will

today in yoga i had an interesting teacher named will. he did a lot of the kinds of inner-fire-generating breathing exercises that i truly hate, but he also said a lot of strange and funny things during class like, "Imagine your armpits have eyeballs, and they're looking at each other" and "With each breath lift higher... like Kirby" and "Pretend it's the 70s and you're in an ashram."  

princess has changed her mind

I woke up early to go to yoga at 10:30am and yet it's 10:32am and I'm sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee out of my princess mug.

chandelier

It has been an odd week.

I spent last weekend catsitting a big orange cat named Jackson in a beautiful Williamsburg apartment. My only duties were to play with Jackson an hour a day, scoop his box filled with what looked like white crystal diamonds, and keep the water and dry food flowing. However, the extremely kind catowners invited me to enjoy their Netflix, their air conditioning, and their private rooftop patio and its glorious views of Brooklyn and Manhattan. I felt like I was on vacation in a penthouse getaway. Netflix is an bogglingly addictive thing and I watched the entire first season of Portlandia and that documentary on the portrayal of women in the media, Miss Representation. It was okay. Felt a little exaggerated at times. I watched my new favorite music video, Sia's for "Chandelier," over and over and danced extravagantly in the living space and practiced my wannabe-splits. I stood on the patio woozy from my own wine and watched the sky change from day to dusk to night. It was completely otherworldly to inhabit this incredible quiet space when I am so rarely alone.

Monday I decided to take my laundry to the laundromat across the street just to try it out. As I was walking in I ran into a boy I went to undergrad with in Los Angeles. Apparently he lives on my street and moved in the same time last year that I moved in. I hadn't seen him since we were both on the undergraduate student government's programming board's concerts committee circa the 2007-2008 era. He's now in New York, starting a job as an editor on Teen Mom. What's funny is that the laundry ended up being more expensive than I'd thought so I took it back to my building anyways.
That night I attended a wholly audience-performed Mariah Carey musical in Williamsburg with Brenner and he was cast as Nick Cannon and I was Mawaiah and together we sang Hero. After our show-stopping performance I ended up talking to another person I haven't seen since undergrad. The only time I'd ever spent time with her was when we went clubbing together in Shanghai in 2007. She'd just moved to New York and fate brought us together at a Mariah Carey musical in the back of a shitty bar in Brooklyn.

Tuesday I started at that new yoga studio. Wednesday I went out to dim sum in Chinatown with anyone else I could think of who is currently unemployed. That night I went to a virtual reality event at school. All of us starry-eyed students thought it would be about how people are pushing the VR boundaries and doing cool things. In reality it was a bunch of start-ups trying to monetize the Oculus via 360 video and a lot of other people lining up to put Oculi on their faces. Youjin Jay and I abandoned ship to eat Chinese food and feel a little confused about who we are now that we are masters. Thursday I wasn't feeling too great so I decided to go to a cemetery. Aijia came along and we walked to a graveyard a few blocks north of us in Queens and we sat and talked amongst the graves and then afterwards were overcome with an intense desire to do things that living people get to do, so we had happy hour beers and and then hot dogs and sliced potatoes. I then discovered that I'd been invited to interview for what could potentially be a dream job, but that it would force me to move away and that gave me an insurmountable amount of anxiety so Youjin came over to be my therapist. She told me to imagine my life as a book, and to imagine what that book contains so far and what I would want the next page of the book to be. Then we sat in the backyard with Jed and our summer subletter Lenka and drank whiskey by fairy lights while large fireflies came to visit us and flash around our heads like ideas.

Friday Aijia and Lenka and I tried a new neighborhood bar on Troutman for happy hour. The neighborhood has been changing before our eyes and suddenly there are more glamorous bars nearby than we can count. One even has chandeliers. Saturday we went to our friend Rios' housewarming but the house was already so unbearably hot inside that we ended up spending the night outside sitting on the stoop. On the way home Lenka and I went dancing until 3 in the morning. Yesterday I watched the World Cup and it was mildly entertaining and then I went to a going-away party with a lot of our crazy Chinese classmates for a girl who's moving back to Singapore. One of the girls in attendance had just gone to an S&M club in Manhattan for the first time and was telling us what it was like inside by making everyone act out the different scenarios she'd encountered.   

cold mountain

I've been intensely reading Cold Mountain, "a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished America in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor" and the source which spawned one of my favorite movies, Cold Mountain. Every time I put it down I keep looking at the book from wherever I am in the room and itching to open it again. Today I started at a new yoga studio, my fourth in the neighborhood since Jai, Loom, and Good Yoga. The instructor was the tannest white girl I have ever seen and at the beginning of class she told us a story about Ganesh and his competition with his brother to win a mango and I think the moral of the story was something about the subjectivity of what encompasses your 'world.' At the end of class when our eyes were closed she asked us to visualize our own worlds and what is your world and there was nothing I could do to not see the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Civil War. 

yoga log

all the times i've gone to yoga since graduating on may 23rd, plus that one time where i went to yoga to the people instead of this studio

last loom

My 30-day pass for my current yoga studio expired today so I went in at 10am to savor my last class (unless I become a big spender?). Yoga Goddess was not there this morning, unfortunately, but one highlight was that instead of my usual supported headstand, I did my first forearm stand ever (albeit for only a few seconds). I will keep working on this at home and probably leave my footprints all over the walls. On my walk home, it was snowing so hard I felt like I was in a snowglobe. 

anti-yogi

when i'm in yoga class i typically end up thinking about all the ways in which i am not yogi-like at all, like because of my sports bra or my glitter hello kitty nails, or my wandering inappropriate mind and my reminders-to-self that i should note all this in my blog.

lina from la

I went to open level vinyasa class at noon today and there was this unbelievable goddess-like girl who was exotically beautiful and incredibly good at yoga. She had the best body with a narrow waist and long long legs like some kind of albatross winging through the air effortlessly and mercilessly while the rest of us clunked and quivered in place.
She talked to me! after class and it turns out she's Lina and she's from LA too.

sarah

A common book that the young people like to read on the subway in New York is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I often find this puzzling, because Nabokov is already so dense and challenging to navigate that I don't understand how anyone is making heads or tails of it while being jostled left and right, back-to-front, poked from the sides, and repeatedly fallen on by that girl who won't just hold the fucking railing.

Tonight I went to probably my favorite yoga class so far in New York. It was really soothing and I loved the teacher. I always worry that when a yoga teacher touches my face, she'll smear my eyebrows off.

whoa

last night after the restorative yoga class my hippie yoga teacher was in the studio's kitchen making "raw" sushi. imagine an incredibly muscular, sort of masculine woman in her 40s wearing a knitted black peruvian hat with the danglies on either side of the head along with an extremely housewifey orange floral patterned apron. she was ladling out portions of a drink she'd concocted - it was like a mysterious brew in a plastic bucket with whole plants and sticks floating around inside. it tasted like toothpaste. meanwhile, she was ranting about what the rest of downtown LA at rush hour looks like from inside her yoga studio. "I just want to stand outside with a sign that says, 'W...H...O...A. WHOA. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. We're on a planet. WE'RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE.'" she then talked about how, while living in Bali, she chucked her cell phone in a rice paddy because she realized, with her phone constantly ringing and her experiencing road rage and worrying about arriving places on time, that she had become too LA.  

i recently went to a yoga class where i was stationed next to a girl with two double-jointed elbows. it was like watching a bird with broken wings trying to fly

ouch body

i didn't know why i hurt all over and then i remembered: i did yoga yesterday (body aches all over), i'm bleeding out of my crotch (body aches all over), and i'm officially sick (body aches all over).
i'm going to go put myself out of my misery 

office space lullaby

every day i think, this is the most hostile day at work i've ever seen. and then the next day, i think, no, this is the most hostile day. people are always yelling and screaming at each other and it's a very unprofessional mess. i remain neutral but frazzled, with my obliviousface on. i've taken to doing yoga in the elevator up to and down from the eleventh floor. i'm so glad i'm going back to monterey

gumby

i'm going to try to detox my current malaise with yoga. tonight was the first time that i was so sweaty all over that i was sliding all over my mat.

yoga bathroom solace

yoga was so intense tonight that in down dog the sweat drops were rolling towards my eyes and flecking off my body. yoga made me so nauseous that i had to leave and hide in the bathroom, where i stood with my heartpounding feet on the chill floor in the candle darkness. there was a pleasant smell of damp wood coming from somewhere in the darkness, and the hand soap smelled like tender tropical flowers and i smelled here and there like such and drank out of the tap in handfuls, dousing the inner fire that makes for a good yogi.

wednesday's child

between a rock and a few other hard places. i want to fold into the smallest of yoga poses and stay there for hours and hours. instead i sleep for hours and hours because nobody cares that i came to look at their books and my feet are hot and my handshake is hot because i walked here from afar and then i dream of finding a speaker blasting avril lavigne into my room.

boiler room

the boiler has been out and i haven't showered in three days. i've gone camping and done yoga in the interim. look and feel like an olsen twin

frugal yogis

last night we were supposed to go to a free yoga session and i spent all day sort of worrying about it and how hard it would be, but when we got there it turned out to be a meditation session, which i really enjoyed, and then i ate krispy kreme donuts all the way home in the back of joanne's car.