A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

that's actually the name of a book i had as a kid, but it works.

here's the truth of the matter: living in a language you don't speak is just plain hard. and trying to do that when you're not well (i have a cold and mo has an upset tummy) is even harder. it started with the taxi ride last night -- well, that's if you don't count the fact that the ferry was running 90 minutes late, and the hotel had no hot water, and the restaurant where we ate lunch smelled like rot, and that i came back to a bad email from a friend. so far i've been all sardonic about our gaffes and our missteps, and it is funny that so far we've managed to order food without pumpkins or horses (which is what happens if you get the vowels in ceballo backwards) but today -- well, today i just wanted things to be easy.

probably not the best frame of mind in which to go to a spanish yoga class in a whole new tradition. the school was founded by maestro deRose, and seems to have as its founding principle, and explicitly as its mission statement, to make as many yoga teachers as possible, who are then instructed to go forth and fill the world with deRose's credo. what exactly that is, i'm not sure, but it seems to involve tantra, ecstasy and the good democratic belief that anyone can experience nirvana. new teachers are required to study for a minimum of four years before they take off with their own studio. it's sort of like slow food meets pyramid scheme: the world will be completely deRosean in, like, two thousand years.

anyway.

the pollyanna in me would say that taking a yoga class in a foreign language is a great way to learn The Parts of the Body. trouble is, you don't know whether "pecho" is going to be a workhorse word, the kind of thing you might use in conversation -- for instance, if someone steps on it in the subway -- or whether it's going to be all technical, like "anterior cruciate ligament." try using that at the bus stop.

the self-pitying part of me, which really had the upper hand today, has to wonder why on earth i let marcia talk me into this. the very first exercise we did had us hunched over jiggling our abdomens. can you imagine? i go to yoga figuring what the hell, surely my sanskrit will aid me where my spanish lets me down, and if all else fails i'll just follow the guy next to me, and the first thing we do is utterly invisible to the cheating, naked ojo. we're all bent at the waist, hands on our thighs, hauling our stomachs in and letting them fall out approximately 20 times a second. not only is this not the sort of thing you can see through the next guy's t-shirt, but it's also surprisingly difficult. so when the peppy little 21-year-old teacher teacher takes pity on me and comes over to demonstrate, with her taut little 21-year-old midriff, she has to say to me, roughly translated, "no, no, you have to pull your stomach in and then let it out!"

then there's the breathing. in the middle of the class -- yeah, the middle of the class, when we least suspect it -- she has us all lie down and breathe. for, like, half an hour. first we breathe with the lower part of our pechos. then we breathe with the middle part. by that point she realizes she's lost me, so comes over to demonstrate "media," which is insulting enough, who couldn't figure out what that means? but the worst part is that i'm utterly unable to express what i want to, which is, "no, no, actually, this is not a language problem. i just hate the frickin' breathing! just leave me alone to dog it in silence, and pick on that woman over there, the bitch with the perfect pedicure and the concave belly."

so that was yoga.

when i got home, mo informed me that the power in our apartment was off. "did you call someone?," i asked, snottily. of course she had. she had very industriously turned up the name and phone number of the building caretaker and dialed away. however, it turns out that in buenos aires, you can't call a cell phone from a land line. do you need me to repeat that? you can't call a cell phone from a land line. why this is so, heaven only knows (and it might be an issue of short-term rental apartments, or it might be that you need a calling card for any call to which charges accrue, or it might be that on mondays you can only make telephone calls with a calling card), but there it is. so we have to get a phone card to dial the caretaker. who, of course, speaks no english. and i, of course, make the mistake of starting the conversation in spanish. i can't help it, i'm canadian, we're polite that way.

anyway, my bad spanish ("no hay electricidad en el apartamento, qui est-ce a la fitz roy, veinte treinta" -- yeah, cynthia, it's that bad) elicits a flurry of something or other, which i interrupt by saying, icily, "i'm sorry, senor gustavo, but could you convey any of that in english?" which elicits another flurry of something or other, which is abruptly cut off. i'm standing in the apartment holding a dead phone line, wondering: is he coming over? did he tell me to call someone else? is there anyone else to call? did he use any swear words? i caught "cinco," but is that 5pm? five minutes? five apartments ahead of me? five reasons i can go screw myself? i have no idea.

i look at mo, mo looks at me, and we sit on the couch to wait and see what will happen.

around 5:15, senor gustavo shows up. he asks all sorts of questions we can't answer, partly because we don't understand the language and partly because you just never understand questions asked by roofers, plumbers, or appliance installers. did we plug the fridge in? or, is the fridge plugged in? who in the twenty-first century would have to ask? finally he says one thing we understand, "no tocar nada!" he leaves the apartment. five minutes later, the lights are on. he's saying something about "cortado cortado cortado," which means something's been cut, but i have no idea whether he's referring to the phone call or the electricity. but who cares: now that we have internet back, we can look it up. you know, along with other handy travellers' phrases like "the man is taking his duck for a walk" and "say, isn't that the sears tower?"

sometimes, it's just hard. i'm not quite ready to say that my next vacation will be a cruise, but i can say that i understand the attraction. you know, they teach yoga on cruises. in english.

Never say another mean thing to yourself

i go to this sweet wednesday morning yoga class. it's tiny, usually just three or four of us -- and no, i'm not going to say where, 'cause i don't necessarily want to share. our teacher is terrific: wacky and funny and curious and talented and honest. she's just what you want on a wednesday morning.

i'm quite surprised to groove on this class, because it's very casual. make that extremely casual. and i'm not just saying that because i came up through iyengar yoga, a tradition based on nit-picking exactitude and dead seriousness. iyengar is yoga for protestants, perfectionists' yoga: if you're not being constantly corrected, you're just not doing it right. i first checked out chantelle's class because what's a sabbatical for if not taking yoga on weekday mornings? plus, being near zocalo and the italian centre, it would provide a built-in alibi for any consumer splurges. i didn't really know what a vinyasa class would be like, but i figured it would be self-improving to learn. when i found out vinyasa means flow, i almost fled. BKS and Gita definitely do not approve of "flowing." the next surprise was music. yoga to music? and we're not talking ShantiOm sitar-and-tabla covers, either: chantelle blasts dave matthews, ruthie foster, vintage U2, and colbie caillat.

there's always a lot of laughing in chantelle's classes, a certain amount of chitchat/catching up, as much ranting as necessary, and i usually get teased for analyzing everything. above all, there's a lot of learning. there's something about the immediacy and forthrightness of our time together that means we tackle our questions directly, whether they're about the optimal positioning of your shoulders in a dolphin plank, the name of a given muscle in the rotator cuff or the pronunciation of a sanskrit word. there's no singular agenda, and so we all teach and learn together. it's the paulo freire ideal, in action.

if you've read my earlier comments on yoga, you'll know that i'm not much on the non-physical bits. so when chantelle came back from a workshop with rolf gates and brought his book meditations from the mat into the class, i was nonplussed. turns out, rolf has smart things to say. i don't mind rolf. but what i really love is chantelle herself. at the end of last week's class, she said to us, during sivasana, "never say another mean thing to yourself." the fact of it was shocking enough: it's a terribly intimate thing to say to a collection of women. but the idea behind it is so shockingly revolutionary that it's had me thinking all week. what would that mean, to make a commitment not to say mean things to yourself? how telling is it that my first reaction is, but what will we -- my selves -- talk about, then? could you think mean things about yourself, and just not say them? if you stopped being mean to yourself, could you still be mean to other people? and how long is "never," anyway? what if you started by not saying anything mean to yourself for, say, a week. uh oh: what if you did start that way? far from being the end of a conversation, it might just be the beginning.

Confession from the yoga mat

the worst part of every yoga class is, hands down, the breathing. i understand the theory behind it. i'm a teacher too: you always need some sort of transition from the world beyond to the task at hand. and when it comes to bodywork, and especially the spirit-infused bodywork of yoga -- well, breathing just makes sense. of course you start with the breath.

but i gotta tell you, i hate it.

it's not like i don't try. i cross my legs and straighten my back. i allow my shoulders to relax and my chest to rise. i feel my spine like a long string of pearls. i close my eyes. i visualize The Breath of Life, i ponder the miracle of the pulmonary system (not in those terms, i use appropriately mystical terminology), and i feel:

nothing.

everybody else in the class seems serene. focused. even occasionally transported. i know, because i peek. they love to breathe. they groove on it. their bellies fill and their bellies empty and sometimes they smile. they feel at one with the universe. meanwhile, over on my purple mat, things are not going well. my feet are cramping. my anklebones hurt. my neck is stiff and i'm trying not to fart. worst of all, this breathing is having exactly the opposite mental effect than it's supposed to. instead of dwelling in the present, i'm becoming panicky about the future. i can't help listing the number of important things i could be doing with this time. a reckless multi-tasker, i generally breathe while i answer emails. you know, simultaneously.

when we finally, finally start to move, it's a relief beyond words. gingerly i unpretzel myself and before i know it, i'm lost in the bodywork. is there anything more satisfying than a really challenging pose? i'm amazed that i can wring out an inner organ, recalibrate my skeleton, and hover just a few inches off the ground on a good chaturanga day. i find relief in the exertion, and knowledge. every once in a while i get a bodily glimpse of what an asana is supposed to be like -- what it's supposed to "do" -- and i comprehend from the inside out. realization doesn't come at me in the usual way, like a cosmic baseball to the head ("suddenly, it hit me!"), but spreads like a pool inside me. i can't even pinpoint an origin. i just get it; i know.

at those glorious moments, the distinction between mind and body shimmies just enough that i can imagine what it might be like to sit quietly and follow my breath.