You're Doing It Wrong

You know how you get to the point where you never want to hear a song again? This is the problem with radio because it takes about 10 songs and plays them until you can no longer stand them. I don’t get because I think the more a song is played, the more it sells. But why would you buy something you can hear on the radio 50 times a day? (Or on your ring tone or whatever the kids are doing these days.)

The only time I listen to the radio is in my car during the commute and I listen to about 6 different stations so this is less of a problem except for the 80’s station.

I listened to a lot of radio in the 80’s and I can still remember what songs I grew to loathe from overplay: anything from Tears for Fears Songs from the Big Chair; anything from David Bowie Let’s Dance. I think I cried once when “China Girl” came on the radio one more time. Dire Straits Sultans of Swing, which apparently came out in 1979. Flock of Seagulls. Men at Work. I even got tired of “Heaven” by Warrant. I could go on but you get the idea.

Present day 80’s stations do the exact same thing. They play the same 50 songs over and over. “Hungry Like the Wolf” sounds great when you haven’t heard it for 20 years but put it back into daily rotation and you hit that saturation point pretty quick. I don’t think I have ever turned on my car radio and not found a Billy Idol song playing somewhere. Seriously, does anyone ever need to hear “White Wedding” again?

Aren’t there any good and rarely played 80’s songs?

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.