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Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness

~ Recovery from PTSD & depression + yoga, silliness & poetry…

Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness

Tag Archives: Pantomime

Four more days…

19 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by Svasti in Learnings, Life Rant

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

aversion to technology, baby talk, blusters, booming voice, central casting, character sketch, Dinosaurs, hard-nosed reporter, heyday, leathery perma-brown flesh, newswoman, Pantomime, phlegm-ridden wheeze, Pinocchio, real life cartoon people, rhetorical world, salacious gossip, smoker’s cough, You Send It

She’s straight out of central casting (btw, I’ve always wanted to use that term in something I write), and her first name is Lou*. Second name: Craddock. It’s impossible to tell her age because of four things:

  1. She smokes with abandon and as a result, has a dreadful smoker’s cough and reeks like a pub (in the days when you could actually smoke in pubs). She sounds like she’s about to lose a lung every time she emits that terrible, phlegm-ridden wheeze.
  2. Her skin is tanned beyond reason and it’s not clear if the cause was too much sunbathing in the 1980’s, an addiction to tanning beds and/or self-tanning products. It doesn’t really matter – the result is leathery perma-brown flesh that probably makes her look older than she really is.
  3. Her hair might’ve been blonde once, but nowadays it’s silvery white and the colour is possibly fake. Once again, hard to say without getting personal and believe me when I say you really don’t want to go there…
  4. Physically she’s in pretty good shape for her age, wearing form-fitting skirts and dresses as her uniform. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in pants. She’s a Skirt. Y’know.

But actually, it’s her attitude is that really gives her away as someone whose heyday was most likely in the 70’s (placing her perhaps a few years younger than my parents). She’s always commenting on how handsome men are, and whether she thinks the women are dressed appropriately, and cattily noting if she thinks they’ve put on weight. External appearances seem to mean a great deal to her, and there’s a bizarrely sexist undertone to much of her conversation.

Of course, there’s also her aversion to technology, to the point that she traded in her work-issue Blackberry for some kind of Nokia – and none of the most recent models at that (which she rarely remembers to take with her). She’s not overly comfortable with computers, can barely read her emails, has trouble opening jpg files and isn’t interested in learning how to use You Send It, despite her need to regularly send and receive incredibly large files. She’d rather order around the team’s junior, even though he doesn’t report to her.

Lou is a newswoman from another era. You can just see the hard-nosed reporter she must’ve been back in the day, and yet here she is trying to work her old-style magic in this modern era while eschewing current technology with one of her many trademark blusters or pantomime-style grand gestures. And that’s all before 9:30 in the morning. Every. Single. Day.

Worst of all however, is her booming voice. She arrogantly writes off her loudness (the volume button seems to be stuck at loud, only getting LOUDER when she’s feeling extra feisty) as being “because her mother was deaf”, meaning that she grew up having to shout constantly. Of course, throughout the many years in which she no longer lived with her mother, apparently Lou never learnt enough self-awareness or control to tone it down. Not at all!

Also: Lou likes talking on the phone. A lot. And LOUDLY-LOUDLY-LOUDLY. This isn’t just restricted to work calls though – oh no! Those in her vicinity are bestowed with all kinds of stories they wish they’d never heard. Everything from salacious gossip about who’s having an affair with whom, to over-shares about the state of her dog’s #1’s and #2’s.

In detail. Loudly. Did I mention LOUDLY?

Then there’s the baby talk. The way she pronounces her own name on the phone when she calls someone: “Hi, it’s Woo Cwaddick”, just like my two year old niece who hasn’t quite got the hang of pronouncing all of her vowels. Except that Lou (or Woo), well she HAS learned to pronounce her vowels – several decades ago, in fact. It’s cringe-worthy at best and rage-inducing at worst.

Her giggle sounds like it belongs to Popeye on acid – deliriously nutty and on-purpose, and once again LOUD. And often. Really, really often. Then, there’s her creepy stare: as far as we can work out, she has a need to stare at someone while she’s on the phone. So not only is she booming away about something or other, but then she turns her head to look at you over the top of her glasses, bringing the volume DIRECTLY at you while you’re trying to work.

Hilariously, the response of the work mates who sit closest to Lou in that open plan office that houses the communications team is to stick their headphones on and drown her out with music. For some reason, listening to Nick Cave or The Pretenders or Lisa Gerrard blaring in your eardrums is infinitely better than her daily stage show.

But she hates it when others wear headphones, and tries to talk at them anyway. She sits there in her seat shouting their name a few times before giving up in disgust, seemingly never twigging that she’s the reason for so much headphone usage.

The LOUDNESS got so bad that the CEO even called her in for a chat. So now, whenever he’s around, she tries to keep it down. And boy, did she hate being told off! The CEO chat helped a little, but whenever he leaves it’s back to the normal (for her) volume.

Lou is like some kind of cartoon character come to life, Pinocchio-style. Quite frankly, I suspect she’s a little nuts. But she’s not alone – she’s but one of the many, real-life and ultra-colourful (I’m being polite here) people that populate the workplace I’ve just resigned from.

Yes, I wanted a little security and stability and so I took a job that I really wasn’t sure about taking at all. I’d mistakenly thought that taking a bit of a pay cut and working in local government would mean an easier job with less stress.

But the place is choc-full of people just like Lou, in their own special way. Then of course, there’s simply not enough people to do the work that’s required to bring everything up to scratch. And many of the people who do work there have been in the same role since dinosaurs and giant kangaroos roamed the land. They’re stuck in a rhetorical world with mind-sets that only function when there’s a policy to tell them what to do and how to act.

I know, this all sounds a bit harsh but I promise you I’m not exaggerating in the least!

I lasted four months and I gave it a good go. But seriously I found it impossible to function effectively in that sort of environment. It was more stressful and not less – more work to do with less people to do it. AND I’d taken a pay cut for this privilege!

So after many entreaties to the universe, a call came in two weeks ago from a recruiter I know. And yesterday I handed in my resignation. Luckily, I only had to give a week’s notice because my probation period wasn’t up yet (oh please, DON’T make me tell you about the weird situation with my reporting manager because that’s another whole barrel of crazy with it’s very own flavour!).

I’m taking Monday off as annual leave because a friend of mine is getting married on Sunday night… and so I only have four more working days to tolerate this inpatient hospital full of candidates for an involuntary hold, all of whom should be taking oodles and oodles of prozac or valium. It’d be a social service, I swear.

Four more days, four more days… yeah, that was my chant on Friday and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna keep a countdown chant going from Tuesday to Friday next week…

~Svasti

* Name has been changed to protect the completely loopy.

P.S. It’s not that I don’t have compassion for these people, because I do. It’s just that I refuse to lose my own marbles from continued exposure to this place, which I’m pretty sure is actually a wayward home for Those Who Can’t Get A Job Elsewhere. Most of them, that is. There are a tiny handful of people that still seem to have a grasp on reality. I hope for their sakes, they get out!

P.P.S. And it’s been an excellent training ground, really. For understanding just how many kinds of “reality” exist out there for people. THERE ARE LOTS.

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On becoming a yoga teacher – part 1

10 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by Svasti in Yoga

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Abhasavada, aerobics, Asana, Bali, Childrens' theatre, Guru, non-dualism, Pantomime, prosthetic pig nose, Tantrik philosophy, Yoga, Yoga Synergy, yoga teacher training

I used to be afraid of it. Asana, that is.

My first knowledge of the existence of yoga was when I was eighteen or nineteen and a member of a children’s theatre troupe. We staged children’s shows (pantomime) in exchange for free lessons in performance, voice, movement, clown work, costuming, front of house management and so on. It was run by a curmudgeonly matron named Joy, which wasn’t too ironic because when she wasn’t being grumpy, she really was rather lovely.

One day in the dressing room as I applied my prosthetic pig nose (I was Mrs. Pig in The Three Little Pigs), I wondered aloud what form of exercise I should be doing. A fellow performer told me that yoga was all she needed for fitness and health. For some reason I didn’t press her for details, and she didn’t offer.

See, I’d been a synchronised swimmer and a dancer for much of my childhood/teen years. And I’d also caught on to the tail end of the flouro high-cut leotard aerobics fad. I was already flexible. What else could yoga do for me? That was my thinking back then, anyway.

Next time I heard the word yoga mentioned was when I was forced to take an indefinite break from belly dancing. I’d been performing all over Sydney for a couple of years but had a toe injury that forced me to stop, or have surgery (which I ended up having many years later anyway). I was probably about twenty-five. A friend of my then-fiancé suggested I try his yoga school in Newtown.

And that’s where I met my very first yoga teachers. They’re kinda famous these days: Simon Borg-Olivier and Bianca Machliss of Yoga Synergy. To be honest, even though I enjoyed their classes, I didn’t quite get the point of yoga. Any pose that called on my flexibility was fun, but I found the strength stuff a bit… meh. Or to say it another way, I found asana that required physical strength (of the upper body especially) very difficult and my ego didn’t like it!

Simon and Bianca are great teachers but it took me ages to listen to their verbal instructions properly (**note: this is not to call fault with their teaching at all – more, it’s just that I don’t think I was “awake” enough to be able to listen properly, if you understand what I’m saying). I clearly recall the moment when I realised what Simon was actually saying in a class, versus what I thought he’d been saying. It was a revelation really. I probably did yoga there for a year or two, but once I left my fiancé, I moved to the other side of Sydney and didn’t know of any local yoga classes. And I wasn’t in love with asana, not yet.

Til I met my Guru. Even then, I was way more focused on trying to understand Tantrik philosophy than anything else. We’d do some asana but then we’d be sitting to meditate, read or engage in long conversations on non-dualism, view or abhasavada (for example). But watching him do asana was thrilling. He was (and is) a big muscular man and yet his movements are impeccably graceful. And flexible and strong. It was… inspiring.

When I first met some of his American students, I felt very intimidated because they were so darn good at yoga, whereas I was clumsily inept. Guruji confirmed: Oh don’t worry about that – most of them are yoga teachers and they’ve been practicing for years. Uh huh… somehow, instead of feeling inspired by this, I wanted to crawl away in a corner. I thought I’d never be any good at yoga asana!

Then post-initiation, post-assault and post-toe surgery, we had our Bali retreat which was specifically focused on asana and for the first time I got it. It’s kinda easy to let it all sink in when you’re immersed in a traditional Hindu/Tantrik community. It was my first real understanding of working with yoga from the bones – inside out, not just relying on muscular strength or physical form.

Even after that and attending many more classes, I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing with yoga asana. I felt silly. I tried doing yoga at home but would give up after a few poses simply because I had no confidence in myself or my abilities.

However by then I did understand the way to structure a yoga practice: standing poses, balancing poses, back bends, twists, forward bends and inversions. But I had no flow. No sense of how moving my body was connected to my mind, let alone anything bigger than that.

[To be continued…]

~Svasti

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Trippin’ the light quirk-tastic

07 Friday Nov 2008

Posted by Svasti in Fun

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Anthropology, Audition, Childrens' theatre, Drag queen, Drugs, Gypsy curse, Imaginary friend, John Bertrand, Meme, Monologue, Moving house, Pantomime, Quirky, Weird

A little while back Christa over at Giggle On! tagged me with a meme.

I’ve always been, hmmm, a little unsure about memes coz they seem to be as random as those emails you get occasionally: “All about me!”. Where you’re meant to fill out this sort of questionnaire and send it on to your friends.

I guess the idea is you’re perhaps sharing different things with the people in your life, unless, you know – you actually talk to them and they know you fairly well.

That, or its just something to do when you’re bored at work for ten minutes and you just wanna to prattle on about the insipid details of your life…

But none of my other blog posts are cooperating at the moment, so I decided I might as well write something. So here I am. Hi meme. Hi Svasti, wanna play? Okay…

The meme says to list 7 weird or quirky things about yourself.

As per my initial comment to Christa, if you’ve read my blog you can probably count at least a dozen quirks of mine already. But here’s a few more for your entertainment:

  1. Two for one: I could float/swim before I could walk and I could read my older brother’s books (two years ahead) before I went to primary school.
  2. When I was a small child, one of my imaginary friends was called ‘fucking bastard‘ – inspiration courtesy of the foul mouthed over-the-fence neighbours. My mother wasn’t impressed.
  3. I’ve lived in at least eighteen houses in my life. Since I was 21, I’ve never lived in the same house for more than 3 years. I hate moving but unfortunately its my gypsy curse.
  4. I did the whole drug taking thing in my late teens/early twenties (everything but heroin) – but kind of thought of myself as an anthropologist. I studied myself and my friends and questioned why we were doing all that sh*t.
  5. From the ages of 18-20, I worked as an actor in a childrens’ pantomime theatre – instead of payment for performances, we got free acting, voice and other related training. It was cool. And I was broke but happy.
  6. I once took a tip for audition monologue ideas from a drag queen around 3am in the morning.
  7. As an under-10 learn-to-sail child, I ranted crossly at the father of two boys who’d put a crack in my boat when I had right of way. I think you should teach your sons to sail properly, I told John Bertrand.

So there!  🙂

I’m not gonna tag anyone – but if you wanna play go ahead! Write your own post and let me know in the comments. Or… just throw a quirk or two out there in the comments section if ya can be bothered…

I’m off to get ready for my big night out – seeing my celebrity crush. Jeff Martin (former leader of the Tea Party). He’s the only musician I get a serious case of ‘fan girl’ about. He’s hot and talented… sigh… drool…

‘Kthxbai!

~Svasti

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