The Thing with the Ticking Thursday, Aug 28 2008 

Sleeping and Travel and writing , , , , , thewritingspider 1:36 pm

     I drive Husband crazy with my eternal quest for the Perfect Sleeping Environment. I must have the following things in order to have a very good night’s sleep: (in no particular order, they are all equally important):

     1. Dark – Lots of dark. I spent the night at this girl’s house once in high school and she and her sister had applied copious amounts of tin foil to their bedroom windows such that when the door was closed and the lights turned off, there was no seeing anything. Your eyes never adjusted. I spent half the night trying to see my hand in front of my face and trying not to think about going to the bathroom since I couldn’t see the door or the two other people in the room. It was great.

     2. Quiet – I enjoy a little quiet music or ocean waves at first, but then can we just turn off everything? Husband likes the whir of fans. I feel like the Grinch when complaining about those loud Whoos. “If there’s one thing I hate…oh the noise, noise, noise noise!”

     3. Blankets – I’m like Goldilocks here. Can’t be too thick or too thin, it has to be juuuuust right.

     4. Temperature – I think you’ll all agree with me that a cold room is not only healthier but more conducive to sleep.

     Many times, as a guest in other people’s homes, I have slept in guest rooms where the hosts have placed a timepiece that insists on ticking. Or they have a conveniently located DVD player attached to the guest TV that creates a floodlight-like experience in a darkened room.

    When I went to India for my friend’s wedding, I slept in her bedroom and she slept in the guest room. Darkness wasn’t a problem in the southern India in the middle of a teeny town. But there was a clock. It was an innocuous eighties-style clock, gold plastic and a little gold plastic pendulum. The first night I sat there in bed wishing I could just fall asleep but like the ever-beating heart in Poe’s story, it just got louder and louder. Finally, I got up and pulled it off the wall intending to find a new home for it. There were no dresser drawers, no places to put it. I finally found a nail in the en suite bathroom which didn’t exactly fit the clock’s hanger hook thingy, but it was 1 a.m. and I was fed up with it.

     My intention was to return the clock to its original position first thing in the morning and move it every night. At some point that first night, I was awoken out of a sound sleep by a noise. Oh the noise! In my curry-induced stupor I fell back to sleep, not realizing it was the samurai clock leaping off the wall in the shame that I had dismissed it to the bathroom.

    Now I’d done it. Broken my host’s bedroom clock. How typically American of me. I put the pieces on the bed and went to shower thinking of a way to politely explain my accident. While I was in the shower, the housekeeper, a young woman who would later inquire anxiously about the location of my other ankle bracelet (I had one one that my mom gave me before I left but apparently only Indian prostitutes wear just one anklet…), had cleaned the room – made the bed, swept the floor…and disposed of the clock.

     I have no idea what they thought about the clock incident. I told my friend I broke it and she laughingly dismissed it. I can’t imagine what the housekeeper told the cook or my friend’s mother. “I found this clock destroyed in pieces on the bathroom floor. Clearly the American hates clocks and wishes to break them.”

     In a hotel room in Miami earlier this year, I was on a business trip and staying and a fancy schmancy hotel. (How fancy schmancy? Well, Avril Levigne was staying there at the same time and I got shooed away by her bodyguard. How’s that for fancy?) The smoke detector had an obnoxiously bright light, green and blinky, that was like something from a landing strip. Thinking of course that I’d just remove it before I left, I climbed up on the dresser and applied one of my emergency band aids to the blinking light. Verrrry effective. I wonder if anybody has noticed that the smoke alarm seems to have a boo boo…because I forgot to remove it.

 

 

**Amusing side note: My spam blocker caught this gem after I posted the above:

Direct contact with ticks frequently results in tick infestation.

 

In My Tribe – Isolation vs. Belonging Wednesday, Aug 27 2008 

writing , , , thewritingspider 11:19 am

     Something that has been on my mind lately is feelings of isolation vs. feelings of belonging. I suspect this stems directly from my recent activities on a certain social networking site and the sudden interest in…dramatic pause…Friends. To Friend or not to Friend, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the unconfirmed Friend Request or just say, “Bugger. I don’t like her anyway.” 

     It has gotten me thinking. I don’t think I’ve quite conveyed here the horror I recall suffering at the hands of my classmates at Our Lady of Perpetual Hellish Misery. Maybe that’s a little melodramatic. Okay. Remember the kid everybody made fun of in school? The nerdy one who didn’t really fit in? The one people made a lot of fun of? Yeah. That kid was me. I’ll admit it, I was a weird kid (I’m a weird adult but now we call it “eccentric” and “quirky.”) and that didn’t help. So let’s just say I had a rough couple of years in grade school where I felt left out, isolated, and lonely and that really helped define who I am now.

    Looking back on the groups of people I’ve been part of – or not part of – the times I felt I belonged, truly fit in and felt good, are few and far between. I think I have spent a lot of my life worried that I’m not fitting in, even as an adult. I wonder if this this a habit now from too many years of use. Am I just focusing on the negative? Was I really having more fun that I remember, as much fun as all these other people seem to have had? I’m not talking about being lonely. I don’t feel lonely. I’m talking about a certain connection other people have innately.

     My hunch is some people who knew me at some of these points in my life will be surprised to know this. And I think many of them will remember me vastly differently than I remember myself. Same for events. You’ll remember that year differently than I will, not just because different things happened to us but because our we felt differently about ourselves and how we fit in to the grand scheme of things at the time.

    This is turning out to be a much more difficult post to write than I thought, since I’ve had all this percolating for a few weeks.  

    Dave Matthews and the Blue Man Group address the ideas in this way:

If I sing a song, will you sing along?
Or should I just keep singing right here by myself?

If I tell you I’m strong, will you play along?
Or will you see I’m as insecure as anybody else?

If I follow along, does it mean I belong?
Or will I keep on feeling different from everybody else?

     It’s a minor comfort that Dave the Blue Men feel different than everybody else. Well…I think maybe the Blue Men like it that way, don’t you? But Dave. If Dave feels like that then there’s hope for me yet.  

     I would say I’ve gotten better at understanding why I might feel out of place in certain situations and I think I’ve gotten better at navigating some of the relationships that make me feel out of place. I don’t think I will ever feel at ease at work (please see old post about work life) but I keep trying to find a connection.

   I’m not interested in throwing myself a pity party, though it might sound that way here. My dad might say this is all part of my “artistic temperament.” (And my mother would say I’m “moody.”) My friend C would say it’s because I’m a Cancer, prone to over-analysis and introspection. I’m just interested in exploring why if people are all alike, why do we feel different? If we’re all different, why don’t we find comfort in everybody being different?

I was going to post this then I thought of something else:

     The twist here is that I’m a writer. I write at work. I write at home. Scribble me this, Batman. Writing is a solitary endeavor, one that, for me at least, can’t be performed well without time alone in a quiet place. So for me to be happy writing I have to isolate myself which might lead to the belief that I am not part of the group because I have shut myself away with my work. I write to connect with people, as I am attempting to in this blog, and the irony is that I have to be alone to connect with people.

    Oh cruel irony, thou cold mistress!

    The plot thickens. I will continue to mull this over and report back with new findings.

 

Grumpy Yoga Teachers Sunday, Aug 17 2008 

Exercise and yoga , , thewritingspider 7:16 pm

     I have been taking yoga classes fairly regularly for the last fifteen years or so. I’m no yogini, but I really enjoy going to classes because it breaks up my usual workout routine and I feel good after doing it.

     That said, I can’t afford to practice yoga at one of my city’s poshy posh yoga studios where classes are full of stay-home-moms down dogging on Lululemon eco-friendly align mats before they pick up the kids from chic-chic Montessori. I attend your basic all-in-one gym (we’ll call it City Gym) that offers yoga classes taught by instructors from the poshy posh studios so I figure I’m getting the best of both worlds – half an hour sweating on the elliptical followed by an hour of ashtanga. Montessori moms at a minimum.

     The teachers I’ve taken with are usually friendly and relaxed and they don’t yell at you if you forget to take your socks off right away or your back isn’t totally straight. I like teachers who encourage you to work where you are in class – don’t force anything and be aware of your body. For instance, if your balance isn’t quite “on” today, well, maybe you don’t do full tree pose. For some reason, there is a particular studio in my town is churning out snobby teachers who seem impatient with us common folk at City Gym who can’t quite get Crow pose and don’t really want to do headstand without a wall.

     I used to go to a different branch of City Gym because it was closer to my house. The woman who teaches Saturday morning yoga classes came to class like a drill sergeant, efficiently setting out her mat and beginning class promptly with no chitchat. She’s small with wild hair so it’s more like a scary little yoga elf. She overpronounces all her words which gives one the idea that she doesn’t think you speak English and are also deaf. She barked corrections from the front of class, pointing at the offender and gesturing impatiently to soften the knees and point the sits bones at the sky.She complained frequently that City Gym didn’t have proper equipment like they did at Poshy Posh Yoga Studio where she also teaches. One guy was so after she barked at him to remove his socks and use a proper sticky mat… I never saw him again in class.

     I did learn a lot in the class. Scary Yoga Elf started out by only using the Sanskrit words for poses, which is fun to know for a werd nerd like me. She did lots of variations on the poses so you could chose a good variation to help you learn to do a full pose. Apparently, when she started teaching our class, she had just retired from a full time career as some kind of high up executive and was still sort of too tightly wound. I think she was settling into being a full time yogini – which would explain the boot camp mood of most classes. After a few months, she started to learn everybody’s names and smile when she said ‘namaste’ at the end of class and I worked up the courage to ask her a question about how to wash my mat.

     Then I moved and started going to a different branch of City Gym. The woman who teaches the class I go to is also a teacher at Poshy Posh Yoga Studio – just like Scary Yoga Elf Who Is No Longer Scary - and manages to start every class with us City Gym-ers on a negative note. I’m scared to talk in class because she’s bossy and blunt. Plus, as I discovered the day I was late to class and had to do my poses right in front of her, she has alarmingly furry underarms.

     The first class I went to after she started at my City Gym, I was startled as she went around grabbing people and adjusting their poses. I personally have no problem with a teacher adjusting me, but I do have an issue with teachers who do not ask permission to do so the first time they want to push my sacrum into position by pushing on my bottom. At the end of class, she gave a little speech about the importance of attending class regularly then abruptly said, “Namaste.” A few people whispered it (like me, because I was sort of terrified) and she sneered, “And nobody says namaste.”

        Two weeks ago, she gave a lecture at the beginning of class about being a good intermediate student. “That means that if you have been taking class for a year, well, how can I say this nicely…you don’t know more than me.”  Last week, she started class by telling us that someone had told her teacher at Poshy Posh Yoga Studio that she makes people move out of her periphery. “I can’t imagine why anybodywould tell my teacher and mentor at Poshy Posh that I do that, which is ridiculous. If you have a problem with me or my class you need to come talk to me about it.” (Insert defiant glare at everyone in the room.) “Instead of just gossiping.”

     We had a substitute once who was amazing. She started class with a quote from a famous athlete then talked about yoga as a journey, not a destination, and asked us to come to the mat and do whatever we could do today and just enjoy that. She was relaxed. Calm. She didn’t bat an eye when a woman came in late, left her socks on for a few poses, then removed them. Plus her hair reminded me of Lilias from the old PBS yoga show I watched as a kid.

     I’m afraid to talk to Grumpy Yoga Smurf teacher because I fear she will smite me with her Sticky Mat of Doom. I’m afraid to put a comment in the City Gym suggestion box because she might lecture us all again about gossiping. I hope that she’ll calm down and learn paraa dala skandha pose, or Remove Chip from Shoulder pose. Until then, I will keep going to class and try to keep my sits bones up high.

 

I am slightly obsessed with… Friday, Aug 15 2008 

Travel and writing , , , thewritingspider 11:24 am

     Burning Man. I don’t remember when exactly I heard about this art-show-rave-camp out-love-in, but I’ve been longingly checking the website every year for about five years. I love reading the lists of what to bring and not to bring and the stories of past years’ festivities. Burning Man seems like an exhilarating experience and I would like to have it some day when I can afford it. (It’s a long way to the playa from here and gas is ’spensive.)  I don’t even know what I would bring to trade, what I would call my camp, what costumes I would make. But I would surely meet wonderful and interesting people and have a hell of a time. We all need a hell of a time once in a while to shake things up.

     On some level, I think wanting to go to Burning Man is part of my continuous craving to meet and be surrounded by creative people. LOTS of creative people. All at once. Like a crazy intense summer camp for crazy intense people and supportive observers and other such interesting characters. According to the articles I have read and the photos I’ve seen, Burning Man is beyond a gathering of artists, rather it is a catalyst for a community of rainmakers – people who want to change something in this world.  I can only imagine the energy of the event and it makes me dizzy. 

     It’s possibly I’ve completely romanticized this Burning Man thing. For all I know, it’s just a hot dusty mess and then you come home. But I don’t think so. I think it’s a changing experience and it’s one I would like to have.

     Since I am a writer-type person, perhaps I should find a publication of some kind who will let me write about Burning Man. Perhaps they will include funding for the adventure. While I look that up, I’m going to put that out there for God, the Universe and Everything. HEY, SEND ME TO BURNING MAN TO WRITE A FANTASTIC ARTICLE FROM THE BURNING MAN NEWBIE WRITER. THANK YOU.

     If you’re not familiar with Burning Man, check out the website www DOT burningman DOT com. There are much better definitions of it than I could ever give.

 

Some thoughts on navel-gazing Friday, Aug 8 2008 

creative nonfiction and writing , , , thewritingspider 11:20 am

     I was talking to a friend last night on the phone and she told me about her cousin’s new wife who is, in my friend’s words, “an over-sharer,” and followed it quickly with “she has blog.” While the mention of the blog was simply a way to understand the magnitude of the young woman’s vanity, I caught of whiff of something that’s been going around – that people who blog are a bunch of vain, self-centered so-and-sos who think their little lives are soooo important.

     I’m putting words in my friend’s head. What caught my attention was not her attitude toward bloggers at the moment - the description of the cousin’s wife was to show that the girl is young, naive, and apparently somewhat annoying. It got me thinking though, about whether all bloggers are somewhat narcissistic, vain, and so forth. I started a blog last summer and found myself so frozen with blog stage fright that I eventually deleted the entire blog – both posts – because I wondered who on earth would want to read it? But the truth is, people do read blogs. They read their friends’ blogs, strangers’ blogs, and a bunch of other amazing things.

    Also yesterday I was listening to a podcast on writing yesterday, one of the hosts said she didn’t read people’s blogs because she doesn’t care what they’re doing and she doesn’t write blogs because she’s not going to write things like, “I did a poo yesterday and it was very satisfying.” There are certainly people who write such things but not all blogs are like that. Yours might be, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s fair to lump all blog writers together.  

     In Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather, Lee Gutkind, the “godfather of creative nonfiction,” defends the emerging artistry of a new genre and talks much about the criticism he gets for being a navel-gazer. Creative nonfiction is my current poison of choice so thinking about where to draw the line between creating art (yes, I do think creative nonfiction is an art - stop by any university creative writing class and you’ll see exactly how there is a way to write it and a way not to write it) and verbal exhibitionism.

     I set my own definitions. I write about things that interest me. While I write my own truth here on this blog, I carefully choose the subjects about which I’m going to write. There is a long list of Things I Won’t Share with You, My Three Blog Readers, and the Ether. I could write about the eczema that keeps me clawing desperately at my neck most of the time. I could write about my sex life or my phobias or how we’re going to clean and seal the kitchen floor this weekend. But I don’t because those things cross the line into Boring/Personal/Off-Limits Because Husband Would Divorce Me. I drew my line in the sand and it may change which is the beauty of sand.

     The beauty of the blog is the connection. Reading people’s blogs gives me insight into their lives, however polished up they’ve made it. I feel connected to other writers, I see people thinking interesting and thrilling thoughts, making me laugh, showing me something new. Lately I’ve been craving creative contact and in a small way, reading blogs is it.

 

Misplaced Persons Wednesday, Aug 6 2008 

Friendship and lost and found and writing , , , thewritingspider 1:40 am

     There’s losing people to horrid things like death, and events from which they cannot return. And there are friendships that fall apart or are hacked up into tiny bits with a sharp machete. There are people with whom you become geographically incompatible.

     What about the people you misplace? Like Julie Christensen. I misplaced her, I think. We became very best friends during Girl Scout camp the summer before my seventh grade year. She was from Bardstown, played the piano and was in her school’s gifted and talented class, which was all deeply interesting to me. She also had incredible asthma that was treated with nightly sessions hooked up to a breathing machine thing that spit out curls of vapor in a most frightening horror-movie way. We wrote for while, I visited her at her home. She was part of my soul tribe.

     I don’t remember misplacing her but by high school she was gone. It wasn’t until college when I met a girl Julie had gone to school with who told me Julie’d been in a very bad car accident and though she was still alive, was potentially a parapelgic or something equally devastating. I had no way to contact her and was sure she wouldn’t even remember me anyway.

     Friendships like these start with perfect intentions to write, to call, to visit, to share, but then when the effluvia of daily living rubs the new clean off, the odds become steeper and steeper until you can remember him, or her, or them, but only when you’re half paying attention.

     I bring this up because these goofy social networking sites we’re all ga ga for are allowing us to replace the misplaced, find the displaced, and decide if we meant what we said when we gushed, “We are going to be best friends forever!” There are a few people I deliberately misplaced. There are some who misplaced me similarly.

     Julie, if you’re reading this, I never forgot about you, or your nice family or your feisty dog that got me my first flea bites. There was something of our friendship that meant a lot to me so that whatever little threads bound us together for a year, or two, are still just hanging on, and I’m sorry I misplaced you.

 

My Momma Dressed Me Funny Monday, Aug 4 2008 

Clothing and catholic school and writing , , , , thewritingspider 10:57 am

     I don’t know if this is an actual insult or one simply used for comedic effect but “Your momma dresses you funny!” is something my classmates at Our Lady of Perpetual Hellish Misery* would have lobbed at me if they had known about it, probably.

     I was mostly dressed wrong from the first grade on. I couldn’t even get my school uniform right. Everybody else had Tretorns, I had Reeboks. While the other girls had Liz Claiborne purses I had this pink and white number from a discount store. Frankly, we didn’t have a ton of money when I was growing up for me to have expensive and fashionable clothing and I spent a lot of time trying to mangle my wardrobe into something that vaguely resembled the pages of Sassy magazine.**

     My mother had this idea of what I should look like, and I had this idea of what I should look like and she usually won out because she had the checkbook and I didn’t want to rock the boat. I remember showing up to a sports banquet wearing pink trousers held up by madras plaid suspenders and a pale turquoise button down oxford. I probably had a perm. Everybody else was wearing Guess! jeans and sneakers and I had on suspenders.

     One year, she wanted to have a skirt made for me for the Valentine’s Day dance in junior high. It was incredibly kind of her and its something my grandmother would’ve done for her if she was going to a dance.  I’m not sure why I thought it would be a better idea than just buying something off the rack. Maybe because I got to look at patterns and fabric? I picked out a short three-tiered number in red cotton covered in tiny white hearts, a wide white elastic belt with plastic heart buttons to fasten it, and – the piece de resistance – a white t-shirt complete with shoulder pads and red ribbon bows. I thought I looked pretty cute at the time. However, I spent the entire night pining for my crush to ask me to dance and when he asked my best friend to dance instead, I sat on the hay bale (why were there hay bales at a dance in February?) while “Love Bites” blared through the darkened school gym, feeling hot and uncomfortable and fighting back tears. I still can’t listen to that stupid song without feeling just a little bit pathetic.

     I have spent most of my life feeling vastly un-dressed for the occasion. Except for the odd wedding or birthday dinner, I look around at some point during the evening and wish I’d worn something else entirely.   

 

 

*Name of the school has been changed to protect the guilty sinners.

** This was back when Sassy was a hipper edgier version of the pop-color washed out drivel it became later. Do they even publish that magazine anymore…?