Okay, so, something vaguely interesting! I went to the Texas Yoga Asana Championships this weekend, which is basically COMPETITIVE YOGA! (WHOOO!!!) It was a fascinating experience because I had no idea what to expect from "competitive yoga", really. It turns out what it is, is everyone competing performs a series of postures, five mandatory ones and two optional ones. They're judged on grace, poise, how correctly you perform the posture, and that's basically it. They then pick one man and one woman to send to nationals in LA. Welp, a teacher from my studio won the women's division! So that was exciting and awesome. Plus, I got to see a whole crapload of really insane advanced postures that I wouldn't normally get to see, such as: Crane pose, Peacock pose, Full Camel pose, and Headstand. There were other cool ones but I either can't think of them or can't find good pictures of them. So it was a pretty sweet deal.
I AM GOING TO YOGA TODAY, GOD DAMN IT, DON'T LET ME SKIP OUT.
Word of the day!
bauk: A ridge of land left unploughed. OR As used in Scotland, a strip two or three feet in breadth.
WHICH WOULD BE BORING, EXCEPT KEEP READING BECAUSE WITCHES.
Plough Monday
Witches were long believed to harass farmers in their fields, as we read in W. Grant Stewart's The Popular Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1823): "The wily witch will penetrate into the ground and place herself in the line of the plough, and as it passes over her she will creep in betwixt the sock and the coulter. The plough is consequently expelled from the ground for a considerable space, and a bauk is the consequence. For these insidious and barefaced acts of iniquity the witch, if discovered, seldom escapes with impunity. Stopping the cattle, the ploughman will take hold of the stone, bestowing upon it the most abusive and opprobrious epithets, and dashes her with all his might against the hardest substance he can find as a mark of his hatred and contempt for her character."
So, basically, if you did a shitty job at ploughing, BLAME IT ON WITCHES! I, for one, think it would have been far more effective to just build a bridge out of her.