11 posts tagged “navel gazing”
I tend to do quite a bit of navel gazing during yoga classes, and by navel gazing I mean putting my introspective head on though I do literally spend time gazing at my actual navel as well. I find yoga quite mindless, especially when you filter out the mediation and the new age rhetoric, as all you are doing is breathing and following instructions for a series of poses. I like to think I do my best thinking on the mat, and today I was mulling over why I have been feeling so out of sorts. I managed to identify key ingredients that had been missing this week - escapism and thinking.
Escapism comes in many forms. My favs are studying ancient civilisations and watching genre tv shows based on cool futuristic stuff (hello science fiction and fantasy). I find that both of those things lead to thinking and that in turn leads to a happy me. Does this makes me an uber nerd? Because I really hope so. Last week was primarily about the day job, and in the evening I only had time to watch the Daily Show and Colbert. As much as I love Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert they are very much based in reality, and given that most of my favourite shows are on break for the summer there are slim pick-in's for programs that transport you to a galaxy far far away.
Is it odd that a lack of Fringe, Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica, Chuck and Doll House disrupt my reality so much? Not really when you think about the Obama-BSG article the Onion ran a few months back. Dude, I am totally on the same page as I have an entire summer to fill before school and the new tv seasons begin in earnest. What am I meant to do till then?
Next up will be my summer sci-fi survival guide.
There was a scary article in the UK last week about how Camelot (the lottery people) had to withdraw a scratch card game as there was widespread confusion over negative numbers. A damning indictment of the state of education me thinks, and a far better litmus test than all those government bodies and the stats they produce. My suggestion is that we start a series of scratch cards testing basic literacy and numeracy to get better idea of just how bad things are, and of course the beauty of this suggestion is that the consumers (or "students") will be paying for the privilege! The money raised can then be fed back into education.
Q. What do Bionic Woman, Without A Trace, Life, Journeyman, House, Life and Pushing Daisies all have in common?
A. British leads.
Apparently Brits playing yanks is the new black. So why not outsource the writing? Market forces and all that. In strikes of yore (of more essential workers) there was the shipping in of new workers, or scabs to use the parlance of the street*. My suggestion is that we look to Canada. I can't imagine anyone getting mad at Canadians? And, so many US shows are filmed over the border why not get locals to write the scripts?
My next suggestion is that we open up the writing of our shows to the great unwashed of the blogosphere. Most of us have pretty strong ideas about the direction our favourite shows should be going on, and I think it is fair to say that we couldn't make a worse job of Bionic Women (and its teams of writers rehashing c-plot lines from Alias and Felicity).
Finally, plays. They have already been written, and why not raise the bar of what is on TV. Given the prevalence of Brits with theatrical backgrounds already in LaLa-Land this idea should be a shoe in.
Any way aren't writers meant to be starving in garrets suffering for their art? I can't imagine the artisans of La Bohome to be wrangling over residuals from downloads whilst accepting donuts from aristos.
*Shamefully stolen from the Band From TV's reworking of Minnie the Moocher.
I have five hundred more words to go before I can call it a night.
Five hundred words between by arse being on the sofa watching the first episode of the third season of Slings & Arrows and not being sat here gazing at a half conceived essay. I swear there is nothing more intimidating than a blank page.
I chummed Alex part way to the PATH train (he is off to tennis tonight) so I could get a blast of cold air and a grande skim no-foam latte. I am putting my faith in the coffee based beverage. Wish me luck and send any spare words my way.
Update: Four hundred and seventeen words later I am calling it a night.
It has been one of those unraveling types of weeks. I got to today, looked down at my feet and there pretty much was my life transformed into piles of metaphorical thread. What is a girl to do other than lament to her husband that she could really do without the "job" bit of her life. He of course countered with the riposte that he too could do without the pesky job bit of his life but that like gravity it was a given and not going anywhere for either of them. I guess I brought this on myself. If I hadn't have done so darn well in last summers exams I might have had some wiggle room. But I did and I don't.
I slash we have a plan. A five year type of a plan that sees us: moving cities, starting a family (Gaius has a nice tyrannical ring to it) and most importantly for me getting a first and learning Latin (the language bit isn't compulsory for Alex). With these future accomplishments under my belt, graduate school and a hopefully slightly more cerebral sort of a life will be on the cards (though not without a decades worth of hard slog - I swear the studying and homework will never end). It looks as if we are going to have another year to eighteen months in NY; which is fine as long as I keep reminding myself that what I am doing now is not what I will be doing forever and that hopefully there will be a hard stop to the relentless juggling.
I must put an end to this self indulgent whining as I have much to get done tonight so I can watch CSI at nine and see what type of job Liev Schreiber does filling Gil's shoes.
I am having one of those "I can't believe it's not butter" weeks. Except you need to substitute substitute dairy products for the days of the week. Once again the week has leap frogged its way to Thursday night and I am looking at a weekend spent tied to my desk because everything has been piling up big time. This is what happens when you go out twice on school nights and your work/study balance is a tight rope. Any how it is a long weekend (something in honour of Martin Luther) and I have plans to catch up with everything from Roman wall paintings to de-moulding the bathroom tiles to finishing the oh so politically incorrect Live And Let Die to catching up with blog posts. I fear that Alex will ban me from the DVR if I don't post about our trip to Chicago over the weekend and then there's all the films I've seen in the last month.
Where to begin...
It is still not really all that wintry but that has not stopped me from wearing my big arse coat about town. This means that several times a day I nearly pass out because of heat exhaustion. However, I am determined to get my monies worth from this purchase so I will persevere wearing it on the subway even if it does double my volume and stop me from sliding into those teeny tiny spaces.
I went to my first yoga class of the New Year this evening. My first class in a week ten days fortnight. I knew that it would be brutal because I have morphed into a blancmange. I had to do my chaturangas on my knees rather than "lose the integrity of the pose". This is a big step for me (I gave my ego the night off), normally I tend to me in a state of denial and try to give the impression that I like practise all the time at home but I knew that my form and mat would give me away. Whenever I neglect my mat, leave it all rolled up in a dark corner of the apartment I know that when I next take it to class the edges wont lay flat and everyone will know how lazy I am. Some how I always am the yogi with curled up edges - I think the others iron their mats before class.
Buying two jumpers and fixing up an appointment with my hairdresser were the peaks in my productivity this week; best laid plans and all that. I always find it hard to get my head back in the game after an extended break from work. To spend four days solely studying is bliss, sheer nirvana and it can be difficult to readjust. Circumstances dictate that I someone who is forever juggling and switching between roles.
Today I caught myself behaving like a New Yorker. I have morphed into a hybrid Brit slash New Yorker. I sound British, I dress British yet I have impatient Manhattan sensibilities. We're going to spend Christmas in London, and afterwards catch up with our respective families. I am going to fly up to Scotland for a day to attend my Grandpa's birthday and catch up with my Dad's side of the family (this deserves its own post as I now have to plot my escape from Lockerbie) whilst Alex spends sometime with his parents. For the past month I've been checking the Virgin Trains website for times and prices for Alex's trip to the Midlands, but when I enter the 26th December as the date of the outbound journey I always got an error message about this data not being availble... blah, blah, blah. I finally caved today and called them. What I find out is that there is no Virgin Train service on Boxing Day. I was flabbergastered and I kept the poor woman on the phone as I grappled with the concept. The Americanised part of my brain could not believe that things would grind to a halt and I started to get peeved.
It is amazing how quickly you adjust and forget your old way of life. I've got use to buying coffee and eating out the majority of the time, I'll take the subway over the tube any day of the week, and A4 paper looks just plain weird.
So far my year has been a blur of fauns, beavers and turkish delight bearing witches. This is because I have a Narnia themed calendar hanging on my bathroom wall; as I clean my teeth I can muse over where the year has gone, and how can it be November when it only feels like April. It probably doesn't help that the weather has gone mild again, and that I found out at the weekend that the All Saints are back together. So not only does it feel like April but April 2001 to boot.
Things are getting a little bit more interesting at work, which adds to the craziness of juggling it with studying because I am now much busier during the day (which is good because the day flies by), and the office is making the right noises about going green. I'm part of a working group looking at that type of thing... I am not much of committee person more of a doer or dictator if you will. I switched the office over to recycled paper on a whim, and if I had my way I'd do an overnight regime change to all things granola and birkenstock. First thing would be timers on the bathroom lights. What do you reckon 30 secs and then plunge them into darkness....
