Why I've Been Talking Politics

(This is a long and confusing post with too many ideas.  I'm sorry.)

I have a lot of stuff I want to write about, but I haven't been able to pick a topic for a few days.  I didn't particularly want to write the "Eleventy Things I'm Thankful For" until sometime later, after the holidays are over (although I have many, many things to be thankful for and I'm sure it will be a massive read, so make sure you grab a cup of coffee and probably a snack, just sayin').  Beside that, all that's been on my mind other than living and stuff are issues that could probably be deemed inflammatory, either positively or negatively (depending on your beliefs/political views).  And I didn't know if I wanted to do that, because I didn't really want to put myself out there like that, all saying what I actually think and stuff.

And since I have a tendency to miss the obvious points in my life, it took me three days to realize that really what I should write about is my thoughts on... my thoughts.  How I got there, why I think that, and how come I feel so uncomfortable saying so.

Speaking my mind has been a life-long battle for me for a couple of reasons.  The first is just that I try to be nice, and I guess my definition of nice has never included running others over with my opinion.  The second is that I genuinely believe that everybody has something to say and a right to say it.  If I don't listen to the opinions of others, why should I expect them to listen to me?

I'm re-reading that paragraph.  It makes sense, and I still agree with it.

The problem might just be that in the last several years, I've gotten "listen to others" confused with "don't say anything back," "hide my own opinion," and "as a result, carry around sub-surface, deep-seated doubts about the things that I believe the most."  This might explain why I shrug apologetically when people ask me if I'm a vegetarian, and other similar scenarios.  But the fact remains that I'm in my mid-twenties, and who I am is starting to solidify thusly: I'm a borderline-hippie vegetarian yoga practitioner who is very concerned about environmental impact, arts education, and feminism/the status of women today and in the future.  Phew.  Even writing that makes me uncomfortable.

I don't want to shout my opinions.  I've never felt at ease around people whose voices were so loud that they overshadowed their actions.  Even peaceful and respectful dialogue can end really poorly, especially if you are trying to dialogue with people who aren't so peaceful and respectful.  That can be much worse than just keeping one's mouth shut, in my experience.

But I'm an adult, or at least I pretend to be.  And that means that I need to stand up for myself and learn to do difficult things like advertise my own business prowess and flute playing, and basically figure out how to convince people that I can do all the things I know I can do.  And I thought a good place to start would be a blog.  I'm not shoving it in anybody's face, and nobody has to read it.  Everybody can start conversations in the comments section, and they don't have to stare at my face while I say stuff they may not want to hear.  But I can practice saying the things that are true for me without constant second-guessing, hence my political/personal posts.

So that's that.  I wonder if other people have these thoughts?

Pepper

In grad school, I was involved with the graduate student union.  While I have mixed feelings about unions, I really believed in this one.  The graduate TAs and GAs unionized when they hadn't had a pay raise for over a decade, had no benefits, no health insurance.  They were doing important work for the university, for other students (graduate and undergraduate), and for various branches of learning (including agriculture and the sciences) and weren't able to make ends meet.  At that particular university, the grad students did a third of the teaching and two-thirds of the grading, so it was no wonder they felt that they should be better rewarded for their work.  As an aside, a number of other groups also felt shorted and unionized against the university, including clerical and technical staff, and even a portion of the university faculty.

I was a part of the union the year we were bargaining for a new contract.  While I was sorry that I didn't have the time to be a part of the bargaining team, I turned up for every event that I could manage, including the most awesome one (in my opinion): a grade-in.  The TAs and GAs didn't do anything special or different than usual.  We just took our stacks of grading from our office to the floor of the administrative building.  We spread out our papers on the floor and sat cross-legged and peacefully caused a little bit of gridlock for the administrators who wanted to cut our health insurance and pay, even as they raised university housing by five percent.  And, as a side-note, tuition doubled between 2004 and 2011.  Doubled.


But my point is, I'm a big fan of the peaceful protest.  I believe that there's no better way to educate the people you're trying to change than show them who you are and what you do in a peaceful way- no yelling, no screaming, no throwing liquids of any kind (or solids, for that matter).  I just think that pacifist protest is really the way to get things done.

Then again, when we did our grade-in, we didn't get pepper-sprayed at point blank range by the police.

I don't go to UC Davis, and I've never had any affiliation with them, but I was horrified (as I'm sure many people were) to see a video of seated students and non-students being pepper-sprayed and manhandled by the police.  I thought it was especially ironic that the Chancellor (Linda Katehi) said that camping out on campus was not allowed because it posed a safety issue to students.  I imagine that's true, especially if the students are having their sculls fractured by thrown canisters of tear gas, which actually happened to one protester.

While I have no affiliation with the school, I do have a lot of sympathy for the protesters.  I'm a young, well-educated adult and have consistently struggled to make ends meet since I finished my dual masters.  I have many of the same frustrations as all of the "Occupy" movements, and a big part of me feels like the pepper-spraying and tear-gassing of peaceful protesters is a big fat analogy for the whole reason they're out there protesting in the first place.

I'm not totally finished processing this, but I think I have two hopes for the outcome of this event having been widely broadcast.  The first is that I hope it doesn't deter people from demonstrating their dissatisfaction with a broken system.   If there's anything that we can learn from large-scale, long-term peaceful protesting, it's that it doesn't achieve results overnight.  And secondarily, I hope that it encourages everyone, police or student or otherwise, to practice peace and compassion.  As angry as watching the video made me, it was a good reminder that violence doesn't just come in the form of pepper spray.

Savasana Adjustments

Before I had accumulated any of my (minimal) experience teaching yoga to kids, I would have thought what they liked best was the opportunity to be more bendy, or to take a nap, or to do pairs poses and giggle at each other.  But after teaching kids for a year, I find myself continually surprised that their favorite pose is pretty consistently savasana with some kind of guided meditation.  I have a few ideas why, but I think I need a little more experience and a little more time working consistently with kids to really figure it out.

However, I think one of the reasons is the adjustments.  I had a yoga teacher when I was first starting out who made really fantastic savasana adjustments.  She would grasp a foot, one at a time, with her thumb on the arch of the foot, and pull.  The way she did it, it adjusted the hip and made the legs feel longer and relaxed.  I imagine you could get a similar result from pulling on an ankle, especially since some ankles tend to pop uncomfortably if you put even moderate pressure on them.  In any case, the almost all the kids I've worked with have loved this adjustment - in fact, I can't think of one off the top of my head that hasn't.

The second adjustment is to do essentially the same with the arms.  This can relax tension in the shoulders and neck, and make the arms feel more relaxed.  I'm consistently amazed by how many kids carry tension in their shoulders.  Sometimes I'll see even eight- or nine-year-olds with their shoulders around their ears.  I usually follow this with making sure the palms of their hands are flipped toward the sky and either pulling fingers lightly, or putting light pressure on palms with my thumb.  This is another favorite.  When it's done to me, it makes my hands feel grounded and my fingers seem longer (a nice bonus if you're a musician or teaching musical kiddos).

Adjustments are tricky things.  As yoga teachers, we have to be careful not to cause any injury or pain, which means being hyper-aware of any previous injuries or sore spots.  I'm terrified of making an adjustment that hurts a student.  Because of that, I likely make adjustments less frequently than I should.

That being said, the ever-present yoga student in me looooves adjustments, and there's nothing better than a yoga teacher mindfully helping me to where I need to be.  Yoga in the West is a mind/body fusion (emphasis mostly on the body), and I think it's important because of that for teachers to be aware of how to adjust and not be scared of it.  In the end, I'm still a teacher coming to terms with the student in me that just wants that adjustment. 


Adult students, by the way, also love the savasana adjustment, according to the feedback that I've had from adult classes.  And heck, feedback from myself.  Some days when I couldn't get off the couch to a yoga class for any other reason, the promise of that little bit of extra stretch was enough.

Meet loaf.

I love Jonathan Safran Foer's stuff- "Everything Is Illuminated" was one of those books that leave such a lasting impression that they become a part of you, and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" had me in tears in public.  So when my up-to-date S/O saw that he was writing a non-fiction book about vegetarianism, I was really interested in what he had to say.  And it was a lot.

Vegetarianism is a complex issue.  It's a relatively small choice, sometimes, but it has a huge social ripple.  I think my family was very concerned when I showed up for Thanksgiving and made a broccoli quiche for myself, and I was a little concerned myself.  Foer talks about his grandmother's signature dish, chicken soup, and how important it was to her to feed her children and grandchildren fatty pieces of meat after running from the Nazis and starving for years.  For him to give up her soup, and deprive himself and his son of the stories and family history inherent in eating it, was a very poignant illustration of the issues I'm sure many vegetarians battle (albeit sometimes unconsciously).

When I went veg, it was very important to me not to "make a big deal out of it."  I didn't want to make any family or friends feel the least bit guilty for eating meat, and I didn't want anybody to feel judged.  That's something I still feel strongly about, but it's been difficult to accomplish because the act of me turning down meat sometimes seems to make people uncomfortable about eating it no matter what I say.  Foer confronts that issue head-on too, and discusses frankly the moral and ethical issues that we grow up with concerning eating animals.  Not meat, animals.  As an aside, what an interesting book title.

Think about it: from the time that we're tiny we read the story of the three little pigs.  The wolf wants to eat them.  Why is the wolf bad?  It's in his nature to eat other animals.  But that doesn't matter, because he's going after a living thing and he wants to nom it, and he's bad because of it.  And then we wonder why we have guilt complexes while eating pork chops.

Before reading this book, I ate a lot of fish- not at home, but when I was eating at restaurants.  Because of the points that I can't reiterate eloquently here, I haven't had fish in a couple of months.  I don't want to make any shining proclamations about how long this will last or its universal application (I ate a small amount of meat in France this summer because so many of the issues that made me go veg weren't issues with the meat I was offered there), but having a plant-based diet has become something really important to me, surprisingly so.  I find myself becoming an outspoken advocate of reduced meat consumption more than almost any other issue.

Maybe some other time in a shorter post I'll talk about why I went veg in the first place.  There wasn't any one reason, and it's kind of a complicated story, so I'll leave it for another day.

Anyway, the whole point to this post was that I made this recipe for this vegan loaf that I can eat on my homemade tomato thyme bread.  I wasn't sure about it, as it had a bunch of stuff that I've never cooked with before (like nutritional yeast and vital wheat gluten) (which totally sucks since my friends with gluten allergies can't enjoy :-( ).  But it turned out yummy... it has the texture of sausage (with a hard outside and firm inside) and has a spicy-delicious-salty flavor that I totally want to eat with ketchup and mayo.  And maybe a tomato slice.  On an open-faced sammitch.  And maybe I can put it in the toaster oven.  Drool.  And my wonderful, supportive S/O likes it too.  Victoire.

So then I shamelessly stole said recipe and reposted in the hope that the three people who read this will make it and love it.  And there you go.  This is worth trying out, even if you aren't going the veggie route.

Back to the Beginning

So I move to Rochester and what do I do for a living? Guess. For those who know me, it's the most ridiculous, out-there thing ever.

I'm teaching preschool.

What.

And then sometimes I come home and throw tantrums, just like the kids. :)

Give Up

I bought a yoga mat in France. It was the only one I could find at a big sports store, and it came with two foam blocks. I took it outside for two days in a row and did fifty-six sun salutations (it's hard!) and stared at the horses and the mountains and got sun on my back and shoulders. And then I just kind of stopped.

I mean, we got busy. We had the recital, then E and I went to Cannes for a couple of days, then there were family things and I just didn't have time. After we were in Cannes, we were only back in Mons for a couple of days before we left, and E got really sick so I was with him most of the time. Then we came back to the US, spent some time in NYC with his cousins, and moved here. And we went to one class, but it wasn't enough to even make me sore the next day (and believe me, I'm so out of shape that standing up and sitting down could make me sore).

And it's funny, because I'm only talking about the physical side of yoga, but all the mental stuff went to crap too in a big financial freak-out that I had when we sat down and I realized how much I need to keep me going, just based on my bills. I haven't felt quite right mentally since then.

What is right? This living situation. I love it. I love the apartment, and between the two of us we don't really need any more furniture (except a kitchen table). I love the time we've been spending together and with other friends. I love that I have a job, that we have a recording studio in our apartment (with a piano!). I hate that our horn-playing neighbor plays Mahler excerpts at 10:00 PM, but I sort of love that at least we have a musician neighbor. But if she does it one more time, I'm going to start practicing Stars and Stripes Forever on piccolo right into her window.

So pretty much what's missing is exercise in general, yoga in specific. But it's definitely been an interesting study in how much the physical affects the mental.

Some Non-Yoga Thoughts on Leaving Boston

So I'm moving in twenty days- one month in Connecticut, one month in France, and then heading west for a year. And I've been thinking a lot about Boston and what my year and a half here has been like, how I've adjusted to the city, how I haven't adjusted at all. Personally, my time here has been very, very confusing. Getting married and divorced within a year is nasty business, and I struggled for a long time with feelings of anger and guilt over being duped into moving to Boston in the first place. But I have to admit that the city itself, while confusing and seemingly contradictory at times, is definitely interesting.

Boston people are pushy. They know what they want, and you'd better damn well give it to them. This was especially apparent when I was working retail, and middle-aged Bostonites would come in expecting a personal shopper (and getting one, through pure pushiness). If you do something that's aggravating in traffic, like merging late (even though you've been signalling for five minutes), or stopping for a pedestrian (even though you're supposed to), you can expect to be yelled at and shown interesting variations of the middle part of the hand. Living in a really urban apartment has made me strikingly aware of how much Boston drivers honk their horns. Especially at four in the morning. I hated the pushiness initially. I like to think (or maybe pretend) that it's given me a little bit of an edge that I didn't have before, though. At least now I think I have the option of going all Boston on somebody if they need it. :-)

Boston people are really proud to be Boston people. On the upper crust, there's the serious and studious Harvard/MIT/BU/Tufts crowd that's mostly non-local but which seems at first to be the pulse of a city that basically shuts down at 9:00 PM and mostly doesn't party. But after living here for a while, you start to become aware that the Harvard crowd is just the skin of the city. All the blood and guts are made of the real natives, the ones that might drop "r"s and tell hilarious-but-slightly-racist jokes and really are Boston. No Yankees fans allowed. I've seen three people in two days with large, noticeable Red Sox tattoos.

Boston is a really, really green city. Every subsection of the population throws their cans into a recycling bin that gets picked up curbside once a week. People take the T to work to avoid driving their cars (not just because traffic in Boston moves at an average of 8 MPH, but also because it's better for the environment to use mass transit. And there's such a good system here). You can't walk two blocks without running into a yoga studio. The young, working, mostly-tattooed yuppie population can be seen after hours drinking herbal tea and carrying yoga mats. Nobody looks at you sideways if you mention that you're on an Ayurvedic diet or ask where you can get kombucha. This is a part of living here that I love.

There's also The Cambridge Mom. The Cambridge Mom has lofty ideals about how to raise her children... and actually follows through with them. The moms I have been fortunate enough to work with all are extremely well-educated (don't know one without at least one masters degree), most of them practice yoga, work and raise kids, and care deeply about their families and their community. One mom has quotes all over her kitchen from various philosophers, holy books, and writers that remind you, every time you take a glass out of the cabinet, to breathe deeply and enjoy every moment you've been given. One mom's kids run to the fridge to grab the jar of wheat germ to put on their yogurt for dessert. The kids are kids- but they often surprise me with grains of wisdom that seem very mature for their years. All of The Cambridge Moms seem to want to give their children this indomitable sense of hope- that life is good, and people are good, and you can make the world a better place right now! You don't even have to wait until you grow up. I love that about living here too.

Plus, after I moved here my sister followed, and I think Boston has been exactly the right place for her. She fits in well, she found work immediately, and now she's going back to school to be an NP. She also found her dude here. And that's a total positive.

So I might be back, after this year. And I wouldn't mind at all, because I feel like I know the ropes now. I can navigate the subway like a pro, I know which windy, poorly-maintained streets are one-way, and I'm fairly adept at avoiding the $50 street-sweeping parking tickets (god, these people love their parking tickets). I think I'd be much better at Boston a second time around. But for now, I'm a little relieved to have a year off to spend with my best friends, working and living in an environment that's a little more laid-back.