The Pee Post

So there was this article on Jezebel about Susie Orbach, who wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue and just published a new book titled Bodies which is about (obvs) loving our bodies. Orbach is all about telling women to stop having these weird relationships with food/hunger/overeating/dieting, and to prove the point Jezebel links to an Orbach quote:

It’s very hard—when you have a population that is disturbed by eating—to know how to eat the right amount of food without going nuts.

The only way out of that is knowing what hunger is and what satisfaction is the same way we know what peeing is. That could be the only guide.

At first glance that quote seems to hold up. But when I thought about it I realized that I, like many people, have a bit of a complicated relationship with peeing too. Complicated in the same way that my relationship with eating is. Consider this:

1. The first thing I do in the morning is pee, even if I don't have to.
2. The last thing I do before bed is pee, even if I don't have to.
3. Sometimes I pee just because friends are peeing.
4. Sometimes I want to pee just because someone else mentioned pee.
5. Sometimes even thinking about pee makes me want to pee.
   
6. Sometimes I pee just because I know I won't be able to pee again for a while.
7. Sometimes I pee just because I want to see what the inside of a bathroom is like.
8. Sometimes I pee because I need to get away from my desk for a moment.
9. Sometimes I pee just because I'm in the bathroom (doing something unrelated like brushing my teeth) and the toilet is, like, right there.
   
10. I always have to pee extra when I'm nervous, stressed, or tired.
    

Substitute "eat" for "pee" (and "refrigerator" for "toilet" in number 9) and it's the same thing. Sure, we all know when we really have to pee (and when we're really hungry), but many of us pee for unrelated, emotional/social/habitual reasons. Just like we eat.

Or am I the only one who does this? ^__^

(Thought I'd throw that one out there to the blogosphere for your amusement. )

Thoughts, In Order, From A Weekend Ashtanga Intensive

This instructor has gigantic feet. Like, Sideshow Bob-sized.

I am the least-experienced person here.

I don't care if I am the least-experienced person here, the instructor just asked who here didn't know how to find her bandhas and I am absolutely going to raise my hand.

And I am the only person who raised her hand.

Bandhas are awesome!

And ha! Now other people are raising their hands and asking the instructor to help them find their bandhas!

Oh--that's why Lululemon sells "yoga thongs." (I wonder about my own panty lines for about two seconds and then decide not to care.)

Mula bandha uses the same muscles as holding in a fart. I think that's why I seem to take naturally to it.

(Then we start the Primary Series, and my brain stops churning around so much. Mostly it thinks "I love yoga," if it thinks anything at all.)

(Later, when we are working on jump-backs/jump-throughs:)

All of the best students are in the front rows, and they're all wearing Lululemon. And all of the students having difficulty are in the back rows, and they're all--like me--wearing generic "yoga pants" and t-shirts. It's strange that there's not at least one student up at the front wearing an old t-shirt. Is there a correlation between people who have long, flexible hamstrings and people who have both the means and the desire to spend $150 on a pair of Lululemon yoga pants?

They have better hair than I do, too; the women up at the front in their Lululemon. They have better hair and better clothes and fantastic hamstrings.

I wonder if it's a class thing; they're all my age or younger, but they're more advanced at Ashtanga than I am because they started taking it earlier. And they started taking it earlier because they had the opportunity to take it earlier; and that means they came from a position of social or economic privilege, which means of course they would choose the $150 yoga pants.

But that's being presumptuous (and mean). Maybe it's a value thing; at this point the people in the front rows value their yoga practice so much that to do it in anything other than the best athletic wear would be to do it a disservice. But does that mean that those of us in the back value this class less? Or value ourselves less? That doesn't make any sense; and yet the truth of the matter is that the people in the front have expensive yoga gear and great hamstrings and the people in the back have old t-shirts and difficult hamstrings and there has got to be a reason why.

Why do I have short, inflexible hamstrings? Is it my genetics or my personality? And if I practice for a bazillion years will I ever be able to lift my leg over my head?

I am so grateful whenever the instructor comes to work on my body. He could be spending more time up at the front with the Lululemon crowd, but he seems to like working in the back rows best.

(During the passive stretching exercises:)

Damn it, I didn't feel any pain until the instructor said "don't pay attention to the pain!"

Now it really hurts.

Really, really hurts.

$%$(*%&#!!!!

"If you try to run away from pain, the pain will never go away. You have to face it head-on and confront it and then it will start to go away slowly. This is advice for all aspects of your life." This is uncomfortably true. Now I'm sweating, in pain, trying to cheat by adjusting my weight to get out of the pain, making the pain worse, and remembering the times in my life where I avoided confrontation and everything turned out worse off for the avoidance.

This is the part of yoga intensive where I feel like a complete failure.

(And at the end, during the question-and-answer period:)

So this instructor started Ashtanga in "middle age" and has only been doing it for ten years? That means that when I'm 37 I could be that awesome. And on Third Series. (Never mind that I have been steadily working on Marichyasana D for two months and still haven't progressed past it.)

Wait--most Ashtangis, including teachers, don't actually practice full series every day, six days a week? This is the part of yoga intensive where I feel like... well, for better or worse, I do get up and meet my mat every day. Which puts me ahead of most other students, apparently. (Never mind that I have been steadily working on Marichyasana D for two months and still can't make my fingers touch.)

Is the natural path for a talented yoga student to evolve into a yoga teacher? This instructor never did yoga until he started Ashtanga ten years ago and now he's teaching it; and half of the advanced students are training to be teachers. I love Ashtanga but I don't think I'd ever want to go into the teaching track; my years of teaching piano lessons have de-romanticized the whole concept.

Everyone is going out for a party now. My workplace needs me to come in and work on a project this evening, so I don't go. Very disappointing. But I like my job, and I want to do the best at my job that I can do, so... off to work!

I have got to get myself a yoga thong.

Not A Soap

Thirty seconds ago, this was going to be a very different post.

To wit: today we all got Christmas presents on behalf of our office. What was really neat was that everybody got a different thing. Some people got gourmet cookies, some people got a CD, etc. When I opened my present, I squee-ed with excitement because underneath the wrapping paper was... a bag of scented soaps!

I was so thrilled that I immediately went to the person who had given all the gifts, and thanked this person effusively and with much gratitude for giving me this bag of soaps, because they were so pretty and I love soap! and what a great present!

And I was going to write a blog post about how fun it was to get some soap after I spent so much time blogging that I wasn't going to give any soap because I am the only person who actually gets excited over soap.

But first, of course, I had to take the soaps out of their little bag.

When I undid the (to my credit, moderately opaque) wrapping, I discovered that all the colorful little square-shaped bars of soap had wicks in them.

They were candles.

Part of me wants to imagine that the person who gave me these candles gave out enough presents that maybe, when I came in to thank her for the soap, she might have believed that she actually gave me soap (especially because I thanked her with such genuine excitement), but the kind of person who would take the time to give a personalized present to everyone in the office isn't the kind of person who forgets who got what.

In short, I made an idiot of myself today. (On the plus side, I got some pretty candles.)

Still More Of This Picture-Taking Stuff

The sign is a little blurry, but it says "Free Holiday Treat! Get a free cookie when you buy a Fresh Value Meal!" Someone should send it to Fail Blog with the label HEALTH-CONSCIOUS FAIL.

One of the selling points at the National Zoo's ZooLights exhibit was the opportunity to get your picture taken in front of a snow globe. When we went, this is what happened: we walked up and saw a person in a panda suit dancing around inside a giant inflatable snowglobe. Suddenly, the snowglobe begins to deflate. The person freaks out and pulls the panda head off. The "event manager" tells her to stay inside the snowglobe and it is reinflated (while she is still holding the panda head, looking both terrified and miserable). Once the snowglobe is back up, the woman puts the head back on and starts right back up dancing. My friends and I all whipped out our cell phones to commemorate this moment.

At the Target. Footie pajamas for women. And not just this particular one. There was a whole aisle of them. Mmmm... sexy.

Now, I don't remember how long it took to play a game of Clue when I was a kid, but I was very disappointed to see it miniaturized and advertised (clearly to parents) as something that will only take 20 minutes, tops. What -- you can't even give your kids the full half-hour anymore?

And a partridge floating above a cypress bush!

Too Many Stories!

I have way too many blog posts to write and not enough time to tell them!

Let's see...

• I tried to make laddoos using a recipe from the internet, and they turned out like laddon'ts.
• I had a party! It was awesome! There are pictures!
• President Bush's email address is nuts and OMG Hillary SoS and Obama is so cool and I loved the article about Michelle Obama's booty and should I be one of those people who rents out her apartment for inauguration weekend????
• I also have all these other pictures I've been taking, like the one of the Epic Fail sign, and I need to post them so you all can see them!
• I bought a pair of gloves which is good because I didn't have gloves before, and they're the kind that go part of the way up my arm so they keep the whole thing warm, and they've got a diamond pattern knitted into the back and they're really pretty.
• I've gotten to the point in Ashtanga where my yoga teacher is assisting me into getting into more complicated postures, and now I'm all "should I be going to class every day so she can assist me more?"
• Also I read this Ashtanga book which was all about focusing my mind and stuff, and I'm like "I can do that, but then I would have to stop doing my daily practice while I play last night's Daily Show/Colbert Report on Hulu, and I don't know if it's worth the trade off, even if following the drishtis promises me inner peace and enlightenment."
• I've made three more loaves of bread! They're still totally weird shapes because I've been baking them in my Dutch oven, but tomorrow I'm going to buy a loaf pan and that should solve the problem.
• I saw Christopher Plummer speak tonight, and it was sad because he looked nothing like Captain Von Trapp but at the same time I wish that when I'm 78 years old I could be just as articulate and witty and intelligent as he is, never mind the face wattles.
• Today's Questionable Content is just like the inside of my head is, most of the time. ^__^

I guess maybe I don't have to write most of these posts anymore. ^__^ Though I do want to share the ones that have the pictures.

One More Comics Observation: Batuik, Where Are Your Flying Cars?

If Lynn Johnston's comic strip shows life at it's permanent "For Better," Tom Batuik's Funky Winkerbean shows life at its perpetual "For Worse."

Becky Blackburn gets accepted to Juilliard and then gets in a car accident and loses her violin-playing arm; lovable band director Harry L. Dingle goes deaf; and the strip's "heroine," Lisa Moore, begins the story as a knocked-up teenager and (after suffering many dismal life events in between) ended her arc last year when she died of breast cancer.

And then there was the whole "Wally Winkerbean in Iraq" subplot, which, while it was prescient and important, did not end happily for Wally.

Anyway. So right after Batuik killed off Wally and Lisa, he decided to "time-jump" the strip ahead by ten years. He said that he didn't want his strip to get stuck in "extended grieving," and he wanted to start writing about the lives of the original cast's children.

Great. So now he's writing about Summer and Rana (whose parents, before the time jump, were killed by land mines in Afghanistan) and Cory instead of Becky and Lisa and Wally (smart choice, since two of the three are no longer living).

But now his comic strip is set in a future ten years ahead of where we are now. And, aside from character ages, he does not reference this in any way.

And so I ask you this, Mr. Batuik: What happened with the Iraq War? Did Obama just finish his second term as president? What's the must-have technology that took the place of the iPhone? What about the recession and the energy crisis?

And where are the flying cars?????

Scratch That -- Reverse It.

Breaking News: FBorFW is not ending after all.

Not fair. I do not want to get emotionally involved with this strip again. It was all going to end on the 30th, gosh darn it!!!!!!

If The Last Words Aren't "For Better Or For Worse," Some People Stand To Lose A Lot Of Money

The comic strip For Better or For Worse is scheduled to end on August 30.

Well, not exactly "end." Stephen Pastis summed it up best:



However, Lynn Johnston has confirmed that the last new strip will run on Aug. 30, five days after the August 25 "Lizthony" wedding strip which for some bizarre reason is taking place on the fifth anniversary of Anthony's first comic-strip marriage (to the ill-fated Therese), and spoiler-types have confirmed that it will be a lengthy "here's what's going to happen to the rest of the characters for the rest of their lives."

There is already all kinds of snark going around about what wonderful things Johnston has planned for her characters (Michael winning a Pulitzer Prize, April marrying Gerald). Ever since it was leaked that Johnston's marriage had fallen apart, people began noticing that her strips started centering only on the "for better" part of life, as if she were insisting her characters have all the fantasy happiness she wished she were experiencing herself. (Seriously. Read the link. It explains why she decided to pull a 180 and pass Liz off to Anthony instead of Paul.) That's all well and good, but it turned her strip from a tongue-in-cheek look at the ups-and-downs of daily life into a parade of unrealistic Mary Sue adventures, which, in turn... prompted all the snark.

Anyway. The thought of a "here's what will happen for the rest of their lives" ending focused entirely on success and happiness made me think of how another author, with equally beloved characters, handled a similar situation.

From Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys:

It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it. But as that somewhat melodramatic conclusion might shock my gentle readers, I will refrain, and forestall the usual question, 'How did they end?' by briefly stating that all the marriages turned out well. The boys prospered in their various callings; so did the girls, for Bess and Josie won honours in their artistic careers, and in the course of time found worthy mates. Nan remained a busy, cheerful, independent spinster, and dedicated her life to her suffering sisters and their children, in which true woman's work she found abiding happiness. Dan never married, but lived, bravely and usefully, among his chosen people till he was shot defending them, and at last lay quietly asleep in the green wilderness he loved so well, with a lock of golden hair upon his breast, and a smile on his face which seemed to say that Aslauga's Knight had fought his last fight and was at peace. Stuffy became an alderman, and died suddenly of apoplexy after a public dinner. Dolly was a society man of mark till he lost his money, when he found congenial employment in a fashionable tailoring establishment. Demi became a partner, and lived to see his name above the door, and Rob was a professor at Laurence College; but Teddy eclipsed them all by becoming an eloquent and famous clergyman, to the great delight of his astonished mother. And now, having endeavoured to suit everyone by many weddings, few deaths, and as much prosperity as the eternal fitness of things will permit, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall for ever on the March family.

Alcott came this close to ending it with "rocks fall, everyone dies." ^__^ Which I have always thought was just fantastic.

We'll see if Johnston pulls off her denouement with half the class.

I Was A Dork In High School, Okay????

In "honor" of the completely unnecessary second X-Files movie, I'll share a little song parody I wrote back in high school.

It's meant to be a take on "Best of All Possible Worlds" from Candide, which you can hear here. (You should watch; it's got Kristin Chenoweth.)

Chris Carter is standing at the head of a classroom. His students are Mulder, Scully, Skinner, and Krycek.

CC:
Let us review
Chapter eleven!

Students:
Paragraph two,
Axiom... one???

CC:
Once one dismisses the rest of all possible shows
One finds that this is the best of all possible shows!

Students:
Once one dismisses the rest of all possible shows
One finds that this is the best of all possible shows!

CC:
Pray classify
Black oil and green goo:

Skinner:
Black oil clouds eyes.

Krycek:
Green goo eats through shoes!

CC:
There is a reason for everything under the sun

Scully:
Is there a reason why we all said "Axiom one?"

Skinner:
Objection!
What about bees?

CC:
Twas bees that led to Scully's fall
When she was there in Mulder's hall
Oh, happy bliss!
Potential kiss!
The shippers were excited!

Krycek:
Instead, love unrequited!

CC:
If bees had not been introduced
In season four first sighted
That kiss would no doubt have produced
A liaison which would reduce
This show to merely twaddle!

Now on to Aristotle!

Mankind is one,
All men are brothers.

Students:
Some hybrids come
From human mothers.

CC:
It's understood in this best of all possible shows
All's for the good in this best of all possible shows!

Mulder:
Objection!
What about corn?

CC:
Though corn may seem a yummy treat
Our corn you wouldn't want to eat
Because when grown, it has been shown
To hold the black oil virus!

Students:
A threat that doth inspire us!

CC:
I know that you all want to go
And fight the black oil virus,
But really, if you all must know,
We haven't had corn on the show
Since X-Files: Fight The Future.

Students:
A broken mytharc suture.

CC:
Mulder, it's me
Sure, fine, whatever...

Students:
Mulder, it's me
Sure, fine, whatever...

CC:
Proving that this is the best of all possible shows!
Some love, no kisses, the best of all possible shows.

Believe: The truth is out there!
I made this!

The ensemble continues repeating "Believe: The truth is out there" and "I made this!" in various challenging harmonies until they reach the climax:

Believe the truth is out there in this
Best of all possible, possible, possible shows!

Chris Carter leaps onto a table.

CC:
I know the truth is out there!
I!
Made!
THIS!!!!!!!