Hot Yoga

I'll start by saying that Hot Yoga is the closest I've ever come to dieing. After that I'll say it was also the grossest I've ever felt in my life, and I've done the Warrior Dash in full zombie makeup. By reference, the Warrior Dash is a 3 mile obstacle course that starts in a filthy river, has you crawling through mud under barbed wire, and jumping over burning coals at the finish line, but that's another post altogether.

It may come as no surprise at this point I would try something like this. Yoga is intrinsically linked with meditation in many circles and I'm a bit of a hippie so it makes sense I would end up doing it. My girlfriend had recently been getting into it and wanted someone to go with her so naturally she yoked me and dragged me out of bed at 8 in the morning on a Saturday.

Surprisingly I have no legal recourse for this treatment.

She drove us to a studio up in Bayside, NY called Hot Flex Yoga. I was already on the warpath to embarrass her as thoroughly as possible; I wore my Vibram Five-Finger shoes ('toe shoes'), pajama pants and wandered in groggily waving cash and demanding a rental mat. They obliged me and I walked past the desk with my shoes on. For the unitiated, that is a big no-no.

Shoes come off before you get past the desk, remember this. We had to endure a cheerful man literally get down on his hands and knees in front of me to wipe up the rancid street water I'd tracked in from the parking lot. They got an "A" for effort as I slinked into the studio proper and set down my mat in the balmy room.

I was interviewed quickly by the teacher (yogi? Stinking bears) regarding my physical shortcomings and informed I could quit at anytime. Whether this is a normal practice or a pointed warning was lost on me but I've been assured since that I was being marked as weak.

We went through a quick but well-described series of positions that tested my flexibility, which also exposed that I had none. I rigidly followed the instructions and in short order became a sweat faucet. Now let me be clear, I've run during NY summers which range from unbearably dry to Georgia balmy. I've done cardio at Planet Fitness during the January rush when the air conditioners broke down. I've never sweat like this.

It was about 3/4 of the way through the practice that I almost passed out for the first time. We had been down on the ground for a bit and stood back up to stretch and I started to white out so I hid from them on the floor. The environment of these sorts of classes is pretty open and judgement free so I shouldn't have felt bad, but I'm a bit self-conscious and stared intensely at the floor like I was breaking open some really advanced chakras or something.

I reprised my role as 'almost passing out guy' at the 7/8 point and the 15/16, at which point everyone else was instructed to sit down and I pretended to just be faster at sitting then they were.

The class ended with a calming led meditation focusing on each body part to relax them. This was actually a technique I learned during my daily meditation to defeat pain/discomfort and worked equally well after soaking a yoga mat in body juice. On my way out I noticed that the worker who had wiped up my street slime was also picking up every rented mat but mine and hanging them over some dryers at the front of the room. I took the hint and hung my own.

On a serious note though it was a great experience and me being out of shape is the only reason I felt funky during it. The class was taught by a very capable instructor and I never once felt bad for having to take a break. The building and studio is lovely and accessible and the price is very good for the quality of the class. If you're interested and in the greater Bayside area I'd highly recommend checking them out.

Looking out - How not to suck

In a previous entry I flippantly referred to my motorcycle side mirror that was missing a nut, and how I was a huge jerk for not just getting it fixed since I knew more or less what I was doing and exactly what I'd need to get it done.

Well, riding home from work one day last week I heard the familiar sound of a small metal nut loosing from my bike and dinking it's way to the street below. Now, this noise could have been anyting: I could have run over a screw, or a car could have been clicking nearby, it didn't mean that my bike had just lost one of the precious securing devices that keep it in one piece. But I knew, somewhere deep inside, what it really was.

It wasn't until the next morning that I found out for sure. My mirror was now free to do as unsecured major visual apparatus usually do in moving vehicles: cause havoc. During a lean it shimmied a half-inch out of it's hole and I overcorrected for what had appeared to be the bike falling over by screaming like a little girl and riding nearly into a ditch. The rest of my ride was a disgruntled attempt to keep the mirror secured to my jacket without punching two new screw holes in my torso.

I want to make it loud and clear that I was literally taking my life into my own hands by not fixing this earlier: that nut could have ended up in my chain or wedged into any moving part of my bike that would have resulted in a short and likely fatal lesson in dancing with traffic. I managed to scrape by and didn't even check to see what had happened, putting myself in danger twice.

That weekend I took the freewheeling device and the freewheeling girlfriend in the car to home depot to determine the nut sizing and grab a socket wrench extension. Anyone who has worked on a bike will tell you the less often you need to dismantle things the better, and the extension would allow me to tighten it without taking apart the entire head.

Home depot is the only place where I have no shame in talking to a sales rep. I don't know if it has something to do with the inviting atmosphere of warehouse/dungeon or the cheerfully colored Halloween vests, I just feel secure among the 5-story tall bathroom fixtures and grow op hardware. I cornered the first terrorized employee in orange and grilled him for information on where to find hardware.

"Good day good sir. Might you point me towards the nuts aisle that I might repair this symbol of my irresponsibility?"
"What? Uh hardware is in aisle 9."

Off we went and shortly I had accosted another victim. He took the mirror with only my muted attempt to inform him of its metric nature in mind and quickly located the nut I needed. Before leaving I told him I appreciated his handling of my nuts and asked where I could go to find a socket wrench extension. This is not a remark that the hardware isle reps find humorous.

Final stop was the tool section where I shopped extensions for ten minutes. Did I have a Husky or Craftsman back home? Was there a difference? What if one of them was metric and the other was imperial? If I buy one and I'm wrong I'll have to go through the intense embarrassment of a tool return, which as we all know involves surrendering your man card to the authorities.

"Hi, I want to return this extension."
"Was it defective?"
"Uh, no."
A pregnant pause.
"Is there something wrong with the device?"
"Nope."
The clerk becomes suspicious. He narrows his eye and sizes me up. "Sir, did you purchase the wrong extension?"
"Possibly."
"Get out sir."
"But-"
"Sir, don't make me repeat myself."

Becoming bored of my silent reverie of several minutes (I'm prone to retreating into a fantasy world when I've been given too many options) my girlfriend finally got tired and pointed out a full metric set with a snake extension that was about the same price as the solid extension I was agonizing over. We then narrowly avoided the armed Home Depot security guards and absconded with the merchandise through trickery and deceit.

Pictured: Trickery and deceit

There's not much to it after that, I reinstalled my mirror and fitted the nuts on by hand before turning to my new best friend to tighten them up. The mirror is no longer a problem and I learned a valuable lesson about not procrastinating.

Note: I was originally going to end this with one of those goofy half-sentences like I can't ever finish anything but then two weeks later I peeked at my post drafts and noticed I'd never posted it, so I think that seals it then, no?

Why Write? Oranges

Why write?

It's a devious question to ask. It's a dangerous question to ask. There are things you can do that have much simpler explanations: Why do you ride roller coasters? Because it's fun, it's a rush, I like that weird screaming/laughing thing people do on it. Why do you ride a motorcycle? I tried to convince myself it was because it was eco-friendly, but shit I just like the marriage of grace and screaming death you get from riding. Why do you drink? Because drunk. Simple.

But why write?

Writing is something for masochists. You basically go through 5 stages of writing a work and they follow thus:

1) Get an idea!

I have this great idea! I should write a (novel, poem, short story, etc).
You're super excited about your idea. You develop it in your mind, flesh it out, rack your brain on how to start it. Pretty soon it's boiling out your ears and all you want to do is commit it and rake in royalties for the next 10 years. You may piss off at work to scribble sentences in a notebook, you might spend lunchbreaks on a laptop, you may even carry notes in your cellphone.
Perfect title! Well, maybe a working title: "The Ur-Angeh"

2) You start to really write it

Yeah, now I'm getting in to the meat of it. The ideas are coming out on to the paper, it's all beautiful and pretty, and so easy!
You're etching meaning into something with permanence! Yes! Every sentence is another shining beacon of intellect and witty humor. You can smell the benjamins from here, move over 'Catch in the Rye', you're about to drop a bomb in the American subconscious.
That funny thing you did with the oranges was awesome, people are going to buy it just for that shit.

3) You start to really... actually... write it

Ugh, why is it taking so long to get this stuff out? I've been writing for 5 weeks straight! I've only got like, 40 pages! What the hell! This writing thing takes too long.
That boundless energy wears off. Now writing is just a second job you do at night once you're done cleaning off the barstools or teaching orphans how to read or murdering drifters to sell to the roach coach on Northern Boulevard.
I'll just half-ass some of those chapters. I can fill them in later. People will still be high on the oranges thing.

4) You finish it

I... I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I've only got forty pages and twelve storylines to tie in, then off to the presses!
Ah, you're very close! Perhaps you're like me and you like to write the last chapter at the midpoint and see how well things tie in, maybe you just know how it ends and you just 'feel' it coming. Either way you're just about there. Not long now, then you can take a break from your indentured servitude.
Maybe if I bring back the orange thing right before the end, then that first orange thing was only foreshadowing the real orange thing. Yeah, that's good.

5) You start editing it

I get to read it in it's entirety! This is going to be great, I can finally see where all my hard work went and OH MY GOD THIS IS AWFUL. WHAT WAS I THINKING? I used "orange" nine times in two sentences! What is wrong with me?
Now you get to start from the beginning and read the whole thing through as if you weren't the putz that wrote it. That will be fun right? WRONG. You learned things while you were writing, probably read books and generated a style for the story. Now the beginning is wonky and you can tell the exact moment that phase one wore off because the writing takes a dramatic nosedive. Now for the pain of editing...
Fucking oranges man.

In short, I write because I hate myself on a very deep personal level and I prefer the hell I control to the one I'd experience huffing paint fumes in the alley behind the Walmart.

Or because it's great to create an entire world, a society, and to lay a glamor over someone else and bring them into it to experience a world created entirely from your imagination. But that sounds a little too trite.

I'll go with 'drunk' again.