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.

Checking the "Conference" Box

Today I registered for a conference. I'm not sure if it's the best conference in the world (the seminars sound interesting, but the online reviews aren't great), but there ought to be at least one or two solid takeaways I can bring back to my job. So cross your fingers that my first dip into the world of professional development turns out well!

I also... um... had six inches cut off of my hair. At least six. I hadn't planned on doing it, but I had just signed up for cooking classes and registered for this conference and gotten new adjustments in my yoga class and I was running around the office managing an event this afternoon and at one point I saw how disheveled I looked, with my eighteen-odd inches of hair shoved out of my face by two bobby pins, and I thought "this is not the image of success I want to portray."

And yes, it is completely lame that I actually thought the phrase "image of success," but I went out immediately after work and asked one of Dupont Circle's nice young gay salon artists to please make me over, and he did.

I guess that's what writing out New Year's goals will do to you. (I wonder what crazy thing I will do next?)

New Yorker Caption Contest Entry

Here's my entry for the week:

Happy Blue Year, Part IV: Goals

Last year, I wrote out a New Year's dream: to sing at an open-mic night. Didn't do it. (To be fair, I spent half of the year living in a town that didn't have open-mic night.) I think part of it was because my language was too vague; it was a dream that I wanted to do but didn't really take seriously.

So this morning, in the spirit of my "getting out there," etc., I wrote out a series of goals. These are different from resolutions because they are not necessarily mandatory; I resolve to clean up my Ashtanga practice because if I don't, I won't progress and I might even hurt myself again. But goals seem a bit more concrete than dreams, without the feeling of having "broken" them if I don't manage to achieve them all.

The first goal I wrote out was "cooking school" and you will be happy to know that in under an hour's time I had located and enrolled in monthly Middle Eastern cooking classes at the Lebanese Taverna. Already I feel like I have accomplished something!

Here are the others:

• Cooking vacation (that is to say, "find some kind of cooking-themed vacation package, enroll, etc.")
• Yoga vacation (there is actually a place that does a combination cooking/yoga resort vacation, but... it's in Kerala)
• Meet more people interested in Ashtanga (either through a Meetup.com-type-place or by simply posting a sign on the wall of my yoga studio which reads "Ashtanga Students' Happy Hour, because classes are so quiet and no one ever talks and wouldn't it be fun if we all got to know each other?")
• Attend 5-year college reunion
• Go to at least one conference in my field
• See Arcadia at the Folger Theatre
• Take day trip to NYC and see a taping of The Daily Show
• Take day trip to NYC and see TMBG live (see, that's why that $50 AB&B gift certificate will come in handy)
• Enter the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest... every week
• Eat at The Grill From Ipanema (but not alone)
• Eat at Lauriol (ditto; see, I walk by both of these restaurants several times a week and I've always wanted to go in but never have)
• See the Richard Avedon Portraits of Power exhibit (is running through Jan. 25, so had better get moving)
• Start attending open-mic nights both to meet new people and to see if it's something I want/would be able to do

... and two more which are secrets.

What's interesting is how many of these goals are ridiculously achievable. What's stopped me before from doing these kinds of things was a misplaced sense of frugality, which in retrospect I took a little too far (trying to save $15 by not going to SPX was idiotic). But I have my little nest egg tucked away and so it is about time to start exploring the city a little more.

And I've already enrolled in cooking classes! Woo-hoo!

Happy Blue Year, Part III: Indebleu

So last night I went to Indebleu, to a "mixer" for people in the DC area who had registered with AirBed and Breakfast. (AB&B is a place where people, literally, rent out their airbeds or spare rooms to travelers who want a cheap place to stay. In DC, it's specializing in inauguration rentals. Would much recommend over, say, Craigslist; I posted an inauguration rental on AB&B and it got rented within the week.)

I was a little disappointed -- with Indebleu, not with AB&B. If you go ahead and click on the Indebleu link you'll see what I thought the place would be like; but when I got there it was just a bar, and instead of playing the jazz-mood-music they play on the website, they had several giant televisions, all tuned to The King of Queens.

In short, I was overdressed.

The AB&B hosts were great; they had goody bags for everyone with a toothbrush and toothpaste and a $50 gift certificate if we ever wanted to stay somewhere. (Which I do. But that is another post for another time.) I was kind of more excited about the toothbrush than I was about anything else that happened that evening; as a mixer it was 95% female and we spent a lot of time standing around trying to make conversation, but getting a free toothbrush was pretty awesome, especially because that very afternoon I had accidentally dropped my old toothbrush behind the toilet.

So there you go. But I put myself "out there," as it were, and that's a start.

Now I'm going to go brush my teeth!

Happy Blue Year, Part II: Resolutions

All right. So my first resolution is pretty easy. I need to clean up my yoga practice. It didn't get sloppy while I was doing the modified practice (I had pulled a rib muscle and my teacher put me on some modified asanas); it got sloppy afterwards, when I began to catch myself doing things that were sort-of-halfway between "modified" and "full."

This essentially means I need to focus my attention a little more on what I'm doing, and start going to class more often!

My second resolution is to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that I get invited to a NYE party next year. This means that I need to put myself out there and start meeting new people. (I am not, necessarily, very good at this.)

Happy Blue Year, Part I

Sorry I didn't do a New Year's post... spent most of NYE filled with gloom and doom and did not want to add that to teh blogosphere.

Why gloom and doom?

I wasn't invited to a single NYE party.

Part of it, I know, was because nearly everyone I knew took off for vacation last week, and no one was really keeping track of who was in the city when, and nothing got organized.

But then I met a group of friends for a New Year's Day brunch, fresh back from their vacations, and they were all talking about the parties they had been to in DC.

And I got pretty gloomy because no one had asked me to go anywhere. (At one point, I had even tried to invite myself to a party and it didn't work out.)

And yes, you can say "then why didn't you throw the party and invite them?" and it comes back to "well, everyone was on vacation last week..."

So there you go.