Nov 252009
Yay, Yoga!
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Nov 202009
Towards the beginning of the year, Alpha Geek got laid off. It seemed like a good idea to cut back on obvious luxuries, like my membership with the YMCA.
I used to go to the Y two or three times a week for yoga classes. Now and then I’d try aerobics, and once I attempted a “spin” class (the seat on their stationary cycle was uncomfortable enough to leave bruises on my posterior). Mostly, though, it was yoga.
There are lots of reasons to do yoga. The practice encompasses many aspects of a person’s life: the physical, the spiritual, the emotional, et cetera. There are eight principle branches of yoga. One of those branches is hatha yoga, the physical discipline. Hatha yoga is usually what people mean when they talk about “doing yoga,” and it’s the yoga I used to do at the YMCA.
My reason for doing yoga was simple—it made me feel good. Physically good. Sometimes I wouldn’t feel like dragging myself out to the YMCA, but I’d go anyway because I knew how good my body would feel after I was done. Yoga made me feel like everything in my body was aligned, working together, everything pulling in the same direction.
I missed that.
I tried looking for yoga programs on the Fitness channel.
I found a show called Namaste Yoga.* It seemed similar to the classes I took at the Y, in the gentle flow from one pose to another and the patterns they followed. However, the program is only thirty minutes long, and I didn’t feel like I was holding each pose long enough to really explore and experience it.
I found another show called Inhale, an hour-long program billed as “high energy yoga.” I’ll say! That one was more of a calisthenics yoga.
Nothing wrong with either of those shows—everyone does yoga for their own reasons, and that’s why there are so many different types of yoga classes. But neither one of them gave me what I wanted, that feeling that my body had been realigned and was working in harmony with itself again.
I put yoga on the back burner for a while.
Recently, my friend Romilly sent me a link to The Fluent Self, as a blog I might be interested in (I was). While poking around the site, I saw something that brought yoga back to the forefront: a yoga DVD. Havi has taught yoga for many years, in many countries, so she knows whereof she speaks when she promotes this DVD as Yoga That Doesn’t Suck (officially titled Yin Yoga).
And it doesn’t! Yay!
I’m so happy to have yoga again. I’ve been doing the slow, gentle “Yin” series three days a week, after my C25k run. I think next week I’ll start doing the active, energetic “Yang” series on the in-between days when I don’t run on the treadmill. For now, all I know is my back feels so much better.
The two-hour lecture on what Yin Yoga is, and why you’d want to do it, is recommended but optional. I watched the whole thing in one sitting, because I’m a biology geek and I thought his discussion on anatomy was fascinating.
I bought this DVD with some of my birthday money. I think if I get any Christmas money, I’m going to try Shiva Nata. Because it looks weird and interesting, and because I just have to try anything that promises “hot buttered epiphanies.”
*Namaste is often said at the end of a yoga practice, and is also used as a greeting. It is said with a slight bow, palms together at chest height, and the literal meaning is “I bow to you.”
Beyond the literal, the meaning of namaste is (roughly) “The spark of divinity within me acknowledges the one within you.”
I think that’s pretty cool.
Noob Herder
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Nov 132009
I was farming leather in Scholozaar Basin when a guildmate sent out a plea over guild chat.
“Can anyone help? I’ve tried to do this escort quest myself, but I keep dying.”
“I can be there in five minutes, is that okay?” I sent back, heading for the nearest flight point.
Helping out a guildmate trumps farming; that’s what guildmates are for. (At least, it is in our guild.) My guildmate’s character is level 26; mine is level 80. My character was vastly overpowered for the quest he was attempting. We blitzed through it in no time.
“Need help with any others?” I asked as we headed back to town. “I love one-shotting the mobs, I feel like a real badass.”
“Sure,” he said, listing several quests with (at his level) hard-to-handle bosses. “Let me just clear some bag space.”
About then another lowbie whispered me asking for help. Turned out he was on several of the same quests; we invited him to our group and sallied forth.
Before long I was herding a small bevy of lowbies through Redridge. We mowed down orcs and gnolls. We slaughtered big bosses. We finished all of their quests in the zone.
I don’t often hang out in the lowbie zones, simply because I do get flooded with requests for help from total strangers. I can understand needing help with a difficult boss, or getting through quests that are maybe just a little too high for the character. And a higher-level character in a low-level zone gets noticed.
And to be honest, most of the time I politely decline. Guildmates I’m happy to help out, and they help me out when I need it. Random strangers, not so much—I do have my own things I want to do, and I don’t pay $15/month to be Feathermoon N00b Herder. And often the request for help is either too demanding or borderline illiterate (or both).
[LazyNoob] whispers: can u help me
To [LazyNoob]: With what?
[LazyNoob] whispers: can u help me w a quest
To [LazyNoob]: Which quest?
[LazyNoob] whispers: can u help me
To [LazyNoob]: With…?
[LazyNoob] whispers: a quest
I never did find out what, exactly, he wanted me to help him with. I did know he was on another continent, and whatever he wanted would involve
- stopping my own quests
- traveling back to the capital city
- taking the portal back to the continent he was on
- traveling to his location
…and that would all have to happen before I could even begin to help with whatever it was he wanted. I thought the very least he could do, if he expected me to invest that kind of time in his quest, was to be clear on what it was he expected me to be doing.
Unfortunately, there are just as many entitled asshats in the virtual worlds as there are in the real one. I once wondered why these guys don’t ask their own guildmates for help. Now I suspect it’s because their attitudes have already alienated any guildmates who might have helped them, so they have to turn to strangers.
Fortunately, World of Warcraft has a wonderful feature called “ignore.” Put the asshat on your “ignore” list, and you never hear anything else he might say. It’s the opposite of the “friends” list.
And now and then I do run into a total stranger looking for help who is polite, intelligent, and converses with me for a moment before making his request. Those I’ll often help out, because they’re more fun to spend time with.
Let that be a lesson to those of you playing multiplayer games—treat the other players like human beings, rather than props in your single-player game, and they’ll be a lot more willing to help you out.