yoga teaching reality check

Last night I saw one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, bar none. It was an enormous, bleached-white fluffy cloud, which against the navy blue sky already looked bizarre and Photoshopped. But the cloud was full of lightning. It kept appearing under the folds and seams of the cloud, skittering above the outside edges, lighting it up within and without. It was so marvelous, and it was exactly the kind of thing you couldn’t capture on film without a world-class photographer. I called BF excitedly on my way home from class, telling him to go out and look at it, which he did. The show was still going on when I pulled into my driveway, so we leaned against his car outside and watched it for about 10 minutes. I didn’t really want to go inside, to tell you the truth. Truly remarkable.

Last night I taught at 7:40, and before class started, I called BF to whine. I really am not enjoying this class, as I told him. It’s not working for me to teach so late, and to teach classes straight from Thursday to Sunday every week. I’m having a few different sources of conflict with this teaching thing: 1) I feel like I am complaining too much, comparatively, because in reality teaching does not take up very many hours in my week; 2) I feel like I am complaining too much, because after all this was what I wanted; 3) I don’t know why I am so reluctant to teach, when after all this was what I wanted; and 4) most problematically, I have totally lost track of what my goals are in teaching yoga, and indeed in doing yoga, in the first place.

7/29

When I first started working, as an adult, I couldn’t really believe that this was how the rest of my life was supposed to go. When you think about it, working means being forced into one place every day for eight hours with the same people and the same situations, five days a week. Half of your waking weekdays are spent this way. The people issue was a major part of what chafed me: I did not choose these people, and I potentially have to spend more time with them every week than I do with my family or friends. How is this reasonable? How is it not a farce, a phony situation where I spend most of my week with humans who are chosen practically at random by the hiring taskforce of whatever my workplace is?

I learned that the thing you do is you make the best of it; you gravitate towards people (and potentially workplaces) that don’t suck. You try to find things in common with your coworkers to make the day pass. You are polite and friendly. You deal with it. But even after doing office jobs for most of my adult life, on some days I still find myself walking into the office and greeting my coworkers with private amazement. Who are these other humans? Why am I forced to tell them good morning? Why do I have to see them again, when I just saw them yesterday? – I spent eight good hours of my twenties with them, and only an hour with BF before we had to go to sleep. How is that fair?

blogsleep

I just discovered the “Details” dropdown in my feed reader. I am well aware that there are heaps of functionality in Google Reader that I completely ignore, so no need to confirm that little chestnut, but this one kept me interested for several minutes by clicking down the details for all of the blogs I subscribe to.

This was, erm…humbling. The detail shows how many people subscribe to the feed of the blog. The non-anonymous writing blog that I keep – well, I don’t really keep it, it’s more there, and I very occasionally write a post in it when the mood strikes me to write about writing – had only a single subscriber: myself. Mars is Heaven had the third-lowest number of subscribers of any blog in my feed (not counting the writing blog, which means I have two spaces in the bottom five, awesome). So I guess it can be confirmed that very, very few people actually care about what goes up here.

I realize this should not matter much. During the short sabbatical I took earlier this year, I continued to post my thoughts privately when they occurred, and this was helpful in recording and purging but did not satisfy me. I need to feel that I’m putting something out to the world. Of course, thinking about it, perhaps the reason I’ve gotten away from writing fiction and trying to publish it is because I have this blog: giving it away for free, using up all my creativity here. It’s a help to put down my thoughts every day, or, like yesterday’s post, to do a writing exercise. But it may also be a mistake. My brain will not stop nagging me about fiction writing and how I have to get back to it, but every night I just don’t do it. Every morning I come here, instead.

I find myself unsatisfied with the blog, in general. Not what I’ve written, but the reaction: I have failed to set the world on fire. I guess that will always be so; I don’t want to market or promote myself (what would I market or promote, anyway? I do not have a single topic that would draw people), and comments will never be a sufficient number or contain a sufficient understanding of what I was getting at. I am too much of a control freak and a perfectionist, I will always be looking for the perfect comment or the perfect number of them that never comes.

That is my fault and no one else’s, so please do not take offense.

—

In my youth, I struggled with insomnia, from elementary school all the way through college. When I was in high school, I discovered the melatonin in my dad’s medicine cabinet. (Valley of the Dolls I have never been.) I took it occasionally and was amazed at how in twenty minutes I dropped right off to sleep, when normally it would be an hour or two or three before I finally dozed. I never took it very regularly, though, just when I absolutely couldn’t get to sleep and I hoped Dad wouldn’t notice me swiping a couple of his pills. During college, I found that a more active day helped me to sleep more deeply, and with a few periods of exception, the sleeping mostly went well for several years.

About a year ago, I started having trouble sleeping again. This time it was not sleeping through the night – suddenly being dead awake at 2:30 AM, 4:30 AM, etc. – and early waking, dozing unsatisfyingly for an hour or longer before the alarm went off. It led to a lot of weary afternoons. So I started taking melatonin regularly, as a supplement, every night before bed with all my other pills (fish oil, magnesium for my heart, good ol’ progesterone). And I slept well, through the night, happily (whatever my dreams may have been).

I started to wonder in the last couple of weeks whether the regularity with which I take melatonin is what’s causing me to be so tired lately – whether my system has become so saturated with the compound that I’m not fully awake. (I’m trying all kinds of variables to pull out of this fatigue before I surrender and go to the doctor.) So, at the beginning of this week, I stopped taking the melatonin. And of course, sleep has become the same frustrating struggle it used to be. I can’t drift off easily, I haven’t slept deeply, I’ve woken too early, and I’ve become sleepy at strange times (nodding off at 6:00, for instance, but wide awake at 10:00). It has been a tiring week. During the day I feel jumpy, distracted, and over-wired, as if I’ve had caffeine.

I don’t know whether this means that it was a good thing or a bad thing to go off the melatonin. It’s possible that my brain just does not secrete enough of it, and not being on it is fucking up the synthetic circadian rhythms that the supplement has helped to create in me. On the other hand, maybe being on it has caused a dependency in my brain, and I don’t secrete enough because I’m getting enough through the supplement, and I’m feeling the jolt of my body not being able to catch up just yet.

I don’t know. I just feel like crap and want to be able to sleep without being fatigued all day.

rhapsody in green

I, famously, have a brown thumb. I have killed cacti, philodendrons, Chia pets. I have planted already-growing herbs in fertile soil and they have promptly died. I have emptied more pots stuffed with yellowed, withered leaves than I really prefer to remember.

When we moved into this house, MD gave us a gift of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (yes, on purpose) in a single pot, which I put outside and tried to tend as best I could. The parsley died first; it gave a good show of trying to re-sprout the following year, but it was fooling no one. The sage remained the most reliable of the four until this past winter, when its woody, cypress-like stems refused to keep producing plentifully for no reason I understand. The rosemary died two years ago, but this year it has come roaring back, with far more output than it ever had, again to my bafflement. The thyme gave up the ghost last year, and the thyme I bought to replace it this year has already shriveled up under (probably) overwatering.

Last year I bought a big blue storage tub, punched some holes in it, and planted mint, oregano, and cilantro. No luck with the cilantro – I later learned that you have to keep farming cilantro continuously, that it will go to seed unless you replant every few weeks - but mint is apparently little more than a weed, and having fresh mint around has proved to be more useful than I could have imagined. A basil plant I raised back in 2008 did well for a while, proliferating beyond my ability to use up its leaves, but its pot was un-holed on the bottom and it drowned after a particularly heavy thunderstorm. It broke my heart and I have not tried again until this year, when I bought living purple basil, and also raised some regular basil from a pup indoors, and planted them in my blue tub along with perpetually dying parsley and friendly, lovable oregano, which keeps growing in such a dependable way that I quite adore it.

Out back, I planted some zucchini, because I have heard from numerous sources that you can’t really stop zucchini from growing, and I thought, oh yeah? Place your bets. I also raised a couple of pepper plants indoors as I did the basil, which are outside now. I rounded it out with some spring onions, which the package said to thin out, but I don’t know how to do that, so I’m going to just keep growing them to see what happens. I also have chives out there, weary, battle-hardened chives that over the years have seen the same four pots be repeatedly filled and emptied with living, then too-soon dead, compadres. I don’t know why the chives have lived where every other plant I’ve tried to raise has died, and died again. But they have, dear chives.

This year, my plants are all growing for me. The zucchini is lusty and spiky-stemmed, with lovely wide leaves, and now, little nubs that will flower and maybe even produce real edible zucchini. The pepper plants have not produced any buds yet, just more and more diamond-shaped leaves, but when I come close to them and stroke their leaves, the smell of a just-cut bell pepper unfurls and I cannot help but love them, infertile though they may be. The basil, it lives! It produces more leaves! The rosemary, ah, the rosemary…I stroke it through my fingers and the scent left on my hands is earthy, bright, intoxicating. The oregano smells like nothing mixed with mint, and the mint smells like those third and fourth chews of gum, after it’s too much but before it’s too little. I cannot stop going out into the front and back of my house where the plants are, squatting to admire them, caressing them gratefully, refraining from watering them to early graves.

I love my plants. I deeply do not want to kill them. I will miss them when winter comes.

7/26

My weekend went a little like this. The Saturday class at the studio where I regularly teach is rotated. First two Saturdays are a NIA dance class, the 3rd Saturday is yoga with D, and the 4th Saturday is yoga with me. Early in the month, I emailed D to ask her if she and the NIA teacher had worked out who was going to teach the extra class, because there are five Saturdays in this month. She didn’t understand what I meant at all, and when I wrote a second email to explain, I never got a reply. I brought it to the attention of the main front-desk person at the studio a couple of weeks ago, and she said she hadn’t realized there were five Saturdays in July, and she was going to write that down and take care of it. I saw D last week, and I asked if she and the NIA teacher and the studio people had worked it out, because I was teaching the middle three Saturdays at Lululemon and could not do whatever class was in the middle. (Lululemon was from 9-10; studio class was at 10:15.) D assured me that it had been worked out, and that the studio had gotten someone to teach it, although she didn’t know who. I said that I was going to teach on the last Saturday of the month, right?, and she said yes, that’s the plan.

During savasana at Lululemon – my last teaching gig there, presumably for a while, and I was sad for it to end – my phone vibrated inside my bag. I checked the message when I got out, and it was my studio, asking whether I was going to show up for my class or what. I called back and explained rather impatiently that D had told me it was all worked out, 5 Saturdays in July, just taught at the ‘lemon, etc. This didn’t cut any ice with the front-desk person (or she was just an idiot); she kept repeating that I had the fourth Saturday in July and that I was on the schedule. (There is no work schedule for teachers or anything like that at all, just a flyer for the customers of the studio that explains when the classes are and who’s teaching them.) I realized that no matter what I said, I was responsible for teaching or missing this class, so I said fine, that I was on my way, and there was huge relief in her voice.

I called BF and left a furious message on his voice mail (not furious at him, of course), and then called the friend who was traveling for almost an hour to see me for lunch and a movie to tell her that I was going to be late getting there. It was stupid of me to make plans, I guess, because I kind of expected that this would happen. Throw a fifth Saturday into the month, and yoga people just can’t cope. It didn’t keep me from being extremely angry, though, because I had made plans, because I didn’t want to teach two classes right in a row like that, and because once again I feel as if I’ve done everything I can to be organized around the people who work at this studio (virtually none of whom are organized), and I’ve still gotten stuck doing what I don’t want to do.

So that is partially the story of how I taught six classes in four days. Also, after weeks of absolutely bupkis for my yin class on Sundays, I had six people come in yesterday afternoon. I taught them as best I could, but it was a pretty rocky experience, and I had the same problem of middle-aged people being capable of so much less that I didn’t know what to do. (In restorative yoga this is a very easy problem because you just pad them more; with yin this is less of an option because the poses aren’t supposed to be comfortable.) I wish that teacher trainings would address this better. All the people in teacher trainings, of course, have open bodies from doing a lot of yoga, so we don’t get to see how the poses look or how to modify them on bodies that are stiff and inflexible. There is some information presented, but not nearly enough. They should have clinics, bring in folks off the street so that teachers can figure out how to teach people who can’t straighten their ankles.

In between my classes yesterday I napped on the sofa. I slept so deeply that I dreamed that I was napping on the couch, and BF came home, and although I got up from the couch and went downstairs to see if it was him or a burglar, I couldn’t actually rouse myself from sleep, I was almost sleepwalking down there, unable to really open my eyes, and then I woke myself up on the actual couch and felt the same sensation of not being able to wake the hell up. Which is the state I’m really still in this morning. I am so weary.

I know I’ve been saying that a lot. Whine whine. I think that the issue is that when I teach, all my energy centers are wide open, and energy’s pouring out of them like oil into the Gulf, and so when I’m done I’m just exhausted. It’s not something that can be reclaimed by napping or eating a good meal, it’s something that needs to be built up over time by replenishing my self, and that’s why I can’t seem to shake the tireds, because I still have to go back to my day job, instead of sitting by the pool with a book for a couple of days before teaching again.

7/24: TGIF over here

I’m reading The Robber Bride right now, a Margaret Atwood from the 90′s, and it’s interesting. Not much like many of her other books, which are obscure, or brilliant, or have a certain conceit, or even are sci-fi-ey. It’s – dare I say it? – ordinary. Of course every sentence is wonderful, the wording and the style are unique, and she makes interesting choices with how to write the story of each character: Tony with clipped little sentences and lots of nouns, Charis with running-on almost to stream of consciousness and non sequiturs, and Roz with emotion and decisiveness. But it’s funny how un-extraordinary the story is, for Atwood, and yet how compelling and interesting it is to read. It’s an interior novel, rather than a novel that makes a point or brings something new to the reader’s experiences, and therein does not really have any hallmarks of Atwood. Except that you don’t want to put it down. I look forward to my half-hour before bed with zest most days, since I’ve been reading this book.

I taught last night, and while I think I might have been a wee bit plodding, a little less intense than usual, I still didn’t really mind the experience. I had two students – the same two that I had last week – and they seemed impatient to do more. I’m disappointed with myself for not giving them more, but I also am giving myself a break because of wedding, job stress, the fact that I’m teaching until eight-fucking-forty PM, which is just way too late for me!, etc.

I’m at something of a loss for content today, so I’ll point you to other people’s (as well as my own, elsewhere). These are two of the cutest videos you’ll see all day. I am not usually a fan of internet cute, because how many cute puppies and babies and kitties can you see before they all look the same? But the animals are baby sloths and a slow loris, so I don’t feel like such a cliche. I watched them without sound, so if the sound adds or detracts from the experience, yay or sorry.

This is an interesting Times article about John Friend that my mother sent me. She wanted my opinion, and I said the following in response:

“This article is quite a good summary of the state of yoga in the US. I’ve paid some attention to John Friend and his work, I’ve done Anusara yoga and met people who teach it, and I continue to reserve judgment on him and his style. The comparison between him and Joel Osteen is extremely apt, and I think that none of us can really be sure what goes on behind the friendly and inclusive manner of either man.

“It’s my opinion that you don’t become a yoga celebrity without a personal agenda to go along with your global agenda – and the global agenda may be thoroughly well-meaning and heartfelt. But the personal agenda, I think, is still there. This does not mean you cannot be a good person and a good practitioner of yoga while still having this self-centered goal. However, it may mean that at some point the two agendas may cross, and which one you’re going to choose will be noticed by the world.

“It’s also my opinion that ‘diluting’ yoga, and even commercializing it, is neither good nor bad but simply is. Everything in the world is in a continuous state of evolution, and that includes yoga. People who want to keep yoga ‘pure’, or keep it the way it was in India in the 9th century, are fighting a losing battle, and one that may not even be legitimate. It’s also reactionary in kind of an ignorant way; who’s to say that yoga was better then or better now? Ganga White himself told us that he thought yoga was in a much better state now than it was in the golden 70′s – much safer, much more variety, much more availability.

“I see no harm in people coming to class, whether they come to class in a $200 outfit or rags, whether they come to Bikram or to a class on a mountaintop in India. They are coming to class. They are feeling something. That can only be to the good.

“Many of my yoga colleagues do not agree, but I think they’re polishing the brass on the Titanic, and need to let go.”

And also, here is a post that I wrote for No Butts. If you could leave me a little support over there, I’d really love it; I guess the vulnerability and unhappiness and waffling that I’m feeling in this stage of my fitness journey didn’t really come out properly. That, or no one except TB has read it yet.

wedding stuff, part 81 of 875

Last night I was invited over to MM’s house for dinner so that we could Discuss The Wedding. I dreaded this. Deeply. I didn’t know what she’d want to tell me, suggest to me, or ask me, but I knew that whatever it was, I was going to have to do fancy footwork while still being truthful and not cave in while not being rude. Woo! Fun!

I don’t know how much to say, because I don’t want to get all wrapped up and go on for thousands of words, but it was a very frustrating and disheartening evening. MM clearly wants us to have not a formal, but a fancy, wedding, with no expense spared to give us what we want. She also wants to tie in the location of the wedding and make it a sort of Chautauqua-themed weekend. And she is doing that thing to all of our guests that she does to me and BF, and assuming that everyone has the resources and the interest to a) spend the whole weekend there b) go out and do all sorts of Chautauqua-themed things and c) be as emotionally and literally involved in our wedding as we are.

From her perspective, I can see how it appears I am being too careless about our guests, and being too frugal with the biggest party I’m ever going to throw. But I fail to see how any of our friends and my family are going to be SERIOUSLY PUMPED about attending our little wedding. It’s just a wedding. MM explained somewhat tearfully that she cannot even express how excited her family is that BF and I are getting married; they love how happy he is with me, and it’s so terrific to them that we’ve chosen to spend our lives together. I appreciate that, but her family is the most togetherly family that I’ve ever encountered, and I just have a hard time with MM’s assumption that every person on our guest list feels the same way about families/weddings/weekends/etc. that she does.

But that was sort of the theme of the evening. BF and I had discussed that we wanted the rehearsal dinner to be just our parents and his brother – something small and intimate and extremely casual. I suggested a local fish restaurant that has gorgeous outdoor seating. MM, however, had already started to put together plans for a fancy catered dinner at one of the smaller venues in Chautauqua. She expected that we would want to invite all of our out-of-town guests to the rehearsal dinner…which is all 50 potential guests. The way she saw it, it would be thoughtless of us not to give them something to do during that evening. The way I saw it, I didn’t need or want to have two receptions. Just the one will do, thanks. We will have to negotiate this, because she explained that even if we do it my way and have a small and casual rehearsal dinner with our closest family, she and MD will probably put together a dinner for everyone else to attend, catered and at a venue.

Nngh. Anyway. She also asked me rather critically why I was putting together such a simple wedding, and didn’t I want to make it a celebration? (This really hurt my feelings; we are celebrating, this is as celebratory as BF and I get.) I think she is coming from a kind place, wanting to make sure that BF and I aren’t cutting back on any of the items in our plans because we feel we can’t afford them. But we’re not. I don’t want to spend $20,000 on a wedding. I don’t want to overdo things or spend money for the sake of spending it. There is no reason for that. I don’t know if I explained it properly, but if I did, MM didn’t get it at all, I might as well have been speaking Tamil.

So I find myself torn between MP, who want us to have a more lavish wedding than we want, and all the criticism I’ve read and gotten from outside sources, telling me that the amount I am spending is obscene and I should be ashamed of myself. Attention MP: I don’t want to be wasteful, I want things to be just right. Attention everyone else: I’m spending the amount that I think is right for where I am in my life. Attention all: I am doing my best.

She also suggested that I expand my guest list to include a few of the people that she knew had been invested in my life in the past. Her particular suggestions were good ones, but if I invite the people she suggested, the line will no longer be clear to me of who belongs on our list and who doesn’t. It’s not a matter of snobbery at all, or even money; it’s just – if I invite these people who were important to me ten years ago but whom I haven’t seen in seven, what’s to stop us from inviting half of our high school class? Or KJJ, who invited me to her wedding but whose friendship I’ve since quietly allowed to drift away? Or my mom’s best friend from my youth, who was and is an important role model to me, but whom I haven’t spoken to in more than 15 years, and who deliberately ended her friendship with my mother two years ago? I am frustrated by my inability to explain this, and also by my knowledge of MM’s perspective; she is the one, after all, who tried to pressure me into going to the funeral of my former boss’s mother, with whom I felt no connection at all. Not everyone has to go to every event of everyone they know, in my view; this is not how she feels.

The thing she told me to wrap up this topic was that she finds it hard to believe that anyone who has encountered me in the past would not feel some sort of friendly interest in me, a caring connection, that would induce them to attend my wedding. People who’ve known me want to know how I’m doing, and they want to celebrate with me at the big events of my life. Maybe I have much lower self-esteem than I thought, but this was a compliment that I thought I in no way deserved.

In fact, it reminded me of something my mother said when I was a kid that was exactly the opposite. I moved around every few years when I was a child, because my father was military and we never stayed anywhere for very long. I don’t remember what move or what expressed thought prompted my mother to tell me this particular metaphor, but what she told me was that moving somewhere is like putting your hand in a bucket of water. While you’re there, you’re immersed; your hand and the water are in the same place, and interacting, and intimate. Then, when you move away, your hand leaves the water, and the water is exactly the same as it was before your hand arrived. A few drops may cling to your hand, but the water on the whole is unmoved. As an adult I have no idea what she was trying to accomplish by telling eight-year-old me this, but at eight I was horrified. Do I actually matter that little? I asked her. Sadly, she nodded, and said that people forget each other so easily, and I just need to get used to it.

I think this idea, or some version of it, has stuck with me; I don’t see the point of inviting people to my wedding who have not been important to me in years, because why should they give a damn about me now? Our lives have moved on; we have stuck our hands in new waters. I also think that perhaps this is MM’s perspective getting the better of her again, finding weddings much more important than many other people find them; it’s unthinkable to her that any father would not want to go to his daughter’s wedding, would behave in the way my father has. She told me passionately that if she’s learned one thing in her life, it’s that you cannot depend on anything except family; and family you can depend on no matter what. Me, I have learned that I absolutely cannot depend on my parents, no matter what. They have each hurt me too much, too often. So we’ve got something of a disparity going into it.

Also, I think I unintentionally hurt her feelings very badly by all the planning I’ve done so far. I didn’t consult her at all before I started making calls, to ask her what she thought of my plans or of the vendors I was calling, and although she didn’t say anything, her tone as she continued to ask questions was chilly and sad. I did not mean to hurt her by planning without her. I did it because a) I knew what I wanted, and did not particularly want opinions, b) I wanted to get it over with, c) I didn’t want her to think I was lazy and not doing any work on the wedding, and d) I didn’t want to wait around for her to consult with every friend she has at Chautauqua to see what they thought of the vendors that I was calling.

There were other things that we disagreed about – the DJ problem, particularly – but I’m exhausted all over again just from reading what I’ve written so far and don’t want to think about it any more. I think the difficulty ahead is not going to be in the actual planning of the wedding, but in negotiating the wedding we want with MP. I think MM wants to make it an event that I can be proud of, but what she would be proud of and what I would be proud of are two incredibly different things, and she is unintentionally holding me to her standard of partying. And I’m just not her.

July movies, part the second

Reefer Madness – Oh, so worth the 68 minutes of my life. I’ve never seen a movie so ripe for riffing. I know there’s a DVD release with a voice-over track from Mike Nelson, and I’d like to see that version very much. Most of my thoughts were sort of one-at-a-time with this movie, like “These kids are the worst potheads of all time…even I know that you’re supposed to inhale” and “What on earth is the point of being a scheming drug dealer if you’re not charging for the drugs?” The hysteria here about pot’s effects kind of makes me want to drag out that old teenage chestnut about adults just wanting to restrict activities that are fun, if slightly dangerous, by providing ridiculous overexaggeration about their effects. I’m also a little curious about the date the film was made, because although the dancing and the ladies’ hats belong in 1936, the hairdos, the clothes, the slang, the film stock, and the cars belong in the 50′s. (It’s also my understanding that teenagers as a concept didn’t really happen until the 50′s, because kids generally worked a lot more commonly before then.) I can’t believe that no one other than me has noticed this, though, so the date must have been determined to be correct.

Hollywood Singing and Dancing – Not actually a movie, a kind of special. It was as long as a feature, an hour forty-seven (which is why I’m bothering to put it here), and I don’t know who produced it, but it was like something from A&E or AMC. It ran through the history of the Hollywood musical, from the 1930′s to Dreamgirls, and it was extremely entertaining. Not much I didn’t know, but so enjoyable to watch all those clips from all those wonderful movies.

America the Beautiful – A documentary about the cultural requirements of beauty in the U.S. Something of an expose of the media and how they collude (somewhat unintentionally) to make women in America feel mostly rotten about themselves most of the time. The anchor of the piece was a young woman who became a runway model at 12 and had retired by 16, and her changing personality as she grew older was interesting. Lots of good and/or shocking tidbits about this topic, but there wasn’t much coherence. The gentleman who directed it also narrated it, and his narration was somewhat uninspired. I couldn’t find out much about him (apparently he’s president of “Sensory Overload Entertainment”), although I think he’s affiliated with Oprah somehow. Overall, the movie made me very glad and proud not to wear makeup, not to watch TV, and not to read fashion magazines. (I think these choices are why I generally feel good about myself – even if I do think I’m too soggy in various places of my body.) (And yes, I realize that’s ridiculous.)

Moonraker – Oh, boy, was this terrible. I mean, wow, so very very bad. Bad jokes, pretty bad action, an appallingly bad script. Eeesh. I love Lois Chiles, and it was great to see her, but blech. It’s a shame, because I truly love the sound of the word: moonraker. Really a great word.

Michael Clayton – Extraordinary. One of the purest dramas I’ve ever seen, and the most engrossing movie that I’ve seen in recent memory. Directed so brilliantly that I’m sort of pained at my memory of how Eclipse was directed, and overall, just an amazing film. The subject matter is the law, and most of the main characters are lawyers, so it was interesting to me for that reason – although I don’t work in this kind of law (the big and powerful kind) and never want to. The thing that keeps coming back to me is how thoroughly human this film was. Murder has significant weight, here, it’s not just a plot device that sometimes happens in thrillers, but a poor moral choice that will have flames licking at the characters’ heels for the rest of their lives. People make choices that they have to deal with, not in the context of the two hours, but in the context of the lives they will live once this slice of their story ends for the audience. I think any narrative that makes you wonder what the characters are doing when they’re offscreen is a successful one. It’s not exactly a lighthearted family comedy, though, so don’t go in expecting to smile walking out.

Spice World – Supremely silly, and ridiculous, and fluffy, but for all that, not a bad movie. I know that sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true. It’s not poorly directed, the dialogue is not [always] terrible, and it certainly plays fast and loose with the term “plot”, but not to its detriment. Also, I think they may have gotten every famous person in Britain to be in it – Elton John, Elvis Costello, Bob Geldof, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Roger Moore (who bottle-fed a baby pig at one point), Jennifer Saunders, etc etc all had cameos. I actually loved the Spice Girls during their reign back when I was in high school; stupid and weightless music, but totally infectious (and great for working out, btw). It was kind of nice to hear them again, and remember how much I’d enjoyed their music back in the day.

Metropolitan – About twenty minutes into this, I started psychically begging BF to get home already and release me from watching this. I found it dull in the extreme. I read a lengthy essay explaining what’s so great about it, but I disagree. I nevertheless sat out the running time, just to see if I was mistaken in my initial impression. I was not. Although this would be a good movie for Woolf to argue her drawing-room point about, these drawing rooms have no conflict of any significance and hence are not compelling. It’s just conversations. Like a weird, alternate-universe Woody Allen film where the bohemian intelligentsia have been replaced with the young, old-money upper class, spouting no original opinions of their own but only the shadows of adults’ with university book contracts, with no joie de vivre to speak of and nothing new to reveal.

7/21

So, I watched the pilot episode of The Office last night. And, to my great surprise, I really disliked it. I thought Steve Carrell’s portrayal of the boss so thoroughly toed the line between a straight performance of an absurd character and an absurd performance of an absurd character that I could not find it in me to find him more funny than I found him obnoxious. (Brilliant work, though.) The other thing is, I’ve worked in this office: the majority of people are so ordinary as to blend in with the file cabinets, a few people are awesome, and a few people are awful. I do not need to see the shenanigans of everyday life in this office. I’ve lived it. And the final thing is, I have a sort of Pavlov reaction to the reality TV model of showing action in handheld and then showing short clips of people talking to the camera about the experience afterward. I hate it, so much that it’s difficult to watch even decent or fictional programming that uses this model.

BF advised me to watch a couple more episodes beyond the pilot. I will. The pilot usually does not do the series justice. (Good God, look at ST: TNG.) But I’m really very surprised that I liked it so little. I love Office Space so much that I was sure I’d like this. In a way, it’s almost a relief: one less TV show of which I have to watch all the archives before I die. Buffy will be enough work for me, thanks.

Maybe it was naive, but part of me expected that I would see that locked-out girl again this past Sunday morning so she could pay me back. That’s what I would do, come up with that $100 as soon as I could and bring it back to where I knew my benefactor would be. I didn’t see her, though, so I guess she figured it was a gift. It sort of was; I wouldn’t mind seeing that money again, but Boomer told me once that I should never lend money unless I am prepared never to see it again. I think this is wise advice.

By Sunday afternoon, I had taught an active class on Thursday night (when what I really wanted was a slow class), a slow class on Friday night (seven students!, but what I really wanted was an active class), an active class on Saturday morning to 33 students (free, sadly), an active class on Sunday morning (really fucking tired by then, had a difficult class as well), and a slow class on Sunday afternoon (to one student). I was worn out.

Teaching on Thursdays is really not working out for me. New folks drop in sometimes, but usually it’s just the one student who requested this class, and the new people have not made repeat appearances yet. Plus, it’s so late. I don’t get home until after 9, and my bedtime is 10:00. It also makes me sort of weary for the next day of work to teach an active class so late in the evening. Saturday morning’s class was at Lululemon, and I had some great students, but I worked hard, and I don’t know if it was because of that or because of the hard floor, but I was pretty sore by the evening.

The next morning, already tired, I taught another active class. A teacher that I know, who is older and teaches very mild classes, attended. She sat out about half the class, and her apparent disapproval of what I did was, while not unexpected, so discouraging that it was a challenge to finish the class in good spirits. I had another student in, an older woman who has come to a number of my classes in the last couple of months, who often complains about what I’m teaching in a sort of snarky, good-humored way. (It seems very negative to me, but I figure that if she really disliked my classes, she probably wouldn’t come.) In a previous class she had mentioned that when younger, she could do full dropbacks – dropping back into wheel pose from standing by reaching her arms back. This is a goal of mine, and the way that I’ve worked towards it is by curling back and walking my hands down the wall and then up again to build my strength and surety. I had written a class that integrated this exercise, and when we got to it I mentioned to this student that I had put it in just for her. I instructed the students on what to do, and she said oh no she couldn’t, her head was stuffy today and she couldn’t try it, and oh she had to go to the bathroom, and she excused herself.

A stuffy head is a pretty dumb excuse for this particular exercise. An aching back would have been more realistic. If she had said she wasn’t comfortable with it, fine, I don’t care, I’m here to offer the path, not lead you down it. But to brag about being able to do it in the past and then wimp out of trying it with an excuse that seemed fake to me…yeah. I was not so much a fan of this student at this point. I sympathize with why she might have been hesitant – didn’t want to feel how her older body was less able to do this thing that she used to be able to do, didn’t want to freeze up in front of everyone, etc. But my suspicion, from watching her yoga in the several classes she’s taken with me, is that she was fibbing and never really could do this, and what I did was basically calling her bluff.

In the afternoon, I went to teach yin. For the last two weeks, no one has shown up. Today, the one person who showed up was the incredibly stiff guy who has caused me such despair and bogglement and fury in the past, and I was so extremely unhappy to see him. He keeps coming to my classes, which I guess means that I’m doing something good for him, but I feel at this point as if the universe is shoving a grapefruit in my face by continuing to have him show up. He could definitely benefit from yin, but to have him as the only student meant that he took my standard monologues as if I was talking directly to him, and he was responding to me, talking back. (While still not following my directions in the poses.) He was supposed to be going within, letting my words roll off him, that’s the whole reason why I think up such vague things to say, so you can ignore them if you want to. Instead he was behaving as if we were chums, not in a class setting, and I was just chatting with him. Aaaarrrrrgghh.

So teaching this past week and weekend was pretty goddamned frustrating. It really wore me out. And it starts all over again tomorrow night.

And Finally, my job is not going very well in the last couple of weeks. Something that my male boss said (I have one male and two female bosses) has made me afraid and anxious, right back where I was when I started this job, about billing enough hours. And in the last few days, I have not been able to avoid making one mistake after another: giving what was construed as legal advice, and having the client conveniently forget that I told her not to rely on what I said; telling a potential client gently that she has to communicate with us in order for the relationship to work, and having her take that so personally that she complained about us to another client; having the antics of a client who has, thank GOD, fired us, make me and our office look like we’re incompetent; and all manner of other things like that. I feel like I’m in Guitar Hero and the needle is edging towards the red, the red meaning fired.

Oh, and I’m also planning a wedding, did you guys know? It’s not going badly, as far as I can tell, but the florist is supposed to send me some information and prices today. I care about flowers probably the least of all the things to do with this whole shebang, so if the prices are too high, I will be unhappy.

Life ain’t much fun right now. I’m so glad I have BF.

sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy

And while I’m talking about shoes, why the hell are high heels so aesthetically pleasing? What is it about the curve upward to the elevated sole that’s so evocative? I’ve noticed this since I was very young and I’ve never understood it. I mean, when they’re attached to the pretty curvy legs of women, they are even more attractive, and so is the woman, and this is baffling enough in itself. But my local shoe store is sort of an outlet place, a big open room with hundreds of pairs of shoes displayed just about five feet off the ground, so you can see them all stretching before you. It’s one of my favorite stores to walk in, to see all the lovely shoes. I know this is a girl thing, I mean it’s one of the most prevalent cultural jokes about women, but even BF concurred that high heels are inexplicably attractive. What is it about? Anyone have any ideas?

Lately I have been feeling fatigued, sort of in general. By 8:00 PM I am too tired to do anything but lie down and let something shiny and moving play across my eyes. I’ve been a little worried that I am somehow ill, in a blood test kind of way. On Saturday after I taught at Lululemon, I decided to go to the new organic market in our town to see if they had all the ingredients that Giant unsurprisingly didn’t have this week – mirin, soba noodles, tamari, orange flower water. On the way there, I saw a farmer’s market, and thought I might stop in on the way back to get a couple of tomatoes.

The organic market was a wonderland, a little Whole Foods, and they had all kinds of stuff that I’ve seen mentioned in Heidi’s recipes but never seen in person. (Although no orange flower water.) I bought what I needed and drove back to the farmer’s market. The one in my town is pretty sad and overly expensive compared to what farmers’ markets in much more fertile, sunny, populous places must be like (Florida, California, etc.), but it was kind of nice all the same: people milling about, friendly farmer faces, and a clarinet quartet from a local high school to accompany our browsing. I got my tomatoes and, walking back to my car, noticed how good the sun felt on my face.

Since receiving a second-degree burn from sitting in the summer sun in Louisiana for 45 minutes, and since reading repeatedly that my skin type is at the highest risk for skin cancer, and since seeing the leathery chest of a woman I know who’s spent a lot of time outside and in tanning beds, who’s aging into her sixties with shocking rapidity, I have tried to stay out of the sun as much as I possibly can. 50 SPF has to be reapplied to my skin about every hour, and I still burn through the sunscreen in certain areas. So it’s just best for me to stay in the shade. But despite all this, I’m a sun-baby; I love feeling it on my skin, love being outside, love the heat. Feeling it on my face while I walked back to my car with my tomatoes, I wondered if this was what I needed to do.

What followed was a mini-adventure in trying and failing to use our community pool. It’s not worth relating. Instead, I drove to MP’s house. They have a pool and were not home (and are always encouraging us to use the pool, although BF doesn’t like the outdoors and I’m not really a pool person). I slathered on my 50 SPF and laid full out in the sun for about half an hour. Afterward, I dipped in the pool to cool off, changed into my yoga togs, and went to teach.

Last night, despite still being sore and weary from teaching (more on that another time), I felt a hundred times better. I think some vitamin D was exactly what I needed. I got a little sun (through the sunscreen) on my face, but it’s not a bad burn, and I think the color makes me look a bit better, actually. And I still feel good this morning.

There’s more to say, but it can wait for another time.