Lance, Church, The Euro Warrior, and Wimpy Yoga

This afternoon as I looked around on the porn box while waiting for it to be time to go to Bikram, I decided to see what Lance and the boys had been tweeting from the tour the past few days. They are surprisingly boring tweeters, but I read a quote that said "Cycling is like church, many attend, but few get it". It stuck with me as I felt the people around me in class tonight. Yogis are the ones who "get" Bikram, and they are kind of like habitual Catholics or rabid Pentecostals, in the devotion aspect (we don't spend near as much time kneeling and I haven't seen anyone speaking in tongues during class yet).
The funny thing is all the different types of people who do "get it", and lately I have been looking for a common thread of what makes people Yogis. During class tonight there was the Seashell Man, Mr. Nasal, The Gourmet Queen, Pippi Shortstocking, Gumby, the Businessman, and the Pink Pirate, who all have nothing noticeable in common, but they all "get it".
Oh, I forgot my new favorite, the Euro Warrior-
I have decided she is some kind of Slavic athlete, maybe tennis. While she practices with great determination and focus, I envision a coach of some kind standing over her ranting in a very mean sounding language. She also has a rather nasty surgical scar on her knee, and I do truly love to be near people with scars, they make me feel less alone. I have developed an entire bio for her in my head (I have no idea if any of this is remotely accurate, but, I am an only child, and we make up vivid stories to populate the world in our heads, to survive the silence of our childhoods. Some people say we have a well developed sense of imagination. I just say we make shit up, that's what we do). Anyway, the Euro Warrior's power feels like a freight train behind me in class, and she, like all the rest, "gets it" and has nothing else noticeable in common with the other Yogis in the room.

We were also talking about different types of Yoga today before class and I had to explain that Ive never tried any other types of yoga besides Bikram, because really I don't like yoga other than Bikram. America's version of yoga is pansy, weak, crap, made up so people can (with out sweat, pain, or much effort) feel like they are doing something good for themselves. I even hate telling people that Bikram is yoga, because I think they will never understand that it is actually hard and challenging and rewarding and that we don't sit around and hum and sip green tea...There. I said it. I am a Bikram snob, and I am tired of people thinking what I do everyday is like an activity someone's grandmother does with her knitting club on the beach on Sundays.