Hot Yoga

When I was 17-- hell, when I was 22 even-- I gave not a shit about vegetables or exercise. I made an attempt at tai chi in my early 20s and eventually gave up because I couldn't be bothered. I didn't like zucchini or peppers until I was about 24. I didn't take up dance until around then either.

Oh, the wasted years of mediocre health. I was doing pilates and enjoying it until I moved last October and my fragile routine crumbled under the change. I've been wanting something else to complement dance since (Anything for flexibility) and for some reason I can't seem to force myself to take the trip into town to get back into it.

So this week I start hot yoga. Frankly, I could stand to lose a few pounds and this is an activity I can do a few minutes from my house. Even on my laziest days I think I could make myself go. And I do get a lot of lazy days where video games and the internet have a much stronger draw than doing anything that would be to my physical benefit.

I bought new workout clothes to motivate myself. Also, it being hot yoga means lots of laundry. And I'm not going to go if every two classes I have to do a load to be able to go again.

I'm really hoping that this is going to be something that sticks. Of course I actually have to start. Maybe once I do I'll finally be able to touch my toes. I'd like to be able to do that before I hit 30. I mean, frig. If I don't get my ass cracking on my health and flexibility now in my 20s, I'm kind of screwed for the future, right?

I miss being able to eat McDonalds with no repercussions.

Rock the Gala

The gala, the gala, the gala. I love the gala.

I had a great time, exposed my belly and of course looked chubby in the tummy in most of the photos that were taken, but what can you do? I still danced my best, looked my best and felt awesome about it. And now I feel ready to move up to the first intermediate level. Two years of dancing and I really feel like I'm a dancer now. Not a great dancer, but a dancer. I claim it as part of my identity and that makes me happy.

The day following the gala, I went to a cupcake/tea party. It's about as fun as it sounds, which is basically loads of fun. It was at McPal's boyfriend's apartment and it ran for about nine hours. We drank tea and ate sandwiches, made and ate cupcakes, had pizza, good conversation. It was exactly the sort of party I like to attend.

I woke up this morning still full and with a belly that looks as though it's quit on me. There's also about six cupcakes in the kitchen, begging to be eaten. Four of them are Sesame Street cupcakes: Cookie monster, Oscar the grouch, Grover and Bert. Oh yes. A few of us got creative. It was, after all, a meeting of the craft club. I don't know how I'll be able to eat those, though. I mean, how do you take a bite out of Grover's face? I'm sure the Dude will find a way.

Before I go, here's something I read recently that really struck a chord with me. I'm still on a feminist rampage of important causes and want to share this item from one of my favourite blogs.

In the now

My last rant garnered a lot of attention and some thoughtful discussion. And that makes me happy. The Dude and I watched this yesterday. It's called Dreamworld 3, and it's a documentary piece on music videos and the way they influence our ideas about masculinity, femininity and sexuality. It was very thought-provoking.

Speaking of femininity, my belly dance gala is tonight. This is the first time I've felt ready to not just dance, but smile. I feel confident tonight. I feel comfortable. I'm going to go out there and enjoy it, not just freak out inside and wait for the high to come after I'm done. I'm hoping to be more in the moment.

I find it can be hard to do that on a regular basis, be in the moment. So often I'm either reflecting on the past, what did and didn't happen. Or I'm thinking ahead, about the life I want and what I need to do to get there. I so rarely just live what is happening in the now. I get lost in my head and think forwards or backwards.

So tonight I'm going to try and do just that. Be present on stage, be me, dance, enjoy it, rather than just trying to get through it without screwing it up.

Wish me luck.

The Giving Spa

One thing about going to the spa four four hours is that the next day you're ready to go back again. If I could somehow spend my entire life getting massaged, I don't think I'd consider it a life wasted. I came home with the nicest hands and feet I've ever had and very soft skin.

And now back to real life. I have dance class tonight. I'd been trying to build up callouses on the soles of my feet to help with my dancing. Soft feet means pain during certain moves. Considering I had a paraffin treatment on my feet (and hands), I'm back at square one. But I don't care. My feet feel like I was born last week. My hands, which were peeling from what I suspect was from washing too many dishes, are no longer flaking away and are more supple and pretty. So pretty in fact, I can't be expected to use them to wash any more dishes for the next couple days. The spa is the gift that keeps on giving.

Coulda shoulda oughta

The watching of the Olympics continues. It's getting a little out of hand. (**side note, I did not know there was a luge with two people lying on top of one another. The hell?**) But tonight I took the time away to go to dance. I tried a new class tonight called "Just Dance". Supposedly an all-levels class. Sounds fun, right? If realizing how little you know and how crap you are compared to a real pro is fun, then I had a night of total awesomeness.

No, no, I've never been under any illusion that I'm a magnificent dancer. I'm not angling to go pro. I just want to dance and have fun. But man, if there is anything that kills the buzz it's trying to keep up with a highly advanced dancer as she rocks every move she knows in quick succession while you in your novice glory pull off something resembling a weak jig alongside her. I dunno. If you can't participate, it's less enjoyable. She was pulling out moves I'd never seen before, never mind learned.

So back to structured classes for my skill level. There's another gala coming up in June. It'd be nice if this time I had a flatter stomach for it, but I'm not holding my breath (or doing extra sit-ups or cutting back on ice cream or anything that might lead to said flatter stomach, so never mind).

I've begun to really think more about how I'm going to age. I'm not flexible. Never have been. I have this fear I'm going to become this old rickety fart who pulls out her back while she's bending over to do up her velcro shoes. And I fear this will happen when I'm 40 instead of 70.

Sometimes I don't feel young. Like when I can't stretch properly, or when I think my bowed legs are getting more pronounced, or when a night of casual drinking makes me feel haggard and feeble.

I suppose comparing yourself to anyone is going to lead to unhappiness. And watching myself flounder so foolishly beside someone very beautiful and accomplished tonight, who was about my age, was a bummer.

I'm also on my moon time. I love being able to excuse wimpy feelings on hormones and wimens problems. At least then when you feel down on yourself, you don't have to feel totally responsible for it.

I should take up yoga.

Belly pictures

So here is a photo of me at the gala. My arms are looking a little bulgy, but that's nothing new. Alas, I'm not smiling much either, though I could have sworn I was! Actually, I have one of those neutral faces that is very serious looking, which old men on the street tend to disapprove of and then command me to smile. When I think I'm giving a small smile, in reality I'm actually bringing my face up one notch from serious to calm and unaffected.

Serious Jendra is serious!

I'm pretty sure I gave real smiles at some point in the dance, but I'll have to check out the DVD to be sure. Oh, the DVD! The bringer of good and bad news. Look at what you did right! See how you utterly screwed up. What's with that weird face you're making? And so on.

Here's another picture that makes me look thinner:

Ah, the light is hitting my tummy juuuuust right.
Looks flat, don't it? Hehe! Success.

PS I know I haven't written about my actual birthday. I'll get to it eventually. The gala is still fresh and full of joy in my mind.

Just Dance

I showed my tummy. I totally danced belly exposed to the world. And I loved it! I may post some pictures at a later time. We'll see if any turned out.

I also only ate one piece of banana bread and one grain cracker so I would avoid the inevitable food baby gas pregnancy that would have made such exposure unbearable. After dancing I ate fried food from the Falafel House, which was catering the event. Mm-mm-mm. Post-dance gluttony. One of life's great unknown and untapped pleasures.

I put about, oh, six times the amount of makeup I usually wear to gussy up for the gala. It was sexy, it was tarty, it was barely noticeable under the harsh lights, and it was a bitch to take off. But it was also completely worth it. I felt hot.

There were these two dancers who were utterly to-die-for amazing and, frankly, hot stuff. After they were done, I turn to the Dude:

Me: Have a boner?
Him: =o
ME: 'Cause I know I do.
Him: =O

Heh heh heh.

I had a friend in the gala as well, and McPal showed up for moral support and good times. One of the better exchanges of the evening came courtesy of him, also after the two amazing dancers of wowness:

McPal: This is when being gay makes me feel like I'm missing out. That's hot! And it does nothing for me. Men don't do that.
Me: Some do.
McPal: Well, yeah, but when men do it it's not sexy!

And he's right. And I've seen men come into the belly dance classes. Without T&A and some extra pounds of well-placed flesh, the whole thing doesn't really work. Of course, with men there's nothing quite like a nice set of defined abs. Women can have those too, but like bellydancing men, a sixpack on a woman just ain't pretty.

No shrinking violet

Today is the final dance class before the gala. I'm mildly freaking out. I don't exactly have the choreography memorized. I know what moves go to what segments of music. I don't remember the order of the music segments, so after each one is done I have to pause to hear it. This is not good. I've been practicing in the living room like on of those joggers who jog on the spot, only with belly dance.

I also stayed up all night last night to correct what has been becoming a growing problem. Staying up just a wee bit later and sleeping in a little bit longer, over the course of time. This Sunday the Dude and I slept in until 1:00. It was unprecedented. I haven't done that since... actually I can't remember, though I know I often pulled it off in my teens.

I spent a large portion of the evening doing this. Oh yes. It's so nerdy I could die. But due to practice I can now name 150 countries out of 195. Have you heard of Benin? Slovenia? Nauru? Now you have.

I spend the rest of the evening making excellent headway on When Everything Changed. Seriously, holy shit. Now, I've always considered myself a feminist. I know it's not fashionable to call oneself that, but I don't care and I've never cared. A feminist is someone who believes in equal opportunities and rights for women. I've found it very difficult to understand why any woman would not openly express solidarity with that.

And reading this book and seeing in black and white the history of it all actually makes me mad that today's women don't want to own this title of feminist. It somehow seems like a way to appear more demure for the benefit of men. Because what woman in her right man would not be in favour of the rights she enjoys due to feminism?

1960:
Women cannot obtain credit without a male cosigner.
Women cannot obtain mortgage or apartment lease without male cosigner.
Women can legally be fired for getting married or pregnant.
Child support and alimony are not enforced laws.
Employers can legally pay women a fraction of what they pay men on the basis that they're not the breadwinner, even if they're widowed mothers or divorcees with children.
Employers can legally sexually harass their female employees.
Women can be denied entry to university programs for medicine, law, engineering and business.
Employers can post help wanted - male and legally discriminate against hiring women.
Funded sports programs in school for women don't exist.
Dress codes required girdles and high heels in many jobs that were female friendly, such as teaching and nursing. (I own a girdle, which I occasionally wear. They're wildly uncomfortable.)
Rape cases can be considered invalid if the woman was not a virgin prior to the assault.

And due to a strong fight for decades to bring about change, these are no longer our realities. I'm 27 and cohabiting, a college graduate, childless and working in a career I enjoy. I've obtained my own credit card, signed my own lease, wear what I want, have a sex life and practice birth control outside of marriage. I've been able to make these choices independently, based on my own ideas of what will bring me happiness and where I want my life to go.

Thanks to my mother's generation of amazing women. You're damn right I am a feminist.

And with that rant, I'm going to get back to practice my choreography-- which is a dance that would never have been available to me to learn without feminism opening the doors for female expression of their own sensuality.

PS: Latvia, Tonga, Lithuania, Malta.

To tummy or not to tummy

The gala is about two weeks away. I'm nervous, I'm looking forward to it, and it brings out different emotions in me. I've never done anything that made me feel so beautiful or so self-conscious. And I've posed nude for artists.

And that was an act of bravery, yes. And it made me feel beautiful, sure. But not in a sexy way, but just as a beautiful human being who was fine just the way she was. I did it a number of times, but that's another story.

Belly dance is different. It's not exposing everything about my body. Rather, it's a showcase of my femininity, my curves, and hiding all the rest. But that in itself can be a problem because certain body parts don't look so great on prominent display. A bloated stomach, for example, looks a lot nicer on a naked body than it does stuffed into a hip scarf.

I have no problem with nudity. Granted, I wouldn't walk around naked in public or flash my breasts to my acquaintances or want my family to see my junk. But generally speaking, posing nude for art classes is a lot easier on my ego than, say, being in a bathing suit. Or wearing a cropped shirt onstage in front of hundreds of people.

Funny, not so worried about the choreography. That's more within my control than my tummy is, as I have no control around chocolate bars and cake.

No heat = hibernation

I'm still writing my book. It's coming along slowly, but every time I take a go at it, I move the plot forward. So this is good. So long as it doesn't feel painful, impossible or stale to write, I should be okay. It's a huge project. I just need to stay on task. Unlike every single other time in my adult life when I've tried to complete a full work of writing.

I won't be writing today, however, because I'm overtired. I keep sleeping far too long and at the wrong time. The result is feeling like a lumbering groggy bear being disturbed during hibernation. Speaking in full sentences today is proving too much to ask of me. Also, it's chilly in this place. Had a conversation with one of the downstairs neighbours yesterday. She said she would address the heat issue at a later time.

There would be no heat issue if they would just come to accept the fact that the Dude and I are deserving of warmth in our own home. I mean, come on. It's November in Canada. There will be no more turning off the heat, I don't care how much money you'll save if I freeze to death during the day.

I need to practice my dance choreography for the student gala. But lately I've been too damn cold to get motivated. I don't want to be out from under the covers. Unfortunately, being cozy under the covers leads to falling asleep, and therein lies the basis for all my irritations today. Amazing what a little heat in my apartment would solve.

Fours weeks till showtime, and the ass is grass

I am still plugging away at my book, bit by bit. Sometimes just adding to it so the story won't get cold. Often if you take too much of a break, trying to get back into writing the same story feels like eating pizza that's been left out a couple days. Just not happening.

I've decided rather than trying to create a full story off the bat, I'm going to just begin a new chapter each time it feels right, even if it's just after a page of writing. I can beef up my details, dialogue, and descriptions on the second draft. All I need to do this first draft is to complete the actual plot. I need a skeleton before I can build a body. So far so good.

I have no personal deadlines for this project. But as far as other "projects" of sorts go, I have only four weeks until my student dance gala. That's only four dance classes to get good enough and organized enough and confident enough to make this happen. It's also going to require a lot of practice at home, and there's not a ton of room for choreography in this living room, or anywhere else in this apartment.

I also don't have a top I want to wear for the performance. Last year I wore a halter with coins on it. It was fun, but it didn't expose much of my torso. And I don't have very much torso to expose. This is a small handicap for belly dance. On the video of the night, I saw myself and I didn't look... right. I looked rather squat, I think. To counteract that, I need to show more tummy, to elongate what I do have.

When I was watching the other dancers move, long stomachs exposed, and I could see an undulation wave down their abdomen, I felt envious. Though one woman looked like she was half an inch away from giving the audience a peep of her holiest of holies. I wasn't envious of that. Rather, that's my nightmare. I'm convinced if I tie a scarf too low on my hips or wear my skirt further down or something, everything will just fall off my ass. I've never seen that happen to anyone else, even women with very flat bums, but that doesn't mean it won't happen to me. Things like that have a way of happening to me.

Maybe I'll go practice now. I have a belly dance skirt and I'll wear it all low down, learn to convince myself my rear end will hang on to my clothes.

The belly

I've been taking belly dance lessons for a year and a half now. A little longer, actually, but consistently for a year and a half. The winter student gala is coming up. I've performed in two of them. The first one was an act of bravery, the second a need for the rush I felt from the first. I don't get many adrenaline rushes in my life, but performing a rather sensual dance with an exposed stomach in front of 400 strangers does the job.

I've been eating a lot of crap. Tasty crap. Fattening crap. I live so close to an amazing cupcake place, the Dude brings home chocolate goodies (his metabolism is a thing of beauty and I'm pretty in awe of it, while hating him at the same time as he wolfs down his second bag of chips in less than 24 hours), and I have no will power, not really.

I used to be a very skinny girl. But when I stopped being a girl, I stopped being skinny. I wish I didn't care. Intellectually I don't care. And if someone else other than me has flesh on their bones I find it pleasing to look at. Aesthetically, I truly believe women look more beautiful if they have more than less. Seeing a very skinny woman does not fill me with envy. So why when I look at myself do I get critical?

When I was in college I drew a lot of nudes, and the fleshy women were a joy to draw. They really glowed, their lines were magnificent and they looked soft and comforting and feminine. The skinny women were good for skeletal studies, but otherwise didn't offer the same enjoyment from a drawing standpoint. The lines were harder and more angular, yet lacking pleasantly muscular lines like men had. It really shaped a lot of what I thought about beauty. Skinny was not doing it for me.

And yet... the satisfaction of buying a small instead of medium, a 6 over and 8, and the sinking in my heart when my arms seem wobble more than before, and my lack of a flat stomach remain.

Regardless, I plan to bare midriff at the gala. Like it or lump it, I'm going to shake and jiggle on stage and feel good about it. Way I figure anyway, despite not feeling totally at peace with my body, it's likely all downhill from here as I get older so I should show off what I do have while I still got it.