Saturday, April 12, 2008

Hot yoga, hot Shannon


Hot yoga: Yesterday my friend Jen, a PhD hopeful from my department, took me to her hot yoga class. 90 minutes of fairly intense yoga poses in a heated room. Sweat, baby, sweat. I absolutely adored it, and the instructor seemed quite impressed by my performance considering it had been a year since I had practiced any yoga at all, and had never set foot in a hot yoga studio. I went again today. I think I will be addicted. The studio is a bit out of the way--probably a half hour on bike. I'm not sure how I am going to get there when Jen's schedule doesn't coincide with mine.

The photo is me warming up in my living room before I went today.

Hot Shannon: Last night was somewhat of a bust. I went out with Amanda and her friend Erin. They were lovely and I had a nice time chatting and even dancing with my two companions. But then, something snapped in me. Somewhere between about 7 or 8 people stepping on me without so much as an acknowledgment of doing so, colliding with 'Barbara Streisand' as I turned a corner and being met with total disgust as if the entire incident were my fault, being grabbed and prodded by multiple males who had not even the decency (hell--the creativity) to try and talk to me before rubbing their zippers on my ass, and (and this one did me in) watching all the little Boulder white people be hard asses because they knew the words to "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" I started to hate people--a lot of people. I couldn't explain my frustration to Amanda and Erin last night, and I struggle to find the words to do so now. There was just something so empty and shallow all around me that I pitied, then hated, then loathed. And I'm not talking about the club scene in general, or random hook-ups with strangers, or anything like that. No, I actually find a place for those things and can enjoy myself a lot in said shallow interactions. There was something more to last night. And the key, the element that reassures me that I am not simply getting too old to "go clubbin'," is this whole white people singing hip hop lyrics. It just got me. I looked around at all of these kids (cause, regardless of age, that's what they are) who had likely never read a damn thing about the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement. Kids who see hip hop culture as a way to earn street cred, but who have no connections to the streets. I thought back to the Immortal Technique show, its whitewashed audience, and I wondered where all awareness was in this generation--if it was lost on them. Because we're all going to wake up 50 years from now and feel the cruel sting of a mindless, completely consumer driven society having been running things for a long time and we will know what its like to have nothing but meaningless, shallow liberal ideals that do nothing but slap a band aid on open heart surgery, and we will suffer those consequences. The ones who put us there won't. Like a drunk driving accident, the drunk always get up and walks away. Its my mom's wonderful and priceless best friend dating back to 7th grade, Rob, who lays in a coma for seven days until finally passing who pays for that mistake. And the enlightened ones will suffer too, will watch as those in power (or simply those in mass) throw away this gift called life, mock God, mock humanity. They will be neither the Christians nor the atheists. They will simply be the emptiness, because that is what they are in sum. Nothing but the things they have purchased, the irrelevant accomplishments they've achieved. And we will sit and watch them squander this world, its resources, their love, their spirit.

I fear we will be powerless.

Yesterday I made a claim that I would be posting the first of many scenes from a screenplay I had composed. Given the rant I went on, we will save that for another day.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm enjoying this

Eric E. English said...

It saddens me that you ascribe the shallowness of late capitalist consumption in the 21st century U.S. to "liberal values." This mis-attribution is what has caused well-meaning cultural conservatives to join forces with, and thus empower, the corporate forces that place us in our current milieu of empty, mindless, and destructive consumption. Trust me, the guys rubbing against you in the club ARE NO LIBERALS.

Unknown said...

I think you should be careful with the word "liberal" and the way you toss it around - most of what you are critiquing is a "neo-liberal" ideal, which would include such anti-intellectual concepts like "tolerance" instead of "understanding," or "solipsistic relativism" vs "situational reasoning (phronesis)" etc.

Liberalism is full of good ideas, most of which you agree with, so just use caution with the word precision is what I would say.

- Steve, channeling Prodicus