I've been held up twice in two days by the presidential or vice presidential motorcade -- this is getting annoying. Yesterday Connecticut Avenue was blocked off at Woodly Park as I was finishing up lunch with a friend (it took us over 45 minutes to get back down to Dupont Circle); today P Street between 17th and 18th was totally closed off as I was walking back from getting coffee. Not even pedestrians were being let through. I'm not sure which member of the executive branch has caused these disruptions but there are certain vehicles you can generally use to identify the status of the motorcade-ee: only the president and vice president seem to travel with their own ambulance at the ready (for Cheney the defibrillators are probably already charged) and a large black vehicle devoted to high-tech communications equipment -- the thing bristles with antennas. So now, besides all their crimes against humanity, this administration in inconveniencing me. Intolerable.

It really is remarkable how many police it takes to shepherd one of these guys through the city. In addition to the maybe 20-car motorcade, ambulance, communications vehicles, and multitude of heavily armed secret service, city police are brought in to block off every possible access point to the travel route. That means a minimum of 5 to 10 police at every intersection, alley, or sidewalk for at least a half-hour before the cars come through. Just to stop access to one residential block this afternoon, I saw at least dozen police cars, 10 motorcycles, a number of bicycle cops, and a horse. Add it up over several miles of a travel route and the numbers are staggering. I once saw the presidential motorcade go by on Rock Creek Parkway while I was running and there was this enormous rotating collection of black SUVs that would pull across every entrance or exit route to the road (even after police had cleared all traffic and blocked the streets), jump out with automatic weapons, wait for the main motorcade to pass, hop back in the car and zoom off to get in front again and block the next entrance ramp.

I don't have a point to this post, just that I'm tired of these guys ruining the world and causing delays in my city.

Normally I love my yoga classes. I like how challenging they are, how I get to be around other people, how tired I sometimes feel by the end. Thursday was a good example of why I enjoy going: it was probably the single hardest class I've ever taken (Mike is starting to give Alise a run for the title of toughest teacher!) and by the end just moving into child's pose was an effort. But Wednesday was a totally different story. That class, jivamukti, is longer than other classes and can be very hard. I've only gone 3 weeks -- I wanted something more difficult than the open flow classes on Wednesday -- and the quality has been a little erratic and occasionally too new-agey for my taste. Nevertheless, I was there on Wednesday when the teacher announced that she was going to try something new: play a yoga CD she likes. Huh? Sure enough, rather than the usual personal iPod mixes we get from teachers, she put in a commercial yoga CD and we all started to follow along. Now I know that I do not like that. Apparently, one of the things I enjoy about yoga is the human element and part-way through I started feeling very resentful about the voice telling me what to do. I work with computers and machines all day long and yoga gives me that human break. After 15 minutes I was thinking the whole thing was Orwellian: 24 of us were in neat rows in a darkened room, all trying to move in unison to a disembodied voice giving instructions. I was also reminded of those scenes of factory workers in China doing calisthenics to loud-speakers blaring bits of philosophy and propaganda intermixed with commands to touch ones toes. Exactly. It is a pretty funny scene, in retrospect, but if a teacher decides not to teach and gives it over to a CD again, I'm leaving.