Monthly Archives: May 2007

So on Friday, Chris and I edged out of a nighttime reception at San Francisco’s AsianArt Museum and made up the escalator for the South and Southeast Asian galleries. Chris is the best companion for this kind of thing, since strapped with the most serious antiquities fetish I’ve ever witnessed, and because his talk is sharp and attentive […]

Multitasking is such sweet solace. Stupid solace, more like. I’ve got a 178-page .pdf and piles of forms from the university’s Institutional Review Board; and they are slowly eating my Saturday amid water-breaks and internet interludes. I’m an impatient foot-stamper in the face of bureaucracy, too immature or maybe just unable to muster the methodical […]

A friend just took a group of welllll-off college students, most residents of the OC and pre-law majors, to visit a tiny downtown non-profit—a support center for undocumented workers. It was the first time many of these students had talked to an immigrant worker as a real person, even if such people inivisibly do most […]

A mentor sent over a freshly minted syllabus this morning. At the bottom, he’s printed a kind of empiricist’s creed, straight from Shakyamuni Buddha. Not something you see in the university too often, even though it’s so harmonious with the disposition of scientific research. If only social scientists would take the time to flesh out our […]

The real argument of last Saturday’s wisdom quiz was that fools seek situations where they don’t have to think deeply or engage fundamental questions. The wise eat it raw, and don’t need their world to be pre-digested by preachers or teachers or ideological shorthand. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the commodification of […]

“So I’m going through something with my back…” This is what we say in yoga. Not: “I’m injured.” What does this language hide; and in what ways is it more true than using the language of injury?” For months I’ve been keeping notes on the subject of injury and astanga yoga, and noting the variations in experienced […]

As I was saying, I keep practicing astanga because it gives me a body. In a layered, dynamic way that makes me curious and more alive. It’s a low-maintenance thread of ecstasy one can pick up and run with for years, without a dealer or tryst-schedules or the baggage of a charismatic religion. (Ecstasy may seem […]

Today’s extra four hours of sleep brought to me by: the American Sociological Association, Air France (“please keep your eye cover, with our compliments”), and… the Quadratus Lumborum. Managing to sleep past dawn is reason to celebrate, but there’s a large chink in my equanimity. It’s going on five weeks without the endorphin-levels I’ve come […]

Why do you practice astanga yoga? What brought you to the practice?* I practice because: how could I not? If I hatch a reasoned explanation, I might just lie to justify the sacrifices I’ve made and the quirks I’ve taken on as I have habituated to the yoga. Astanga is a weird and jealous lover, quite the […]