Yogic Montages
Last night I did yoga in the middle of my bedroom while the sun set outside. I had missed my class and was too tired after a seven hour shift to bike back down through Mission. I have taken different variations of yoga over the last few years, and usually feel a bit self conscious because I am not a flexible person, nor have I ever truly prescribed to Eastern meditation-inspired spirituality. But lately...maybe it's the sudden change in the air, maybe it's the promise of a new political agenda, maybe it's a personal renewal I am still trying to define, but my muscles seem to listen to me more these days.
This always happens to me when I don't write regularly. The first sentence is the hardest, and then suddenly my fingers find all their old grooves on the keys and adrenaline is renewed. There is a backlog of subjects I want to dissect, and mysterious and/or non sequitur current events. Among them:
1) The Animal-Farm-esque mauling of a San Jose teenager at the San Francisco by a Siberian tiger on Christmas Day. Doesn't that seem like something out of Vonnegut? Weeks later, after police investigation has just barely skimmed the surface, the San Francisco Chronicle's headline portrayed a polar bear's attempted escape. These animals are way too smart for cages. Tragedy gets weirder and weirder every year.
2) The constant, ever-present loom of the presidential primaries. The difference this year, however, is that the candidates we have feel viable, despite their historic significance, and that we as the public are damned ready for change. I don't have much time until the February 5 California primary, but I do like the feeling of choosing between people who might actually empower.*
3) Schwarzenegger's forecast for budget cuts. The further I get from college, the more it becomes clear to me how much money runs us. Capitalism really is designed to profit some, and screw others. The irony of it blinds me sometimes--at my grandmother's house, with her wall full of Socialist publications from the 1940s and the photographs of her various blacklisted brothers. It's striking how the very idea of something--shared power, perhaps, or communal effort--can be considered a threat to the general public.
4) Persepolis. An amazing graphic novel by Iranian-born, European-educated Marjane Sartrapi (one of my personal heroes), now turned animated film. I have yet to see it, but once I can afford a movie ticket, there'll be a review here.
Last night while stretching, I had a sudden technicolor image: It was that familiar blurry montage from any bad sports/competition-themed film where the protagonist discovers his/her challenge, and resolves to achieve a certain goal. When I was a little girl it was the Mighty Ducks hockey movies, or Hoosiers or most any football movie on ABC during the holidays. You know the moment I am talking about--three to six months of running, crunches, strategic study and coached practice is shown in a thirty-second flurry of sweaty images, and suddenly the overweight or under-represented hero is an unstoppable machine. I mention this now because it never truly hit me how much of that growth just zips by on a screen. My life right now are those thirty seconds of effort, study, practice and insanity, with no promised result or goal, but little darting carrots at the end of a string.
I guess that's why I do yoga.
*As far as women leaders go: I had to research Victoria Woodhull, the first American woman to run for president, for my internship at the International Museum of Women. She ran for the Equal Labor Party fifty years before women even had the right to vote--1872. We're talking Antebellum, we're talking stuffy white men who accused her of being a prostitute because she advocated on a platform of Spiritualist free love and was one of the first woman stockbrokers in the U.S. She and her sister Tennie Claflin started their own publishing company and were one of the first to publish Marx's Communist Manifesto. (Full circle, eh?) Woodhull's chosen vice presidential candidate? Frederick Douglass.
Can you just imagine the turn our country would have taken if she had won?
{ Post a Comment }
{ Last Page } { Page 9 of 22 } { Next Page }
|
About Me
« March 2010 »
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 | |
Links
Julia in the Raw (Creative Writing Samples)
Spanish Travelogue
College of Creative Studies
Post Secret
My Aunty
Categories
Recent Entries
Repaintings, of both personal and artistic natures
A Song for San Francisco
Write about small regrets.
Fiery Furnaces
On Saints
Friends
|
