Comrades, there's no private property in Blogville, am I right? So I'm appropriating this great find from LM, who discovered it on the informative Accidental Russophile.
Anyway, I'm claiming these wonderful Soviet children's books for CityMouseistan, on account'a they got mice and other fun critters. Take a moment to poke through McGill University Libraries' great collection, full of beautiful art.
In case this modest, meandering blog hasn't tipped you off, I should go ahead and admit that I'm about the most controversy-shy, conflict-averse person you'll ever meet.
One of my more noticeable physical tics, I was reminded after watching a video of myself in a training course recently, is a tendency to smile and nod compulsively as a person is speaking to me, indicating what, I'm not sure -- I agree? You're interesting? Please like me? If you find this habit annoying, I'm sure I'll be inclined to agree with you. If you don't, I'll probably agree with that too. Being raised partly in the South (where we hide our hostility toward others behind treacly politeness) and partly in the Northwest (where we do the same without so much treacle) probably didn't help with this tendency.
Of course you might guess that simmering beneath this placid surface are unplumbed depths of rage, and you might be right. But aside from obvious targets (the current administration, random PBS schedule changes, the mouse who inhabits my stove), I just don't get worked up about that many things.
And so I say the following with much friendly nodding, plus my most sincere love and respect to my friends reading this who may be so inclined: What the hell is it with yoga?
I know generalizing from a group is wrong wrong wrong, and generalizing from a group of celebrities even more so, particularly if that group includes Sting. And I know that those of you yogis whom I know and love have fabulously toned physiques and are spiritually evolved and informed in all sorts of ways as to what makes this practice superior to the stretching routines I warmed up with in jazz and ballet classes much of my young life. But this Daily News item pretty much covers all my deepest fears on the subject:
Sting sat in a lotus position strumming a sitar - background music for his wife, Trudie Styler's, lengthy ode to yoga while their audience of 500-plus enthusiasts listened and perspired.
"The energy in this room is amazing," Styler began after doffing her gold stiletto sandals. "Perhaps as yoga helps us become conscious of consciousness, it has the freedom to change ourselves and to transform the world. ... The indigenous people of the world's forests, they live in nature. They feel their world. Our worlds have become so far removed from nature that I think we've lost sight of it. I see all the distractions we've created, from our cars to our cappuccinos."
And so on and so forth, until Sting and six other men starting chanting "Hare Krishna, hare hare" over and over - which prompted many in the crowd to jump up and down, drenching themselves in sweat. (Others checked out the cafe and shop, where a sleeveless hemp "Natural High" T-shirt retails for $48 and a pint of vegan ice cream goes for $10.)
The tone of the article is insufferably smarmy, yes. But still. Yoga = Not Sexy. In my humble opinion.
Actually, I think my aversion to the yoga thing mainly comes from my distaste for bare feet. What is it with feet? Why must they be unsheathed in public, when mankind has created delightful inventions like Frye boots in which to cover them? Do you honestly know anyone who has attractive feet? I mean, the toenails! The mere word makes me shudder. Why would I want to lock myself in an airless room while a bunch of strangers manipulate themselves into flatulent positions on weird fungusy rubberized mats and wave their hideous bare toes in my vicinity? I bet some of them even wear TOE RINGS. My god.
Oh my, I'm getting dangerously worked up over here; perhaps I need to recuse myself from the yoga question entirely. Unless I'm wrong, which, quite possibly, I just might be.
If, like me, you see yourself as a woeful procrastinator with the potential to do great or at least acceptable things but lacking the gift of great discipline*, you probably have looked into "time management" at some point or another, at least while procrastinating on doing other things. I never get much farther than looking into it, sighing, and remembering that the concept of managing time is right up there with "lifehacking" and "hipster PDA" on the list of Terms That Give Me the Hives.
That's why I enjoyed this post suggested by my friend Diana, outlining an anarchist approach to time management. Yes, you too can "smash the state by breaking down tasks"! I make no warranties as to the content of the site, but the post says many things that need to be said, including:
-I hate the bullshit moralism connected with being organized. All this stuff about get started early. If you know how long something takes you can indulge yourself and leave it to the last day.
-it’s harder to do something ahead of time because you know it’s ahead of time, so you’re likely to procrastinate
-if you don’t know how long an aspect of a project will take, do it first
-pay attention to how long it takes so you know the next time.
and:
“Lazy” is Bullshit
-I don’t really believe in lazy, I don’t really know any lazy people. I know people with low self confidence who find it really hard to believe in their own projects. I know people who have never learned the pleasure of stimulating and engaging work. I know people who are too worn down by eight hours of pointless, meaningless tasks to take on new projects.
Then again, I'm always easily swayed by writers who can sling around words like "bullshit" with ease, a flair for using curse words convincingly being another superpower I lack.
*i.e., someone who waits until 12:45 the day her credit card bill is due to run over to the bank and pay it before the 1 p.m. cutoff time, someone who consistently manages to put off the process of cooking and eating dinner until after 10 p.m., someone who manages to sustain 10 percent of the NYPL's operating budget with her overdue charges, someone who muses about writing a novel, short fiction, or hell, just some sort of essay, OK, anything but business writing at this point, yet spends any productive time left in the day reading other people's writing, someone who knows she should be looking for a new job yet decides just to start a useless blog instead, etc. etc.
At first I thought maybe I wanted to be a food blogger. Food blogs, unlike the musings of a mouse, serve an actual purpose in life, the "service journalism" of the Internets, I guess. But service requires work, and I have quite enough of that, thank you, so I'll let other people be useful for me.
I harbor secret fantasies of being a foodie, but never can seem to muster the energy to pull it off. And long ago, I realized that my aversion to onions and any meat that may be described as "gamey" or "offal" would hinder me in my ambition to become the next Frank Bruni. And as for deconstructing Frank Bruni, I must step aside and bow to the mastery of this gal, who is responsible for the majority of the laughing-fits-poorly-disguised-as-coughing-fits issuing from my cubicle at work.
I'm also in awe of this blog, which has the most elegant pictures and recipes I might actually want to make some day (it would help if I had an actual counter on which to perform this person's insanely organized prep work, but oh well). I plan to get to this right after I tackle this year-long pile of Cooking Lights gathering dust on my living room floor.
When I do tackle my next Cooking Light recipe, in a year or so, I guess, I'll be sure to keep these helpful tips in mind. As the writer notes, the trick to CL is to "quintuple the amount of any foodstuff that you look forward to ingesting." He continues:
I stumbled across the secret one evening while making a recipe that called for "1/8 cup cheddar cheese," a quantity as wildly improbable as "17 ounces of black pepper." "One cup" is the fundamental, atomic unit of shredded cheese -- did the editors of Cooking Light think we would not know this?
Anyway, CL's recipes are pretty good looking lately, though I never could get past the editors' preference for "fat-free mayonnaise," which ranks just below onions and just above pigeon in my list of Foods That Should Not Exist.
