Hey what’s up

I woke up thinking about this li’l essay on comedy I wrote a long time ago, I don’t know why, and I just re-read it to see if I still agree with it, and I do. I think I would like to expand this into a real essay about comedy, for some sort of publication or journal or well-read opinion site. I will now do absolutely nothing to make that happen.

So I’ve been going to this hot yoga studio. I’m on the fence about hot yoga. On the one hand, the heat feels so good (/bad in a good way) and you really feel like shit is pouring out of you and your spirit is cleansed. On the other hand, it’s gross, and entails doing way too much laundry, and I also don’t know what you do in the wintertime when it’s 10 degrees outside and you’re soaking wet and the yoga studio doesn’t have a shower. Also, I’ve only take hot yoga from three instructors, which is by no means an exhaustive sampling, but thus far they have all been maniacs. The first one I took was full-on Bikram, and dude wore a HEADSET MIC and yelled things that in my memory have turned into “Come on you bitches, bikini season is right around the corner!” with loud music playing. Look, I fully realize and embrace the fact that any yoga we could possibly do in this country is by its nature going to be weird Americanized yoga, with an unhealthy, sublimated, and deeply ironic given the circumstances, focus on body hatred. I fully accept and understand that American yoga bears scant resemblance to whatever actual Hindus in Indian monasteries are doing as part of their spiritual practice. AND YET, the headset mic and the bikini bod talk is A LITTLE much, for me. Like lets at least pay lip service to peace and calm and breathing and chakras, isn’t that why we’re taking yoga and not jazzercise or whatever they do instead of jazzercise these days?? Aren’t we actively choosing yoga because we’re trying to at least ATTEMPT to chill out for a second, and not think about getting our bods bikini-ready, as they do in ancient India?

So the two yoga teachers I’ve had here thus far have been rigorous and scary and I’ve left class feeling amazing, but there is this tinge of craziness that at first I chalked up to the east coast–which could be the case–but which now I’m wondering if it’s more about specifically hot yoga. Like for example, I’ve taken A LOT of non-hot-yoga from A LOT of different instructors, in different states in this great nation, and every single one of them has cultivated this vibe of peaceful non-judgment. They all make a point of constantly saying “if something is too intense for you, just take child’s pose!” They’re really into you taking child’s pose instead of pushing yourself, because the whole point is we’re here trying to get away from the bullshit capitalist American “no pain no gain” ethos. In these hot yoga classes, they also say this. They say, oh, just take child’s pose if you feel like you’re gonna barf. But then during the actual practice, they’re constantly encouraging you NOT to take child’s pose! At point last night dude even yelled “DON’T TAKE CHILD’S POSE! PUSH IT!!!” and I was like, holy shit, but I really want to take child’s pose right now, and I have been taught that that is a loving and peaceful and appropriate thing to do, so now I don’t know what to do and maybe I will actually just barf, which I really don’t want to do but I’m also conditioned to “push it” when an athletic authority figure yells at me to “push it.”

We end class by chanting 3 Oms and EVERY TIME there are people who go up a third from the root note everyone is singing. This to me is kind of the emblem of American yoga. We’re in America, so as much as we try, we can never escape that. We are too cultured to think about bikini bods and pushing it. We can only be cultured to our very bones in triad-based tonality (a Western system), to such an extent that even as we’re sitting here with hands in heart pose, chanting in sanskrit or whatever, we’re still gonna do it in thirds. It cracked me up. I wanted to try a plagal cadence just to see what would happen. “AMEN!”

Now I gotta go to campus and have eight thousand meetings