Walking in other people’s sweat

A week ago, Kevin and I took a 2 hour beginner’s yoga workshop with Janet Stone at Yoga Tree. This teacher apparently has quite the following. She has DVDs, retreats, t-shirts and teaches others how to be yoga teachers. Our class had only about 15 people (probably because it was such a beautiful day outside). This was a nice size because she was able to provide instructions and give feedback on our poses.

On Friday, we decided to go to one of her classes for all levels. We met another friend there for the 6:15 PM Friday class. I figured that a Friday couldn’t be that crowded. People would much rather be at happy hour on a Friday… not yoga, right? Boy was I wrong, this class had about 100+ people. We have this number because there were at least 10 people per row and about 10 rows. The yoga mats layed out were no more than 5-6 inches apart from each other. This was quite the scene. There were some highly experienced yogis doing all sorts of crazy moves like hand stands, heads stands that jumped to back bends, and a lot of people seemed to be meeting other friends there.  The class started with some VERY loud “Om” chants and moved on through a series of flow yoga. I didn’t actually find the practice to be too physically challenging, however, the room was so hot that everyone was sweating so much and it was hard to breathe at times. On certain poses, you were also on your neighbors mat or staring straight at their butt from behind. At least once, we smelled someone with gas added to the smell of body odor and sweat…. The practice ended with a chant sang by the teacher. Her voice was amazing, actually. But, what was more amazing was that she had the crowd join her in a three part harmony of a chant. This was very impressive. I thought it sounded great.

Once the class was over about 1.5 hours later, I was pretty glad to get out of the room. I was walking around the room bare foot and noticed that I kept walking in pools of other people’s sweat…. ugh. It was pretty gross, but, I’m actually still glad that I went for the unique experience. Kevin also realized why most men in the class had gone shirt-less. His shirt looked like he’d just come in from some pouring rain. This was a different world from my typical gym yoga practice which I returned to today.

Positive News Stories

Most of the news is filled with tragedy, bad economic news or the newest ponze scheme, but, today, I heard two very news stories that really made me smile.

#1 President Obama signed into law the bill that I wrote about in an earlier post called the “Serve America Act”. The bill will fund Americorps, tripling its size over the next eight years. The bill also provides ways for senior citizens and high school students to give back to their community for very small education grants.

I actually can’t believe that there were so many people in Congress (mostly, if not all, Republicans) who voted against this bill. The bill is perfect for our bad economic times. It gives opportunities to new college graduates who are looking at a very dismal job market. Plus, it will give us cheap labor all across America! The amount of money spent for the work that these volunteers do is equivalent to paying someone less than minimum wage… for often very skilled jobs.

There is still one bill waiting for Congress’s approval. This is the “Incentive to Serve Tax Act” giving companies tax breaks for allowing employees to volunteer their time. I could personally be affected by this one, so, I REALLY hope it passes. If it does, I’m going to try and push Adobe to give us some “Volunteer Days” as an official benefit.

#2 The second piece of news that I enjoyed today was the clip from last Sunday’s Miss America pageant. Apparently, Miss California was asked by judge Perez Hilton how she felt about gay marriage. She stumbled on her answer eventually saying that she believed marriage should be between a man and a woman. The b*tch lost and a lot of people think it is because of the way she answered that question. If someone actually lost Miss America because they came out against gay marriage, then, we’ve come a long way in America. And…this makes me proud!

In case any of you missed it, here is the video:

TaxCut Torture

Earlier this year, Kevin had the brilliant idea that we should do our taxes twice. One time with Turbo Tax and one time with TaxCut. He thought that somehow, there might be a subtle difference and we could save ourself some money. I agreed that this idea could potentially reap some benefits.  So, we both embarced on the fun journey of doing taxes over the course of the past few weeks. Unfortunately, Kevin claimed his right to TurboTax while I was stuck with TaxCut. I used TaxCut a while back, but, after one year, I moved back to TurboTax (probably for good reason). TaxCut made enterring dividends, stock sales and options so difficult!

So, last Wednesday, we both finished our set of taxes and printed them out to compare. Mine was a savings of about $200. As we started to go line by line through the 1040, we pretty much only matched up on the first income line. After that, it was all different. Ah! What a nightmare. We spent a few hours going over… well… is this a short term capital gain? I thought options were a long term capital gain? I realized that many of my numbers were wrong because TaxCut had not guided me through the questions like “Is this an employee stock purchase? Is this employee options? etc. Plus, I had a typo where I said a loss was $180000 instead of $18000. Oops. So, in short, we scrapped my set of taxes and went with Kevin’s Turbo Tax. Next year, we might use a tax guy.

My attempts at flying

After some pushing from Kevin, I decided to try a “yoga wings” class at my gym. Its practically a circus act where everyone has their own long flowy white sheet that they toss and turn upside down in. Here’s a sample photo:

There were about 13 people in this class (11 women, 2 men and the two female instructors). You were constantly wrapping your arms or legs around this white sheet while it held you up in various poses including a lot of inversions (like the one to the right). I had a really hard time jumping up onto the cloth at times. I like to blame the fact that I’m vertically challenged and maybe it was set at the wrong  height for me, but, really… I think I was just chicken. I didn’t do half of the inversions that nearly everyone in the class was doing. They all made it look like we were in the circus and I was a clown. Oh well. Eventually, I did do one of these little moves shown in the photo, but, I never got to any of the more complicated stuff.

I’d like to say I will stick with it until I’m tossing and turning like a circus show, but, I doubt it. I’ll stick to my traditional yoga routine.