Yup, still going, haven’t missed a day.

There’s just not a lot to really write about every day on that topic. The one thing I am glad is that I did hold out and find a yoga that follows a strict sequence. The amount of minor, ongoing posture tweaks and things to remember is so detailed that it seems crazy to think of going into a class that mixes things up every day.

Like I’ve said before, I think most people go to yoga to de-stress and chill out, but since I arrive with no stress and pretty chill, I need more.

It’s kind of funny how much the sweat helps the practice. In one pose, you need to remember while facing toward the floor, to squeeze your shoulder blades together for the duration of the posture. I’m certain that at one point I was not doing that, because the one time I finally did, when I lifted my back up, it was like a waterfall of sweat flowing down the length of my back, having pooled up in the concave bit I created in the posture.

A lot of what I do now is corrections. My left arm doesn’t extend as far as my right, after a biking accident when i was in sixth grade. So, I’m not symmetrical in the postures, necessarily. When the pose has me grabbing a foot and holding it up with my right hand, my spine is straight. Not so when the pose is reversed on the left. Another case is the bow pose, I believe, where you hold you right ankle in your right hand, kick back, as your extended left hand pushes forward. So, your leg is kicking your arm back, while your arm is charging your body forward, stretching you both ways. On the left side, I can’t twist my gimpy hand around properly, so initially I just did a different grip. but, after talking to some of the teahcers there, I’m so close, we’re trying to make it happen. So, now, I am able to grab the knob of my ankle with my left hand, but there’s not much there to grab onto. But over time, that should enable me to grab it properly. I’m actually optimistic that yoga will break down some of that scar tissue and bring more flexibility to the picture.

Well, there certainly can’t be LESS flexibility. It’s amazing some of the stuff my body refuses to do after 30-odd years of letting it do whatever it wants.

Today, I read David Lynch’s book on creativity and meditation. Meditation is truly the next frontier for me after yoga (well, now that yoga is ongoing, I’m not waiting to master it or anything silly). I have a Wayne Dyer book here on Japa meditation that even comes with a guided meditation on CD (which I transferred to my iPod today), so that’s on the queue for this week. I’ve already come out, now it’s time to go in.

Forgot to add in the last post, got the letter from Stanford today. No fellowship for me.

Woke up today at 4 a.m., after going to bed pretty early, and decided to just stay up and start working early. there is something about that time of the morning, as many people do creative work then. Wayne dyer writes all of his books in the middle of the night, and I know Chuck P. has done it often as well.

Dyer specifically encourages people to get up at that hour, saying that most people get up at the same time every night for a reason. He usually ties it to a quot by Rumi: “The morning breeze has secrets to tell you. Do not go back to sleep.”

So, as I wasn’t all that tired, I did 90 minutes on the book, then went to yoga for 6:15a. It was certainly interesting to start a yoga practice before the sun was up, and an orange streetlight up near the window to our studio. By the time class ended, the sun was up and the streetlight out.

When I was working on the novel prior to yoga, however, something interesting happened. It is the first time I directly attribute something that occurs in a non-yoga setting to my yoga practice. I was working on the novel, fully intending to do early yoga. But then my mind started thinking ahead of what else i could accomplish today due to my early start. And, as soon as I noticed the errant thought, I froze. I then simply inhaled. Closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, I just flushed that thought out of my mind and went back to work on that sentence. I know it seems simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Unitasking is not cherished in this society, so we have to teach ourselves how to do it. Multitasking is easy, since the results suck.

So, home at 8 a.m., having already done a good chunk of work on the novel, and finished yoga, I put in another hour on the book, then chatted with my grandmother, and caught the first showing of Black Snake Moan in the theater. Tacked on a whole foods run for chana masala ingredients, a quick pop into Old Navy, and a swing past the Oasis mailstop, and I’m home at 3ish with a lot accomplished.

Not much to post on the site today, so I think I’m just going to do some reading before I start crashing. Or I could watch a DVD and crank out a review. We’ll see what happens.

The only problem with my new schedule is that it started right before I have a Fillmore show tomorrow night. I think I need to treat my schedule like anyone else, though. If people with day jobs stay out late, they set an alarm, down caffeine and suffer through.

As much as it’s inconvenient for nealry everything else in my life, I really do like it. Of course, if I’m writing and doing yoga daily, what else do I need to focus on really?

So, I wore the new Nike running shorts today and, no surprise, it was a lot better.

Today was the first day i was ever late for class, as I was optimistic about the pace of a line at the post office before class, which is always a mistake. So, I missed the breathing exercises, but it definitely made the first few poses feel different, not being warmed up from the inside, etc.

Made a big commitment on Oasis today, which is to read Camille Paglia’s book interpreting 43 poems during the month of April for National Poetry Month. We’ll see how that goes. I just hope there’s some reader interaction, and it isn’t just me posting away on my own. I’ve always wanted to read the book, though, so a good use of time either way. Unlike a Book Club, which I’ve never found a good way to do online, this actually works pretty well, as each poem of group of poems is only a few pages, and I already broke out the posting schedule for the whole month, so if people get the book, it’s easy to play along and each day/poem is clearly delineated in advance.

What wasn’t mentioned on Oasis, of course, is that I’m trying to get an interview with Camille to run on April 1 to contextualize it all, why she thinks poetry is important, and then we’ll just let her rip into any other topics, just like last time.

Talked to my mother today, and mentioned that when she had called earlier, I was at yoga, and she said, “Oh, you must like it.” And, well, yeah, I guess I do. But that just isn’t the vibe, really. Similar to how I approached the gym, I really don’t sit around and think about things like that. I just do them. So, I have to like it enough to keep going, but I don’t know that I’ve ever pulled back and sorted out my feelings about yoga.

Actually, I think there are so many ancillary benefits to yoga that they would outweigh whether I liked the practice itself.

Today was the plug-pulling on the TV, so the only thing still connected to the TV is the Video 1 input, which is the DVD player. I’m not saying I won’t watch TV at all, but it will probably be relegated to the weekends at best. The Tivo can hold a month of shows based on my pared down season passes now, so I can ignore it for quite a while.

Of course, there is a huge stack of gay DVDs there, as well as ones I want to watch, but there is more of a barrier to putting on a movie, as opposed to a 30 or 60-minute TV show.

Well, going to bed early tonight. Tried Trader Joe’s Whole Wheat Gnocchi for dinner tonight, did half a bag of it, with some sauteed eggplant and spaghetti sauce, with a side of corn. Definitely a keeper, especially with the whole grain aspect in there. Now, if I can only find whole grain tapioca balls for my iced tea… Hmm..

Less observable stuff happens as the class goes on. The stuff that does crop up, well, it’s hard to tell when something is new because I was unable to do it before, or new because I never noticed it before. Today, when I was bent over, I noticed that the end of the string used to fasten my shorts, which is fastened at the end like a shoelace, was pouring drop after drop directly onto the towel on top of my yoga mat. The interesting bit being that it is suspende din the air, which means all of the string had to be thoroughly soaked, but also that somewhere above that everything was so wet it was providing a continual salty stream downward, so that the constant dripping never let up. So wet.

When we do the second series of poses, which are leaning from side to side without bending elbows or knees, when my arms are raised up, they don’t seem to bow out anymore, and continue a perfect line up from my torso. I know they didn’t do that before, but it’s fuzzy whether that is just improved form or something that was difficult to do prior.

The mindset is the most beautiful part. There is a lot of smiling in yoga for me. It is the ultimate reality. When i can’t do a pose, there is nothing to do but accept my balance isn’t there today, or that I just can’t lock my knee out. but everything is about that moment. Cardio, on the other hand, was always about putting in the time so that I could have a skinny future. It’s so much nicer to be present in the moment.

So, after 9 a.m. yoga today (Sunday, Day 12), I went to a brunch at a friend’s, which was being held in advance of the big anti-war rally in town. I made sure in advance that it was Ok for me to show up, seeing as when it came time for the group to head to the rally, I’d be peeling off. So, I did, and coming in a bit sweaty from yoga made small talk pretty easy, since everyone wanted to hear about Bikram Yoga. There were a lot of misconceptions that I was able to clear up, mostly that it is an “intense” class, which is something that comes up often. I mean, sure, there is a huge physical obstacle with the high temperature, but I find it to be fluid and graceful far more than intense. When you think of everything you do in 90 minutes, I would never correct someone and say it wasn’t intense, but not in the way people seem to think. I mean, there is no downward dog, no inversions, the teachers are all very quick to offer modifications for people of all skill level. It is far more healing than anything else.

After brunch, which didn’t have a lot of vegan options, I popped in to Dosa (a restaurant names after its Indian signature dish). I never went there before since, it is two doors down from Herbivore, which I adore, and it seemed expensive for what is essentially a crepe. I didn’t think it would fill me up. So, on a day where I wasn’t quite full, it seemed to be a good choice. I found the food to be very good, but the flow didn’t really work for me, I got the Spring Dosa, which is veggies in a rice-lentil flour crepe, which you dip into a lentil stew, and you have a coconut chutney as well as a, hmm, tomato-based chutney(?) to add to the mix. It was all tasty, but about $4-5 more for the full-on meal than Herbivore, which is more filling. But, any place with interesting stuff and vegan options is always fine by me.

Later in the day, I went downtown and did some shopping. Far more shopping than buying. I tried (C)Ross Dress for Less, Loehmann’s, a ew discounters, but couldn’t find what I wanted. Finally, I caved and just went to Niketown.
I was looking for running shorts, because being so close to naked in yoga class already, I want to push the edge a bit further. No, actually, all the shorts I wear to the gym go down to my knee, so I’m constantly breaking posture to tug them up my thigh to give me “slack” for the movement. So, running shorts avoid that problem by not having much to them at all. They are seriously short, with just a little built-in mesh undergarment to keep the boys happy. So, that will be the likely fous of the Day 13 blog. It will be nice to not have to break concentration to deal with that issue, though.

After that, I went to the Castro to meet Chris and Tawn. It’s a bit strange, because I’ve been reading Chris’s blog for months now, since it is about him living in Bangkok, teaching English, learning Thai, etc. I’ve no clue how I found it, but I don’t know if I had forgotten or ever knew that he is from SF. So, a few days ago, he mentioned he and Tawn were coming to the U.S. for a quick trip, and to save time, they would be hanging out at a dessert shop in the Castro from 6 to 8 p.m. on Sunday. So, this place is like 4-5 blocks from my apartment, which seemed completely out of the blue seeing as how I didn’t recall/knew he was from SF at all. When I read that, I figured I had to break silence and say hi, so I wrote Chris a quick e-mail, and he wrote back, but that was it. So, out of nowhere, I just sort of showed up to meet them in person. And it was surreal, since I’ve been reading his blog for a while now, so I know a lot about him and Tawn, but literally Chris found out I existed two days ago, and Tawn possibly had no clue. And the weird part.. it wasn’t that weird. Nice guys, so I’ll definitely visit them when I visit and/or move to Bangkok again.

Nothing surprising again. It’s mainly just doing the class.

The stuff that happens in class is all just instantaneous, as tehre are no real big revelations happening. Mostly it is just picking up on a little new bit of the instruction, pulling back a shoulder, lifting up a chin, flexing deeper into a pose. When I do Triangle Pose now, my fingertips touch the floor, but it’s hard to say if that is new flexibility, or just improving my stance and other elements of the pose that lead to my fingertips finding the floor.

It’s really about letting go. Unlike cardio at the gym, which seems to require distraction in the form of music or podcasts or hot guys working out, yoga requires me to be in that moment. The entire class is done facing a mirror and, whenever possible, I get in the front row, so it is just me right in front of the mirror.

But, as for the sweat, it is amazing. I didn’t know I had so many sweat glands before this class. In the one pose, my head is hanging low, giving me a close-up view of my feet for the duration of that pose, and I can literally see droplets of sweat coming up out of the tops of my feet.

The sweat is the craziest part of the practice, especially now, as my body still requires a lot of coaching and holding to get things in place. To have a sweaty, slippery hand grabbing onto a sweaty, slippery foot, and hold it in place against my sweaty, slippery thigh, while standing on one foot, with the other hand up in prayer position, well… that’s a whole lot of lubrication working against me.

It also grounds the eating habits for the day. It is really hard to binge after yoga, not that I’ve tried. Today was the closest I’ve come to binging, but it’s nothing emotional at all. I just have roasted acorn squash with cinnamon in the refrigerator and, well, that’s like having dessert and calling it a meal. In fact, my lunch today was a big bowl of roasted acorn squash, roasted butternut squash, and roasted apple, and that was it. I did two acorn squash, one small butternut squash, and one apple, altogether late this morning, as I made it to 9 a.m. yoga.

I really like 9 a.m. yoga. The hard part of it is that you can’t eat two hours before doing the class, and the class is about a 25 minute walk. So, if I get up at 8 a.m., my options are: have breakfast and catch the noon class, or not have any breakfast until around 11 a.m. and, well… people don’t get this fat by putting off many meals. And, when there isn’t roast acorn squash prepared, I tend to not eat much after dinner, so I’m usually hungry when i wake up.

Today was absolutely perfect, though. I rolled out of bed (euphemism, of course, as rolling out would lead to injury) at 6:50 a.m. I ate breakfast, set my alarm for 8:20 a.m. and went back to bed. Perfect! That’s not a system that will work on a regular basis, though.

Oh, and I heard back from the guy about the office, and he’s a little miffed that I bailed, mainly from a rent perspective. He said he thinks it would be fair for me to pay for the entire month of March, since he isn’t able to rent it because I took it, but then adds that if I had a problem with that, I could just send him the $75 and that’s it. So, as you might guess, he’s getting $75. If i thought I really screwed him over, I’d pay up, but by my math, he showed me the apartment late afternoon the day before he was headed out of town. So, from the time I moved in until the time I left, he was out of town. And, according to his e-mail, he will be out of town for the rest of the month, and therefore unable to show the place to any other prospective tenants, which is his reasoning why I should pay.

My take on it is that, unless there was some other interested party coming in later the same day I took it, he would have been out rent for the whole month, since he’s been out of town since then. So, he’s actually $75 to the good on rent. And, it also seems strange that I have to pay for all of March, when we’re only halfway into it, and the office being vacant for the rest of March is sort of because he’s not there to show it to anyone else.

So, yeah, call it a $75 lesson. Nothing earth-shaking.

Returning to yoga talk, it’s sort of strange how yoga seems to work into my compartmentalized, scheduling mind so well. Between the class times, the no-eating for two hours thing, and my desire to not go for the 6:15p or 8:15p classes, it’s very much decided for me when to go. The noon class seems to be happening most often, because I want breakfast when i wake up, and it’s not an issue stopping to eat at 10 a.m.

As for the working at home thing, I’m trying to roll back and piece together how I was able to write 760+ pages of a draft here, and while some of it was my “write 2000 words a day” thing giving me a metric, I think the other part was not having cable TV (see aforementioned knowledge of American Idol, a few posts down). To be fair, I tried to be good a while back. I canceled the cable. They just never showed up and yanked the wire, so I don’t have a bill, but I still have cable.

So, I think the plan here, and this is so stupid, but i recently went in and cleaned out my TIVO, freed up as much space as I possibly can. Then I went and whittled down my season passes, and made them all the lowest possible quality. And, I’m just going to yank the wires going into the TV, save for the DVD input.

I never waste time by randomly watching a full-length movie, and I have a lot of stuff to review for Oasis, too. So, DVDs are fine. Actually, for lunch and dinner today, I watched one segment each of Wayne Dyer’s Inspiration PBS special on DVD, so I’m doing one segment of that at a time. So, I’ll probably do that instead of seeing Rosie do Hot Topics or whatever else.

Now, you might be thinking, wouldn’t you just have to reach around and push the cables back into the TV to be right where you are now? Yes, but I won’t. The TIVO right now can chug away for 5-6 weeks, recording my must-see shows without a problem. So, that’s resolved.

That’s about it for now, though. Time for bed.

All these Wayne Dyer lectures mention his getting up between 3 and 4 a.m. to work on his books, based on the Rumi quote: “The morning breeze has secrets to tell you, do not go back to sleep.” He feels that is the houer when you are most quiet, the surroundings are most still, and you’re able to best tap into your source/God. but, if you’re going to bed at 1… not likely to happen. When I used to wake up at 4 to work on my book, I was crashing around 10, so still some work to do.

Sorry, Rumi. Not going to happen tonight.

It’s been one week of Bikram now.

Today was OK, my body was resisting more than I like. But I still felt I pushed myself. It’s never about putting in the time, I really want to focus and make the time matter when I commit to things.

There’s so much going on at once in that class, sometimes I just pull back and focus on breathing. There’s an impulse to hold your breath in a pose, but you really should push through it, use the breath to help deepen the posture, etc.

I spoke to today’s teacher after class, since I’m not very flexible, so I was curious how to know which thing to focus on. Like if one pose says to keep your righty foot on the ground, but then lunge sideways to the left, keeping your left thigh parallel to the floor, to me those are either/or situations. I can either keep my foot grounded, or set the left leg properly, but not both. So, she said to always go by what they say first. If the position starts with the foot plated, make that my mission, and then only work the left leg until it starts to affect the right’s ability to stay in position.

Also, I was curious, so I started reading about Bikram, the guy who started the class. I was expecting the usual sunshine and light that often permeates this side of things. But, well, he sort of sounds like an arrogant prick. So… I’ll just stick with the class and not delve deeper into the guy behind it all.

Despite his attempt to copyright the series, they are all standard yoga asanas, so I’m improving either way. If I decide to do something aside from Bikram at some point, it’s all to the good, so I’ll continue.

So, one of the real ding about the office happened yesterday, whenI finished a polish on a chapter, and the next step is typically to read it. But then I realized I’m in a shared office. I have walls, but no ceiling, we can all hear one another, and I don’t just mumble through the text, I perform it. I tend to do it one time textually, trying to hear missing/wrong words, and to make sure it still holds together. And then I do it the second time like a public reading, acted out and fun.

But, in a quiet office, where most people seemed to be doing telecommuting and Internet startups, etc., the vibe wasn’t right.

Then I started thinking the same would be an issue when I did phone interviews for Oasis.

Long story short, I borrowed a car, emptied the office, and now I’m back home full-time. Still down there for yoga classes, but that’s just a break in my day now, with a roundtrip 8 block walk.

I still have to sort out what it will cost. Technically, I paid the guy a security deposit plus March’s rent, except he has been out of town, so I took my check back and left the keys in their place. Hopefully I can get off with paying for 6 days, and a bit for power, Internet, etc. Slight chance I’m still on the hook for March, but technically, moved in after he was already out of town, and he still isn’t back, so unless someone else was interested, I occupied the office for a time when he wouldn’t be able to show it anyway. We’ll see what happens…

Just reviewing how things have been the past few days, and I like a lot of it, but…

It seems I am always so tame.

There is always this need I have for discipline and structure, and it never works, but I keep trying to put it in place.

Like, I’ve been doing the Oasis and novel work in the office, and adding the yoga into the mix. But, immediately, everything is about trying to make it very clean. Work on Oasis for X hours, then do yoga, then have lunch, then it’s all novel from then until later. Then, I’m home for dinner, and unwinding.

It just seems like I’m some retiree.

I need to find a way to be messy. I need to decide that I can make a paragraph perfect yet tonight and down a Red Bull to make sure I see it through. Wake up and see what the hell happened.

I mean, Bright Eyes playing a late concert shouldn’t rattle me. I don’t have to wake up early. I didn’t have to go to bed after the show. For a brief window, I can just do whatever, whenever.

I shouldn’t know what Jack bauer did tonight. I shouldn’t know Oprah’s running repeats this week. I shouldn’t know that Sanjaya made the Top 12 on American Idol.

I’m trying to figure it out, this compulsion to organize and plan and schedule and tie the days up with a pretty bow. Could I have done more today? The answer is always yes.

I just fear that passion and fire don’t arrive on schedule. You can’t order up inspiration for tomorrow between 10 a.m. and noon. Life ultimately needs to be accommodating and messy and finds its own path. I mean, I didn’t have iced tea with dinner because I was eating a little late, and didn’t want it to keep me up, so that I could go to bed early, so that I could wake up early, so that I could put “the plan” into effect again.

Knowing what really isn’t the solution doesn’t point out what should be, though.

Maybe it is specifically working against my comfort zone. Go to a noisy coffeehouse and find a way to make that energy work for me. Packing up my laptop and some clothes and heading to Thailand again. I keep saying I don’t want to be one of those people who gets all into rituals, like I have to go to Asia to write books and such, but… whatever works is fine, really.

I think the rented office thing… eh, it’s a pretense. It is what I really need to learn how to do without all the hurdles. It proves that when I’m not home I can avoid the distractions of home. It’s not learning anything, really.

I mean, it’s the sand that makes the pearl. The imperfection, the struggle.

What’s the point of ditching corporate America if I keep following its strange conventions?

But it leaves the larger question remaining: How can you learn to live messy?

Hmm, the mini-heatwave we’re having in SF isn’t working well with the Bikram. Previously, coming out of class into the cold, breezy air cooled you down immediately. But without that cooling, it’s taking a lot longer. I showered, dried off, and went over to the organic grocer a block away to pick up some apples and iced tea for the office, and by the time I walked back, my T-shirt was already getting pretty soaked through.

Today’s “news,” if you can call it that, is that when sitting Japanese style, feet touching behind you, my butt touched my heels today. Previously, I was sort ofresting on my hands, suspending in the air. Yesterday, there was a slight grazing of fabric, but today, I was sitting on my legs. We haven’t hit the point where this is, like, comfortable or anything, but it’s progress. Other stuff is harder to gauge.

One thing is that the class does speed by. 90 minutes of yoga seems much quicker than 45 minutes of cardio.

I may have to look for a sweatband soon, and see if that does anything. I want to paint the picture properly here, so that you get a true sense of the amount of sweat here. When we do a position where my nose is lower than my chin, sweat starts running up from my chest, across my chin, and directly into my nostrils, at about the pace of an electric coffee maker. So, it’s certainly hard to maintain focus and breathe through your nose with it slowing filling with hot, salty liquid.

When I’m standing up, the issue is just making it hard to keep staring into the mirror. They say the more you do it, and the more you breathe fully through your nose, the less you will sweat eventually. We shall see…