I don't think I can underestimate the effect of Sex and the City on the BF. The fact that Carrie Bradshaw is a writer on the series... I think there is something key here about her profession - teaching other's to tell their own stories.

Yoga - I have practiced Anusara, Ana Forest, Iyengar, Hatha, Bikram, and Ashtanga. I finally have a sense of what these different schools focus on and what works and doesn't for me. It's taken me a long time to really develop a personal practice, but now it's become a part of the routine, much like writing. The heart was missing from Iyengar for me - both the heart and spirit. Bikram is a good workout, but it also leaves something to be desired. Can anyone explain to be the difference between Ashtanga in the Pathabi Jois tradition vs. the Patanjali lineage?

I transcribed a great oral history over the break of an interview with Al Young, a Chinese-American world championship race car driver. He donated his race car, the Challenger, to MOHAI and was interviewed about this object and his experiences in the sport of race car driving. Al talked about having an undiagnosed learning disability and doing poorly in junior high and high school (after being identified as a gifted learner in elementary school). He talks about his ADHD and how he had to learn to read while walking and moving to be able to focus. Yet this disability came into play in helping him in race car driving. When the lights would flash for the race to start, you have a thousandth of a second to leave the starting position, and for him, it would all play out in slow motion. His oral history talks about women in the sport, not just bathing suit models, but female race car drivers who beat men, and how they had a distinct psychological advantage over the men - because it's not a sport about "strength." Cars interest me about as much as sports, but this was a wonderful oral history of one of Asian America's little known heroes.

Reading Working the Woods,Working the Sea from Empty Bowl. Poems from treeplanters, loggers, and salmon fisherman, a literature of the "back-to-the-land" movement. One of the writers in the book tells of his days planting trees in word patterns to write out radical and poetic messages. It reminded me of David Antin's cloud poems, but ever more radical and activist. A sort of performance poetry meets land art meets environmental activism.

Mike O'Connor's The Basin is the best book I've read all year.

Tomorrow is 2009. Cripes!

Classes for the winter:
- Collections Management with lab at the Wing Luke Asian Museum.
- Thesis credits for continued work on the chop suey project.
- Educational Leadership

Here's to setting an intent: I want to be in Taos in Summer 2010 at the Wurlitzer.

It is hard to find a healer. The person I wanted to refer to my friend in Leonardtown, MD, has uprooted to Rochester, NY. The person I wanted to refer to my friend in Austin, relocated to Dallas, buying the practice of the woman who wanted Kort to take over her business. She left Dallas to find a cure for her aging boyfriend's macular degeneration and imminent blindness. Sharon absorbed the business of a Japanese acupuncturist who left Dallas to go to medical school in Mexico, to only drop out and later return to Texas. My acupuncturist left to pan for gold in Durango after considering a romantic stint on a cruise ship fighting Somali pirates. My current healer is MIA - he wasn't really taking new patients, and is in the process of closing a yoga studio. This all teaches me something - it's not right to keep moving Kort and I around - as I have been given the lead in the last year or two. Kort needs to be rooted in a place to build healing relationships with his clients - to lose your healer is a painful experience, at best, a difficult transition. I think I've lived it too many times this year to feel like we can keep doing it.