Author: Teel

Today I did the second twenty minute section of Yoga Zone’s Total Body Conditioning DVD.

I knew that since I was already physically sore and tired from dealing with the irrigation (see the blogcomic for today) that I might have trouble with some of the poses, and if I hadn’t set myself up to feel accountable to y’all yesterday, I would have oh-so-easily used my pre-existing exhaustion as a valid excuse to not do yoga. But hooray I did yoga anyway!

What I’m finding right now I’m best at in trying to follow these routines is screaming ‘FUCK YOU!!!‘ at the people on the screen. I was doing it perhaps a little more yesterday than today, but it was still there, and perhaps the thing I was most successful at. Something about how I use (or don’t use) my legs has made all the muscles/tendons down the backs of my legs (hamstrings?) ‘too short’… Too short to really even attempt a downward dog without intense feelings of pain, sure, but even when they begin the session by trying to get me to sit up straight with my legs straight out in front of me and my spine straight and extended I find that I can either have my spine straight and vertical OR I can have my legs straight out in front of me… like all the connective tissues down the backside of my body are too short and when one half of me straightens out the other half folds up. So they explain what wonders sitting up straight with my legs straight in front of me will do for my breathing and I mutter ‘fuck you‘ back at them as I struggle to perhaps keep my legs and my spine straight by bending backwards 30 or more degrees at the hips.

They move on to other positions, and I keep finding myself unable to sit up vertically and have my spine straight at the same time in them without effort and strain… except they seem to think that this sitting up thing is the easy, resting part of the position and proceed to begin bending at the hips (keeping their spine straight as can be) and bringing their foreheads down to their legs or the ground or whatever. If I’m not looking at them, just trying to follow directions, I feel the strain in the places they say I’m supposed to be working and I use my breathing to move as deep into the pose as I can and then when I look up and see them bent full in half and look down and see I’ve just managed to get barely into that ‘sitting straight up’ thing they started at and they get a bigger ‘Fuck You.

And then towards the end of today’s routine they went from a plank pose (I can do that! My backside tissues are certainly long enough that I can have my entire body in a straight line!) to downward dog (I can sorta do that one, though I certainly can’t move fully into that pose and direct most of my attention towards just not doing it wrong and hurting myself…). Which would be fine, but they want me to go back and forth on each exhale and inhale respectively, what seemed like a ridiculous number of times. I mean, I could have reasonably held in the plank pose twice as long, or maybe in the downward dog pose 2/3 as long, but going back and forth and for as long as they did … man. I collapsed before they finished into child’s pose to give myself a rest before they moved on. Then they asked me to move from plank pose into being on hands and knees, so I jumped up onto all fours… and they moved into child’s pose. Which was fine. Then corpse pose, and then the closing, and then credits, and I didn’t move from corpse pose until the credits ran out.

Okay, that’s that. I’m going to upload the blogcomic I did before I started yoga now.

Maybe I’ll fuss about Yoga more tomorrow!

Yay! I just did yoga again for the first time since … I don’t know… Years ago, now. I’ve known the whole time I ought to be doing the Yoga every day or every other day at least, but I just haven’t been doing it. Always there are excuses, it’s too late or I’m too tired or there’s no room or … Whatever, I just didn’t feel like it. When I moved to Pine I set up the space in front of my TV specifically to provide the long thin open column of space that yoga requires, and that was over three months ago and … nothing. But today… today I learned that even for the brief routine I did, the space is just slightly not wide enough. Or my arms are too long… but I prefer to think that I’m just the right size for me and everything else in the world was built too small…

Anyway, there’s a reason I’m typing all this (and may even do a comic of it in a moment), and it comes down to the idea of accountability. Since I basically live alone and have no traditional ‘job’ with co-workers and no traditional ‘social life’ with friends, it comes down to modernevil.com to provide me a modicum of human contact. (Which, by the way, with the sudden draught of posts, has put even me into an extra sort of funk.) The idea of accountability is great for things like dieting and excersizing, especially when the people holding you accountable are expecting you to do the same for them; dieting with a partner, working out with a partner, these activities are easier this way and because of what mostly comes down to a mental switch. Because each partner will be pushed to ‘stick with it’ for the sake of the other – they don’t want to let their friend down. (This could be used to make a strong proof that selflessness exists to some degree in humanity, I believe, though opponents would say that friendship doesn’t exist except out of selfishness in the first place… bleah.) Except that since my gym closed oh so long ago I haven’t had anyone to do yoga with. Or really anyone to be accountable for my own health except myself. I tried to make group accountability real with the idea of ‘Fuck 50 lbs To Hell’, but … none of the people involved communicate regularly and then no one was making progress, so we all stayed fat together. Sigh.

This is something new I’m trying. I’m going to post every time I do yoga (which hopefully will be every day). Sometimes just a simple post saying I did 20 or 40 minutes of Yoga to such and such a video (thanks to Marie, I have three yoga DVDs to choose from, each with two twenty minute routines). Sometimes something longer like this, or maybe even a rant complaining about breathing (those of you who have been near enough to hear me breath may have a clue of what I might sound like doing the intense breathing that yoga creates), or whatever. But I’m going to try to post every time. And I’m going to imagine that my audience (I still have around 200 regular daily readers) are all holding me accountable. That all 200 of them will be disappointed in me if a day goes by without a yoga post. That my audience actually cares about my health and physical fitness.

Now, there’s the rare possibility that some of you actually do care, and a rarer possibility that some of you will actually post encouraging comments or try to take up yoga with me. If that turns out to be the case then Hooray! I’ll do what I can to live up to the actual expectations that are expressed, and if someone else decides yoga is for them, I’ll do what I can to encourage them and hold them accountable for their own health.

On the other hand, if it goes as my currently downtrodden and pessimistic side seems to think it will and people don’t even bother to read posts that start with the word ‘yoga’, I’ll still try to live up the the imagined expectations that I’ll pretend my caring audience has expressed, (hopefully) effectively fooling myself into feeling held accountable and being motivated by this imagined outside expectation to do this thing even when I so easily come up with an excuse.

So, today’s the first day. Today I did the first twenty minutes of Yoga Zone’s Total Body Conditioning Yoga for Beginners.

I went ahead and reserved a room in Vegas anyway. And in addition to the idea that reserving a room I can’t really afford was something I didn’t think I ought to do, I reserved it at the Las Vegas Hilton, where I told myself the last time I was there I would not return to until I was at least semi-fluent in Klingon. I looked at prices at other places, at cheap-ass places and at places on the strip (one weeknight night at the Bellagio in the steeping heat of summer is more than I paid for two nights at the Hilton on a weekend that no Vegas hotels seem to have good rates for), and some places had reasonable deals… mostly for nights other than the ones I need to be there for the wedding on. I even found an upgraded room at the New York New York Casino (for the wrong nights) at only $5/night more than the generic ‘Station’ hotels are charging during the week. But, for $10 more a night than the station I chose the Star Trek package at the Hilton & get two free admissions to the Star Trek Experience (street value: $50) two free meals in Quark’s bar (which would cost almost as much at the Experience admissions), and 10% off in the Star Trek-themed store (though unless my art takes off, I won’t be spending money there). Plus some free drinks in the casino I would have got anyway… but between the package stuff and the reasonable price (that includes a second person in my room, if anyone wants to come – they charge the same for one person as for two) plus the fact I probably would have ended up eating at Quarks anyway, if not paying for the Experience again … I think it was the best deal I saw. Oh, and not to fear – the people I’m going with are also Star Trek fans, and were planning on going the the Experience anyway.

Blah blah blah…

So as long as I managed to get the second (more detailed) book of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition for 50 cents at a recent book sale and have recently lent both my Klingon language books and my Klingon language learning software to my father/brother, I may just try to memorize all the Rules of Acquisition instead of trying to figure out Klingon language structure in the next couple of weeks. Or maybe I’ll memorize the Klingon rules of Acquisition and memorize a few important phrases in the Ferengi language. Strike that, reverse it.

I feel like I’m not being clear here. Oh well. When I was documenting all my financial whosi-ma-whatsis the other day I discovered that one of my credit cards upped my limit without telling me, literally days before I looked, by an additional $500. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be putting more on credit with no real income source in sight, but… Well, I was looking at rooms and rates last night and this morning and … I just about decided on the Hilton before I went to work in the store this morning, so this afternoon when I came back up to my room everything was set up to reserve the room but my name, address, credit card… and today in the store I had a lot more believable interest from people in my art… from people who seemed to know what they liked and …. frankly that clearly had the money to be buying art… so I felt a lot better after today than after yesterday, when I got more quizzical, confused looks at the art than interested or appreciative looks… and I booked it.

Okay, I’ll stop rambling about this now. I don’t want to be (or to seem to be) justifying it to myself, or to you… I just wanted to say what I’m doing. But I just remembered I left some laundry in the dryer downstairs I better go get it.