[formerly] short and not-so-sweet

Yesterday afternoon was very disappointing for me – I had a weird and unsatisfying conversation with my mother, the yoga class I went to was all wrong, and I had a terrible social encounter right after class – so I am low today. I’m glad it’s Friday, but it would be nice if it was Saturday instead.

I looked in the mirror last night and realized that I look awful. My dark circles are large and pronounced and they make me look like I’m terminally ill. I don’t know why this could be, because I’m careful to get 7.5-8 hours of sleep every single night for months at a time. It might be because I’m indoors 23.75 hours out of the day. Whatever the reason – I hope it’s not a terminal disease that’s somehow disguised by how healthy my lifestyle makes me feel – I wish it weren’t so.

I’ve been staring at this screen for ten minutes waiting for something else to come to me that I can add to this post. I don’t want to talk about yesterday afternoon’s foibles. This morning in the car, I was putting together the yoga class I want to teach to friends and family after I get trained (I think of this often – I’ve even mentally composed the email I’m going to send to them all inviting them to the class), and it’s just making me sad and depressed to think about it this morning. It’s WAY too far away for me to be thinking about it yet, a hell of a lot farther away than I want it to be, but I persist because I’m looking forward to it so much. Thanks, brain. You know just how to make me feel better.

Last night I went to bed feeling peaceful and grateful for BF and generally fine. This morning I feel inadequate, greedy, talentless, immature, and not very hopeful.

With any luck, I’ll have an okay day, and the weekend will arrive in less than eight hours.

Update: Boy. What a ridiculously impossibly horribly adverbally long day this has been. It feels like I’ve been here for 10 hours and it’s not quite 3:00 yet. The internet is a dry creekbed, and I got so lonely that I decided that the noise of me typing to myself was better than nothing.  Even, or especially, if I have nothing to say.

I am also depressed by the depressingness of the original post above. I thought seriously of privatizing it (after TB has already commented, naturally, because he’s My Biggest Fan), just because if I don’t post tomorrow or Sunday I will have this very bad meaningless gloomy post up at the top of the page for three whole days, but after all those three days are temporary and teh webz is forever.

Since I’m now in more of a snarky bad mood and less of a wrist-slitting bad mood, I will talk about yesterday afternoon’s foibles after all.

My mom called me on Wednesday evening with a sad little I-miss-you message, but my phone was on vibrate so it was me who missed her. This is the first conversation we’ve had since the one I wrote a post about which I haven’t published yet, which was very terse and which I walked away from with great anguish, and last night’s convo wasn’t much better.

I realized during this talk that my mother really, truly, absolutely can’t see past the end of her nose, and/or the limit of the patterns she was raised with and which she’s been following since she was a tiny girl. She may have sympathy for her fellow human beings, whatever situation they may be in, but she is thoroughly incapable of empathy. This stretches into all kinds of funky areas of life that you wouldn’t think of, and one of them is the simple matter of being a good conversationalist. I firmly believe that the central precept of being a good conversationalist is to be a good listener – hence, ask questions, and actually be interested in the answers. Pay attention to what is said, and don’t just wait for your turn to speak.

No one holds conversations like this all the time. That would be impossible. But it’s hardly ever that I can remember holding a conversation with Mom where she wasn’t either interrupting me or obviously not paying attention to me. Last night she did the trick of not paying attention to the content of the conversation really at all, but paying surface attention only, so as to keep up with it at a level slightly higher than “yeah”s and “uh huh”s. She was constantly agreeing with the things I said, even if it contradicted what she’d said moments earlier. I said something cryptic about my father and she didn’t ask what I meant. She overdialed her happiness or sadness about whatever I had to say – “I don’t start class until the last week of January” “GREAAAAT!” to “one of my class is 3 1/2 hours long” “OH NOOOOOOO” – and I’m 99% sure she lied to me to end the conversation.

The thing is, if I weren’t her daughter, it would have seemed like a normal conversation. But because I know her so well, I know the signs of Mom Is Not Listening. I also am smart, and can tell when people are agreeing with me to keep from getting into a few sentences of additional conversation. We’re all guilty of that at one time or another, but this was really silly.

Admittedly, she told me she was preparing dinner for some friends who were coming over, and my mother has been COMPLETELY incapable of multitasking virtually her entire life, but I don’t know why she didn’t think about quality rather than quantity and tell me she’d talk to me later. Probably because she wanted to make me feel better after our last terrible conversation. But this one just made me feel worse. Why talk to me unless you’re going to pay attention?

Mom is a strange woman, in that she’s not cold-hearted or self-centered, but I don’t think she truly believes that all human beings are on the same plane. I think she unconsciously believes that there’s her, and then there’s everyone else. It’s not an ego thing, it’s just that she can’t possibly imagine that other people are sharing the same experience as she is, this crazy treadmill of life. For this reason, she can’t imagine what it’s like to be on the other end of the phone with her when she’s not paying attention. She can’t imagine that she needs to do anything other than just hit the basics, responding at the lowest necessary level for me not to detect that she’s not paying attention. This will serve her purpose at this time. She fails entirely to think about what my purpose may be, whether I’m calling her because I need something or because I want her to apologize for our last convo or because I just want to talk. She just doesn’t think of me that way; I am external to her, and what I want is only relevant as it affects her.

Knowing this about someone, and being incapable of explaining it to her in a way she’ll understand, especially when you love her a whole lot, is very, very, very frustrating.

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This is now a decent-sized post with content I’m pleased with, but I’m not stopping because there’s still an hour and fifteen minutes on the clock and still no work to do.

So then I went to yoga. I chatted with Kathleen for about 20 minutes (very pleasant), and then read The Heart of Yoga until it was time for class to start. Kathleen has added several classes to the schedule, and hired a bunch of new teachers for the new year, and I met a few of them last night. One of the women – although she was a girl, really – who showed up for class last night was attending her first yoga class ever, and it was clear from the way she stood, listened, reacted that she knew absolutely nothing about it. I couldn’t help watching her while I went through class myself, thinking about what I would tell her if I were teaching her, what adjustments I would make and what advice I would give. Her mountain pose had hunched shoulders and pigeon toes, and you better believe I would’ve said something about that.

Anyway. I have written (towards the end) about how much I like the Thursday class, but this one was just no fun. We started with a lengthy abdominal series, and while ab work is necessary, that doesn’t keep it from being unpleasant, and also a lot of the work was getting done by my hip flexors instead, which can be very painful if you overdo it. After that, we stood up and Jennifer (whom, I disclaim the rest of this post with, I love and think of VERY highly as an instructor) started explaining that she had decided to break down the basic sun salutation, Surya Namaskara A, into its individual parts and teach them more in-depth, with different mental and physical foci in each set. (Once again, here is a fairly good demonstration of the sun salutation. There are as many variations as there are stones in the river.)

This sort of seems like a good idea to me, except that after doing 108 of them in late December, I am still sort of overloaded on sun salutations. I had the chance, during those 108, to think carefully about my alignment and posture and point of focus. I had the time to meditate upon what my wrists were doing, what my third eye felt like. By no means do I think I’ve “mastered” the sun salutation, because mastery is for immortals, but I feel…unable to find any new insights on the exercise at this time. So I was frustrated by this, the longest segment of the class.

And then we moved right on to…handstands! The thing I totally can’t do for no discernable reason! Yaaaay!

Okay, not-yay. I have been trying to practice handstands for weeks now, practicing with the L-shape* against the wall to build my shoulder strength, and it’s been so painful and difficult that I find it sort of ruins my afternoons. If I somehow cheat in getting up into handstand, crawling up an opposite wall or starting very close facing the wall and crawling up it that way, I still can’t hold it for longer than a few seconds before my entire self is screaming “GET ME THE HELL DOWN.” Paul incisively pointed out on Wednesday that I have the strength, the experience, and the comfort with inversions that I should be able to do handstand. I agree; all the pieces are there. Yet I can’t. It’s a mystery. Yesterday, with Jennifer’s help, I kicked up, and then held it with her holding part of my weight for about 10 seconds before I gave in to the screaming and got down.

*I’m not even going to try to find a picture of the L-shape. This is how you first begin to handstand: sit against the wall, measure the length of your extended leg perpendicular to the wall, and then get up and put your hands right where your leg ended, feet against the baseboard, facing the wall in a very short downward dog. Walk backwards up the wall until your shoulders are directly over your hands, hips over your shoulders, feet against the wall. You should be at a perfect 90-degree angle. This builds shoulder strength, and teaches you the balance of holding your weight in a similar way to handstand.

Then we did a restorative – a boring, supportive, non-stretching, non-muscle working restorative. I can sometimes enjoy restorative poses, but yesterday was not one of those times. I had to pee and my muscles felt unsatisfied and I was just not happy.

So, to recap: ab work, workshopped sun salutations, handstand, restorative. Not really the class I wanted yesterday, when I wanted to get out of my head, not be pushed into it by repetitive or self-esteem-draining or boring poses. I wish I’d gone to Bikram, or had gone home and done a flow practice of my own.

As class wrapped up, I heard a conversation between two of the yoga teachers I’d met earlier, and tried to join in. I failed. I was clearly not welcome in this conversation. This made me feel so horrible that I can’t describe it to someone who doesn’t have social anxiety, and capped off all the day-ruining that had taken place so far.

Then I went home, and BF had dinner ready and waiting for me. Ohhh, BF. How I do love you. After I told him all about what I’ve just told you, he even did the dishes after I was settled in on the couch. Because he knew I was feeling rotten, and he’s the best guy in the world.

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Well, this really snowballed into a much longer post than I thought it would. I guess keeping it all bottled up is simply not for me. Whew. And while I’ve still got 45 minutes to go at work, I feel a lot better about facing them. Maybe tomorrow you’ll get the beginning of the story about my mom.