for me!

343 posts

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For a blog that’s not really about much, not too shabby.

when all hell’s breakin’ loose you’ll be right in the eye of the storm

I woke up this morning at 5:30, totally unable to get out of my head this problem with a case at work that I’ve been dealing with since November. There was nothing whatsoever to do about it until I went to work two hours later (and even now, there’s likely nothing I can do about it), but my brain wouldn’t stop running over and over it nonetheless. I have this problem not infrequently. I have often woken up and been unable to return to sleep because my brain is jogging around a certain track of thought over and over and over again. I try visualizations, I try breathing exercises, I try yoga-style mind clearing, I try forcibly thinking of something else, but nothing seems to work except getting up and finding something to do to take my mind off it.

Which is what I did this morning. Email and Freecell at 6:12 AM is not really the best way to start your day.

—

So I mentioned the other day that I had another crazy idea that I was thinking about implementing. Last night BF and I talked it over thoroughly and I’ve pretty much decided to do it when paralegal training is over in May. Of course if I change my mind, or it doesn’t work out, I’ll have egg on my face all over again on this blog (cf M.L.S.) so I think I’ll continue to keep the source of it to myself.

I apologized to BF for all my wacky notions, plans that never come to fruition, etc., and he took hold of me and said “Where would we be without wacky ideas?” I said, “You mean us specifically…?” I thought he meant the theory of relativity and the horseless carriage and stuff like that. He said that without the wacky idea of being a game designer someday he’d be a programmer for Initech, instead of currently being a game designer. Without the wacky idea of us moving in together after only a few months as a couple, we wouldn’t be as absurdly happy as we are. Etc. He has a very good point.

—

Rant of the day: if you don’t treat electronic devices with care, they will break. Moreover, my (wacky) belief is that if you approach electronic devices with the attitude that they are not only expendable, but are somehow your enemy, they will break more often. EP, in my office, treats the copier horribly, slamming the lid down and cursing at it when it has even a slight jam. And it jams for her a lot more often than for anyone else. And the built-in stapler often refuses to work properly when she needs it. She also physically broke the latch in the fax machine last week, because she was slamming that lid as well, and then blamed the fax machine for being shitty. (This fax machine is old and heroic enough to warrant military decoration.) Her computer is always crashing, and no one else’s in the firm does. This is not the only example of this I’ve seen around this ol’ world, but it’s certainly the most consistent. Machines will break if you’re not nice to them, if you don’t treat them with a mood of cooperation.

A friend once told me that you can’t look at a computer as if it has a personality, as if it crashes and refuses to work on a whim. It’s a tool, exactly like a pencil, and if you use pencils improperly – pushing too hard or not sharpening – they will break or fail to be useful, just as computers will. (He told me this many years before Vista, of course.) There’s a bug in my Mac at home wherein the Save command used on a .doc file (as opposed to a .docx, FUCK YOU MICROSOFT WITH YOUR FANCY NEW EXTENSIONS FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER) will cause Word to freeze up and lose most of the new data that I was trying to save, and I’ve figured out that the reason is that the computer wants to do a prompt asking you if it’s OK to overwrite the old file, but can’t because you’re not in the right screen. Since the whole point of the Save command is to preempt that prompt (hee), it’s a pretty ridiculous bug, but it’s one that I understand. I get extremely frustrated when I forget this and lose a bunch of changes I just made and have to restart my computer, but I also don’t think the computer is somehow plotting against me. It’s just a bug, and has nothing to do with me.

This attitude has made my life with electronic devices ever so much easier – easy enough that people have remarked that I have “the touch” with copiers or computers or whatever. I just see them as a series of simple machines, which is really what they are – even enormous programs with millions of lines of code are complex sets of simple yes/no functionalities – and this seems to set me apart.

—

I’m thinking about taking a Bikram class sometime this weekend. I really wish I had been able to take one after my awful day on Tuesday, but I think that even delayed, the pushing and the intensity will feel good. I may even go to the Baltimore studio instead, to see if it’s any less smelly. I also have to do a big project for Legal Writing which I should have started on earlier this week or last weekend, but I admit my continued (true) thought in procastinating was “I’ll have more time to focus on it if I wait till the weekend.” While it’s not an unpleasant assignment, anything that gets put off and put off starts to feel sort of bleah, so that’s how I feel about it. Bleah.

I got to do some real work yesterday, and it felt nice to be active. Today I doubt I’ll be so lucky; all three attorneys are out of the office and it’s Friday anyway. So you guys all need to update your blogs to entertain me today. Okay? Go!

more appointments, more copays; go admirals!

I got about 50% participation in my free lunch yesterday. MM was in and she was really pleased with the flavors and so forth. I gave her the recipes. BB came downstairs and had this weird conversation with me about the food – she kept sort of teasing me for how healthily I ate, long past the time when it would have just been curiosity about how I managed to bring my lunch every day. I couldn’t figure out what she meant at all. But I really meant this lunch to benefit OG and DT, who have been working like slaves lately, and neither of them partook or even replied to the email telling them about it. That hurt my feelings, and also made me sorry for them that they didn’t get to eat any of it.

See if I ever do this again as long as I work here.

This morning I had my follow-up with the bone doctor about my leg/possible back problem. I explained that the Aleve had really made a difference and that my mom had changed my mind about the course of steroids, and the doctor said that she wanted to get x-rays and possibly an MRI before proceeding with the steroids, just to make sure that it was a nerve inflammation we were looking at. (The last few weeks of symptoms have convinced me that she’s right.) So she sent me in for x-rays, and a very friendly tech poked and pushed and prodded me around on the table and got 4 views of my lumbar spine.

I noticed while I was waiting that all of the mascot flags of the high schools in the area – including my own alma mater – were hanging in the hallway, all in a row. I have no doubt that this place makes most of their money from the sports medicine part, because the biggest sport around here is lacrosse, followed not too far behind by field hockey. Those are sports that will tear you up, even if you’re young and resilient. (ACL tears were as common as cliques at my high school.) But still, seeing the flags was sort of amusing. The most interesting artifact in the place, though, was a magazine called Arthritis Today that I caught sight of while signing in. The logo was jolly, and the woman on the cover looked like she was winning a race. These images quite contradict my idea of Arthritis Today. Also, a whole monthly magazine just on arthritis?

The x-rays of my spine were such a vast relief to me. I’ve seen a good number of lumbar imaging in the course of my job, and the spines always look collapsed and curved. Mine didn’t look like this at all. There was a whole lot of room between each of my vertebrae, which to me speaks to healthy disks, and the doctor actually told me I had some straightening of the lumbar region. I have no idea what this may mean, because the lumbar is one of three natural curves in the human spine, and not having that curve is, I assume, bad. She didn’t tell me anything to correct it, though, so I guess it’s not that bad. I wanted to point at the x-rays and ask “What’s that? What’s that?” because although I am not cut out for a career in medicine the human body fascinates me, but I knew this would be annoying and she had other patients to see so I restrained myself.

She set me up for an MRI on Tuesday and then a follow-up appointment with her on Friday. I reacted so badly to the CT scan I had in 2006 (not claustrophobia, it was just…never mind) that I’m not looking forward to the MRI, and I don’t like being out of the office like this in little dribs and drabs, but of course I’d rather know what’s wrong than ignore it.

Thursday, my favorite day. Even if it is drizzly and nasty here right now. I have a couple of posts in the can that will probably be for the weekend. One of them is an asana column. Work is still an absolute desert for me, and again, I don’t want to complain, because a) I have a job and b) people who are constantly overworked and stressed out at their jobs would think I’m a prat. But ack, the guilt!

I dragged my crock-pot into work for this?

I had a sincerely unpleasant day yesterday. The office was filled with cigar smoke for reasons out of our control, there was a client meeting that I suspect did not go too well (there’s backstory on that one, and bitterness from me), everyone was absurdly busy all day except for me, and I was in some physical pain and mentally very stressed out for most of the day. There was negativity almost visibly floating around in the air, and I could feel myself being affected by it. (I know this sounds impossibly hippieish, but I have always been strongly affected by the emotions of the people around me. My whole mood can change when someone in a strong mood walks by me.) I was in a black air when I drove home, and I wanted to try and do something to make myself feel better. I knew if I spent another evening wallowing and watching TV on DVD I would end up feeling worse, but I didn’t feel like doing anything else. I started a yoga practice, but I couldn’t get all the stresses of the day out of my head and everything about my surroundings was pettily irritating me, so rather than dishonor my practice I just let it go.

Then I came up with the idea to make lunch to bring in for everyone in the office tomorrow (today). I’ve been thinking about doing this for many months, but for reasons both practical and political I have not. I realized, though, that this kind of funk would probably only be cleared away by doing something constructive for someone else, so I decided to go on and prep the food, and if I didn’t end up taking it in, BF and I would just have sandwiches and soup to last us for a while. Which I did, and I did bring it in. I sent an email this morning about it, and thus far two of the eight people in the office have replied with thanks.

I would not be surprised if most of the lunch goes uneaten and unthanked-for. Part of the deal of working at this office is that it’s a pretty thankless job, even if you do stuff that’s out of the ordinary. Hopefully I will still feel better instead of worse (worse because even the attempt to do something constructive for someone else failed), but at least it’s a good reinforcement in not expecting anything in response to your kindnesses. (I have trouble with this concept. I think it comes from my natural planning-for-all-eventualities-ness instead of ego, but that could be wishful thinking.)

BF was sweet to me in the evening and played Drake’s Fortune for my amusement. It’s a surprisingly good game, but I think I’m going to write an entire post entitled “Surprisingly Good Games” about some of the stuff he’s been playing lately. Then after dinner (leftovers) we went upstairs and watched Total Recall, which I’d never seen before and which BF had only seen in truncated bits on TV. It is the third one down in this very amusing review by dear Wil, who is right about the psuedoscience and the hot-wife problem but I didn’t much care about the former since it was just an action movie. BF and I were both surprised at how good it was, and I was near amazement at how much I enjoyed it. I think they went juuuust a little overboard with the squibs, like, every time, but I loved how even the insanity of the plot going in truly bizarre directions was appropriate to the story of the film. How else can you keep walking on that line of “maybe it is all made up”? It tickled me to pieces and I loved it.

This morning I feel better, but I also feel as hopeless about my job as I ever have. It has been a slow time for me this last month (or two…) and as much as I try to find work for myself there just isn’t much. There are clients I’ve been trying to get in touch with since October whom I am now reduced to leaving messages for every other day politely asking them to call me the hell back, and this is pretty much my key task at my job right now, which does not subtract from the hopeless feeling.

Yesterday I tried to write, but it did not go well. That’s all I’ll say about it here.

A big ol’ organization task has dropped into my lap this morning, but while it looks all complicated and time-takey-uppy, I think it will last about an hour and then I’ll be twiddling my thumbs again. As I told MFA this morning, I’m not complaining about having nothing to do, exactly, I just feel guilty as hell because everyone else is working so hard.

Update: Holy shit, read this now. It’s the most interesting thing I’ve read in 2009.

why did they name a cookie “chalet”?

So I think the previous post sort of came out the wrong way. I didn’t mean to sound like such a snob. I was trying to explain by the end that my sense of superiority had morphed into realizing that counterculture is just different from mainstream culture and that’s okay and we can all hold hands and bunnies can hop around the happy-faced daisies, but I don’t think I did a very good job. Oh well. I’ve been evincing my bitchy gossipy side a lot in the last week. Probably the visit from my dad made me feel like I’m 14 again.

I had the l33test dream evar last night – I dreamed myself into an episode of Star Trek involving a weird planet with a culture that morphed into US culture and then back again after stealing Riker’s ability to speak English and behave like an Earthling. Me and Wesley and Data were the away team on the planet, and Wesley and I were doing that awkward teenage starting-to-be-PDA thing that you do when you’re 15 and attracted to someone, and I was standing outside the dream as my 27-year-old self saying “Aw, God, no, I already had to do this awkward teenage PDA thing, please don’t make me do it again.” Naturally, Wesley saved the day. There was a short in-joke between us about an arcade version of The Force Unleashed that made a cameo. I believe this dream had the most nerdiness per capita it’s possible to have in a dream not involving comic books.

Last night BF and I made breakfast for dinner – whole wheat pancakes and scrambled tofu with green curry paste, smoked Gouda and avocado. I haven’t had breakfast for dinner since I lived with my mom, and it was really good and a nice little shake-up. I also made cheese popovers with the smoked Gouda. Yum.

This weekend I realized I couldn’t remember at all which Girl Scout cookies were which, so I decided to buy one box of each kind (aside from Samoas, believe me, I am FULLY AWARE of what Samoas taste like, having consumed more boxes of them in my lifetime than the entire state of Minnesota) from the criminally adorable Scouts peddling at my local Giant. And I did. So now I have 7 boxes of them stacked up in my kitchen, gradually getting eaten. My verdict? I still mostly just like Samoas. I was born without the female gene that makes us red-eyed crazy for Thin Mints, and I prefer caramel to peanut butter fillings (luckily BF is exactly the opposite, so a box of chocolates always gets eaten evenly in our house), so the shortbread is really the only other kind I would want to buy on a regular basis. And their shortbread isn’t remotely as good as that shortbread you buy in the red tartan box, the kind that melts in your mouth. Ohhhh slobber.

Yoga yesterday afternoon was a bit tougher than usual – Noelle seemed fired up. She also seemed out of breath throughout class, which is no real surprise considering she’s just over a month away from giving birth.  She asked me to stay after to take a couple of pictures of me in yoga poses – she wanted to send pictures of the studio to her friends back home, and she thought that me in poses would make a better set of pictures. I obliged with pride. I also got up the nerve to ask her if she and her husband wanted to come to dinner with me and BF sometime, which I’ve been wanting to do for weeks. She said sure. Now I have to worry about whether it’s going to be awkward or fun.

Work is still slow. I think it’ll continue to be for a couple of weeks, because another big case (huge, actually) is about to settle. I may be able to write a little today. I think I’ll also put together another post on a single yoga pose. Maybe.

unplugged from TV

Yesterday I turned on the TV and flipped around for a while. I do this every few weekends, just to check that I still think TV is largely awful. This time I stopped on VH1 and watched this video (no embedding, sorry). The actual music I thought was totally derivative of what Pink has been doing for about a decade with a little new-style production thrown in, but the look of the video, and of Lady Gaga herself, really troubled me.

I felt like an alien watching this example of the media of the human race. I felt completely disconnected from the culture which produced this video. Generally when I flip through the TV, I feel somewhat disconnected; I look at the anchorwomen on “news” channels and wonder when sparkly lip gloss became mandatory for journalists, I see commercials that are vulgar or boring and feel no surprise that the Clios keep seeming to favor overseas advertising, I am appalled by the frothing-at-the-mouth consumerism of our nation that television seems to speak for and to. But always before I’ve felt a certain grateful disdain; I’m glad to be disconnected from the idiot box, glad that I spend my time in ways that are not so obviously wasteful. (I have seen transcendence on television, make no mistake, but as Grady Hendrix had it in an otherwise inconsistent and incorrect article, “The Sopranos is…an intellectual fig leaf concealing the vast wasteland of Two and a Half Men reruns.”) Yesterday I realized that it’s not just the television that I’m disconnected from – it’s the culture that’s attached to the television, in all senses of that word.

The plasticizing of pop stars, the sexualizing and objectifying of men and women, and the surreality (subreality?) of the surroundings inherent in that video – all of these things have been around in an extreme form for a couple dozen years (and in a semi-non-extreme form for a lot longer), but I was sort of disturbed at how far we’ve gone. I felt an emotion that was beyond disapproval – it’s the emotion I imagine parents feel when their perfectly normal and happy children morph into goth teenagers, as if there’s an alien in your house, or maybe the alien is you?, and I felt sad. I think my connection to American pop culture is completely severed, and irretrievable. In a lot of ways this is not such a bad thing, because I am a lot happier not feeling the need to stick my finger down my throat so I can fit into a black latex catsuit and four-inch stilettos. But being disconnected from the culture in which you reside can lead to even more intense alienation than I already feel. Plus, how can I be fairly critical to a culture that I know so little about?

But I thought some more about it, and I found some solace. Over the weekend, I (happily, proudly) put this object on the back of my car:

Now, people who slaver for Lady Gaga videos and music almost definitely do not know what this symbol means. Even people who are pretty plugged into geek culture may not know what it means. I’m hip to the ways of a certain American culture – it’s just not the predominant one. To me, Cliff Bleszinski and Jerry Holkins are celebrities. The thing I learned from watching VH1 yesterday (and then thinking it over for a while) was that although the predominant culture is not one I want to be a part of, I gots people all the same. I don’t know if we’re in a new enough America that a bunch of different cultures can run along in the same river, with no one way of media consumption being called “mainstream”, but honestly I think we’re getting there.

I also realized that I need to stop being judgmental about the rest of those cultures if I don’t want people to judge mine. (Which they will, of course.) If TV grosses me out, I should stay away from it, without feeling I’m somehow abnormal for not liking it (one end of the spectrum) or thinking that everybody else is an asshole for not seeing how awful it is (the other end). This was sort of the last bastion of intolerance in my mind, and beginning to break it down feels pretty good. It’s also a bit of a lesson in self-acceptance.

[I know I have readers who like and watch a lot of TV that I would find truly horrendous, and I don't intend to offend you with this post. Sorry if I did.]