a highly exaggerated version of a real incident

Yesterday afternoon I walked in the door, some winter in the cracks of my coat. “This is how you’ll know,” I said, and I held up this item:

“If I ever stop liking Green Day, I’ll be ready for the booby hatch.”

“Oh really?” said BF. “That’s the criteria? Green Day?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s nice to know I’m not too old to feel like I’m 13 again. And if I ever get too old to turn Green Day to top volume in my car, you’ll know I belong in a rest home for batty old dames.”

“What if they make a bad record?” he said.

“Test me with Dookie,” I replied.

“What an odd sentence,” said he.

I finally got around to buying this album earlier this week. Honestly I’m embarrassed that it took me so long, because after 15 years they’re still one of my favorite bands, and I try to run right out and devour albums that my favorite bands release as soon as possible. I need to give it several more listens, but my impression right now is that it’s really good, if not quite as good as American Idiot. I’m totally impressed with the band (or possibly just with Billie Joe) for trying to make punk-pop the vehicle for grandiose concept albums about the mood of America post-9/11. And impressed also with how well they succeed. The second-to-last track makes me kind of sad, because the melody is unbelievably derivative of the music they’ve been making since Warning. But a lot of the rest of the album is fresh, with various fun styles and influences. And even if they have slowed down the tempo a lot since the days of Kerplunk!, they still rock. Hard.

And if you’re rolling your eyes while reading this because you don’t like Green Day, I will fight you.

(Is this post seriously how I’m closing out 2009? Oh well. It’s been a very hard week at work. Unsurprisingly. Here’s to 2009 – and let’s hope for fewer sad celebrity deaths in 2010!)

wordless Wednesday

om shanti

(image came from here)

I wanna be in the energy, not with the enemy

In the spirit of TB, Tanaudel is Teh Kewlz!! She sent me a beautiful copy (I hope, a copy) of a picture she did some months ago that I adored. She also included a little desk calendar that features the Australian Outback! It was so sweet of her and I have no idea how to thank her.

I did a home practice on Sunday after I wrote this post, and it was extraordinary. I put together a nearly-hourlong mix of intense music for it, which I just threw together quickly but which turned out to seriously impact the practice. In a good way. A sampling of the songs: “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning” by the Pumpkins* (that song that was in the Watchmen trailer, the one that gave me shivers), “Unnatural Selection” by Muse, and – seriously – “A Place for My Head” by Linkin Park. That was the most incredible song of the practice, actually; I did two sun salutation Bs to it, slowly, measuredly, and the energy in my hands was so intense that I was clutching the mat while I lowered into chaturanga. My limbs were trembling with it, with what the song gave me. There’s so little hard-hard rock that I enjoy, but that which I do enjoy allows me to transcend my reality entirely.

Little R-rated moment here: I don’t know if I did too many hip openers during the practice or what, but I wound up with some distinctly sexual energy while I was on the mat. Had BF gotten home at the right moment he would have been attacked. By the time he did get home, I had calmed down a lot, but we still fell asleep that night with dopey grins.

*Meaningless music sidebar: I’ve never really liked the Smashing Pumpkins, although they were one of the most prominent bands during my generation’s growing-up. For me, it’s maybe one song in fifteen where I think they get it just right, where Billy Corgan’s horrible voice is in exactly the right place, where the songwriting is totally without frayed edges or holes, and it’s those songs that I can actually enjoy. There are so few, though, compared to their catalog on the whole. “Ava Adore”, “Tonight Tonight”, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” (in its own way), and “Beginning” are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

Last night I was supposed to stop by home, pick up the flyers I printed out for my Sunday class, and proceed to Annapolis to put up the flyers and take Paul’s class. But BF was home (he’s off this week – his company, intelligently, always closes between Christmas and New Year’s), and he’d just finished making dinner, and I hadn’t really wanted to take class anyway, so I just stayed. And we had such a nice evening together, with all this time to spend since he was home two hours before he usually gets home. It was wonderful. Tonight I’ll have to do the flyer thing and go to Target for sundries, and I’m going to go right after work so I don’t get distracted by BF and his awesome self again.

Next week the one-credit massage course at AACC starts. It’s on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6 PM to 8:30. I think it runs for two weeks like that, which means I’ll have two pretty intense weeks. Still, I look forward to it, to what I’ll learn from it. I’m really glad I decided to go ahead and do it, despite all the driving and time and so on.

Going back to work after a few days away, I always do this sort of awful “oh…yeah. Yick.” This job sucks. I’ve worked at jobs where the company was corrupt or sleazy, jobs where I was totally taken advantage of, and jobs where the work was just horrible, so I know that this really isn’t that bad in the scheme of things. But it’s still essentially a sucky job, and I wish it was not what I did for 40 hours a week.

Does anyone know how to distinguish junk undereye creams from the real thing? I have deep dark circles, and I’ve tried hydrating, a good diet, tons of sleep, and so on. I’m ready to try ridiculously expensive eye creams now, but I don’t know how to figure out what’s worth the money and what’s not. I don’t really care about fine lines and wrinkles, and I don’t have any puffiness. Suggestions encouraged!

I found 2009 a weird and challenging year, even if a number of my personal goals came to pass. I’m glad it’s winding to a close this week.

Monday Meme: yet more randomness

This is actually the other half of last week’s Monday Meme, but I thought it was far too long so I chopped it up for two weeks’ worth.

26. What color is your watch?
Silver with small turqoise accents. I like it for its style rather than its color, actually, as I’m not really a turquoise fan. It’s an antique with an unusual clasp.

27. What do you think of when you hear “Australia”?
I sigh longingly. I think of exciting red desert and see the opera house and hear Geoffrey Rush talking as the pelican in Finding Nemo. I know it’s probably none of those things in reality, but oh, do I want to visit.

28. Would you strip for money?
Probably. I’m worried about it being a dangerous job, and I feel my body is for nobody but BF, but I’m not sure I’d really have a problem with stripping in front of strangers if I were single. They make a hell of a lot of money if they can stay away from drugs.

29.Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive thru?
No.

30. What is your favorite number?
8 or 42

31. Who’s the last person you talked to on the phone?
BF.

32. Any plans today?
On Monday, I’ll be working. Today is Sunday, and I’ll be resting, doing yoga, probably watching another movie.

33. In how many states have you lived?
7 states and two countries

34. Biggest annoyance right now?
This goddamn cold that won’t go away.

35. Last song listened to?
“Suspicious Minds”

36. Can you say the alphabet backwards?
Yes, very slowly.

37. Do you have a maid service clean your house?
Um…how much do you think paralegaling pays? I’m hoping someone will gift me with a great big clean by a maid service for some holiday, someday.

38. Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time?
My Merrells. But actually they have worn out to the extent that they hurt to wear, so I’ve switched to sneakers until I can afford some new Merrells of EXACTLY THE SAME STYLE AND COLOR.

39. Are you jealous of anyone?
Yes. Constantly. Embarrassingly. Too much so to go into here.

40. Is anyone jealous of you?
I sincerely hope not.

41. Do you love anyone?
Yes! Many folks. I have love for strangers, too. I even love the people I’m jealous of.

42. Do any of your friends have children?
Long-distance friends, and friends from high school, yes. Not in the immediate circle.

43. What do you usually do during the day?
Work?

44. Do you hate anyone that you know right now?
No. Hate is way too strong for anyone I know.

45. Do you use the word ‘hello’ daily?
Yes, commonly.

46. What color is your car?
Silver, because of the major salt in the winter where I was living when I bought it. Next car will be brightly colored, I think.

47. What size wedding ring do you wear?
BF asked me this recently and I couldn’t tell him. I’ll go find out for you right now…

…looks like five and a half, perhaps six.

48. Are you thinking about someone right now?
I guess not, except for the constancy of my thoughts about BF.

49. Have you ever been to Six Flags?
Yes, a couple of them.

50. How did you get your worst scar?
Worst? It’s hard to say what the worst is. I have a scar on my left index finger that pains me slightly every time I look at it, because it was my shitty employer who helped me to get it (I cut my finger wide open on a tomato can lid when I was taking out the garbage at the pizza store, and had to get stitches). I have scars on my arms from self-injury that make me proud that I’ve moved on, and proud that I survived. I have a scar on my temple from picking too much at a small army of zits that nested there when I was a teenager. That last one is probably the most embarrassing, but it’s also the least noticeable. I don’t feel sad about any of my scars, though. They are who I am.

controlled expression

Today BF is gaming and I’m at home. I still feel crummy but much better than yesterday.

This morning I went to teach, and I had one student: MD. For Christmas, one of my gifts to him was 4-6 private sessions of yoga with me – a suggestion of MM’s – and I have no idea at all why he decided to come this morning, since those are free and this morning’s was not. Nevertheless, there he was, and I had a terribly challenging time with him.

I hadn’t realized exactly how destructive it was to leave exercise entirely out of one’s life for years and years on end. Until this morning. I knew I’d have to start from the beginning with MD, but I had no clue how far below normal flexibility and strength someone could be. He couldn’t even raise his arms properly. Naturally I threw out my whole class plan and just did a baby introduction to yoga, but it was extremely difficult to figure out how to approach teaching him when there was so much he couldn’t do. If I taught restorative yoga, hey, no problem, but dynamic flow is what I’m best at, and that was not remotely suited for him.

I kept trying to think of what pose to do next, and I kept being stumped. Poses would fly into my head that were completely wrong for the situation; at one point my brain went “How about crow?” and the other side of my brain went ”CROW?? WTF are you thinking, crow?” I managed to work through the 90 minutes, but as I’d expected, he talked and asked questions through the entire thing, which is so not the dynamic I wanted.

It’s weird. I’ve always been a control freak (when you’re a little girl they just call you bossy), and I’ve tried hard to overcome it, but in teaching a class I’m able to embrace it. I feel like it’s my responsibility that everyone is safe, that everyone is doing the poses at their appropriate ability, that the energy stays up and that every minute of the class is accounted for, with no dead air. If anyone brings in comments, questions, whatever, it’s fine with me, as long as the class moves on and I’m the one moving it. MD is the kind of man who sort of naturally moves to the head of the line, who hasn’t worked for anyone else in decades, who leads conversations. I was pretty sure it would be difficult to set up a class dynamic with him where I was teaching and he was the student, but it still greatly bothered me to allow him to interrupt me the way he did. Don’t know what to do about that, whether it’s my problem or not.

He enjoyed the class and said he felt better afterward, energized and good. I told him he’d probably feel it in the shoulders tomorrow. He shrugged this off, but if there’s anything I know, it’s what you feel like the day after too many downward dogs. He has a terrible back and I hope I did some good rather than some harm to him. I hope, in general, that I can help him, but he is a hell of a challenge, especially to someone like me with zero therapeutic yoga training or experience.

Anyway. I’m planning to write a shoulder-opening class and a core-strengthening class for him, but I don’t know what I’ll do for the other ones. The same thing I did today, I guess: make shit up. I just hope he doesn’t come to any more of my Sunday mornings. In an actual vinyasa class environment he’d be a disaster.

I was planning to see Avatar in 3-D yesterday, but I changed my mind and relaxed instead. I have seen a few movies recently that I’ve enjoyed: Black Christmas, a 70′s horror flick that was surprisingly terrific, with a decent enough Margot Kidder playing the resident drunk-ass whore and a marvelous Olivia Hussey playing the Jamie Lee Curtis role in a doomed sorority house; Ballerina, a documentary about Russian ballet dancers that was beautiful but not remotely dirt-digging enough (I wanted to see their feet, and how much they ate); and How to Marry a Millionaire, with Grable, Bacall, and Monroe, which wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. If you feel at all insecure about yourself, don’t see Ballerina. I took a shower right after I saw it, and catching sight of myself in the mirror I felt like a cow compared to those itty bitty little dancers. I’m normal-looking enough, I just don’t have 2% body fat like they do and I’d been watching them for 90 minutes.

I slept funny on my neck, I think, and it’s popping slightly every damn time I look to the left. I think I might go and do a little yoga for myself. I miss practicing on my own, and the freedom that brings.

happy boxing day!

Christmas was fun. I got some really great stuff. Some lovely clothes, including a totally unnecessary and probably expensive hoodie from Lululemon that I love to death. BF got me a Dutch oven, which I’d asked him a couple of times this year to tell his parents I wanted for Christmas, and when I mentioned it to him close to Christmas he had forgotten to tell them, so he bought it for me himself because that is exactly the kind of guy he is. He also got me the DVD of Twilight, which was all I asked for from him. NO COMMENT. I received a very strange “novel” from MD, The Interrogative Mood, which is entirely composed of questions, one after another, mostly unrelated to each other. I read a couple of pages and it drove me insane so I’m giving it away. To what unlucky person I do not know yet. Everyone seemed to love my presents to them, which is also good.

Dinner was good, and my quinoa dish came out okay (I was asked for the recipe I invented by more than one person), and the company was good, and generally it was a really nice Christmas.

I taught a Lululemon class this morning with a sequence I made up about twenty minutes before I left to teach, and I managed to teach it perfectly along the 60-minute timeline, and I think the 12 people who showed up had a good time. I’m pretty proud of myself for this. I’m certainly no expert – I learn something about my own weaknesses from every class I teach – but it was pretty gratifying to be able to put it together and just run with it. Tomorrow’s class I may not be so lucky, but I think if anyone shows up I’m going to teach the hip opening class I’d planned to do on the day no one came.

I still feel sick and shitty, so when I was finished with class the energy I got from the DayQuil I took before I left home was pretty much gone. Yet still, I felt terrific. The main thing that I learned from this morning’s class is that I love teaching. I enjoy it every single time (so far).

I read a Dear Abby once from a woman who had spent many years and a lot of effort to become a social worker, her dream career, and she’d been doing it for about six months and she hated it. She didn’t know what to do, because this had been her only goal for so long and now she realized it was totally not what she wanted. I was terribly afraid of this happening to me, of expending all of this money and effort to teach yoga, of talking about it infinitely on this blog and elsewhere, and then turning out not to enjoy it at all. Which is thoroughly not what has happened! I love it like crazy. I don’t know how I’ll feel in another year or two, but right now it’s exactly as fulfilling and as much fun as I’d thought it would be.

Thank goodness, right? I mean, I’d be pretty embarrassed if it turned out any other way.

no, I didn’t forget…altogether

Merry Christmas to you, if you are a Christmas-celebrating person, and a good evening to you in any case. FYI, Astaire/Rogers and Xmas morning mix extremely well. More tomorrow, with love.

need slips? go to Macy’s

Do you know what BF and I did today? We WENT SHOPPING. On CHRISTMAS EVE. This is the first time I have ever been shopping on Christmas Eve, and it was something I swore I’d never do.

But you know what? We actually had a wonderful time. Part of it was that by 2:00, around the time we were starting to see that wolf thing in people’s eyes, we were headed home. Another part of it was that neither of us was stressing about what we were buying; BF was looking for something for his dad for sort of a Plan B, and I was looking for a dress to wear tomorrow, with no real necessity to buy one.

(Incidentally, I did buy one. A satin orange dress that I love. I also bought tons of black plastic bead jewelry to wear with it, for once attempting to look fashionable. It’s a very non-Christmassy outfit but I feel like shaking things up. The process of looking for, and very eventually finding, a slip to go under the dress is a whole other unpleasant story.)

We ate at Austin Grill, where I had corn chowder that was honestly one of the most delicious things I’ve had in a couple of years (I know! But it really was). We walked around the mall hand-in-hand and people-watched. We made jokes and talked about what’ll happen tomorrow. It was really a great time.

My contribution to tomorrow’s family meal is a vegetarian dish: quinoa with cranberries, sage, and pecans. I kind of made this up, thinking that the flavors would go well together and be holiday-y, and I hope it turns out okay. I haven’t tested it or anything, I’m just gonna make it and hope for the best. Am I nuts?

I haven’t done yoga in almost a week. I’ve been feeling so shitty that I just haven’t thought it’s a good idea to get off the couch. (I still feel sort of blah but my throat is much, much better today.) I was going to today but shopping took longer than I expected. Hopefully I’ll do it tomorrow before dinner; I have to teach on Saturday and Sunday and I have nothing planned out. Do you see a pattern here? I really need to get on that, writing classes more than 24 hours in advance.

Tonight we go for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner at a fancy French restaurant near BF’s parents’ house, a restaurant I really love, and then MB and the parents go on to church services. MM really likes it when we go along, but BF thinks that she’s finally realized it’s Just Not Our Thing (to say the least), so we are not attending and it is fine. BF’s theory is that MB is trying, belatedly, to win some Good Son points by going along this year when we’re not. I think that ship has sailed, but it’s cute that he’s trying. (I love the guy, but BF just IS the Good Son.)

My mom FedExed me my Christmas package, but she put some thing on the package where I can’t waive the signature requirement. They tried to deliver yesterday and then again today while we were out. This means we will almost definitely have to go pick it up on Saturday. I’m irritated by this, because our neighborhood is thoroughly safe and there’s just no reason for her to do that (yay for neurotic moms), and also when does she think they’re going to deliver it when we’re going to be home? It’s not that I think she’s inconveniencing us on purpose, but…it’s  inconvenient, nonetheless.

Well. I’m going to wrap a few gifts while BF’s asleep. I have only a pathetic offering for him this year, but he deserves to be able to unwrap it, at least. Hope you’re having a good Eve, if that is your tradition.

eensy bits

On Monday night I had a dream about Billie Joe Armstrong that was so sex-soaked I actually woke up due to an orgasm. I’ve been fantasizing about him since I was 13. Rowr.

The sick has gotten worse rather than better – as I’ve gone back to working and being agitated all day rather than resting, I am hardly surprised – so I am beat. Last night I made baked potato soup with bacon and cheese, inventing the recipe as I went, and it was pretty good and exactly right for how I was feeling.

I am having psychological/diet issues lately, and I’ve been trying to find the time to write a post about it on No Butts, but haven’t managed. The short version is that for the sake of my mood I am giving up on protesting to myself about what I eat for the remainder of 2009, and enjoying all the stuff I never let myself have, and then going straight back to the control next weekend. I don’t think a week of peace and indulgence is too much to ask.

I got some strange and cryptic news today about one of the two studios that I frequent, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to post here unprotected. When I find out the full scoop in January I’ll put up a passworded post. Believe me, you will not be on tenterhooks any more than I can possibly be.

Only one more day until Rest, and then it will be Family, slightly mitigated by Presents. Merry Christmas Eve Eve, if that is your holiday this year.

Ten Things Tuesday

Ten things I’d go back in time for.

1. To taste the American hog, circa 1920. Alton Brown explained to us that the pork industry has bred pigs to be ever leaner and meaner and neutral-er, where they used to be full of fat and flavor. I’d love to know what those pigs tasted like.

2. To rouge my knees, roll my stockings down, and go dancing, circa 1927.

3. To strap on my platforms, slide on a polyester dress, and go dancing, circa 1978.

4. To watch Twelfth Night at Middle Temple Hall, circa 1602.

4A. While I was there, I’d learn what Shakespeare looked like, what his living reputation was like, and whether he really wrote his own plays.

5. To see (and dance naked at?) a ceremony at Stonehenge, circa 2400 BC.

6. To watch Sarah Bernhardt on stage, circa 1878.

7. To see what the public feeling was truly like in the colonies, circa 1760.

8. To tour the Wild West, circa 1870.

9. To learn how the common people really dressed, circa 1720, 1890, and 1950.

10. To see Liszt play the piano, circa 1842.