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One Reason I like Yoga Better Than Benchpressing

July 20, 2010

Trying Handstand in Middle of Floor

I have a hard time standing up straight.  This is not totally a function of age.  I remember the father of a good friend coming up behind me as a teenager and jabbing a knuckle into the middle of my spine.  I’m not sure if this was a sign of my closeness to this particular family, or his abhorrence of slouching. All I can say is that his own kids had excellent posture.

My current style of yoga, which manages to be both speedy and desultory at once, does not do that much to relieve the natural compression of my spine.    (Part of the problem is that standing up straight takes not just flexibility but strength and attention and speed yoga tends to sidestep these.)  That said, the one yoga posture that I find almost instantly makes me straighter, taller, perkier, is a handstand.  They are just wonderful – for the inside of the solar plexus as well as the out;  they seem to literally take a weight off of your chest; they illuminate the momentary lightness of being.

Unfortunately, I don’t do enough of them.  In my home yoga practice, they rely upon the shutting of a particular door—this requires moving my voluminous yoga mats, taking down the Robert Pattinson calendar which hangs about the place my feet reach, and then too, the Tibetan Thangka which some embarrassed family member has hung over the Robert Pattinson calendar.   This is a laborious operation, which does not fit into my daily speed yoga routine.

I could try some handstands in the middle of the floor or on another wall, but you’d be surprised (i) how intimidating it can be do to a handstand in the middle of the floor—when you are afraid of falling, it’s very hard to kick up; and (ii) how hard it is to find good wall and kicking space in the average New York City apartment.

So right now I’m in Florida.  By the beach.  At my parents’ house.  I tend to take a break from yoga practice at my parents’ – partly because I am pre-occupied and partly because I don’t like doing yoga indoors in airconditioning, or outside on a concrete patio.  The beach is also not great –too sunny, too uneven.

But today, my spine just couldn’t take it anymore.   I cartwheeled in the surf.  Then, despite the lack of wall, I kicked up into numerous sort-of handstands.  (A manic nature and extreme short-sightedness are very useful in these endeavors.  It ‘s kind of a variation on the possible silence of a tree falling in the deserted forest—if you can’t see the people looking at you, is that truly the sound of snickering? )

For a few brief moments, I could feel my solar plexus bloom like a flower on high-speed film, my spine correspondingly straighten.

I’m sure there are gym exercises that give this same feeling of upper back strength.  Push-ups?  Bench-presses?  But I am afraid that all I could bench press would be an empty iron pole, which would be kind of, you know, ignominious, while a handstand—a handstand—has a both inner and outer glory.  With or without a wall.   Or watchers.

Categories: Stress, yoga
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Little Sleep, Little Function, Little Sloth

July 17, 2010

Sloth (Not Elephant)

My husband and I have an ongoing argument about a universal human sleep standard.  He insists that people–all people–need many many hours of sleep for even minimal efficiency;  I counter with the variable sleep needs of different people (citing myself among those who need little); I talk about the efficiency of having extra time to do things in (even if that extended time is burdened with some level of fatigue.)

Sometimes, however, I find that I really do not function all that well without sleep.  Some hints:

  1. At 1.am., folding freshly-cleaned clothes, I come across, in a laundry basket of towels and underwear, the only pair of glasses I own that do not hurt my eyes when working on the computer.  These are old glasses, whose frame has one stem that had been very loose. They are now old glasses, whose frame holds one stem that is not loose.  The lenses are currently very very clean, and shiny.
  2. It is approximately 2:15 a.m.  I am wearing glasses that only hook onto one ear.  I am considering downloading old drawings of donkeys to my computer, since everyone thinks I only draw elephants.  Yes, I know that you have to get up at 4:45 to catch a plane, and that I have not yet packed.  It feels somehow easier to think about donkeys.
  3. It is 2:30 a.m.  I’ll figure out the packing in the morning… that is, in…uh… two hours.  I begin to re-read an old Terry Pratchett novel about wizards whose heads are always up in the clouds, but who somehow manage to come out all right in the end.
  4. 6:30 a.m.  Somehow, despite the repeated last minute changes of clothes, and glasses, I have gotten to the airport.  Feeling extremely efficient, I take my computer out of my suitcase, rather than my little composition book,  and type the original first sentence of this blog as follows: “sometimes you are all too anxious that, in fact, you don’t function very well without sleep.”  I feel just amazingly efficient, though I also worry that the guy next to me is reading over my shoulder.  He, on the other hand, mumbles something about Kansas City while my flight is slated for Orlando.  Hmmm….
  5. After leaning some time on an Delta steward’s counter, I am too tired to be pleased that I’ve been bumped to first class, though I have to say this big wide seat is awfully niiiiii….zzzzz.
  6. Later in the day.  I keep trying to think of some animal to draw, something other than an elephant.  I really can’t come up with anything;  I just feel too tired, too slow, too lazy….
  7. And where did I pack those glasses?

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Body-Mind Dichotomy – Who’s the Daddy? (With Elephants on a Napkin….)

July 13, 2010

On the napkin at the restaurant while thinking these things through

Increasingly I realize that I really don’t own my body; if anything, my body owns me.

I don’t use the word “ownership” to refer to title, so much as in the Pedro Martinez sense of “who’s your daddy?” i.e. who dominates.

I use the word “me” in the sense of personality/soul/ what makes me lively, gloomy, manic, depressed, loving; what makes up my understanding of myself.  I suppose a philosophical type would think of “me” as the “watcher”; that part of my brain which observes everything, including, sometimes, itself.

My first conscious memory of my body’s overriding vote in matters of self-image is from my childhood, hearing  my voice on audio tape.  Back then, it came in big brown reels; it was slick, difficult to manage.  (The old tape recorders remind me of slippery sewing machines, except that they used brown tape instead of thread and tried to stitch a past moment into the present one.)

Agh!  My voice sounded like a baby’s.  A baby’s. When it came on, I was mortified, crushed, had to leave the room.  I had imagined myself to sound sophisticated, an echo of Julie Andrews.  That babyfied voice could not be me, and yet I knew that it was.

These older days, I have the surprise that my body is not “me” every single time I look in the mirror, every time I hear my voice on an answering machine.  There’s always a small second of surprise, sometimes even shock, absolute non-self-recognition.  Worst of all, every time I get familiar (which does not happen much), it changes;  the body refuses to stay put, pat, in place.  (It droops, it sags, it grows, it bags.)

My surprise at my body is one way in that it continually tells me that I’m not its daddy (or mommy).   This doesn’t even begin to address the problem of what the body feels like:the lungs that are suddenly winded, the hips that want to sit down, the eyes that just won’t focus properly.

All that complaining!  And I’m not even someone who actually suffers physical pain. In that case, the body would really take up the reins.

The good news, I guess, is that when Pedro Martinez taunted the Yankees with the question of who their Daddy was, he went on to lose badly and to be taunted right back.

My body is not really Pedro.  (Somehow I know I should bring up George Steinbrenner here, but just can’t.)  And I don’t truly want to taunt it, or to cause it to lose anything (except perhaps a few pounds.)  Still, it would be  nice to see the taunted sometimes come out on top; for the “me” in this case to suddenly feel some identification with itself.

It only happens every once in a while, sometimes even when you hardly think about it, when, for example, you are just walking, simply walking along.

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On Hot, Tired Days – A Passage To Your Inner India

July 8, 2010

Inner India (No Disrespect Intended)

I thought this morning of a new solution for those, like me, who are having a hard time with the hot muggy doldrums of mid-summer:  find your inner India.

Stop it–don’t groan.  (Especially you who have actually been to India.)

I’m not advising you to find the inner India of flies, squalor, unremitting aridity or humidity (depending upon your location and the monsoon cycle), the smell of burning polyurethane—

I mean the India of cool marble floors where your bare feet moistly slab slab slab, the India of shaded mosaic archways of palaces…er…mausoleums, the India of leafy Banyan trees and purification baths (delicious even if taken with bucket and cup), of endless people to watch and to be watched by, people who squat imperturbably in the midst of chaos or sameness for a very very long time, certain, or nearly certain, that there will be another life beside the one that they are currently enduring; the India of hot spiced chai, and where there is airconditioning, of air so frigid you feel your lips turning blue.

Keep in mind those lessons that are available nearly everywhere but are so quickly learned upon the Subcontinent,  i.e. (i) that there are many many forces beyond your control; (ii)  that yes, you have been cheated but there’s no use worrying about it; and (iii) that you should be really really careful of what you eat.

Don’t expect even that little boy who seemed so charming to have sold you real saffron.  (Is pink food so terrible?   He had a beautiful smile, a genuine chuckle.)

Above all, even when you feel like you are wading through an opaque sameness of muggy weekday after muggy weekday, try to find the good in the difficult, the wonderful in the ordinary (the cow in the doorway, the bubble in the Naan, the cardomom in what would otherwise still be wonderful tea).   Don’t be rushed,  don’t let anyone pressure you,  find a hat that you will actually wear.

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Few Clothes in Egg-Frying NYC – Tu-be or not Tu-be

July 7, 2010

Wishful Thinking? (On ManicDDaily's part)

One thing that has taken me aback in these last few egg-frying days in New York City is how few clothes women have been wearing in public.

I’m someone who has always worn a fair amount of clothing in public.

One reason for this is a lot of my travel has been to hot places which are also very prurient places, places where women, people in general, cover up (i) because of cultural modesty (in situations where people live in tight quarters, they sometimes seem to use cloth as a boundary), and (ii) to try to protect their arms, shoulders, eyes, heads, from blistering sunshine.

I tell myself I’ve adopted such practices—longish sleeves, highish necks, loose clothing—in the name of comfort and good sense.  But another reason for the cover-up, and perhaps the truer one, is simply that I grew up with a strong bodily sense of original sin.  This is different from traditional original sin in which the soul is embued with innate moral failings;  rather it is a sense that the body is embued with innate imperfections, imperfections which, if not corrected by diet and exercise, are at best camouflauged.   (I’m not sure whether to blame this on Twiggy or my mom.)

Whatever the reason, tube dresses were never my style.

I seem to be an anomaly in the modern U.S., however, at least on 102 degree days.  I find it frankly breath-taking.

So many breasts, so many thighs, so many fleshy bits, bits that in my sheltered mind are usually not seen outside a dressing room or swimming pool.

So much confidence, so much nonchalance, so much skin!  And so many many different attitudes (from “God I’m hot!” to “God I’m hot!” to “God I’m hot!”)

I vary between admiration (for the freedom and unself-consciousness), to understanding (of why certain other cultures are so very hostile to us), to confusion (on one level it seems anti-feminist and self-negating while on another it seems incredibly feminist and self-accepting), to chagrin (I don’t always want to see all that skin), to–

God I’m hot.

Categories: elephants, Stress, Uncategorized
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More About Guns (And Personhood)

July 4, 2010

Elephant With Gun (Sorry, a Repeat on a Busy Day)

I’ve been thinking a lot about guns lately – not particularly because it’s the 4th of July –but because this blog has gotten recent thoughtful comments from someone who is much better informed about gun types and usage than I am.  Also, I’ve been staying in a house with someone who has an active interest in recreational shooting.

I am a non-apologetic supporter of fairly restrictive gun control.   I live in a city; I move in crowds, largely on public transportation.  But my antipathy for readily available guns does not just arise from the fact that I don’t want to get shot in a public space.  (I don’t.)

It doesn’t even arise from the fact that both me and my dog Pearl get totally freaked out by the crack of gunfire up here in the uncrowded countryside.  (We do.)

What really concerns me is madness both as a term for anger, and a term for craziness (they really do overlap.)

What concerns me even more is the combination of madness and power.

Guns are the metallic distillation of power; they pack, as it were, a very great deal of punch; brass knuckles raised to the nth degree.

I’m guessing that punch is one of the reasons recreational shooting is so popular; I’m guessing that it provides a taste of power, excitement, control, release, kickback; a discipline at which one can become skilled and also charged.

I do understand that.  Sometimes you feel like you are jumping out of your skin; sometimes even very cool humans have to physically let off steam.

I’m not saying that gun owners use guns in that way.  I just don’t have the experience to know.  The only time I ever fired a handgun I fell down.

But I do have experience of human nature; of how angry, crazed, mad, people can become, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes less so.   I especially worry about how that type of anger, madness, may be abetted by a culture that supports a “tit for a tat” as a short-form equation of justice and also as an ultimate deterrent.

I know that hostility for guns may come more naturally to me than others.  I was raised by a mom who was a longtime pacifist; a dad who was an old school turn-the-other-cheek Christian.  More importantly perhaps, I I’ve been lucky enough to have had enough emotional support and societal favor that my ego is not continually on the line.   A sense of personal validity was, thankfully, instilled a long time ago.   As a result, it takes a fair amount of aggravation to make me feel truly “dissed;” even when I have that aggravation, I’m pretty good at just (eventually) swallowing it.

I am sure that most gun owners are not that different from me; that they don’t misuse their guns or assault weapons, view them as tools to support their personhood.

But the fact is that there are many people who do misuse guns; sometimes serially, sometimes just a terrible once.  The availability of a handgun or assault weapon can allow a breaking point to break a very great deal.

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Feeling Loss in Bright Green of Early July – Giotto Blue

July 2, 2010

Giotto Blue

I am right now in a beautiful country place.  My eyes are bathed in a bright light green.  I’m even wearing a light green sweater so I am literally surrounded by the color.

Though I’m also sitting beneath bright blue—not sky, but a screened-in porch, which I like to think of as a Giotto blue.  The paint does not shimmer like the green (or true Giotto blue, for that matter) but it’s still quite lovely.

All this loveliness.  It’s an odd time to think about death, but it’s amazing to me how the thought crops up.  “Crops” seems an anachronistic term till I think suddenly of the “Grim Reaper,” and then it all makes sense.  The fact is that just about anything that grows, dies.  (See how I manage to hedge that—“just about anything.”  How about “anything” plain and simple?)

Now you see it, now you don’t.

I’m not quite sure why I am thinking about this on a 4th of July weekend.  Maybe it’s because when you return to a place that you have long returned to, especially a country place, where you see people you have long seen, but only periodically—you become very conscious of time’s passage.

So here I am in all this bright green, nearly the same bright green as in every single July I’ve spent in the last twenty to thirty years, but the people walking around the green are, well—balder, shakier, heavier, thinner, frailer, greyer, and, in the case of those who were very young in past years, perhaps even more beautiful, and also now able to cook.

Not quite so many day lilies by the garage, more down by the pond.

In my manicddaily way, I focus intensely on these kinds of changes, and can get very sad about them.  Manicddaily kinds of people tend to be extremely good at calling up past losses and imagining prospective ones.   I can become quite mournful even in the midst of what should be joyful moments at the absolute inevitability of loss, disappearance, death.

Some say that the best response to these types of feelings is “to be more in the moment”.  I’m not so sure.  For me, that poignant sense of loss is part of the moment (even if just the moment as experienced by my head or hormones.)

Okay, so maybe a better answer is to be more in the physical moment;  to focus on the coolness of the breeze against your skin, the green before your eyes, the gently warm sun lighting parts of both that green and skin.

But, sometimes the understanding of loss is part of  your physical experience of the moment as well as your mental experience, part of your very chemistry.

For me, one effective (though perhaps obvious) way to deal with this chemistry of loss is to try to summon up some kind of appreciation.  Gratitude  Even just relief.  Any one of these can work as a neutralizer, a base to the acid.

After all, I’m still right here, thinking these things through.  (Hurrah!)   And that mix of green and sun and breeze and Giotto blue is really quite wonderful, and also amazingly enduring.  At least, for now.

Categories: Stress, Uncategorized, Vicissitudes of Life
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On the Dark Side of Eclipse – What To Do When the Escapist Mind Candy Just Doesn’t Taste Sweet?

July 1, 2010

Feeling footloose and a bit depressed tonight, the night after seeing Twilight Saga Eclipse. Such a very unsatisfying dose of Pattinson!  (It occurs to me that perhaps there is no such thing as a satisfying dose of Pattinson.)  But really, in this last movie, he is not so much the vampire as the “Man”, not as in THE man, or macho man, or, even delectable or  wonderful man, but as in guard guy, grim reaper, stern authority figure, nay-sayer.  (On top of that, he always seems to have a head-ache.)

One thing that the overly-stressed do not need more of is the Man.  With a head-ache.

It’s especially unfortunate because one quality Pattinson seems to genuinely emanate in real life is a fairly generous self-deprecating sense of humor.  But there’s very little humor allowed him here.  A touch of snideness maybe.  No generosity.

In the meantime, Lautner—ugh.  (Sorry, Team Jacob.)  He seems like a friend of your son’s or brother’s who comes in and cleans out the fridge.  (Through consumption not Ajax.)   When I see him I just think about having to wash someone’s gym clothes.  I’m sure he’s a sweet person–he comes across as a sweet enough person–but talk about luck.

What makes some people successful and others not?  Being in the right time and place?  The ability to bulk up?  (I hope not.)

In any case, I’ve just about given up on Twilight franchise for secret (or not so secret) escapism.  This, I’m afraid, puts me at a bit of a loss on the pop culture/vampire or other superish male/female hero front.   Especially since I haven’t been able to make myself watch a single full True Blood episode; I don’t think I could stomach one of the Steig Larrson films; and I somehow doubt that Horatio Hornblower is going to catch on.

What to do when the mind candy just isn’t very sweet?  Will I have to write my own?   (It just might be easier to bulk up.)

Categories: Robert Pattinson, Stress
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Triple-Dosing on Stieg Larsson

June 19, 2010

Biker Boot?

Okay, I’ll confess that one reason I’m so cranky today (see e.g. my earlier post complaining about World Cup 2010) is that in the past three days I’ve almost finished reading all of the Stieg Larsson trilogy that begins with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, moves on to The Girl Who Played with Fire, and (I hope) finishes with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  (I do understand that there’s part of a fourth book kicking around in a computer held by the long-time companion of Mr. Larsson, who died suddenly in 2004.)

Although the books follow the same characters (more or less), Book 1 and Books 2 and 3 are quite different from each other.  Book 1 is relatively self-contained, while 2 and 3 seem more like one separate, very long, book with a substantially different focus.  And yet that’s not true either:  Book 1 concentrates on a dysfunctional family and a corrupt and violent power structure; while Books 2 and 3 focus on a different dysfunctional family and an expanded corrupt and violent power structure.

One reason the books are so popular is the main female character of all three books, Lisbeth Salander, who, in my mind, is what results when Minnie Mouse meets Mighty Mouse meets Kevin Mitnick (world champion computer hacker), meets Bobbie Fisher, Joan Jett, Andrea Dworkin, House (the doctor on TV), and, in her teeny pair of steel tipped motorcycle boots, divides her time between tattoo parlor, boxing gym and math library.  (And, of course, her seventeen inch power book.)

What makes Lisbeth so appealing is that, despite the terrible abuse she’s suffered, she remains fundamentally moral, fearless, and, even compassionate.

Also, yes, she’s very very hip.

[Spoiler Alert–sort of.]  The books are good books, if not exactly great;  but they do very effectively tap into that most fearful of situations in which both the “bad guys” and the “supposed good guys”—that is, the authorities—are after you, where there’s virtually no one to turn to for help, where the powers-that-be cannot be trusted.  I know that’s not atypical in movie circles, but I’m not much of a movie person.  So, oddly, the books they bring to my mind are “children’s books”, namely the wonderful Sally Lockhart series by Phillip Pullman, especially The Tiger In The Well, in which Sally’s property and life are taken over by a faked husband with amazing ease.  (It’s Victorian England.)   (Actually, the Golden Compass books also work with this theme, which is probably particularly powerful for children, given the power of authority in their lives.)

It’s strange that the latest iteration of this theme arises in Sweden, a place not pictured by most Americans as particularly venal or sadistic.  (I guess it’s been a long time since Ingmar Bergman.)

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Blogging, Mania, Late Mornings, Late Nights, Stieg Larsson

June 17, 2010

One of the great things about writing a daily blog is that it gives you something to do at night.

One of the great things about writing that daily blog in the morning is that your night is suddenly amazingly, wonderfully, free.

I don’t mean to make not writing the blog sound so great—but, yesterday, after approximately eleven months of daily posts, the prospect of a blog-free evening felt well worth the  sinking anxiety that descended on me as I made my way  (later even than usual) to the office.

That feeling of freedom even felt worth the shoddy speed yoga I inflicted on myself (after using up all my morning yoga time on the deficiencies of presidential desks.)  (See yesterday’s post.)

When I came home last night, I told myself, gaily, that I’d make up for the shoddy yoga by going to the gym for a really good work-out.  Then I might even get to bed early.

Unfortunately, staying up till 2 a.m. can be habit-forming.   As is finding something to distract you at the gym.  (Yes, I do understand that it is probably not optimal to lift weights with a book on your lap.)

So, instead of focusing on triceps, or sleep, I poured myself into the immensely popular Steig Larsson book that’s been sitting on my shelf several months –The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I’m not quite sure why I’ve avoided the book—maybe  because a slightly pushy friend has been slightly pushing it;  maybe because I’d been warned that it describes (spoiler alert) some fairly sadistic violence against women.

The violence so far (I’m about ¾ through), has been manageable.  But, heeding the warnings, I forced myself to put the book down at around 2 before something so terrible happened that I would not be able to shut my eyes.   (I even left time–2-2:30 – to read something else for a while, something innocuous in the sexual violence department.)

Frankly, that discipline amazed me.  Even more amazing is the fact that I’m actually blogging in the A.M. again, instead of lying here in bed reading.  My mind suddenly tells me that this means  I’m planning to finish the book during the day somehow, and then buy the next one (the second in the trilogy by Larsson) for this evening.

Actually, I’m not sure I’d really call that discipline.

This, by the way, is one of the great things about mania—it always finds you something to do at night.

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