I finished Thanksgiving weekend with a yoga nidra workshop. Here’s the conversation Alan and I had when I told him I was going:
“Yoga nidra? What kind of yoga is that?”
“Yogic sleep,” I told him.
“So you just go there and take a nap?”
“Kind of. Except you’re really not supposed to fall asleep. If you do it right, you get super-relaxed but don’t actually fall asleep. But some people do.”
“Hmmm.”
“They even snore sometimes.”
“Hmmm.”
“It allegedly provides the same benefits as eight hours of sleep.”
“Hmmm – wait. How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, isn’t the PRIMARY benefit of sleep, rest? So how would 90 minutes of yoga nidra provide you with eight hours of rest? It’s mathematically impossible.”
“It’s not a math class. And besides, I said ‘allegedly.'”
“I’m not buying it.”
“Who cares? It’s very relaxing.”
“Why do they offer it in the evening?”
“So you can relax more.”
“But then how do you go to sleep when you get home?”
“You’re just so relaxed, it’s easy to fall asleep.”
“But you’ve just allegedly gotten the equivalent of EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP, right? Therefore it stands to reason that it should be hard to fall asleep.”
For the luddites out there who hate social media and proclaim it to be the end of meaningful discourse, I offer you this story, which to me summarizes all that is great about the Twitterverse (and conveniently omits all of the bad).
Here’s the story…
A few weeks ago, I raved about seeing a fantastic movie called “From This Day Forward” that I had funded as part of a Kickstarter campaign. In that same post, I said it was especially cool to see a crowd-funded project succeed in real-life, unlike most of the projects I’ve backed. Then in passing, I mentioned another project I’d sponsored (elegantly designed profane greeting cards) that actually seemed to have gone on to great success – though somehow my donor gift got lost in the shuffle.
Mind you, I wasn’t complaining. I was just bummed I’d never received a set of four profane greeting cards, but I was mainly excited that the company (Calligraphuck) seemed to be doing well. Fast forward a week, and the following appeared in my Twitter feed:
This is great for three reasons: 1) He owns that he was googling himself, 2) Nice customer service. Don’t you wish Verizon or Comcast would approach you proactively like this? (“Sorry we blew the service window by more than four hours – we’ll waive your bill this month!”), and – best of all:
3) I just received a package of notecards in the mail!!!
If you’re scratching your head, wondering what, exactly, constitutes a profane greeting card, keep reading.
If you’re opposed to swearing, you probably won’t be a fan. But Linus (the owner) is a talented calligraphist and his hand-inked designs are silk screened on to high quality paper, so it’s a nice juxtaposition of high- and low-brow rolled into one package – irony at its best. And we all know he offers tremendous customer service!
In case you’d like to offend your holiday distribution list, you can buy his designs at www.calligraphuck.com.
And if you’re struggling to come up with appropriate uses, here’s a quick list of suggestions I created:
For the office Secret Santa…
For the wedding you suspect will end in divorce…
For a neighbor who threw snow into your yard when shoveling – used ironically:
A card all mothers should use when corresponding with their sons – just to keep them guessing…
And I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to use this one to recognize the anonymous office worker who insists on peeing on the toilet seat every day:
Check out his inventory at Calligraphuck – and let me know if I’ve missed some key uses.
OK. So here’s something that provided HOURS of comedy fodder to Alan and me during our recent trip to Hawaii. I think it will be categorized as, “guess you had to be there” but I’m willing to test-drive it on an audience before sending it to an early burial. Here goes…
On our flight from Seattle to Honolulu, Alan left his Kindle in the seatback pocket of the airplane. Nevermind that the flight attendants TOLD us to check the seatback pockets for any belongings. I guess Alan was fairly confident that his contained only used napkins and drink stirrers, which would’ve (in hindsight) been about 90% accurate.
Also? He may have been under the influence of a Mai Tai (or ten) when we landed, so some of the instructions were undoubtedly ignored.
Fast forward two days, to our first opportunity to camp out in the sun and read.
“I can’t find my Kindle,” Alan informed me.
Before I could even suggest places for him to look, he said, “I’ve already searched everything and I’m pretty sure I remember tucking it into the seatback pocket on the plane.”
Doh. Fortunately I don’t enjoy reconstructing events to job people’s memories, so I wasn’t miffed.
Alan was somewhat calm about having no reading material, but I knew why: he’d had his Kindle for years and it was both clunky and glitchy, providing more headaches than smiles. He’d been planning to get a new one for some time and had only stalled out of convenience. He might not like not having a book to read on vacation, but he would certainly look forward to replacing his device.
“I bet you can replace it today so you have something to read on vacation,” I suggested – only partly altruistically since I knew Alan would be bored facing the ocean without something to read.
He immediately latched on to the idea, so we did a quick search to see where Kindles were sold. It was a surprisingly short list, made even shorter when you consider retail options on Oahu. We decided to give “Toys ‘R Us” a try since it was on our way from the North Shore to Hawaii Kai.
When we entered the mall, we couldn’t find Toys R Us. That was somewhat surprising since it’s usually large enough to be an anchor store, but we turned our sites to the directory and found that it was a “Toys ‘R Us EXPRESS.” We groaned, knowing that the “express” meant it probably had limited stock.
As we approached it my mental track sounded like playing the game show “Press Your Luck,” where I kept hearing the phrase, “No Whammies, No Whammies, No Whammies, Stop!”
Upon entering, we found one salesperson – presumably a local high school girl – working the cash register, utterly bored but not looking for an interruption.
And here’s where we enter inside joke territory…
“Excuse me,” I said, hoping to save time. “Do you have any Amazon Kindles?”
She stared at as blankly, her mouth hanging open as if my words had caused her jaw to lock. The only thing that moved were her eyes, which shifted between Alan and me, more slowly than a metronome set for a kindergartener.
After a suspenseful pause (during which Alan and I had both scanned the shelves behind her) she said:
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhm… … … …. ….
No.
Alan and I looked in opposite directions as we swallowed and nodded our heads, trying to formulate a question that would politely allow us to do our own search for a Kindle without insulting her.
Because clearly, she didn’t even try – she didn’t glance around or ask clarifying questions – she had just stood in place, staring at us before taking one full minute to say no. I’m pretty sure that she was trying to mentally riffle through the filing drawers of her mind to recall if she’d ever seen a Kindle, and was finding that each drawer was shockingly empty, as if she were an Enron employeed and we’d just announced an audit.
Alan beat me to the punch. His diplomatic response (as I stood shaking with quiet laughter) was, “Cool. Can you show me your electronics section then? I might find another reader.”
After fumbling for a key, she zombie-walked three feet to a locked glass door just to the right of the counter, pushing aside a rolling ladder that blocked the way. “See anything?” she asked, gesturing to row after row of LeapFrogs.
My giggling intensified, as I imagined saying, “Sorry – we’re looking for a READER, not for something to help us LEARN to read.”
Fortunately, Alan ignored me and pointed. “Hey, I think that’s an {Amazon Kindle} Fire! Could I take a look at that?”
She obliged, allowing Alan to handle the EXACT ITEM we had come in to purchase – the SAME ONE she had just said they didn’t have in stock – as long as he called it something different.
As she rang him up, we couldn’t even look at each other. We both kept making guttural, “um no” noises, the way she had told him they had no Amazon Kindles for sale. We sounded like a retail version of Slingblade while we checked out, then thoroughly lost it in the car.
For the rest of the trip, it only took one of us saying, “Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… No?” to crack the other person up.
In my 10 years regularly practicing yoga, today was a first: I was kicked in the head by the guy on the mat in front of me as we lifted up into Warrior 3.
All righty then. Here’s to new experiences!
Tattooed (in 100 point cursive font) on his left leg was a quote from Les Mis:
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Fair.
And now he knows what you see when you kick another person: My Face. Slightly less serene than that of God.
Can’t wait to see what he has tattooed on his right leg in our next class.
We all learned a lot about each other’s eating preferences on our trip to Italy. If I had to summarize, here are our dietary tenets…
Mom:
It’s not breakfast unless it involves orange juice and milk.
Every table should include a salt shaker.
There is such a thing as “too much” marinara sauce.
Meat makes it a meal.
Me:
Live to eat.
Salami is like a blood-sugar insurance policy – one slice at every meal keeps things ticking.
There’s no such thing as too much pasta.
If a restaurant has bruschetta, we’re ordering it.
Alicia:
Eat to live.
Black tea, hold the sugar – hot/cold throughout the day.
Have yogurt, will travel.
Coronettos whenever possible.
Further demonstrating how differently we approach food, shortly after returning, my sister shared this link for Soylent. I encourage you to check out the page and see if anything about the concept appeals to you. (Soylent is a food replacement product that provides nutrients via a powder that mixes into a drink.)
The stated benefits are:
Time: Prepare multiple meals in minutes – no need to shop for individual ingredients or plan ahead
Money: Spend less than $10 per day on food, and less than $4 per meal – get more than a day’s worth of meals for less than the cost of takeout
Nutrition: Eat balanced and wholesome – get all of the essential nutrients required to fuel the human body
Sorry. This guy’s value proposition falls apart for me with the first bullet – I enjoy taking time to shop for ingredients and cook dinner. And more important than money or nutrition to me is TASTE. It might be wrong, but I eat for enjoyment, not nutrition. My sister on the other hand…
Granted, all you need to do is look at us to see how our eating philosophies have shaped our bodies. She’s an easy size 4, and I could definitely stand to lose a pound or, um, fifteen. Details.
Finally – because I’m mildly obsessed with Soylent and the fact that this guy thinks enough people are wired like my sister that there’s a market for this product – can we discuss the name? Is it a terrible or brilliant marketing move to name his product after the 1973 sci-fi movie Soylent Green, which is summarized by Wikipedia as “…the investigation into the murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, and all-year humidity due to the greenhouse effect. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green.”
I mean, the plot does seem to be playing out in real life, so I can see where Soylent’s founder drew a connection. The problem, however, is that at the end of the film, you discover that “soylent green” is actually PEOPLE. So here’s guy in 2014, selling an unrecognizable nutritional powder and he’s deliberately named it something that calls to mind cannibalism. Interesting brand strategy.
Which camp are you in? Love to eat or eat for fuel?
pithypants 