Back up

Everything is finally returned to normal. Yays.

The massive storm that ripped through the area took out power on Friday. Our house had electricity and air conditioning back by Sunday, with help from our generator on Saturday. The cable company just now got us back up. Which is lovely, because updating a blog from my smart phone sometimes hurts my hands. No immediate damage to our neighborhood beyond some downed trees and wires. We got lucky.

Also, nothing else is new. Amazing how little I missed the internet when I didn't have it.

One week to go

In case you weren't sure, I'm still terrified of my SSDI court hearing next week. My doctors practically begged me to start taking Klonopin daily for a couple of months. No matter what the judge says, I will be a wreck. I can't do this. But I will do my best to do it. You know?
http://naamah-darling.livejournal.com/580259.html

There is the possibility of the judge making no decision next Tuesday, of saying that my case needs to be reviewed more, and that simple thought has caused me to burst into tears, scream into a pillow, hyperventilate, and meditate with deep meditative breathing until I nearly had an out of body experience.

I also am expecting my menses this week, so obviously the above paragraph makes sense. Still... you know... screaming on the inside. Despite all kinds of assurances from every possible angle... screaming on the inside. It is all out of my control, and all I can do is breathe, and wait, and breathe.

I'm sorry. I hate this.

She's the kind of person who flaunts Facebook photos of herself bending completely backwards.

Copied and pasted from a Cracked.com article. Now will all you Yogier Than Thou folks insisting that I do yoga all the time please quit telling me to do yoga all the time? I will do things that appear to look like yoga and that seem very much like yoga, because it feels good; but I'm not going to call it yoga, I'm going to call it meditative stretching exercise. (Apologies. I recently had to lightly growl at someone who was very snooty about this. Apparently, she got deeply hooked on Bikram, Vinyasa, and Hatha Yoga, became best in all her classes, turned into a "yoga snob" and felt so proud of herself that she quit her job at a clinic to become a yoga instructor; now she tells everyone, even total strangers, that yoga in all its forms can heal all sickness in all its forms. Yay?)

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Yoga as we know it today -- a set of postures (asanas) combined with breathing techniques -- dates back to around the grand old year of 1960.

(In other words, yoga is as old as Bono.)

"But how can that be?" you scream, rending your organic exercise mat in two. Well, that "five thousand years old" claim rests entirely on some 5,000-year-old pictures found in the Indus Valley of a man sitting cross-legged. Though this is one of the main yoga positions, it so happens that it's also the position most people take when, you know, they sit on any flat surface.

(The ancient art of sitting on your ass and daydreaming.)

Yoga is first mentioned by name in some 2,500-year-old Hindu religious texts called the Upanishads, but this is actually a term relating to a method of strapping horses together -- literally the origin for our word "yoke." The Upanishads use it as a metaphor for a mental prayer technique, but as far as all those weird stretches are concerned, the texts mention exactly one physical posture, and that posture is pretty much "sit in a way that makes meditation comfortable." So the word "yoga" might describe an old Hindu teaching, but then so does the word "avatar," and nobody's claiming that the James Cameron movie reflects an unbroken line of ancient sacred tradition.

It wasn't until the 19th century that an Indian prince named Krishnaraja Wodeyar III produced something resembling what we call yoga: a manual called the Sritattvanidhi, which listed 122 poses mostly taken from Indian gymnastics. What really kicked-started modern yoga, though, was the influence of the Imperial British, who introduced Indians to the new exercise craze that was sweeping Europe at the time.

Later a guy named B.K.S. Iyengar came up with the idea of combining these exercise techniques with some of the teachings described in old Hindu texts like the Yoga Sutras and let the result loose on America in the 1960s. Since then, yoga fans have grown by the millions, with few realizing that they are practicing a chanted-up version of early 20th-century gym class.