water, please.

Question of the day: Will hot yoga make me pass out or throw up in public today?

I'm definitely not new to yoga, and I'm even sort of not new to hot yoga...If you don't know, hot yoga is yoga in which the room is heated to, in this case, 98 degrees while we go through the series of postures. I know. It sounds aweful. Believe me though, people who do it love it. With a history of just passing the hell out all the time, I've not yet made it through the 90 min. class without having to sit down. If you're familiar with what it's like to pass out, you know what I mean. The blood pressure drops, so you can't stand up anymore...then, if it gets worse, you can't sit up anymore, or if you don't listen to your body or are just in a bad way, down you go. And it's not fun at all. You are sure you will throw up (although I haven't yet), and did I mention that your vision goes? Benign (depending upon what you fall on), mind you, and trust me it will get you out of school for the day, where instead you go to your grandma's and receive special treatment even though you feel just fine.

At any rate, I usually catch myself in hot yoga before it gets bad....I really try to listen to my body, which apparently is just really, really susceptible to heat exaustion...But, from what I was told, I sat in a part of the room where they leave the fans off...Now, I don't think I could go to a hot yoga that didn't have fans, bc our bodies need to evaporate sweat to cool ourselves...At any rate, I didn't have that, or maybe it had something to do with going to the 6 am class, with the way they saw we wake up dehydrated, but people, we had an incident.

I'll leave out most of the horribly embarassing details, but it involved me crawling, yes crawling, and also laying with my face on the floor of a public bathroom. Not. Pretty. People. This happened to me the summer after I graduated high school, at a car wash in the McDonald's parking lot. I had just moved to Dallas and didn't know anyone, so I ended up at a car wash for a church or something, and it occurred to me that I was just seeing the outlines of people. Bad sign. Enter nausea. I knew I had to lay down fast, or it was all over. Much like a sick dog, I quickly found my way to the most isolated place I could find, I remember I could barely see. It's kind of like looking at the negatives of a photograph, the light comes through, but everything else is getting blacked out. Anyways, the grease, the disease of the floor, none of it mattered. Ah, it feels so good, the cool floor.

And there on the bathroom floor I was found. Yes, the urban McDonald's disease-infested bathroom floor. Finally.

"Oh my God, We have to call an ambulance."

"No." I try to sit up, you know, wipe the bathroom floor STD's off my forehead. Can't. Sit. Up.

Someone brings me orange juice. I don't know who they are but I drink it. the floor has probably already killed me.

Long story short, I am able to get them to wait ten minutes. And, I recovered. And got the h out of there.

The moral of the story is, well, there is no moral. Just sending out a general wish that it doesn't happen again today...Please? Fairy God Mother? Baby Jesus? Collective unconscious? Genie? Please?


POST YOGA UPDATE: Thank you Fairy God Mother, Baby Jesus, Collective Unconscious AND Genie! Today was the first day of hot yoga that I actually made it ALL the way through the 90 minutes without having to sit down. Tomorrow, 6am, will be my first morning class after our little "incident." I plan to drink lots of water before bed to make sure I'm hydrated, and then to get up at 5 and start drinking again.

Also, I've been really focusing on being mindful of my eating, especially after being inspired by Lauren's reference to the Time photoshoot showing families' weekly groceries from around the world. Also, I was reminded today that the top 20% of population, fiscally, control 82% of the wealth (including food, water, etc). If you are reading this, you are most certainly in the top 20%, trust me, no matter how poor you think your ass is. I want to really evaluate whether I'm living sustainably. "We must live simply so that others may simply live."