Ruined

Yup, yoga has ruined me for flying. I only had to go as far as Chicago (~3 hours), but the sitting still part was unbearable. I had this really intense ache in my left hip joint that I couldn't resolve. I'm sure the people sitting near me, both flying to and returning from Chicago, were ready to strangle me, I was so fidgety.

There was no room for a Marichy A, and that was just what I was dying to do. LOL! Airplanes really do seem to be designed to thwart asana. I've been okay on flights where it wasn't packed full--then you can find a little space to stretch. But these flights, unfortunately, were both overbooked.

Chicago was great. Cold! I think it was even cold for the natives. I realize I am a wimp, coming from the desert and all, but the general folk walking around on the street looked like they weren't having too much fun either.

Class was amazing. Very intense, very concentrated. We started at 8:30 AM and ran until 9 PM each day. I've read Julie's accounts of conferences in the coding world, and she's remarked on the male-to-female ratio. Interestingly, this class was around 50 people, and only 3 of us were women. Product design and development. Engineers, designers and a few marketing folks. Who knew the demographics would be so skewed? So the days were full of doors being opened for me and people asking me to go ahead of them at the buffet line at lunchtime. Dinners were sit-down affairs. I was talking to someone and then looked up. Everyone at the table had been served, but no one had picked up their fork. "Seriously?" I thought to myself, "Are they waiting for me?" Opportunity for experiment: yup, I picked up my fork and everyone began. Emily Post, apparently, is alive and well.

Lots of discussion of product development (duh! that's what the class was about) from many different perspectives. Discussion about Monsanto's transition from chemicals to seeds for farmers; Proctor and Gambles' development of "new molecules" for cleaning products; car manufacturers' attempts to have people equate their cars with their emotional selves. Uuuuuuuuuugh. I started to have a pretty severe case of capitalism nausea. When the discussion was about how the weedkiller RoundUp was developed to go into plant stems and kill weeds, even if just a bit of the chemical got on the leaves, and how the company then used their technicians to develop corn and soy seeds that could resist those chemicals, it was characterized as a stunning commerical success, ensuring, as it did, that the vast majority of crops would be grown with those altered seeds. I shook my head and said to the guy beside me, "Really--we, as a species, deserve to die." Sigh. A couple of things I learned in class: 1) focus groups are out of fashion, and for very good reason (biased data), and 2) it's probably not a good idea to eat anything or clean anything or breathe.

Yoga while traveling is interesting. I had my mat in its bag, and the hardest thing for me to do was to check it in. I had books to carry and read on the plane, so that was my carry-on item, so the mat had to fly in the hold. LOL! You have no idea how difficult it was for me to leave it with the TSA guy. He had about a hundred bags all lined up to go through the x-ray machine, and there I am, handing him my mat bag and tempted to say, "Please, look after this." Sure, lose my clothes and all that, but let my mat make it to Chicago!

Chicago is an hour ahead of Scottsdale, so if I got up at my usual 4:30, that'd be the equivalent of 3:30 Scottsdale time. Sigh. I compromised and set the alarm for 5. The carpet at the hotel was squooshy, but there was a marble foyer in the bathroom. Practicing in the foyer reminded me of practicing in the foyer of the old house, along with My Gift's and The Cop's shoes. Traveling practice is never spectacular for me, but it is soothing and familiar and sufficient. Oddly, though, I always kind of wonder if that soothing, familiar feeling doesn't indicate that my practice is a little OCD. When my nerves are jangly, it makes me feel better to practice. I know it's a healthy habit, in the grand scheme of things, but is ANY habit really healthy?