Today I had vague plans with Ashley, but we just played phone tag all day and never met up. When we were finally both free around nine, I was too tired to ride to meet her.

But I had a lovely day anyway... first I rode my bike to Hawthorne and read the paper at the Fresh Pot. But it was so nice out, I didn't stay long. I got back on my bike and rode downtown, racing cars down the Hawthorne hill. I went to Borders and finally found the book I was looking for ("Seth Speaks" -- Jason lost/sold my copy of it while I was in Thailand). Then I went to Saturday Market and wandered around soaking up energy, and bought a necklace from a Tibetan guy.

It was 4:30, and I was trying to make it to the yoga class at 5:30, but I realized that all my yoga-ish clothes are at Donna's, so I quickly rode to American Apparel and bought some overpriced stretchy pants to wear. Then I raced cars down Burnside to the bridge -- can you believe I was actually going faster than the cars? It helps that I was running all the red lights. Using up all my stamina trying to go faster than the cars really sucks when I get to the bridge and my muscles already ache *before* I start the long ascent. But oh well.

I got home drenched in sweat from the bike ride, took off my zillions of tangled necklaces and bracelets and earrings, took a quick shower, and put on my yoga clothes. I felt naked without my jewelry and only wearing plain, stretchy clothes. And going to things for the first time makes me nervous. I walked to the space, and luckily they provided mats and everyone seemed not yuppie at all, and really friendly. (I originally took yoga for two years at Reed, but when I tried to take classes in Minneapolis, the place was way too snobby and rich for me).

The class was fucking intense! It would have been challenging for me even back when I was taking yoga twice a week, and this is after years of no yoga at all (except sometimes in my bedroom). Luckily my bike riding means my legs are pretty in shape, but my shoulders hurt like hell now. I'm young and resilient and had my yoga-pride to uphold, so I forced myself to hold all the poses for just as long as all the people who've probably been taking the class for weeks, but I'm sure they're nowhere near as sore as I am. It felt good, though. And when we partnered up to do handstands, everyone was laughing and there were people who sucked at handstands just as much as I did.

I remember a yoga class at Reed when the teacher was telling us to harness our "core strength" while attempting a headstand. One guy raised his hand and said, "But what if I just have, like, core WEAKNESS?"

After the hour and a half class, I stayed another hour and a half for the free meditation group with a guy named Arthur. This week it was a lot easier to listen to him say things like "I breath in, I am happy to be alive" without my thoughts saying "No, I'm NOT fucking happy to be alive!"

We did guided meditation, walking mediation, and silent. Then he closed by telling a story of when he first started practicing, when he was going through a really tough time in his life, and his teacher asked the class to say one thing they were grateful for, and he was so depressed that he couldn't even think of one thing. So we were supposed to go around the circle and talk about gratitude. There were only five people there, so people talked for a while. Michelle, the teacher from the previous class, also had a story about a really difficult time in her life a few years back.

I was last. I said, "Well, I'm going through one of those really difficult times, right now, so I related to your story about not being able to think of one thing to be thankful for." I mentioned how last week I'd had a really hard time with some of the "happy" statements, but that I was feeling a lot better this week. I told them that I recently got clean off heroin after a short relapse, after having been clean for a year, and how I felt that I'd lost my best friend because of it, and how I was really thankful that I'd decided to come to the meditation thing because it was helping to clear my head.

I was kind of nervous but the people were really nice and told me that it was really good that I was choosing to do something like meditation, that it would help me heal, and that I should keep coming.

Afterwards, the yoga teacher, Michelle, told me that I could trade work in exchange for yoga classes. She needs help cleaning the studio each week, and showed me their vegetable garden out back that desperately needs weeding. She says if I take care of the garden and clean the studio, I can go to all her classes for free -- potentially seven days a week of free yoga!

She gave me a hug and told me to stay strong, that she'd had friends who had died of ODs. It's weird, but I thought that someone like a yoga teacher was such a paragon of health and perfection that she could never have known anyone who had done heroin. But I guess it's kind of everywhere.

I was almost dizzy from hunger at this point; it was nine and I hadn't eaten since breakfast, so I ran to the pizza place before they closed and ate a slice. As I was leaving, I saw one of the people from the group: "Hey, you ran off before I could give you some cookies -- I like to bake things and bring them to class." I munched on the pumpkin chocolate cookies as I walked home.

Tomorrow I have a job interview and then I'm going to pay rent with the last of my money and take the bus to Corvallis for a few days to visit Brian.