Look at these pictures.
Read this article, which says stuff about breast cancer that I’ve had little inkling feelings about, but thought it was not remotely my place to say.
Listen to this song.
You have now been entertained for several mintues. Move along.
The weather is finally behaving like November. I am not happy about this, per se, but having November weather dawdle and delay and fail to come was starting to make me antsy. The seasons have a pattern where I live, and going outside the pattern makes me feel at loose ends, a little. I think I was also worried that it would be worse when it did finally come.
Thanksgiving was not particularly noteworthy, except that I made the casserole I invented and it turned out pretty badly. This was probably the least flavorful and moist quinoa dish I’ve ever made, even with a little bitterness to it, and I felt terrible. The strawberry pretzel dish (I’ll post the recipe, I’ve decided, no one deserves to be without this dish in their lives) turned out perfectly, so that’s all right. It was a small gathering this year, with far too much food, and the turkey was apparently a little dry.
The next day BF and I spent a leisurely Friday morning and early afternoon, and while we did actually go to Target on Black Friday, because there was a sweater there I’d seen last week and just couldn’t rest until I owned it, we weren’t part of any mobs and we did no shopping for others. We packed up enough stuff to get us through three days, got in the car, and headed north. Our destination was a resort in the Poconos, where we went years ago when we were first together. BF wanted to show me a good time, so we got the most ridiculously luxurious room that they had, and a good time was indeed had. This resort specializes in “romance”, but it’s a klassy kind of romance, simultaneously hella cheesy and kind of sweet.
This time we got a less luxurious room, but we actually liked it better, because the way the room was designed was unique and interesting, and anyway they still had a large heart-shaped Jacuzzi, a mini swimming pool, and a sauna (which I may or may not have broken when I tried to turn it on). And a round bed surrounded by mirrors. Like I said, klassy.
Upon arriving, we got our stuff into the room and proceeded to spend the next two days relaxing. We paddled in the pool, we watched a silly cop movie, he napped and I knitted, we took a very bubbly bubble bath together with much giggling and some stylish bubble beards, I knitted some more, we ate too much at a totally decent buffet dinner and then ate too much on “Strip Night” when they served steak, we slept and woke and cuddled and spent tons of time being with each other. We spent a good amount of time in the game room at the main building, playing indoor mini-golf, pool (I am a disaster at pool but I love hitting the balls around), pinball and even a little air hockey, which I’d never played. It was so nice to do activities that are pretty common but that I rarely get to do, because bars are too loud and crowded or because pinball machines are an endangered species. No televisions in the game room or the dining room, either, which was very pleasant.
I think I needed this break. Specifically, I think I needed this break with BF. Chore charts and thrice-weekly Bikram are all well and good, but I noticed in the days before Thanksgiving that I was behaving kind of…like my mom. I was critical of BF often, all in a sort of joking way but not in a way that made me at all happy. I was tightly wound and concerned about things coming out right from hour to hour. It seemed necessary to make life proceed in precise sequence, and to participate in each aspect of the sequence in a specific way, and to keep the essential relaxed aspect of myself locked away inside while I got things done on the outside.
BF helped me over this weekend to reclaim that aspect, the me that, oh yeah, accepts BF for exactly who he is. Even if he’s not around much lately, and that means that he doesn’t know how I’ve been doing the housework and chores, and hasn’t cooked in so long that he doesn’t know where all the spices are, and even if it takes longer to get two of us out the door than it does just me, and even if he wants to hug me pretty much nonstop when I am used to walking around my kitchen unhindered by lovely hugs…none of those things are things that matter. I love him, and the parts that matter are the parts that are the same regardless of what he’s doing at work, and I have no need to be commenting negatively about those parts. I miss being with him, and I miss the way that he makes me my best self, instead of my most productive self…which, while it’s necessary right now, is the self I like the least. Thanks to him, and to this little vacation, I’ve figured that out.
I’m back to work, both during the day and at home. I haven’t done Bikram since last Tuesday, and am not planning to do it until tomorrow; I have to go to the grocery store and cook a meal tonight. My back has been hurting in a worrying way, and I don’t know if it’s caused by the Bikram or not, but I think the break might have been good for it. I’ll return with a renewed commitment to a healthy spine, not just a flexible one.
Lessons from vacation – I need to figure out a way: 1) to do chores less resentfully and passive-aggressively and patting-myself-on-the-back-ly; 2) to resolve an exercise schedule that doesn’t wear me out or ruin my back but that keeps me trim and happy with my body; 3) to be productive without becoming as tightly wound and Mom-like as I have been in the last couple of weeks; 4) to win the lottery so I can spend every day with BF.
I think I’m going to make this a tradition on my blog. Happy Thanksgiving.
Other than:
–anxiety about my back
–lots of listening to Joanna, to the point where her music sounds normal (I actually wanted to post a video of hers today instead of writing, but I couldn’t settle on which one. Also, I am considering titling blog posts with her lyrics for the rest of my blogging career)
–actually having a really good week at my job, to the point where wishing I was at home instead during this holiday week is minimal
–lots to say about Bikram, which I don’t want to type out for fear of boring some of my audience (and enthralling others, come to think of it…perhaps I’ll write it later)
–Pennsylvania on my mind (not quite Georgia, eh wot?)
–and gratefulness for no therapy this week,
I don’t really have much to write about today, and honestly don’t feel like making the effort. Hope all of you out there in Radioland are going to have a good holiday, with a minimum of travel and troubling relatives.
I thought the week before Thanksgiving was going to continue turning the boring up to 11 here at work, but it turns out that one of my bosses just figured out how much help I can be in preparing for two major hearings today and tomorrow, and I’ve been a headless chicken all day.
I’m sort of inventing a quinoa dish to take to Thanksgiving at MP’s. It will have: quinoa, butternut or acorn squash (haven’t decided), dried cranberries, sage, and pecans. I’m also taking a totally spectacular strawberry Jell-o pretzel dish (it sounds weird, but it’s the best thing evar) that has so far been entirely MM’s domain, so I’m nervous about not making it right. Wish me luck.
I can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait to go to Pennsylvania on Friday. BF and I are taking a weekend trip just for the two of us, an indulgence, and I have been returning to it as the carrot on the end of the fishing pole for over a week now. Just a few more days and I get to actually be enjoying the relaxation instead of just dreaming about it.
Joanna Newsom on Sunday night was amazing. I had a wonderful time. I had wondered how she could possibly play the complicated harp compositions and sing at the same time, when the singing melody doesn’t always match the harp part, but upon watching her, I realized that for her, it’s all of one piece. It’s not about doing two things at once, it’s about the song as it was written. She seemed to be completely involved in every song she played, no matter the mood of the song (or how often she has likely played them – some were from 2004), and she really seemed to be enjoying making music with the rest of her backup group. (I hesitate to call it a band: two violins, a trombonist, a drummer, and a dude who played five other instruments.) I will be first in line the next time she comes to town. I hope next time she gets to play somewhere with better acoustics – a lot of the finer points were lost in the echo. She’s actually playing Carnegie Hall tonight, and I imagine their acoustics are tolerable.
BF went with me, and although I was afraid I’d feel awkward and unhappy for him, that he was having to sit (actually stand) through Crazy Harp Lady with me, he did a lot of convincing before the show that he was going of his own free will and wasn’t going to have a terrible time, and I felt okay with it. Except that we had to watch Joanna’s harp being tuned between the opener (who is another story) and the main event, which took half an hour. I mean, I know the thing has 40-some strings and has to be tuned, but jeez.
When I went to see Moby in college, he played my dream setlist. He played every single one of the songs I wanted to hear and almost none of the ones I didn’t. I’m not a superfan of Joanna’s, so I didn’t have a dream setlist for her, but I’d hoped that she’d play “Sawdust & Diamonds” and “Baby Birch”, and she did. So I walked away very happy.
Things are shifting with the birth-control decisions, but I don’t really have the energy to talk about it today. Too much happening at work. Hope you all are getting through this week with a minimum of holiday stress.
So, in a nutshell, I think plastic surgery is fine if your desire to change your appearance comes from somewhere other than glossy magazines, porn films, and an arbitrary standard of beauty that I cannot find a reasonable source for, unless it’s the surgeons themselves. That (with some twists and turns) causes us to scamper back to the glossy magazines as a problem.
I held a subscription to Rolling Stone for the entire time I was in high school and college. I still remember receiving an issue (in April 2002, in fact) with Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair on the cover. That image made me suddenly self-conscious about something I’d never even considered: my knees. Their knees were so smooth, with a total lack of knobbles and wrinkles. In comparison, my knees practically had a cobblestone texture, lumpy, elephant-skin-like, utterly hideous. I had no idea about this horrible flaw until that moment, and I worried about it when wearing skirts for an embarrassingly long time before I came to my senses.
What I didn’t know in 2002 is that their knees were undoubtedly Photoshopped. That the sheen on their hairless shins, and the lack of visible veins on their high-heeled feet, and the total lack of a kneecap on Christina’s left leg, were all digital fakery. None of that bore any resemblance to my completely normal knees because they were simply not the way human skin and joints look.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled about Photoshopping (particularly in ABC News online, for some reason – check out good stuff here and here), but as far as I can tell, it’s mostly from the outrageous/shocked angle, such as that Ralph Lauren model who was p’shopped down to Holocaust size. What is this world coming to, they ask, when no one is portrayed in a magazine as himself or herself, when even French presidents have their love handles removed in paparazzi pictures?
A few months ago, I treated myself to an item on my Amazon wish list: Hurrell’s Hollywood Portraits, a coffee table book with pictures taken by George Hurrell, one of the most popular photographers in classical Hollywood cinema. I wanted this book because when I browsed the Look Inside! feature on Amazon, I saw a picture of Joan Crawford both before and after retouching. I was amazed. She had been cleaned up and polished so beautifully that the whole mood of the photograph was different. Her nasal-labial fold was erased, her barely-there dark circles were eliminated, her skin tone was wholly different, utterly normal neck wrinkles were gone, I think even her eyeballs had been touched up. The caption stated that the retoucher had spent six hours on the picture.
According to Norma Desmond, “we had faces then.” Well, I think what they had along with the faces was photographers - pictures taken by brilliant artists, photos that made women and men appear more glamorous, more smooth, more perfect than they ever could be in life. As time went on, reaching that ideal of Hollywood retouching became easier, with a few clicks in Photoshop replacing hours and hours of labor in the photo lab, but it continued to be necessary. I don’t think any pictures have been taken of humans more beautiful than the ones taken during the 1930′s-1950′s – look at this one of Garbo, for God’s sake - but that ideal of perfection has remained constant, in different forms.
It would be untrue for me to say that I don’t like this. One of my favorite things to do on the planet is look at pictures of movie stars. Their faces fascinate me. I probably own another half-dozen coffee table books like Hurrell’s Hollywood Portraits, and I take them out and I look at them repeatedly, and I love them. I have probably spent three hours poring over this picture alone, which has gathered what I think are easily 10 of the 20 most beautiful women in the world. I never imagine myself looking like the people in those pictures, exactly, but I do wonder why my skin has visible pores when theirs never does, and why they don’t seem to have underarm stubble, and how they have managed to hold at bay forehead wrinkles and spider veins and all the other things that I have on my body.
The answer is threefold: stylists, access to products and procedures I will never have, and Photoshop.
The practice of consistently Photoshopping everything in a magazine, to the point where it’s actually a story if an actress prefers not to be Photoshopped, can lead to a lot of young women feeling insecure about parts of their body that they need not. Like, say, their knees. But overall I cannot say it’s all bad. I’ve spent too much time enjoying the products of airbrushing and photo-doctoring, of feeling totally mesmerized by the carefully created images of women and men of glamor and fame. There’s only so much perfection that human people can achieve with their appearances, and that’s where Photoshop picks up, where humans leave off. If it’s possible to look at the doctored pictures not as an achievable ideal to make us feel as if we fail, but as fantasy images, pictures of an impossible ideal that we can enjoy without feeling insecure and inadequate, then it’s wonderful that such techniques as Photoshop exist.
I just worry that they do damage first, before people figure out how cardboard-fake the whole show is. I worry that people get plastic surgery before they discover what it is about themselves that they don’t like, and presume that with enough silicone and Botox, they’ll just be happy, no need to seek some deeper reason. I worry that young women look at flawless evening-gown bodies and don’t understand the hours in the gym, the hours before the mirror practicing for the camera, the hours with the stylist, and (likely) the excessive food deprivation that leads to such an appearance. They just feel bad that they don’t look like that.
There’s a big difference between wanting everyone to look similar, i.e. giving them all the same nose or the same size thighs or the same perfect tummy, and wanting every celeb on the cover of Cosmopolitan to look like her very most beautiful self. The reason this post is part 2, though, is that both plastic surgery and Photoshopping lead to assembly-line beauty: tanning booths, dyed and straightened hair, bikini waxes, hours on the treadmill. Ignoring our individual beauty in favor of the fashion of the era.
I still fall victim to it, despite being well aware of the parlor tricks. I still wonder why I don’t look like the Joan on the bottom instead of the Joan on the top. The answer is, paraphrasing Laurie, because not even the real Joan could look like the airbrushed Joan. That’s what airbrushing is all about.
Okay, so my plan was to post the two beauty posts on consecutive days, but two cool things have happened that I can’t keep from talking about.
The first is that I did my first-ever double in Bikram last night – two classes back-to-back, at 5:00 and 7:00. It was a weird experience. The first class was fine, not quite as strong as Monday’s, and with crappy balance on standing head-to-knee, but otherwise largely normal. The second class was different. I was hardly sweating at all, all the cramping I usually get in my feet during the balancing postures was gone, I was unsurprisingly shaking much more, although my muscles didn’t feel tired or worn out, and I was sick of the heat by the end. (This last is unusual.) And the spine-strengthening series seemed to go on forever. I would swear that time slowed down during the second set of locust and didn’t speed up until the second set of half-tortoise.
I got a burrito and went home – already cold by the time I got there, I was too chilled to go outside and get the mail – took one of the better showers of 2010, ate my burrito, drank 32 ounces of water, and eventually went to bed. BF didn’t get home until after I was asleep, as it was D&D night. Which was part of the reason I decided to do a double in the first place, because he wasn’t going to be home until late. I didn’t feel wiped out, nor was I wired, but the break in my routine made it harder to get to sleep. My body felt weird, like I had puppet limbs connected to loose joints. Lying in bed on my side, I felt like a collapsed paper doll with long stringy arms and legs.
Today (so far) I feel okay – I have small extra knots in my shoulders, glutes, triceps, mid-spine, and abdomen, but I don’t feel stiff or hurty. It isn’t hard to climb stairs. I feel more like I’ve been flattened by an iron than run over by a truck. But we’ll see how I feel after it’s actually been 24 hours.
Just a note: regular Bikram is seemingly making my internal temperature gauge all wonky. It used to be that after doing a class, I felt warm from the inside out and no longer affected by passing wafts of cool air which would otherwise have set me shivering. Now, I find it even harder to get warm in my house after I get home from class and clean up. Maybe this will get better, maybe worse, who knows. Just another part of the process. The classes also seem to be reducing my hypoglycemic issues, so I find that a fair trade.
The second cool thing is that I’m going to a concert this weekend. BF and I are not concert people; the last real show we went to was Roger Waters doing a Dark Side of the Moon redux a few years ago, tickets given to us as a gift from his parents. It was pretty darn cool to see him live, but at the risk of sounding unbelievably square, it was way too loud for both of us, there was marijuana floating around which made us uncomfortable, there were just so many people stuffed into one space, and also did I mention it was really really loud? TB has advised wearing earplugs, which cuts down on the raw noise and doesn’t reduce any of the quality, and this is something I’m going to try next never, which is the next time I go to a rock concert.
One of my favorite artists is Joanna Newsom, who is known colloquially around our house as Crazy Harp Lady. After reading a review of her 2006 record Ys in Slate, I bought it, and had it been vinyl I would have worn it out listening to it. She makes music unlike anything I’ve ever heard – not just because her primary instrument is the harp, but because her voice is plain bizarre, and because she has a grandiose, symphonic approach to creating music, one unheard of in non-classical, non-jazz, non-Sigur Ros styles of music. All of this comes together to make something fascinating, not repellent (at least not to me). Her nom de house is an affectionate one.
This morning I was listening to her wee EP Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band, which has a re-working of “Cosmia” (from Ys) that amazes me with a gorgeous – BF was captivated by the possibility of this phrase – theremin solo, and I thought, y’know, I should see if she’s touring in my area anytime in the next few months. This could be a seriously interesting live show. I Googled as soon as I got to work, and lo and behold – she is in Baltimore this Sunday. So I went ahead and bought tickets.
I feel sort of giddy-excited; I have no idea what her show will be like, considering that, you know, the harp, and her songs range between 3 and 17 minutes long, but I haven’t been to a concert that I enjoyed (aside from pretend-ABBA) in a really long time, and here’s hoping this will be my chance.
Should I wear earplugs in case the harp’s too loud?
My most recent fiction project was about plastic surgery. It envisioned a not-too-distant future wherein almost everybody had had some plastic surgery. The idea was to make yourself look “normal”, more like everybody else, and thus widespread self-alterations were excusable. The thing was, everybody else looked the way they did because they all got cosmetic surgery.
One of the women I work close to – we are not in the same department, but she sits about eight feet away from me – has had a boob job, and I suspect also a nose job, and she defends plastic surgery in a mild way whenever it comes up in the office. I think she was pressured into getting her work done by her odious ex-husband, but I also think that she’s still reasonably happy with what was done. My former friend and teacher J had a boob job and an eyelid resection at the beginning of this year, before we stopped being friends, and she talked at length with me about why she made this choice. She always thought she looked like a boy, with her flat front, and she wanted to feel more feminine. The eye lift was because she didn’t want flaps of eyelid skin obscuring her peripheral vision as she aged, and she thought they were already starting to make her look older anyway.
I am of the opinion that if you have the money, if you are unhappy with the way you look, and if you are a good candidate, whatever elective cosmetic surgery you want to have is none of my affair, nothing for me to judge. I can’t say it’s something I’d never do, because as I look in the mirror and see things start to sag, even the tiniest bit, my vanity cries out with a slo-mo movie noooooooooooo. I don’t think I’d enlarge my breasts, but I might get a lift one day, if things continue in the, er, direction they’re going. I don’t think I’d get cheek implants, but an eyelid resection doesn’t seem like a crazy idea if my eyelids start to get all foldy. I very seriously doubt I’d get Botox, but one day my crow’s feet might actually bother me. You know? It’s never clear how you’re going to see your body until your body starts to change, and then suddenly you want the old one back more badly than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life.
The thing is, J looked different after she had her eyelid thing done. Her face was changed, in some minute but definite way; she simply did not have the same appearance she’d had those few weeks earlier. The procedure she had wasn’t one that I would have guessed would have this effect, but it did. I’ll never know what my coworker’s nose looked like before, what the nose she was born with communicated about her face. As the years wane, I may look in the mirror and see someone who looks a tiny bit different every day, but looking in the mirror and seeing an entirely different face – even if it’s an improved, glamorous one – is a horrible thought to me. I like my face, potato-shaped though it may be, and I like my nascent laugh lines; they show that I’ve lived.
I know that BF likes my face too. He tells me that I’m beautiful most of the days of the week. I can’t imagine what a betrayal it would be to him if I decided to get cosmetic surgery a few months before we married, and bring a different face floating down the aisle toward him. It makes me ill to think about it. This is the face, the body, the person he fell in love with. Would he be happier marrying someone with less cellulite? I don’t think he gives a damn.
What bothers me about plastic surgery isn’t that the patients are doing something to make themselves look better. We are a vain species, and we have the vision sense for a reason. No, it’s that the attitude underneath is the idea that you don’t look good enough for some inherent yardstick of beauty. That you should be glamorous too, that you should have that sheen of stardust on your features. The question this always leads me to is, what yardstick? Where did this standard of beauty come from? The “after” pictures of the women on The Swan look more like porn stars to me than movie stars – interchangeable, glossy, carefully fabricated, with virtually no features that distinguish one from the other. That is not beauty, that is Henry Ford-style manufacturing. Kate Winslet and Vivien Leigh do not have common faces.
I don’t fear for the women of Bridalplasty. In merely choosing to show up for the hog call, they have put to rest my fears about deadening the hearts and minds of women with great spunk and individuality. I slightly fear for their husbands-to-be – but what man would want a woman of such character as a wife in the first place?
I had a strong, good class last night, and then I went home and I did chores. (So far, chore chart = success.) BF even came home early and helped me, the big sweetie. We cleaned out the downstairs closet, a fucking miracle as far as I’m concerned, and I have a big box of stuff for charity (and a big bag of stuff for the consignment store, yay).
Good for me/us.
I am not feeling the holidays this year, y’all. BF and I are mitigating Thanksgiving by taking a fun trip up into Pennsylvania for just the two of us, but even Christmas, about which I have de-Grinched substantially in the last few years, is just not sounding appealing. MM wrote us an email asking what’s on our lists this year, and the answer that I want to give her is “no stuff”. Sure, I’d like some new work clothes, and some DVDs, and a pony, but I get tired looking at all the stuff I currently have in my house, and this year I just don’t want to take off the wrapping paper on yet another eight or nine books I won’t read. I asked BF some weeks ago if we could try and institute some kind of limit on the gifts that they give us – like, this year, we want three presents apiece, only, parcel them out as you will – and he said that it would make them sad if we asked that. I’m just embarrassed at the number of gifts they get us, when I can never figure out what to get them, and when a lot of the gifts are things I won’t use.
As for what I’m getting others, I’m going to put together jars of dry ingredients for a sunflower seed/coconut cookie recipe I like a lot, and…something else. I might end up having to make jam, which I didn’t want to do this year, but just the cookie jar seems like too little. Handmade candles? The handmade candle and soap supplies they have at A.C. Moore are pretty damn incredible, I discovered last weekend. Would you like a handmade candle as a gift if someone got you one?
Speaking of A.C. Moore, they had some of the most odious Christmas music I’ve ever heard when I went in there. Old favorites newly reimagined in a number of styles. They’d added hip-hop beats to a Louis Armstrong and (someone, it didn’t sound like Ella) duet of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It was so very awful.
Things at work are better than they were. I don’t walk around with such crippling insecurity anymore, but I still don’t feel perfectly comfortable. Of course, comfort seems to come from a lot more time on the job than eight months. I just wish my days were more consistent. Yesterday: busy as heck, lots of fun. So far today: nuttin’.
I have a post and a half in the can about beauty – one post about plastic surgery and one half-written post about Photoshopping. I think I’ve done some darn good writing there, but I’m frozen as to actually posting them. The reason is so vain that I can’t bring myself to put it down here. In any case, look for those later this week.
In therapy this weekend I talked about the anxiety I’ve been feeling, which has been strongly affecting my leisure time, regarding my house not being clean. The guilt, it never ends, and it paralyzes me. A few weeks back I spent a couple of hours setting things right in the house, and it felt good, but the cleanliness definitely didn’t last. The nature of things, I know, but I get disheartened and just don’t want to argue with the living room about why it can’t stay clean. So I wind up night after night on the bridge of the Enterprise instead of doing my chores, and I click on just one more episode, fighting back against the waves of guilt with total, ironclad passivity. I am going to willfully sit here on the couch and feel rotten instead of getting up and cleaning, because…presumably cleaning will be worse? I don’t really understand it, why the aversion has gotten this bad.
I explained to D, my therapist, that I thought the way things have slipped away from me has to do with doing yoga about three times a week now. After Bikram, I generally shower, make and eat dinner, watch TV, and rest my muscles; I often don’t have the oomph to do anything else. (Although sometimes there’s the opposite, an excess of energy, and with that I generally do laundry and then…sit on the couch.) I also explained about my mom’s obsession when I was younger with me “doing something productive” at all times. She put these two hands together and said that maybe I felt like taking classes so often has made me feel like I’ve been productive enough, and I have permission to sit on the couch for the rest of the night. The guilt about chores still not being done conflicts with that instinct that my life is full enough, so I sit there and remain miserable. I think this is probably true.
She gave me some strategies for dealing with this. She said that I should actually go so far as to make a chore chart, just like you would do for your kid, and said I should specifically set aside time for actually doing the chores. I do tend to be overwhelmed by “THE HOUSE IS MESSY” and don’t break down that big task into more achievable bites. So I bought myself a little dry-erase board and wrote on it the days this week that I’ll be at Bikram, the (small) chores I’ll do on the non-Bikram nights, the dinners I’ll make (which helped me to make my grocery list), and anything else going on during the week that I need to remember. Next week I’ll wipe it off and start again. It’s magnetic, too, and I stuck a list of all the chores that need doing right now to the side, to help me remember and to feel proud when one or more of them have been completed.
The other thing I need to do is start cleaning up the kitchen after every dinner. After. Every. Dinner. This is how MM’s stove stays clean; with my own eyes I’ve watched her wipe it down when the dishes are done. I don’t do this, because I hate cleaning the stove. But goddammit, I’m going to start, so that I have to do a full-on hacking-off-the-grime clean about 100 times less frequently. I tried this out last night and it went okay, but I’m going to run the stovetop components through the dishwasher tonight; if they don’t get clean that way, I might give up and buy new ones.
This all seems incredibly trivial, writing about it, that I can’t keep my freakin’ house clean, but it has weighed on my mind so strongly in the last three weeks that I felt the need to spill my guts about it. My house is dirty. (Not filthy, but dirty.) I don’t sweep enough, I don’t vaccuum enough, I don’t do enough to keep it a pleasant place to live. I don’t know why, but I just don’t do my chores. I want that to stop being true.
I feel some resentment about all this as regards BF. It’s not resentment that can go anywhere, because BF cannot contribute his half of the housework when he is out of the house 14 hours out of the day and asleep for another 8, and logically the housework goes to me during this time in his work life. It’s not unfair; it just is. I can’t ask him to give up his scant leisure hours on the weekends to clean, when it’s something that I dislike so much that I can’t manage to pull my half right now either.
I experimented on Saturday with going to Bikram first thing in the morning. The earliest class was at 8. I definitely, definitely noticed the difference between going at the end of the day, fully charged with food and water, and going at the beginning of the day, weak from eight hours of rest-and-digest. I was so fatigued by the end that I thought I could barely stay upright for the final breathing exercises. I also skipped the second set of balancing stick: the first skipping of a whole set that I’ve done. Afterward, BF took me to Panera and I had a smoothie and the most delicious asiago bagel with cream cheese in all of God’s creation.
I still plan to try a 6 AM class sometime, but this particular set of circumstances made the first-thing-in-the-morning experiment a failure. I’m going to keep that in mind for the next attempt.
I was thinking I might call my dad on Sunday, but I chickened out. I was lying in bed on Saturday night going over the things I wanted to say, and it all sounded so awful that I decided I probably wasn’t ready to approach the situation with compassion. I also just don’t want to call him. He fucking owes me a call. He’s incapable of it, I know, which is why I was planning to call him, but starting off the conversation with “So, were you ever going to call me?” probably isn’t the way to open these negotiations.
Instead, I did some errands: I went to the liquor store, where a six-pack of Stella Artois twisted my arm vigorously until I cried uncle and bought it; I went to the organic market and bought some mysterious ingredients, along with frozen ostrich meat, which was $12 a pound but I couldn’t resist the idea of ostrich hamburgers at home; and went to the grocery store, which was full of people on their cell phones or in bad moods or both.
OJ was on sale. There, now you know everything.
Calligraphy by Stewart Thomas
