blogging

If you put “style” in the title, SPAM will come


On Friday I had a tiny post about yoga.

As I get a fair amount of junk links, I didn’t pay any attention to the upticks on Friday evening, but when I opened my blog stats on Saturday to over 100 spam, I remarked on it to Rob.

“Really?” he said. “I deleted about 150 already this morning.”

By Saturday evening, 310 sites had attempted to link to it.

Sites for jewelry, sinus troubles, Gibson guitars and weight loss. No yoga. But plenty of celebrity sites, tax software downloads and movies on demand and all manner of exercise equipment. And baby gear. Babies apparently love yoga – as long as it’s stylish – and go ga-ga over the combo.

Normally, as I said earlier, I get a fair amount of spam. In fact, I get two to three times as much spam daily as I do comments from verifiable people. Spam is loyal like that. Dependable as the family dog.

I have no idea how much longer the onslaught will continue. Will it pump up my Technorati, do you think? Spam should be good for something, but I admit to a tiny thrill. It’s nice to be noticed in such a vast space like the cyber one is.

Blogging: the anti-Yoga


Blogging feels heavy lately*.

The unspoken expectation of snark, controversy and condescension permeates blogs and the act of blogging. The genre matters not. What gets read is hot button topics, snide commentary and kabob point humor.

It’s not that I can’t do any of this. It just makes me feel like a karma polluter.

My gig at Care2 is case in point. Posts that aren’t tinder worthy of the forest fire kind don’t get read. If a blogger’s posts don’t garner hits they won’t prosper – bonus wise or in the eyes of their editors.

I am double-whammied at Care2 because I believe that the current trend in education reform is even more revolutionary than Obama’s piddlin’ health care bill. I think it should be covered more extensively.

Readers don’t care. They want edu-fluff. They want to be outraged by preschoolers forced to cut their hair (the kid in question had hair longer than Dee’s and the parents weren’t pulling it back – because he was a boy and hair ties are “girly”) or by kids being punished for writing on school property or equally local “who really cares in the larger scheme of things” TMZ stuff.

I write about issues. I don’t want comments to devolve into flaming based on personal issues – which happens there a lot. How can behaving badly in the comment box further a cause? Really.

But even here or at 50 Something, I feel a premium is being placed on my ability to write cute and clever and that substance is of lesser value.

A little cute is going a long ways with me these days. Even my Facebook status updates make me feel unworthy of the ability to string words together because they are so … typical … of what we do in the ‘sphere.

The medium has(d) so much potential for good, but the traces being left are so banal. Banality being the deepest root of what is deemed “evil”, am I a positive or a negative?

I have to give a workshop this weekend about the Internet as a tool for writers. I don’t know what to tell them. Everyone sells, and what they are selling is mostly meaningless and for the purpose of acquiring … what?  Just acquiring it appears.

I have work to do. Later.

*I wrote this to put up this morning, but changed my mind until I finished reading chapter two of the Sutras this afternoon. Ahhh, Patanjali.  I am not in turmoil, but I feel a change of direction/motivation/inspiration that is difficult to express. Perhaps it is time to do something. Or perhaps I am doing it? Or maybe it is catching up with me or I with it. I am still quite a base person as evidenced by my glee over this, but I find that I hesitate to share things like this and isn’t that the nature of social media and the web?

Losing My Inner Yogina


An author who friended me on Facebook is beginning her new year using a Bikram yoga dvd to get in shape. Bikram is basically one of the “hot yoga’s”. It’s creator lives in L.A. and stews over the fact that he hasn’t been allowed to lay copyright to the asanas/postures that make up the Bikram practice. As nearly as I can understand it without having gone to a class, there are 26 asanas that do not change from one practice to the next and the yoga is practiced in environments of 105F with 40% humidity levels. Oh, and hydration is frowned upon.

Anyway, this author has been updating on her progress and made a comment on the difficulty of doing the program in front of a mirror.

And I went – mirrors? Because I have yet to see mirrors in a yoga studio or be told by a teacher to go watch myself in a mirror. Aerobics is done in front of a mirror. Weight-lifting. Super narcissistic stuff. But yoga, as I have been taught and as I have read, is an inward focus for several reasons but one of the better ones is that to safely get into the postures – you have to be paying attention to what your body is telling you. Something, I have found, that people don’t do much of when they are worried about how they look.

My comment on the mirrors and inward focus elicited this reply:

Bikram is not chanty, third eye, meditate on the pretty flower yoga. Bikram is HARD CORE yoga and your posture counts! Hence, the mirrors!

Whoa! Step back from your organic fiber Lululemon mat there Yoga Princess.

Of course, I didn’t take that advice and launched a reply in spite of Rob’s advice to just let it go. But afterwards, I wondered how yogina that was of me. I had spent the evening before reading B.K.S. Iyengar’s definitive book Light on Yoga and nearly all of what he had to say struck deep chords. I wasn’t getting off to a good start as a budding teacher myself if I could let someone else’s misinformation ruffle me, was I? And picking a bone on someone else’s Facebook profile is just bad form.

So I deleted the comment though this post is certainly not the highest of the roads I could have taken. A more enlightened person wouldn’t have even written about the incident. But I am not quite the hemp wearing navel gazer yet (though I got the most awesome hemp yoga pants from Rob for my birthday) and feel compelled to set the record straight.

I don’t chant. I barely meditate though my inner focus is improving. I am all about the breathing and listening to my body because I am more concerned with still being about to use this body 25 years from now than I am about being a certain size. And it’s not posture. It’s alignment and it matters because you can really hurt yourself if you aren’t properly aligned though anyone who is paying even the slightest attention can align themselves without having to gaze at themselves.

Oh and there are no fucking flowers involved. Flowers? That is so Beatles. That’s TM, not yoga, and a tired Hollywood propagated stereo-type that should have been left behind with 80’s sitcoms.

Competitive yoga is like turning to the dark side of the force, and we all know how well that turns out in the long run. But it was bad, bad, bad to take it personally. Gotta work on that.