Monthly Archives: February 2006

I’ve had 3 of my 4 main recurring dreams in the past 10 days.

1. Tidal Wave – I hadn’t had this one in a long time but I had it last week. Pretty straightforward dream: I’m somewhere on a beach or overlooking a beach and a regular wave gets bigger and bigger until it’s a ginormous wall of water that turns my knees to jelly. Dream interpretation guides generally see this as being overwhelmed in some way.

2. “I forget to go to class” – Lots of people have this type of dream although usually more in the form of test trauma like the person forgot to study for the test. Mine is always that I keep forgetting to go to class and to do the homework and I can’t remember where the book is and I’m worried what the teacher thinks. And it’s always math. This is often seen as self-esteem thing: not being good enough, being tested or under scrutiny.

3. “I have to pee, but can’t” – This is my most common dream, common being at least 3-4 times a year. It takes many different forms but generally I have to go the bathroom but I can’t because I can’t find it, it’s locked, there’s a long line, it’s broken, it’s dirty or in one dramatic instance, it was in the middle of a party and the walls were glass. I interpret this as being unable to express myself about something.

So in sum, I’m feeling overwhelmed, not good enough and unable to express myself. That could be my entire life. I don’t feel like there’s a particular crisis at hand that’s bringing this all up. [Update: I just read the post below this. hm. A clue.]

4. “I’m going back to college and have no place to live” – This is my 2nd most common dream but not one I’ve had in the past 10 days. It also takes various forms: Which room will I have in the sorority house? Will I live in the dorms? Can I find an apartment? Who will my roommates be? Why did I wait until the last minute? I’m guessing this about feeling like I don’t fit in a situation or maybe a variation of the not being prepared thing.

The only part of the Olympics I watched was women’s figure skating (big surprise).

They should have had medals for the ugliest outfits. That adorable Swiss girl in the horrible outfit would have taken home gold. And the Russian skaters wore ugly pants, too. I don’t think the idea of women skaters in pants has to be bad, but as executed at these games the look was just tragic.

I tried to find photos of the skaters to show you but no luck so I came up with these instead. You get the idea and if you like these outfits, the photos were mined from a catalog. You can buy them yourself. Maybe dress as a figure skater next Halloween. Look very serious, have a friend read from a card about how hard you’ve worked for this moment. Then fall down. HA!

Also, who was that woman commentor? Did she utter one intelligent word? If she did, I didn’t hear it. And how come when an American falls on her ass it’s unexpected and when any other skater falls on her ass it’s Olympic pressure, or poor training, or because her “light just went out” ?

Celebrities Who Might Have Been Interesting Once, But Are Now Tiresome
Elton John
Nicholas Cage
Bette Midler
Bono
Mel Gibson
Kanye West

Debatable Whether They Were Ever Interesting, But Definitely Tiresome
Russell Crowe
Diddy
Ben Affleck

Dangerously Close to Tiresome
Michael Stipe
Gwen Stefani

(This project started as a piece of paper I left by the phone with the part about Once Interesting Now Tiresome and Elton John on it. Without even discussing it, Bob added Nicholas Cage to the sheet. He gets me. This is as far as we got.)

I remember what the lost post was about. Bob and I went for a walk on Friday when the outside temp. was in the 20’s and with windchill clocked at a brisk: 14 degrees. After less than 10 minutes, I was quoted as saying:

Why are we doing this again?

Are we almost finished?

My face hurts.

This is like Garmisch,(hey! if you put Garmisch-Partinkirchen into AltaVista, I come up at #5) except no snow and colder.

Subtitle: Technology That I Don’t Get or Can’t Figure Out How to Make Work for Me. (Generally meaning I tried for about 3 minutes and then went on to something else.)(Not intended to be a complete list.)

podcasting
RSS
sound files
hands free
my phone at the office
BBEdit
del.icio.us
social network websites (probably due more to my relative decrepitude)
Flickr Tags
any sort of scripting or setting up hot keys for frequently used computer actions
virtual pets (yes, I realize this is so 10 years ago, but I found my Yoda pet recently and I never could figure out what to do. I killed Yoda.)
any sort of digital watch programing
anything on my cellphone not directly related to making and receiving calls

Things I Can Work
anything on my cellphone directly related to making and receiving calls
DVR
load the dishwasher like nobody’s business (doesn’t really count in this context but I’m throwing it in anyway)
FTP (I can FTP, that must count for something.)

I swear I had a post earlier this week with these three pictures. I can’t remember what it was about but I bet it was really good. And it vanished. I’m very confused how this could happen.

On Wednesday I found out that Holiday is closing the yoga center at the end of March. I don’t know all the gory details but it has to do with the lease and the building. The building apparently thinks it can get bigger, higher paying tenants and Holiday doesn’t want to wildly raise the price of classes. She’s looking for alternatives but the studio as we know it will be no more.

I started studying with Holiday 10 years ago in March and I don’t think I’ve ever been away from the studio for more than 2 months, and even then, just a couple of times. It’s hard to convey, without sound like a cheesy women’s magazine article, what a huge part of my life this has been. Our culture loves to stupefy everything in big dramas about how something (yoga, Prozac, TiVo) changed someone’s life. But yoga has changed my life.

I’m not going to elaborate because that would be boring and stupefy it, but commit yourself to some sort of intense regular self-study over a 10 year period and there’s bound to be changes.

I have a solid home practice so I look to class for continued inspiration and to remind me about poses that I avoid at home. And also, during the weekdays it’s usually my only time to practice. Upon hearing this news I thought about alternatives.

I also attend classes at Yoga Bhoga and I figured I’d shift to more classes at this location. The attraction to both of these studios is the teachers but as luck would have it, they are both optimally located to the office. Once my car is parked downtown, I don’t have to move it for class.

This weekend I attended a workshop with Bob and Ki and while I was there I learned from a classmate that Yoga Bhoga is moving across the river at the end of April, also the victim of a building lease problem. As Auntie would say: fukola-dola.

Now I need to find a new yoga base. One woman at the workshop teaches at Shanti Yoga in Vancouver and that sounds like a good fit so I guess I’ll start there and see what happens.

Last night I finished my book: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. How to describe this book? It’s funny, induces squirming and is super interesting. I learned a ton.

I did not know that cadavers are used in auto safety testing. I did not know embalming is very temporary. I did not know a whole lot of gruesome details about early medical procedures (used to illustrate how doctors learned about medicine without cadavers in the olden days) and I could have remained happily ignorant on that. There’s a bit about studies of guillotine victims and whether they have any consciousness after the big separation. I’ve always wondered this: do you die instantly or do you feel your head bounce around in the basket?

There’s a chapter on cannablism which includes a hilarious scene of the author visiting China to track down a story of a crematorium worker who allegedly whacked off a bit of flesh here and there and gave it to his brother who made it into dumplings at a popular restaurant around town. Can you imagine you and your translator getting a meeting with the director of that funeral home to ask about this story?

Before I read the book I was not excited about the idea of donating my body to science. Just the idea of people poking around my saggy dead boobs and shriveled privates and making jokes made it unappealing. Both the author here and the author of The Undertaking (Book #18) point out that once you die, what happens to your body is irrelevant to you so no point in getting worked up about it. Also, there is some good work to be done, like research to help develop protective gear for people who work around land mines. My cadaver could do that.

And then there’s plastination — my cadaver could be made into a big rubber model that would last for 10,000 years!

Actually my favorite is the compost. Freeze dry, shatter and throw me in the garden. After a long healthy and happy life. That would be my first choice.