Hot Yoga

Driving in to Sawtelle from Praxis' chemotherapy today at City of Angels Veterinary Cancer Group I heard a story on NPR about the rise of competitive yoga.



There are lots of discordant manifestations of Eastern wisdom and culture in the Western world. I feel like I see even more of it being connected to GR, where we don't try to re-interpret culture, or try to sell it as the next big thing... the culture just exists, and we try to share. It sells, that's for sure, but we don't play the hype game.... it's a sinking ship really, and our prominent Asian upbringings have taught us that it's not good to be on sinking ships!

Anyhow, competitive yoga? For reals? Isn't yoga supposed to be some internal struggle, non-competitive, self-improvement, set your own bar kinda thing? Granted I've only done it once or twice in half hour installments at 24 Hour fitness, but I grew up seeing my grandfather do it. He'd wake up at 5 am and do yoga until around 8 or 9 when everyone else in the house was just rolling out of bed and thinking about breakfast. He did it before he went to sleep as well. He did it in the privacy of his study, without music, or incense, sans candles... it was just part of his routine for physical and mental health, and at 92, it's served him pretty damn well.

White people are weird. I just chalk it up to that. They find something that's about self reflection and turn it into a sport, or a talk show, or an info-mercial. This yoga thing is happening in very white Portland, but I'm sure it's happening in LA too. LA, also home to the "maid cafe" in Culver City, staffed by white girls in cos-play yellow face. I'm sure it's going over well, but it's still a poor facsimile of the "cafe" cultures in Japan. There's a darkness that I kind of love about the maid and butler cafes... a really public and acceptable state of loneliness and isolation that can be cured for $20 an hour. It's not spectacle and kawaii, it's a modern take on traditional Japanese ideas about the art of a fine companion, and what it means to host and serve a guest. I can groove on that, even if I don't want to pay money to hang out with boys who are prettier and more gracious than I am. It's disconcerting and reminds me that my femininity is not fully realized - in the most non-patriarchal way of course!



When the GR crew was in Tokyo we skipped out on the maid and butler cafes and went for the real underground shit... the cat cafe!! This is where dreams are realized, where affections are bought and sold, and you get to TOUCH the objects of your desire. Pick up the latest issue of GR (with James Jean on the cover) and get the skinny...



Photo by Pryor Praczukowski, who I hope enjoyed this experience as much as I did!!

When I Grow Up

Pretty in Pink was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw. I saw it somewhere in Santa Monica, at a birthday sleepover with my best friend Brooke. I think Ramey was there and Brooke's mom, but I can't remember any other people who might have been there with us... my long term memory is pretty awful. Anyhow, it was the best movie I had seen and it remains one of my all time favorite films.

I wanted to grow up and have Andrew McCarthy fall madly in love with me, I wanted to have romantic make out sessions in hay barns at country clubs, and I wanted to have the best soundtrack ever to my life, but honestly.... I didn't want to be Molly Ringwald, I wanted to be Annie Potts. Iona, is quite possibly the coolest fictional woman I have ever seen portrayed on the big screen. I'm pretty sure was my first girl crush. I mean, come on... how can you resist her?! (Picture above borrowed from someone's blog... they only JUST saw Pretty in Pink... kinda criminal.) I wanted to be Iona when I grew up, and I still do. She ran a kickass record store, had the coolest apartment on the planet, the best hair, the best clothes, she was the oracle of cool for all the alienated punk rock kids, and she had fun being single! All things that I have only half-way done so far, or will forever struggle to accomplish for myself.

I thought of her a few weeks ago, when my dog was diagnosed with cancer. At the end of the movie, she falls in love with a handsome veterinarian. I should have paid closer attention to make that part of her fictional life my reality, not just the part about working in a cool record store and serial dating. If I had a veterinarian boyfriend, I'd make him sell me chemotherapy drugs at wholesale so I wouldn't have to worry about not being able to pay for the chemo sessions still ahead of us. If I had Iona's boyfriend, I wouldn't have to have art auctions to try to raise money to pay for the chemo and the follow-up treatments that will keep him in remission until his time really does come to leave me. (More on the art auction later, and how you can help Praxis and end up with some amazing art from some of my amazing friends!)


As far as I understand it, Praxis is doing fairly well with the chemotherapy. He has Lymphoma, and if left untreated, he would be dead in a week or two (they gave him 2 months at the time it was diagnosed). With chemotherapy there is the chance of remission, and maybe extension of his life with happiness and comfort for another year or two. We're in our third week of chemotherapy and the negative side effects have been a lot milder than I imagined, and he's maintaining pretty well! He's his normal sleepy/pokey/quiet self. He's been my steady companion since 1994... He's lived everywhere I've lived, loved everyone I've loved, and has unfailingly been one of the positive beings in my life. It's been hard trying to imagine him as sick, and to think of his body slowly failing, and me eventually having to let go.

This has been a rough year for dogs in my life, and the dogs of friends... This weekend the universe lost another good dog, Hanako. She was loved, and an important part of a family that I care a lot about. I hope these pups are leaving us for a good reason - and not just for our hearts to break. I think it gets harder to recover from loss as you grow up, not easier.

Anticipating Emergency

On Saturday I received 3 hours of CPR training and certification. I now know how to breathe into the plastic wrapped mouth of a fully amputated dummy, I know how to adminster the Heimlich maneuver, and most importantly, I learned a secret 911 code that could save my life!! I'm going to share it with you to give you a chance at life as well. It's the right thing to do. This is Bob, he traveled with me on this journey of discovery.



So, the first vital piece of information is to make sure you have a landline at your house. If you just can't stand to do that, then make sure that your billing address for your cell phone is your home address. In the case of a 911 call on a cell phone that can't be completed because something awful is happening to the caller, the address that shows up for the operator is the billing address. Only useful if you're at home and that's where your life-threatening emergency is happening.

So, say you're choking, or there's a psychotic killer in your house and you've found a place to hide, but you need help to survive the night... you have your phone, but you can't make a sound that anyone could recognize as a call of distress. You have to stay perfectly quiet, but you have that cordless landline phone in your hand. Here's what you do: when the operator picks up and says her/his schpiel, the way to let them know that you're in distress, and not that you dialed by accident, or changed your mind about the state of emergency, is to knock on the mouthpiece of the phone three times.

Ok, got that, they say their line, you knock on the mouthpiece 3 TIMES. This lets them know that you need help. They'll send police and a paramedic automatically when they get this secret code, no matter what the emergency.

I'm less inclined to want to try the secret 911 code than I am the CPR that we learned. I now have this strong desire to try it all out in real life. According to our CPR instructor, less than 10% of the population has CPR training, but what's the percentage of people who've been saved by it? Probably even less. In 8 plane flights that I took in the last two months, two of them had medical emergencies on board. Both times there was a doctor or a nurse present who was able to help the person on board until the plane could land and they could get out to the ambulance on the tarmack. I thought it was odd to happen with such frequency.

Is it wrong to want people to dance with danger just so I can cut in?