Dialogue Daze - I broke my brain...

I suspect that I am going to be considered something of a dialogue freak at training.  Which is fine.  For one thing, I like the dialogue.  For another thing, I am actually a freak when it comes to memorization.  I have a strange tape-recorder-like memory.  I can remember the words to a song that I learned in ONE music lesson in second grade.  I know all the words to all my music.  I can bust out literary passages that I memorized "for fun" when I was in my teens.  Not just short things - things like all of Hamlet's soliloquy.  I don't just learn information, I retain it for an indefinite length of time, as far as I can tell.  (Insert anal-retentive joke of your choice here.)  I was pretty delighted when I realized that the Bikram yoga teacher training involved memorizing pages of text, verbatim.  I think my exact reaction was something along the lines of: "OH!  Well, I can do THAT!!"

But just for the record, I have recently, for the first time ever, started to lose patience with this dialogue thingie.  I've been working on finishing up the floor series, and at some point around locust pose I started asking myself, "Who the %#@ wrote this *$#??"  

The line that really drove me over the edge was "Come up please, everybody go up, come up, everybody come up."  Remember that I am trying to learn this stuff verbatim.  I just looked at that line and said, WHAT?  Then I managed to learn it really well, mainly because I complained about it to my roommate so many times that I inadvertently said it over and over.  But then I turned the page and found "Chest up, chest up, chest up, look up, body up, chest up, come up, more up, go up, exhale breathing, come up one more time."  Okay, WHAT??  Augh!!  They're trying to kill me!  (I don't know who "they" are.  This is the paranoid use of the word "they," as in the sense of "they're out to get me, I just know it!")  I learn by repetition, but also by comprehension, which means that I rely on structure and logic.  I do not see the structure in "body up, chest up, come up, more up, go up."

So this is good for me, because now I think I can better relate to all the people who have been driven batshit crazy by the dialogue since page one!

By the end of full locust, I was pretty sure that my brain was melted.  Oops, I broke my brain.  Dammit!  I hate when that happens!  Last time this happened to me, I think I was cramming for a statistical thermodynamics final exam or something like that.  Oh well.  Usually a few nights' good sleep can put everything back in order, so I'm confident that my brain will repair itself pretty soon.  And fortunately for me, full locust is followed by two pieces of dialogue that I really like, bow pose and fixed firm pose.  Both are extremely sequential, which makes them easy for me to remember.  Onward!!  Come to the middle of the towel, sit down Japanese style, kneel down position!  

I hope I'm not going to lose my mind before this training even starts.

I do realize that I could quit memorizing for the next three weeks and still be fine at training.  But now that I am so close to the end, I just have to finish it off!  It's like when you're eating a great dinner, and you eat until you're full, but there's still some food left on your plate, so you end up just eating it anyway because it's there and you don't want it to feel left out.  (Shut up.  My food totally has emotions and wants to be eaten.  I get so mad when people throw out perfectly good food.  I bitch at my roommate about this all the time.)  Anyway, that's exactly how I feel about the dialogue right now - can't throw away the last 5 bites of the chocolate cake!  Must finish it!!