Locals · 28 December 2009
Went out Saturday night with four junior professors—good looking, well dressed and profusely published. I like Humanities people: they’re well read and spoken, hyper-reflective, pleasantly cynical, and know how to choose books and order wine.
Funny – I guess if interpretation is your stock in trade, you’re likely to take your own emotions hyper seriously. Interpretation is just moodiness with good syntax, so woes are raw material. Topics of conversation last night, over a startlingly good dinner at EvE (OvO’s A2HQ) and three bottles of red, included: treatments for seasonal affective disorder, uncontrollable addictions to Zappos.com, how the last push of finishing the dissertation turned them in to monsters, getting psychoanalyzed, adding Pema Chodron to the nightstand along with one’s preferred great literature, the importance of keeping an apartment in Chicago or New York, how there is nobody to have sex with in Ann Arbor. Dark! But also: absolutely real problems.
My favorite is a poet and former Silicon Valley programmer who does self-deprecation with such methodical lightness it’s like he’s crocheting conversation. He makes poems by randomly reconstituting the sections of distress line phonecalls that his DVR software can’t recognize. And also J, Sartre as Gen X-er, a beautifully spoken professor whose expansive catalogue of the reasons academics are more miserable than civilians is nearly complete, based on experience. I suspect he’s taken up smoking just so he can stand outdoors and freeze, his thin, uninsulated frame cutting sharp and tragically fashionable against the 14-hour night. The rest of us are sexless downy puffballs, but J is fighting the good fight in the name of New York City, Brooks Brothers and the MLA. Having sold out immediately for puffiness, I hope his REI resistance is still holding steady when I return from India in March.
Woke up with a light hangover and the feeling in my belly of a fine, rich dinner that hadn’t even begun until 9. Excellent. The night-before preparations for my first Bikram class were in place. Doesn’t seem right to go in to that atmosphere without something potent to burn off. I’ve been canvassing Ann Arbor yoga, just to get a sense of what’s here and in hopes of meeting one or two new kindred spirits. Also, I know that if I start hermitlike here, I may dig in my heels and self-isolate, imagining my practice to be all precious and inviolate. Not that everybody would do this—I’ve just seen myself reflected in those who do. For me, there’s a sneaky depression that comes with that kind self isolation—once it arrives, it’s so subtle I can’t detect it—and it’s this that I especially care to preempt. Once I feel more grounded here, doing only self practice will make more sense.
The carpet at the Bikram studio smelled sweet like the rotting trash in a tropical country’s dump, and the heat cooked me to the bones. This is what I have taken for granted: temperatures and humidity high enough to induce decay and warm my fast-twitch, flightly little core. No wonder new practitioners feel cleansed: the heat does a lot of work on the body as one makes lightly strenuous, very safe shapes. I have been looking for an good sauna in town, but this is a sauna in which I get to do stretches! A nice resource. Afterwards, I soldiered back out in to the cold, my core so superheated and skin so full of moisture that 20 minutes later I was walking naked on the icy wood floor at home, without even a shiver.
Do you know what it’s like when your organs get cold and can’t warm up for weeks? Not if you’re a pitta. Not if you live in California. I was so dry and cold to the core that I didn’t drip a drop of sweat until we got well in to the floor series. Even now, re-chilled, I see that a layer of dread has been stripped away—the dread that began the month in 1998 I spent sleeping in snow caves and frost-biting the right toes. All week, those toes have tended to go deathly white, even when wrapped in layers of wool. The dread is that I’ll never really be warm again. I could have cured it at the YMCA sauna two blocks from our house, but Bikram got me first. Thank you for your brass balls and the fortitude to bring them to Ann Arbor, Mr. Choudry. Somehow they have fortified me too.
Bikram is wonderfully hot, but I also appreciate its democracy and impersonality. Every age and body type in the room—very insipring; and they don’t even say on the schedule who is teaching each class because it’s not supposed to matter. Everyday practitioners of all ages hang out before and after class in tiny pieces of clothing – no shame, but also no pride. Nobody is sculpted or tanned, anyway. And maybe after all that mirror-staring, having a body isn’t quite as big of a deal. I think of ashtanga as a strong container, but—with the damn mirrors, and the goddamn heat, and the talking so incessant you often want to scream—Bikram is even stronger. No escape in that room.
The hot yoga doesn’t light up most of the physical and mental wires that ashtanga engages. It’s a gross level practice, in that sense. The work isn’t deep enough to wring out the internal organs; and the “dialogue” keeps me from dropping in below a certain blip-rate mentally. But… nobody said it was a particularly contemplative practice, or a transformative one. Most people seem to do it because it’s an awesome de-tox, as compared to most ashtangis, who—if they become lifers—usually stay with the practice to cultivate equanimity. Bikram is a hilarious mirror… for ashtanga and all the other yogas. Nobody could mistake this for being a woo-woo spiritual zone; and there is no space for divas or superheroes.
So... there is this area of my headspace that seems to be reserved for locals. Suddenly these—J the brilliant, tragic Zappos maven, Amanda the intriguingly monotonous reciter of the Bikram script—are the characters populating it. I hope they remain so amusing and easy to be with. Likely more kindred community will arrive eventually, but who knows. Disconsolate academics and Bikram junkies aren’t really so strange.
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Categories: integration
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I wish I liked Bikram. Seems like it’d be a good thing to do once in awhile during winter. Every 3-4 years I end up checking out a new studio and find myself HATING the class. “Why am I here? I hate this and that teacher is a douche reading a script!” Then I’m done for awhile.
Posted by: boodiba · Dec 29, 03:35 AM · #
You’ve transitioned from DeLillo to an updated version of Updike? :-)
It sounds pretty sweet — tasty dinner conversation and some sweaty shamelessness.
Posted by: karen · Dec 29, 05:16 AM · #
as a reluctant ann arborite who escapes to her family’s apartment in nyc as often as possible, i had to smile. i’ve really been enjoying reading your take on the town. you seem to know people already, but if you ever have a question, can’t find something, etc. feel free to drop me a line. i’m jaded and startlingly uninformed about the town, but i’ll do my best!
Posted by: dana · Dec 29, 06:09 AM · #
Wait… Dana, I thought you were someone else! Hahaha! Jaded and startlingly uninformed is perfect! I leave next week and will be awau until mid-March (total cop-out, I know), but would love to find you in the spring.
Karen, oh god… do I have to read Updike now? Apparently I’m also supposed to read Feast of Love by Charles Baxter.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 29, 06:15 AM · #
I did Bikram every day for about six months when I was coming off a bunch of medications. In a past life. Years before ashtanga, years before sanity. One day, I sat in the parking lot thinking about how much I was dreading the class, and I just didn’t go back. Ashtanga saved me…. otherwise I would have gone the rest of my life thinking that yoga was a synonym for “boot camp from hell”.
Also, “lightly strenuous, very safe”: hilarious (makes me want to die, every time).
Organ cold. Oh no. Please tell me you at least have a bathtub. I actually DO get that in Los Angeles….
Posted by: Rebecca · Dec 29, 06:17 AM · #
I love Updike. Maybe I’ll re-read and make some suggestions to you. For anyone out there who loves watching “Mad Men,” you should also supplement your 1950s-to-60s historical journey with some Updike.
Posted by: karen · Dec 29, 11:26 AM · #
I’d skip “Feast of Love”
Posted by: Tim · Dec 31, 05:20 AM · #
If you genuinely enjoy being female, I’d stay away from any and all Updike . . .
Posted by: RE · Dec 31, 07:13 AM · #
Haha! That’s pretty funny, RE. Sadly, given the time I was born in history, I have a complicated relationship to the patriarchal hegemony represented by Updike (or Mad Men). Happily, I am at peace with my preference for hairy chests.
Posted by: karen · Dec 31, 08:32 AM · #
!!! I will sample with caution. Maybe also Mary Gaitskill and some of the William Gass that’s been sitting on my shelf unread for years. Sadly, the new Lorrie Moore novel essentially set in Ann Arbor looks bad.
Random- – I gave B. Alan Wallace’s _Mind in the Balance to three people for the holidays. Haven’t read it myself, but he is a very debonair and careful speaker, and the book is a hit with the friends.
Rebecca, I’ve thought about your experience each of the last two days I’ve driven to Bikram. Tim said that Bikram seems to be a phase people go through, and I wondered if one kind of tapers off after the detox effect stops happening. But maybe you just quit because you start to hate it.
I’d be curious to know if there was some part of your Bikram experience – some healing part, maybe- that got reactivated when you found ashtanga years later.
Bathtub. This place was built in the 1920s and the bathroom is sort of tacked on the back, uninsulated by the rest of the house. Very drafty in there. I was dismayed to discover the giant claw-foot tub that charmed me in May is too big lengthwise to fill with more than a few inches of hot water. All in all, baths and showers are kind of freezing.
Bet they were even colder for whoever lived here 90 years ago, before Hot Chillys long underwear, forced-heat furnaces, and… Bikram yoga.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 31, 10:43 AM · #
Ah, how nice! With the boiler still off here, I had a bikram fix last night too, warmed me to the bones. That ‘dialogue’ will drive you nuts by the way.. lamppost! ballerina toes! ugh. Happy times in the stretchy sauna… did you know where you can cheat and stick in advanced postures? : )
Posted by: susananda · Dec 31, 02:19 PM · #
copping out for escaping ann arbor in the winter?? no way. smart! enjoy your time in india and definitely get in touch when you return.
Posted by: dana · Jan 1, 08:03 AM · #
Susan, TELL ME WHERE TO CHEAT IN BIKRAM. I’ll probably go back a few more nights this week, though that will be it for a while unless it’s still ass cold here at the end of March.
Dana, wonderful. Thanks for saying hello, too. I went to this 108 sun salutations class at A2Yoga today, and a couple of people asked me to teach there in the spring. Like a led class or an intro to win new ashtanga converts. Scary. Is this my karma as the child of crazy evangelicals? (Maybe if I keep going to Bikram, they’ll invite me to their secret advanced class and I can try to subvert some devotees? Evil owl….) Anyway Dana, I’m happy you’re (frequently) nearby doing self practice. Very exciting.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 1, 12:17 PM · #