I Hate Yoga

As part of my efforts to achieve a more lissom body I have started going to yoga once a week. I’ve always heard good things about it, that it centers the body and the soul. Whenever you see someone doing yoga on the telly, it’s always with a beatific smile and an extraordinary girth of movement. Yoga is supposed to make tracksuit bottoms look effortlessly stylish. Yoga is going to be the thing that carries me through my midterms and class papers on a cloud of serenity, the stresses and heartache of life rebuffed firmly by my impenetrable chi.

 Four weeks in, I have discovered that I really hate yoga.

I can’t cope with the paradox of it. The instructor is roughly the size of my little finger, with huge eyes and elfen features, and the most soothing voice ever known to man—a voice with which she invites (not tells, but invites) her pupils to bend their bodies into positions which go beyond the limits of human possibility, let alone the most recent edition of the Karma Sutra. She pads around the room barefooted, entreating us to ‘be kind, be kind to your bodies’, while we tie ourselves into knots, rupturing a couple of internal organs in the progress. How can someone so gentle and soothing be capable of causing my body such pain? It’s not as though I’m even obliged to go through all the motions, but the way she invites a person to assume the Downward Dog is so weirdly hypnotic that you find yourself wanting to do it just to please her.

I felt sure yoga would turn me into an unflappable, poreless creature with luminous skin and a washboard stomach. Not so. While all the other girls in class move casually from pose to pose, my body takes every available opportunity to scream in protest: flushing my face, frizzing out my hair, and occasionally making me whimper in agony. While drenched in sweat last week, muscles shaking with the effort of maintaining the Reverse Warrior, I caught a glimpse of the girl kneeling next to me arch backwards until her nose touched the mat behind her. The mere sight of this physical impossibility caused my muscles to give out from shock- or possibly lactic acid- so that I collapsed like a broken accordion into a boneless, gasping heap. Chi? Chuh.

 

It’s true that there are a large number of extraordinarily good-looking men who go to yoga. Blonde, tanned men with clothes that just fall away from their bodies at any available opportunity, revealing their rock-hard abs, sculpted arms, and taut thighs. But they’re too perfect. The view of such a man becomes decidedly eerie once you see them lift their entire bodyweight off the ground, suspending themselves with no apparent effort on their two middle fingers: maybe a big toe thrown in somewhere if they’re having a slow day.  I tried to demonstrate this move to The Graduate via webcam, and only succeeded in kicking a hole in the ceiling and trapping two or three nerves in my neck, while he looked on with an indulgent smile. 

So, it seems that I’ve not quite mastered the inner poise business quite yet. But I am going back to yoga tomorrow afternoon, because I refuse to be defeated by it. By the end of this semester, I will be bendy. 

Namaste.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN? 

 

 

I MISS HER.

One Month In

To my amazement, I’ve officially passed the one-month mark of being on the other side of the Atlantic. Here are the top five things I’ve managed to achieve since arriving in Berkeley. 

1)      ‘The Dinner Crew’

A raggle-taggle group of International House students, who converge in the dining hall every evening to pull the world to rags. Members include a laconic Australian boy with the greatest capacity for one-liners; an irrepressible Irish aristocrat with a fierce love of T.S. Eliot; the World’s Greatest Lover (by his own admission); a pair of classy third-floor ladies known generally as ‘The Twins’; The Roomate, and myself. Conversation topics are carefully selected for controversy, and other tables are forced to stuff their ears against the heated debate and/or raucous laughter. In the fashion of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles we also have a Sensei (thankfully not shaped like a giant rat): an All-American boy from San Diego who coasts around campus on a scooter and leaves his door permanently open with the offer of free chocolate on the whiteboard outside. Keep an eye out for out future adventures. 

2)      A Place in a [Sort-Of] Glee Club 

‘Perfect Fifth’ are one of Berkeley’s many choral ensembles, and seem as nicely cracked as all the other acapella institutions I’ve been involved with until now.  Given that they’ve just undergone a big structural reshape there’s not too much I can say about members yet, but we’re booked to sing at a memorial service next week, and at a wedding in the Napa Valley come October. Here’s one of the pieces I have to learn by then:

...It’s not quite hand-clapping and Darren Criss, but these guys seem hardcore. I’m very much looking forward to singing with them.

3)      A Journalism Position at Caliber Magazine 

(I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE!)

I am hugely excited to have gained a position at Caliber, UC Berkeley’s bi-annual glossy magazine. In the first meeting they stuck a label on my back, informed me that I was now John Lennon, and asked me to admit to the group in a ‘trust’ exercise, what my most guilty song pleasure was. With minimal shame I claimed Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’- despite The Graduate’s best efforts to condition me out of it by licking my face every time he caught me humming one of the riffs.

I should be able to contribute to at least two of the upcoming issues, and am brainstorming article pitches as we speak- determined that the world should hear my views on life in yet another format.

Link to Caliber Magazine

4)      The Worst Come-On Line Ever

Stranded at a party on Friday night, having lost the vast majority of the Dinner Crew in the beer-soaked throng, I suddenly found myself confronted with a group of towering, highly inebriated college boys. In the fashion which is apparently customary on this side of the Atlantic I was manhandled into the middle of the group and turned in a circle so they could read the slogan on my T-shirt, before being asked ‘What’s that all about, dude?” I opened my mouth to explain that it was Shakespeare, but failed to make it past the first three words, cut off by an exclamation from the largest boy in the backwards-facing baseball cap. (Why is the backwards cap thing acceptable? It shouldn’t be.)

            “Woah, would you listen to that accent! Are you British?”

            “Yes, yes I am. How could you possibly tell?”

            “Holy shit, check her out! Are you hearing her?” Raucous affirmation on all sides, before he turned back “Are you related to the Queen? Now tell me, you’re in line for the throne, right? Right?” He threw himself backwards onto one of the sagging sofas, spread his legs and gestured expansively to his crotch. “Little Queen- won’t you sit on my throne?”

            …How I managed to decline the invitation I’ll never know. 

5)      A Sense Of Belonging

Formula insists upon ending in some sort of cheesy register, and as it’s a Sunday night I don’t have the energy to strike out into experimental territory. One month in and I appear to have broken through the culture-shock and the cold water of a different academic system enough to feel at home. I am able to roll out of bed and cross past the Campanile (in-word for the clock tower), pick up a Jamba juice on the way to lectures, and make it through an aerobics class without dying. In the afternoons I do my readings at the Strada Caffe, listening absently to the blonde, hatchet-voiced sorority girl two tables away- “She’s one of our pledges, so we can totally, like, FUCK with her, send her to Sigma, make her do stuff… it’s going to be so much fun…” Slowly my hair is bleaching out, and my skin is turning brown. I wear Cal merchandise to the lectures. 

Of course there are still moments when I wobble- when I want nothing more than to climb into bed, pull the duvet over my head and wish myself back in my grotty Norwich student house. But when that happens I call The Graduate, go for a browse around the vintage shops on Telegraph Avenue… or remember the two-week old spaghetti mouldering in the kitchen sink. 

I’m definitely glad to be here. 

Fun in the sun at UC Berkeley's Botanical Gardens