move along, move along

More nothing to say today: no word on any jobs, the book is dragging along (BF gave me so much extremely helpful constructive criticism that I’m depressed about the amount of work I have to do), dinner with MP last night and dinner with Jennifer and her husband on Saturday night both went fine, I have no real plans for today except to call a high school teacher to run an idea by him that I had two days ago that I think might be brilliant, and I slept well, so there just isn’t much I can give you. Except that I watched a Troma film called A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, which sadly did not live up to the awesomeness of its title (“I never thought I’d say it, but this isn’t as good as Starslammer“), and a picture of a tree.

Taken while I was in Florida as the sun was beginning to go down. Gotta love that Spanish moss. Happy Monday.

asana: parsvottonasana variation/utthita parsvakonasana variation

I’m not 100% sure how to name this pose. On yoga.about.com, a frequent habitation of mine, it’s listed as a pyramid (parsvottonasana) variation. To me, pyramid pose necessitates a straight forward leg – otherwise there’s, um, no pyramid – and the muscle usage is much more similar to extended side angle (utthita parsvakonasana), or even warriors. So I’m willing to call it extended side angle variation as well. I have also seen it called ostrich pose and humble warrior and various other things.

Here is the pose on about.com:

Okay, I’m very sorry to say this about a site that is generally pretty good, but this is a HORRIBLE picture of this pose. It completely blocks what the front leg is doing and gives you no idea of the unusual dimensions of this pose. Which is why I took pictures of myself doing it, in one of the yoga studios where I practice. (This was on the same day I took all those other pictures that are on my non-anonymous website, and yes I’m only getting around to putting this post up now. Shut up.)

This is an okay expression of the pose, but my front knee should have been further out to the side; this way I look as if I’m going to tip over onto my ass. Which is bad. At least my back is nice and flat.

The way to do this pose is to start in warrior 2, and open your chest by lacing your fingers behind your back.

Then you bend from the hips and begin to lift your arms behind your back. You’re aiming for a spot sort of back and to the side of your front foot.

There’s that knee thing starting. You can see that I’m using a block under my head. I’m doing this to mitigate the weight of my torso and head. The eventual pose involves the head resting nicely on the ground, and a straight back, but my hips and back at this stage don’t allow that.

The thing that’s so interesting about this pose is that the alignment isn’t cubic, the way it usually is in yoga. That’s kind of a weird thing to say; what I mean is that yoga poses generally focus on up-down, front-back, side-to-side alignment. Yoga is three-dimensional, of course, because humans are three-dimensional, but there’s very little room for diagonal movement. It’s only along three axes, X, Y, and Z, instead of any one degree of the 360-degree axis.

But here, the torso moves down diagonally, jutting out at an angle from the standard warrior alignment of the legs. Even in the full expression of the pose, with the head on the floor, the body is still out to the side. If it weren’t, it would be lizard pose, but the aim here is completely different.

This pose is rarely taught, in my experience. I think the reason is a majority of students out there have tight hips, and your hips have to be significantly open before you can find ease along with effort in the pose. The first time I was taught it, I wanted to stay in it for a long, long time. It combines a number of opposing flavors in a crazy good fusion: a cooling forward bend with the fire of a lunging pose. A fluid upper body with strong solid legs. The lightness of an open chest with a compressed abdomen. It’s craaaazy!

The most interesting thing about it, for me, is the feeling of a quantum change in one’s personal atmosphere going from standing up to being in the pose. The most recent time I did it in class I thought of “AND YOU GO DOOOOOOWN” from the Bikram dialogue. It’s much closer to hanging upside down than many other forward-bending poses, and for once I’m not limited by my dastardly hamstrings.

I don’t have any Great Lessons to share with you from this pose. It’s just one that I enjoy, and one which seems a little bit obscure that deserves some more airplay.

s, a, t-u-r, d-a-y NIGHT!

Not much to say today.

This morning I went to the free Lululemon class, to see what was expected etc., and it was a little disconcerting. There were about 40 people there, and the teacher did a class entirely devoid of sun salutations. There was some difficult stuff in there, but most of the challenge of it was that my shoulders and thighs were pretty weak from yesterday’s practice.

I’m hoping there aren’t going to be 40 people in the class I’m teaching in two weeks.

Because that would be scary.

I did manage to talk to the manager (at least I think she was the manager?), and she seemed very nice and happy about me teaching, and open to whatever kind of stuff I wanted to do in the class. All in all, I’m thinking about changing my opinion of Lululemon; it’s possible that they’re equally interested in profit and building community. Rather than largely profit, as I’d thought.

Tonight Jennifer and hubby are coming over for dinner, and I’ve been cleaning for about three hours now. I think I’m almost done, thank God. After rearranging the living room and using carpet cleaner. I hate how cleaning makes you notice that there’s other stuff that’s dirty. Very dirty. I want a maid.

I’m also making that recipe I made a few days ago that took forever. It was really delicious, after all, and since I have the day to do it, I’m pre-making about half of it for simplicity’s sake.

Hope y’all have a fancy Saturday night too.

I’m still dubious about Lululemon itself

I have just about had it with BF’s bad router fu.

By which I mean whatever brand of router he buys, whatever model, it does not matter; it only works fairly well for about six months before it recalcitrantly refuses to continue working. The routers have constantly had the issue of hiccuping and causing all the computers in the house to have to reconnect, and some of the computers are too stupid to do this automatically so we have to unplug and replug the router to restart the whole process. It is stupid. And this morning my computer just wouldn’t put up with whatever alien signals the router is putting out, and to write this I am using the free crappy wi-fi from some neighbor (“gregg”) who didn’t secure his setup with a password.

It has been failing so often lately that I think the time is ripe for a-fucking-nother router. I’m wondering if BF shouldn’t teach me to set up the next one, so whatever bad setup juju passes through him to the router will be preempted. (Incidentally, BF’s bachelor’s degree is in computer science, and this is the only area where electronics refuse to roll over and behave for him.)

I spent much of yesterday organizing and editing my manuscript. I managed to put it together in a way that I think makes sense, but I need to read it through again today. I’m pretty pleased, and I have an idea for at least one more chapter (even if I don’t know where to put it), so with luck I’ll be able to hit 40,000. I don’t think I’ll go much above that, though. With all the pictures it might be enough. We’ll see.

Another piece of yesterday was spent watching the first third of The Postman – no WAY am I watching that movie in one sitting, my brain will melt – and it’s just…not a good movie. It reminds me of nothing so much as Heaven’s Gate, which is just an unfortunate movie all around, so uneven, pieces of excellence poking out of thorough mediocrity and dullness. Anyhow, this one, which the crew cleverly nicknamed “Dustworld” during production, is somewhat less excellent in those pieces. It’s sometimes entertaining but mostly it fails. I sort of doubt that my opinion will change through the remaining two hours, but I’ll let you know if it does.

I also went to yoga, and it was yet another of Jennifer’s totally innovative classes. We worked up to this posture, and the actual name of it is so much of a mouthful (triang mukhaikapada paschimottanasana) that I’m going to call it half-virasana. Then we did about 8 variations on it, and came up into wheel out of it and came down out of wheel into it, which was hard but awesome, and we worked into and out of half-moon from it, and generally it was just an interesting class. The foci were quadriceps and backbends, which seem weird to put together in a class, but the emotional effect was unique – grounded and energized, supporting each other. We did a hanuman backbend thing (which I thought was a variation of either pigeon or anjanayasana, but Jennifer called it hanuman variation), and I bent my knee and touched my foot to my head without using my hands to pull. It was cool.

I hadn’t done yoga for five days, and during those days I’d been either sitting, sitting, sitting to work on the book, or I’d been standing up in the kitchen. So my lower back muscles were practically frozen. I loosened them up, but oh were they sore when I got home. I heating-padded the area when I went to bed and this morning I feel so much looser and happier. Missing that many days in a row is so baaaaad.

So my local Lululemon store offers free yoga classes every Saturday. I think the way it works is that the studios rotate who’s going to lend teachers out for these classes. September is apparently the month for Kathleen’s studio, and the person she had recruited for this has had to drop out. She sent an email out asking for people to volunteer to teach the Saturday morning classes during September. I said I’d do it if no one else more qualified wanted to, and she agreed to give me one of the classes, on the 12th of September.

So I’ll be teaching that one. A class full of people I don’t know, and I have no idea what kind of class I should teach or how long it should be, and how am I going to memorize a routine well enough to teach it by then? But I’m going to teach! In like two weeks! I’m so excited! And petrified!

I’m going to go to the free class tomorrow morning just to see what to expect – if they commonly throw things at the teacher if they don’t like her, or what. I’m hoping not. Lululemon’s blocks are probably heavy.

drafting jams…or jamming drafts?

So this is how yesterday ended up, like this:

And also like this:

That’s cherry almond jam. The almond is more of a fragrance than a flavor, since it came from liqueur (and I don’t think all of it boiled off, heh heh).

The draft is OK. I am having major issues with organizing the pieces, which is why that picture looks the way it does, but the actual writing is better than I’d hoped it would be. I.e. it will not need major revision. Which is really all I can ask for.

Just a couple things from the headlines. Have you been following the story of Jasmine Fiore? She’s the “ex-model” (the photo accompanying that story makes her look as if, with apologies to the deceased, she was made entirely of various polymers) who was killed by her reality-show-contestant quickie-husband, Ryan Jenkins. The guy cut off her fingers and pulled out her teeth and stuffed her in a suitcase, and the cops had to ID her by her breast implants. Seriously. I can’t believe that Thomas Harris didn’t invent this story, because how horrible is that?

A somewhat tepid pursuit of Jenkins ended with his body being found in a hotel – he’d hung himself. Sordid. Now they’re pretty sure he had an accomplice. I’ve been following this just because I can’t believe the details. Next it’s going to turn out that the Illuminati wanted her dead.

I also happened upon this charming story. Not that I care much at all about Miley Cyrus, but talk about deluded. No, really, she said she’d marry me. The most famous 16-year-old in the world right now agreed to marry a 53-year-old married man with kids. Really, that’s how it was.

Today is for reading, probably more fiddling with the draft, and not much else. I think I’ve jammed all I’m going to for the week, unless Michael Jackson comes on the radio.

Nope, I don’t believe in filler, not me

Writing post. Apologies.

It may be amazing to those of you who are fast becoming bored to tears by my 700-word posts about the shape of my life now that I’m unemployed (that shape: a flat, happy, boring-ass line), but I have always had a problem meeting word counts. From high school to college to fiction writing, I have always been finished with what I have to say before I’ve written enough to satisfy whatever the requirement is. Since computers were still somewhat new in schools when I was in high school, fancy formatting could make all the difference, but everybody had wised up by the time I was getting my bachelor’s, and I had to force more and more words behind the cursed cursor to get to the right page number. I hated it. Why should I belch more content out unwillingly when I’d already said what I had to say?

I am feeling something like that nervous indignation right now, because I am nearly done with a draft of the yoga memoir I’ve been working on for most of August, and I am at 35,000 words. This is nothing; Wil Wheaton can get away with that, because he publishes his own damn books and because he’s already famous, but an unknown needs 75,000 at a minimum. Most books right now run around 100,000 words. (I have to say on the side that I fail to understand why books have to be around 300 pages to get published these days. You’d think that with costs rising, the audience leaving in droves, and attention spans dropping, shorter books would be all the rage. But no.) There’s no way that I’ll be able to push this book up to a word count like that. There will be a good number of pictures in the book, so I could probably get away with 40-50,000, I hope, but that’s still absurdly short.

I don’t really know what to do. I could try to pad it (and likely fail – not being able to pad was what made all my academic papers too short); I could wait until after teacher training and write a whole lot about that (but I don’t want to – I want this thing out in the world NOW); I could add many, many more little incidents I wrote about from the blog, and somehow try to group them all together (which would be a whole lot of work, as I’d have to basically reread my entire blog from the beginning to cull content); I could start the editing process anyway and hope that 10,000 words appear out of nowhere. My hope was that I’d have a viable draft ready to go to agents and so on before I went back to work, which I’m hoping will be in the next two weeks. (If not, I have to attend a mandatory workshop given by the state about how to try and reenter the workforce. Gag.) I’m not sure this is such a realistic goal at this point, even if editing goes somewhat smoothly.

I’d like to try to go through the first draft with my red pen before the end of the week. I don’t think this is a crazy goal, and I might just format it and print it out for editing tomorrow, low word count be damned; I just don’t know if I’ll know what else I can add to the manuscript by the time I’m finished editing.

See, right there, that was 558 words. If I’m writing just about myself with no regard as to whether it’s publishable, of interest, or related to a relevant topic, I can blather on forever. I just figure that no one’s interested in paying for this kind of minutiae, and I also want the book to have a different angle. Which I think it does. But at this point, my confidence is so low due to the low word count that I’m wondering if the idea wasn’t flawed from the start.

AARRGHHUM DEATH BY CHERRY JUICE

So, I ended up standing in the kitchen for about four hours yesterday. I feel for any non-fictional 50′s housewives who had to do this in heels, because GAWD.

First I made cinnamon anise jelly. Yes, I have now mentioned this here three separate times, but come the hell on: Cinnamon. Anise. Jelly. How much better does it get?

It gets better if you make it with homemade apple juice, for the record. Not made with a juicer, either; made with apples cooked in a pot and strained. Yes, I did. I think the jelly itself turned out pretty nicely, and it certainly smelled like Christmas while it was cooking, so I think it’ll be a great holiday gift. I only came out with four jars but I can make more.

Especially since I now know where the spice store is! They had real cinnamon, and four sticks of it (1 oz) was only a few dollars, so I will definitely be going back for more. It’s about 40 minutes away, but that’s well worth the cost of gas because it’s an actual spice store, selling nothing but spices. They didn’t have grains of paradise, but I don’t have any immediate need for them, so no biggie. I will find them one day.

The rest of the time in the kitchen was spent making this recipe. Some months ago BF and I saw Ingrid make it on the Food Network and I was slobbering all over the place so the next week I asked BF to make it on a day when I was at yoga late. It was delicious (although not as delicioso as the show made it seem), but BF told me that the recipe was a pain in the ass and he wasn’t all that interested in doing it again anytime soon.

So this time, I made it, and…he was totally right. So many moving parts, so many steps, so many vegetables! Usually recipes that I consider too much of a pain to make again involve too much chopping or too much precooking, but in this case it’s just a lot of different food ingredients that are mixed with other ingredients and some of the cooking takes a long time and I burned my fingertips like 8 times and it’s just annoying. The thing is, it’s still a pretty good recipe, with roasted vegetables and a yummy amount of dairy, so I’m sure I’ll be foolishly drawn to it again sometime. Especially since it was much more delicious than the last time.

Other adventures for the day included buying a cherry pitter at BB&B and then pitting about 382 cherries. Cherry juice, FYI, is very dark red, and I wished I’d had someone in the house to take silly pictures of me lunging at the camera with red fingers, because it looked like I’d opened up the jugular of a small animal with my bare hands by the time I was done. Also I was very tired of pitting cherries. But there’s another jam I want to make sometime soon, cherry almond, and the big sticky mess I made with the cinnamon! anise! jelly! was actually smaller than usual, so I will probably be pulling out my big ol’ canning pot again before the week is out.

There’s also more rosewater plum compote, which is thus far a total smash hit with everyone I’ve given it to, to make. I’m planning to do all homemade gifts for Xmas this year (I am tired of the consumer cycle, and very tired of trying to think of clever gifts), and I’m not sure I’ll have the time to make as many washcloths as I’d like to (they are a nicer gift than they sound like – they are flower-shaped, knitted, and made of luxurious cotton chenille), so I’m going to put up as much jam as possible just in case.

Today Jennifer was supposed to be coming over for a glass of wine and chitchat, but she cancelled on me at the last minute. I don’t think it’s at all her fault, but I’m still frowny about it, because I bought champagne grapes and some Brie for her so it wouldn’t just be me, a poor main event indeed, trying to entertain her, and now all that fruit will have to be eaten by me and BF (who does not like fruit very much). Maybe, with luck, it’ll all keep until this weekend, when she says she’ll be able to come instead.

my stuff! my worthless, broken stuff!

I called for a charity pickup for today, and all the stuff is out on my porch right now. I am trying to block out thoughts of what’s inside those boxes, and the idea that I still have time to run out and grab up all the stuff and bring it back in here. It’s not too late.

This is what it’s like being a pack-rat. I know rationally that I don’t actually want to keep any of those things; they have already been vetted, in some cases numerous times, as objects that I want to be rid of. I can’t keep everything, and these are things I very clearly do not want. But I still can’t stand the idea of letting them go…whatever they are, in there. They are things that used to have meaning and value to me; therefore I want them. I waaaaant them.

I wish the truck would hurry up and get here.

—

Today I believe I will be visiting a spice store in Rockville. I want cinnamon, the real stuff, and although Sur la Table or Williams Sonoma might have it, a spice store would almost definitely have it.

Sidebar, for those of you who don’t know: What we generally call “cinnamon” actually isn’t, it’s the bark of the cassia tree (cinnamomum aromaticum). The flavor is similar but a lot more one-note and bold. Real cinnamon (cinnamomum verum), often called “ceylon cinnamon” in culinary sales to distinguish it, comes from a tree that is a lot harder to grow and harvest from, is more crumbly, and has a more subtle flavor. Alton Brown taught me this, and Wikipedia verfies it.

In any case, I’m going to make a cinnamon anise jelly, and I thought I might as well make it with real actual cinnamon. The stuff is pretty expensive, but since the flavor of it is going to go a long way, and be Christmas gifts for my friends and family, I thought what the hell?

—

BF and I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this weekend. It was thoroughly not bad. It dragged in places, and was cringeworthy in others, but it clicked along okay for the most part and Shia LeBeouf was not remotely as annoying as he was in Transformers. Of course, he talked a lot less. And his part was really well-written, with all manner of vulnerability and so on. Overall not an embarrassment to the series – not nearly so much as Temple of Doom, to be sure.

We didn’t do much else of interest this weekend, other than get a new chair – new to us, anyway. It was left over from MP’s furnished rental house which they sold earlier this year, so we raised our hands and said “We’d like it, please.” We are always looking for seating for the downstairs living room – before yesterday we had two chairs plus the dining set, neither of which I like at all, so I’m glad to have a chair down there that I actually do like.

I’m concerned that the new chair will just provide another place for the spiders to colonize, but I’m starting to feel it’s a losing battle. I kill three or four spiders every couple of days, and they just. Keep. Coming. If I had any fear of spiders whatsoever, it would either have been stamped out by all the contact with them I’ve had to have or I would have just moved out by now.

Last night I finished reading Finding My Balance, Mariel Hemingway’s memoir. She begins every chapter with a yoga pose, and frames whatever events in her life she’s talking about in that chapter with an explanation of the pose. It’s a clever way to write a memoir, and she is an accomplished yogini. The memoir itself is a bit thin, but it’s been a good read. Now I move on to the tough stuff: Ganga White’s book Yoga Beyond Belief.

And I keep working on my own book, too. 30,000 words so far. I may be running out of steam, but I’m still working.

Mass Effect: Even The Title Is Boring

The essential oils workshop was pretty interesting, and very well worth the $15, although some of it was sort of tough to buy. I mean that in more ways than one; essential oils are hella expensive (with good reason, but…crikey), and the giver of the workshop talked about the magical mystical healing power of oils the same way that I’ve heard particularly intense yoga flakes talk about how yoga will correct your scoliosis and cure your cancer and make you rich in ten days or less. She definitely made me interested in learning more about oils, for all that. They can help you make lots of good homemade gifts, bath salts and lotions and the like; they make great home remedies for pain relief and so on; and they are a complementary skill to have along with yoga. I could even diffuse various oils during classes to get students in the right mood.

But any kind of getting into it I could do will have to wait until I have a lot more disposable income. Some oils run up to a couple hundred dollars a bottle. She said that because they are so very concentrated, they go a long way and last forever, and I know from experience that this is true, but that still doesn’t mean I can afford the initial investment. However, the oil company she’s affiliated with seems, via the internet, to be one of the more expensive companies of what’s out there. So maybe I’ll buy a few bottles from other companies sometime before Christmas, anyhow.

That is probably the most interesting thing that’s happened this weekend. I am working on cleaning off my “desk” and filing the papers that are piled all around my house, and so far it’s gone really well; I still have a very large box in the garage full of papers and college material and all manner of other stuff that needs going through and filing. I am not really looking forward to that. Thank goodness there are a ton of other things that need work first – closets, surfaces, random piles.

Part of the reason I’m doing this is that BF and I have to move before too long. I will probably write a whole agonized post about this when the time comes, but for now, I’ll just say that experience has taught me to get rid of as much stuff as possible as long as possible before the actual move happens. So, since I have the time right now, I’m trying to organize and do cleanout as a preemptive strike.

Today? Yoga (hopefully), grocery run, reading, more cleaning. BF is going to finish Mass Effect for the second time, and while I’ve found it not so appallingly boring this time around, it’s definitely a less good spectator game than most of the other RPGs he plays.

yes, women in prison in space

Sometimes I love reading the text in spam.

dam shaver leer napoo! vox trite barium hamlet?

I wonder what kind of procedure a barium Hamlet would be. I guess the doctor soliloquizes while he kills you with a barium/poison solution? Unless it’s a small town whose buildings are composed entirely of barium.

I had strange but arousing sex dreams last night. If I provided any more details, you would probably all turn Victorian on me and cease reading my blog forever. No really, they were that strange. And, come to think of it, this is my second romantic dream involving Neil Patrick Harris. I gotta stop thinking of him that way, when I know he can never return my girlish crush on him.

I also watched two movies yesterday (which may explain the dreams, come to think of it): Body of Evidence and Starslammer. The first is an early-90′s movie with Madonna during her Marilyn phase and Willem Dafoe and a pretty young Julianne Moore. It is probably the filthiest mainstream movie I’ve ever seen (aside from Basic Instinct, of course), with so many sex scenes that I was sort of ready for it to be over long before it was. I was also kind of pissed about how mildly and poorly the S&M was portrayed. Ooh! Candle wax! You FIEND! And the scene when Willem took the dom role for once made it look like rape when it wasn’t, and then made it look like she enjoyed the rape which is really bad to put in movies, and the whole thing was just badly handled. Also? It’s sort of a legal thriller, but the inaccuracies about the legal stuff are so large and glaring that, just, yikes. (Not that most legal thrillers strive for accuracy. But this one was really bad about it.)

Starslammer was fairly straightforward: a women-in-prison-in-space movie. I kid you not. I’m not sure any more explanation is required beyond that brief description, except that it was slightly more awful than you might imagine.

Incidentally, I very highly recommend the service where you get Netflix streaming over your XBox 360. If you already have a 360, of course. There’s no other equipment required and they have a gazillion movies, including some of the ones that are already on your Netflix queue. It’s been a real upper in the last few weeks.

Oh! And I seriously cleaned up the garage yesterday. I got incredibly dirty – at one point I saw a piece of dirt on my neck in the reflection of my car window, rubbed at it, and came away with dead spider pieces on my finger. Sooo I showered pretty soon after I was done. Nature gave me a pretty good shower while I was working, though – there was a big thunderstorm outside during the second half of the job that I used to rinse off my hands and face a couple of times. I’m pretty pleased with the results in the actual garage; I killed probably a dozen large and fat spiders, reorganized and then threw out a broken large box, and moved the paint cans around such that they’re tidy.

Today I’m going to an essential oils workshop. The flyer is shameless (could essential oils be the answer to your weight problem?), but it might turn out to be interesting.