Posts filed under 'Yoga'
Until recently, the hardest I ever cried was – I think – upon watching the series’ finale of Six Feet Under. I wouldn’t classify myself as a crier; I get teary and am totally susceptible to blubbering in movies, when watching the Olympics, at weddings, but don’t generally cry – my body tends to channel emotion and frustration into lots and lots of rant-y whiney verbal diarrhea. Charming. And until, oh, maybe November, I couldn’t remember ever just…dissolving. And sobbing. In that way little kids do, as if they are inconsolable, to the point that they make themselves sick. Ugly crying.
I couldn’t remember ever crying like that except for the series’ finale of Six Feet Under, a show to which I was hopelessly devoted and those of you who were also fans and saw the final episode know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t, all you need to know is that the series ended with goodbyes (sniff!), flash fowards (choke!), the deaths of all main characters (sob!) and a musical montage (WAAAHHH!) that left me utterly incapacitated, sobbing into the wee hours of the night, convinced my life was meaningless blah blah blah, the useful sort of 2:00 a.m. breakdown that leads to impacted sinuses and crusty eyes the next day.
For a solid year, I couldn’t even THINK about the final 15 minutes of that show without crying (the dinner party makes my stomach clench even now), and I would on occasion do that pushing-on-the-bruise-to-see-how-much-it-hurts thing and watch bits of the episode. And every time, I would physically and emotionally brace myself for the end, and every time, I would feel…bereft. Hopeless. Devastated. And so, so sad!
I haven’t watched it recently, but I know that if I did, I would cry. I wouldn’t collapse, though, which is (slow) progress, but along with the very thought of the show, for months the song that played over the final montage caused a similar Pavlovian tear-duct response, and so no matter where I was, if I heard “Breathe Me” by Sia, I would sort of freeze, and say something like GAHHUHH, and…cry.
Somehow that song started making its way onto the playlists of yoga teachers, and I remember laying in svasana at The Yoga Lab, hearing “Breathe Me” come on and thinking HOLD ME PLEASE MY INNER CHILD IS HURTING. Then Starbucks added it to their mix, and I think I maybe have even heard it in commercials and while it still sort of makes me gasp when I hear it, the cry-reflex has been mostly tamed. Which is good, because yesterday I went to a 4:00 p.m. yoga class and…yep, it came on, along with all sorts of other punch-me-in-the-gut songs (mellow and heartfelt = good for yoga; Lucinda letting it out = how can I concentrate on squaring my hips when there is SO MUCH PAIN IN THE WORLD. It’s a fine line.) which, considering my emotional state as of late, made me glad that my hamstrings were demanding all of my attention in that moment.
In high school we all used to try and stump one of the science teachers – Mr. Florence – with bizarre questions because, well, he seemed to know everything. There was a column in the school paper called “Ask Mr. Flo” in which students would write in with science-y type inquiries and I remember that once, someone asked “Why do we cry when we’re sad?” But I don’t remember the answer. It’s weird when you think about it, isn’t it?
March 2nd, 2008
I think I took for granted how awesome my Brooklyn yoga studio(s) was (were), and how fantastic my teachers were (well, still are, just in Brooklyn) and how comfortable and happy my fellow yoginis made me. I lucked into a happy little yoga bubble full of people who were – for the most part – the usual mix of Brooklyn hipsters, hotties and hippies. When I moved I was lucky enough to find a studio on 83rd Street with a similarly homey vibe, but I’m still in the process of feeling out teachers and I miss my old instructors and the energy of my old classes, and I miss having someone who knows my name and my body calling out adjustments to me, and I miss all the Brooklyn girls in their Be Present pants.
My new yoga studio is promising; there are a few teachers that have left me with that yummy yoga high I’ve been missing. But some things are different. Some of those things are different-nice, like that the studio faces a little deck and on weekends when I go to daytime classes, there is a fat calico cat that climbs around on the deck. And like that there is more than one bathroom. Some things are just different. Like, there are more men. Older men. Men my father’s age, who wear unitards and tight shorts and skinny tank tops such as the ones sported by the male dancers on So You Think You Can Dance. Men who look like 50-ish accountants and dentists. In halters and Spandex.
February 26th, 2008
My yoga practice sort of devolved over the past few months, becoming less of a practice and more of a ‘crap-I-meant-to-go-to-yoga-tonight-but-found-some-excuse-not-to’ habit, which began to take a toll on me, mentally and physically. And in the new year, I’ve barely practiced at all. I was sad to leave my Brooklyn teachers and studio(s) and fellow yogis; what I’ve always loved about Brooklyn was how many niche communities I discovered. But I’m going to find a new wine shop, a new cheese shop, a new place to get coffee on my way to work, and a new yoga studio. Especially, definitely, a new yoga studio.
My body has been sore lately, despite doing not much more than sitting on my ass and watching DVR’d episodes of After Hours with Daniel Boloud. I took that to be a sign that any stress or anxiety I was feeling was being conveniently stored in my lower back and hips, to be dealt with at a later date. Whether or not I’m ready for that remains to be seen, but I knew, absolutely, that my first priority after moving was to get myself back onto my mat. Right after making sure the cable guy came and hooked up my TV for me.
I went to a 9:30 class this morning, and it was listed as a Level 1-2 class, but was a very gentle, slow-paced class. Which is fine, but by the end I was eager for more, so I stayed for the next class, a Level 2-3 fast-paced flow class, and Wow, did it feel good to get a yoga-kick in the ass. It was exactly what I needed, even more than the cupcakes and wine my friends brought to me on Saturday night, and while my flying-crow-to-tripod-headstand attempt was, shall we say, unsuccessful, I felt at home, for the first time this weekend.
Also, Fairway = death. Do not ever go on a Sunday afternoon. I thought the Red Hook store was bad, but 74th and Broadway is clearly the nadir of Hell.
February 3rd, 2008
I took a three week break from yoga for no particular reason other than a lot of shit was going on in my life and all I really wanted to do was sit on the couch and watch Gossip Girl. The shit started to fester, and then it started to settle down, and then I got an email from one of my yoga teachers about a special two hour class she was holding this Sunday in a performance space she rented somewhere on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. I took that to be a sign it was time for me to get back on my mat.
Caroline and I have discussed this before, but somewhere on my person needs to be a tattoo or talisman or brightly-colored logo tee that reads “NOTHING MAKES ME FEEL AS GOOD AS YOGA.” I’m willing to amend the “nothing” part to allow for certain head-rushy things like falling in love and a really good bottle of wine and crunching new snow and, of course, some down and dirty Doin’ It, but nothing consistently makes me feel as good as yoga. Nothing makes me settle down the way that yoga makes me settle down. Nothing puts all my drama and bullshit in perspective like yoga.
My yoga instructor had also taken some time off, and I felt surprisingly humbled to be reminded that, Oh yeah, we all need a break sometime. Because we all are going through the Shit, at one time or another. And it’s okay. Now shut up and breathe.
Because this yoga class was out on Fifth Avenue, I had to cross Fourth Avenue to get there. And if you live in New York City, you know what the first Sunday of every November is: Marathon Day. And, if you are familiar with the NYC Marathon, you know where the race runs: along Fourth Avenue. It’s a long, wide, straight stretch and I crossed it this morning around 8:45, somewhere near the seven-mile mark. There were no runners yet, but a police escort on motorcycle sped by me, and close behind him was a wheelchair competitor. When he passed me, I burst into tears. Two hours later, I headed west, back towards my neighborhood, but realized that I wouldn’t be able to cross back over Fourth Avenue because at that time – 11:15ish – the enormous, impressive, expressive bulk of the runners were making their way up Fourth Avenue. So I stood at the curb with the masses of cheerleaders and friends and supporters and fans and families and clapped and cheered and cried and cried and cried, because something about sports always makes me cry. If you are running in the marathon, put your name on your shirt: strangers all along the route will scream “GO SO-AND-SO COME ON YOU’RE DOING GREAT WOO SO-AND-SO!!!” and you will get all the high fives and cheers and WOO WOOs you could ever dream of. It was pretty cool to watch. Which was good, because it was basically impossible to cross the avenue and head home, so I watched for about an hour and clapped and cheered and WOO WOOd until there was a gap among runners big enough for me to dash through, on Bergen Street, and eventually make my way back home.
We only got one extra hour today, but between the added sleep, the yoga, the reminder to chill the fuck out, and the marathon, I feel renewed in a way that makes me want to go eat gelato and sit outside somewhere with a cup of coffee and a cozy sweater and fall back in love with New York City. Because really, it was just a break.
(Oh. Am working on taking a picture of the New Coat, but dang, self portraits are hard!)
November 4th, 2007
After yoga this morning I stopped in a coffee shop to get breakfast and on my way out passed a girl from my yoga class on the street, mat still slung over her shoulder, smoking a cigarette. Now, I don’t know why that surprised me because it’s not like smoking and vinyasa-ing are mutually exclusive activities, or like her cigarette was any less healthy than the six drinks I’d downed the night before (well, okay, yes cigarettes are less healthy than wine but I’m just saying, I’m in no position to throw moral or health-related stones), but something about it seemed sort of incongruous, even though I’m not particularly judgy about smoking (unless you are related to me, in which case PUT DOWN THE CIGARETTE BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO LIIIIIVVVVVVVVE!). And I should also confess that while I find cigarettes vile, sometimes I see people walking down the street in the morning, still all sleep-rumpled, with a cup of coffee in one hard and a cigarette in the other, and I think, Now that looks good. Not that I am condoning smoking…or walking around with bed-head.
But Yoga Girl was puffing away and it completely broke with my image of her as a bendy-flexi clean-living purist. One of the things I like best about my yoga studio is that it’s full of what I like to call, Regular People. Meaning, it’s largely populated by my demographic: twenty- and thirty-something and forty-something women, the occasional hipster guy, hot moms and Brooklyn Chic yogis. I feel comfortable there, and I like the instructors who can talk with equal passion about hair care and shoes as the Bhagavad Gita. No one is evangelical about wheatgrass or holistic colonics or vegetarianism or anything like that, and it’s one place where I can go, not talk to anyone, and just concentrate on doing my thing. I was eager to go this morning because I was more than a little hungover and generally sweating out the booze is the fastest way for me to recover.
The hangover came courtesy of the aforementioned six drinks, and the six drinks came courtesy of a somewhat difficult evening with my in-laws. Over the past year or so, I’ve made a concerted effort to avoid in-law bashing, not so much because I am trying to be a Better Person but because the bashing only seemed to create a cloud of In-Law Stress which hovered around me; I was basically kicking up the dirt and choking on it with every complaint or frustration I wrote about. I have tried to accept that we’re never going to see eye to eye, my in-laws and me, and that’s okay. I don’t need to be close with them, I just need to maintain the peace. But a few weeks ago the dirt got all kinds of kicked up when my mother-in-law said some very pointed, inappropriate, and frankly mean things to me over email, and until last night, I hadn’t communicated with her since the exchange because she insulted me to such a degree that I was sort of slapped in the face with the realization that nothing I say or do matters; she is never going to change her mind or her views, and I will always be pushing that boulder uphill. Nothing will ever be enough for her.
I can 100% accept that being respectful of ones in-laws is crucial to any marriage, and I have been trying to do that; we may not get along but I have to respect that they are my husband’s parents and will be in my life for as long as he is my partner. But things have gotten tense lately, and there’s been a lot of passive aggression and manipulation, and all of it left me extremely apprehensive about dinner last night. My sister-in-law was also in the city, visiting her new boyfriend (scraping the jar of icing, I’d guess!) and I met her for a drink near Union Square before meeting up with Kent, his parents, and her boyfriend. I said to her, I’m not sure what level of sobriety you have in mind for this dinner, but I hope you don’t mind if I’m well lubricated. She understood.
When we did meet the rest of our party on the side of 15th Street, my mother-in-law hugged me and I hugged her back but stiffened and felt both uncomfortable and angry and after a minute I started to pull away, surprised by how much anger I still felt towards her. Dinner was, quite honestly, a struggle. Our reservation was for 9:00 p.m. which is later than my in-laws normally eat, and they’d had a really long day, flying into New York on a 7:00 a.m. flight and going out to lunch before heading uptown to the Yankee game; they were exhausted. And my mother-in-law was clearly unhappy with the restaurant choice, and was tired, and I was tense and Kent didn’t really know what to do or say, and my father-in-law didn’t really know what to do or say, and my sister-in-law and her boyfriend were so caught up in their Icing Eating that they were kind of happily oblivious to everything, and I didn’t want to drink too much and say something Bad, but holy god, I just needed to take the edge off, so I had wine, and then more wine, since no one else seemed interested. Except Kent, who looked like he’d prefer to have a glass of scotch in each of his hands, and maybe a spare nearby.
It was a rough night, I have to say. I felt so uncomfortable just by being in the vicinity of so many people who were also clearly uncomfortable, and the only dinner conversation that we all collectively seemed to make was along the lines of, WOW Look At All The People Eating Supper So Late At Night, followed by Yep, We Eat Late Here. And I was cringing, because Kent and I had picked the restaurant thinking it was a Parental Slam Dunk; we were wrong. In hindsight, I should have cooked dinner at home and had everyone come over for a quiet, relaxing, low-key meal in our apartment; my mother-in-law has terrible hearing (which I know is incredibly frustrating for her) and kept asking if we could go someplace quiet for drinks before dinner, which is basically impossible in Manhattan, on a Saturday night. Live and learn, I guess.
My parents are coming to visit in three days; my in-laws, through no fault of their own seem to have terrible timing. I know it’s hard for Kent to spend time with his family and then switch gears and spend time with mine, who operate on very different speeds. My parents bring with them their own set of tics and behaviors that will, by the end of their visit, be driving me crazy, but with them Kent and I can at least be ourselves. That’s the hardest part of spending time with my in-laws; I never feel like I can be myself, neither does Kent. We are careful to operate in the parameters of what makes them happy and comfortable (or at least we try to) but it’s exhausting.  And it makes me angry: I want them to see us as adults, and to appreciate the life we’ve created here. But they just…don’t. I don’t think they ever will, which is what I’m working on accepting, but it’s hard. I’m the person who can’t do handstands and has bad shoulders; when I’m at yoga it doesn’t matter because there’s no pretense. I appreciate that. I’m trying to get there off the mat.
August 19th, 2007
Do you remember how I was so very torn and conflicted and unsure over whether or not to go on the yoga retreat in Sicily? Remember how I was all, But is it OKAY to leave my husband for a week of wine and play in the Sicilian sun…is it OKAY to spend all this money on myself…and then I finally, monumentally decided that Yes, I would go to Italy?
Well, the yoga retreat was cancelled. There was plenty of interest but it turns out June is a bad time for a yoga retreat, because people have a lot of weddings to attend and can’t go on the yoga retreat. Or some shit like that. I was bemoaning our cancelled trip tonight to my yoga instructor, and she put her arm on my hand and said, “Molly, THE FOOD…we were going to EAT AND DRINK SO WELL…”
Sigh.
My teacher started class tonight by telling us about spending last weekend on a shorter, more local retreat, somewhere upstate. She said that she made the commitment to spend her time on this retreat working on being quiet, not talking unless necessary, something that’s hard for her because she is one of those mile-a-minute people who always, always wants to stop and talk. And you learn a lot when you finally just. shut. up… she said.
She said she’d tried to bring some of that home with her, and decided to practice being Quiet on the subway, which is really sort of dead time for us commuters; you can’t do anything but commute, so it’s totally okay to read or play sudoku or whatever it is you want to do, including Being Quiet. But being quiet just brings up that other kind of chatter, my teacher said, the internal chatter, the chatter that is eavesdropping on people next to you and wondering what the hell that girl across the car is wearing and judging someone’s weather-inappropriate outerwear. Tuning out the internal voice is a lot harder than Just. Shutting. Up.
When she told us that anecdote I thought about what I had written yesterday – about religion – and I realized why I may sometimes flippantly say, Yoga is my church. Yoga isn’t church, but it’s one place where I can Just. Shut. Up. I like the quiet, I like only having to think about breathing. It’s what I like about church; an hour of quiet. But what I don’t like about church, or about the Catholic Church (I’ve never attended any other type of religious service) is the other stuff, the politics, the rigidity, the exclusion, the Noise.
Do you guys watch 30 Rock? It’s made me do a 180 on Tina Fey, who I previously disliked. Now I want to run away to a bi-curious yoga commune in Sicily with her and ask her if I can try on her glasses. If you’re not watching, you should — it’s really fucking funny. And a few weeks ago, Tracy Morgan’s character was looking for a new religion. And Jane Krakowski’s character described Kabbalah as “the fun parts of Judaism, plus magic.”
And frankly, the yoga woo woo bits might not seem that far removed from Kabbalah, and I’m not going to get on any soapbox or yoga mat and proclaim myself to be reborn as a yogi, but it gives me what I think I’d like to get from a religion — a chance to quiet down, think about being a better person, and remind myself that for the most part, everyone else is just doing the best they can, so perhaps I should lighten up a little and stop being so judgmental.
But there are things I like about true religion, things I like about Catholicism – aside from the dark, quiet churches – I like the ritual. I like that mass is the same, always. It’s reassuring, although that might be because I have a tendency to tune out the homily and spent the time Reflecting. Or on planning what to cook for dinner, maybe.
But still, there is comfort is the sameness of mass, and when I returned home from college and attended church with my famliy only to discover that our parish had made the WILDLY SWEEPING CHANGE to holding hands during the Our Father, I was aghast. I’m not a hand holder. I’m not someone who enjoys the Peace Be With You part (anxiety! who do I turn to first? how many is too many people to Peace with? how many is too little?), and I do not like holding hands with anyone, ever, except for small children and my husband. I liked mass the way it always was: solemn and boring.
I realize I’m asking for my religion to be a lot of things for me, and frankly, I don’t think Catholicism can ever be what I’d like a religion to be. I’m okay with that; I can still appreciate divinity and theology and churches and ritual while hating policy and practice, can’t I? I don’t claim to be a good Catholic; I’m just working on being a good person.
I had really, really, really hoped to do this work in Sicily.
April 10th, 2007
1. On Friday night I did yoga next a tiny blonde girl who looked like Heidi from The Hills and wore a cashmere wrap sweater through the entire class. She was wearing makeup and pearl earrings and I had just stomped my way through an ice storm to get to class. Needless to say, I did not look like any cast member of The Hills. I felt a little better when I noticed that her pedicure was chipped, but practicing next to Yoga Barbie was sort of demoralizing. Then, this morning, I attempted a drop-back into a wheel, and sort-of-kind-of did it, which felt really, really good. I thought, If a stupid backbend can make me so happy, imagine what a week of yoga in Sicily would do? And that was the moment I decided that, Yes, I’m going on that yoga retreat.
2. I have watched enough basketball this weekend to have learned two things: one, Rick Pitino looks like shit, and two, there is someone on the Florida team who looks exactly like Jim Halpert.
3. Sleeper Cell. SLEEPER CELL! Holy shit you guys, Sleeper Cell makes 24 look like Will & Grace in comparison. Why did no one tell me how GOOD this show is??!?!
4. I’ve discovered the secret to good hair: have absolutely no where to go and no one to see. Inevitably, your hair will naturally look fabulous. And no one will ever know.
5. A good friend of mine told me over dinner on Friday night that she is moving back home to London. I’ve never been to London before, and now I suddenly understand how my mother feels, knowing that only a low-airfare email alert separates her from New York. I promised my friend I’d be an excellent houseguest. I’ve always wanted to shop at Jigsaw!
6. There is a hipster comic book shop in my neighborhood that draws in both the disaffected youth and the chunky glasses crowd. I am intimidated by it, I don’t really understand how things are organized, and I don’t know what to look for. But, there is a new Buffy comic book, Season 8…so I went into the comic book store and greedily snatched up my comic book. And it turns out? Comic books are awesome. An entire product category has just opened up to me.
7. We had lunch on Smith Street, and stepping out onto the icy, slushy, crowded sidewalks immediately killed all my ambitions of taking a long walk and Doing Things. I don’t want to Do anything. I want to lay on the couch and watch more Sleeper Cell. On our way home, we pass a thin mother with huge sunglasses and a Botkier bag slung over one shoulder. She is pulling her 5-yr old son behind her and says, You just got that brand new laptop, so that means no new toys for at least a week…
March 18th, 2007
One of my yoga instructors is taking a group on a yoga retreat to Sicily, and I’m having a hard time coming up with reasons not to go. So far, I have two: one, the expense (a legitimate reason), and two, I feel weird taking a week long trip without my husband. And feeling weird is making me feel weird about feeling weird about taking a trip without my husband.
Kent is fine with me going, and pointed out that now is the time to do stuff like this; who knows if the next time a yoga retreat in Italy comes along whether my life will permit me to attend, and frankly, while it’s an expensive trip, it’s not make-us-or-break-us expensive. I feel strange about taking a vacation without you, I said. Look at it this way, he responded, I travel for work more than 7 days per year, so really, I leave you alone more than you’d be leaving me.
I just feel…weird, I said. What will your parents think? He shrugged and said, Who cares, which is an excellent point. After all, he does leave me for a week each summer to go to Aspen with his coworkers. And while I’m technically ‘invited’ on that trip, his head would implode if I actually came along to his boss’s mountain retreat.
So why do I feel weird? I’ve never had issues with independence or with Kent and I having separate interests and activities. Being married shouldn’t mean being permanently attached at the hip, and being a good partner means letting your loved one do what will really make him or her happy, right?
It really sounds like a fantastic trip, and it happens to fall at the perfect time for me to step away from work for a week+. Like I said, it’s not an inexpensive trip, but how can you say no to something that is all inclusive when the ‘all inclusive’ part specifies local wine and olive oil?
Kent and I still want to take a vacation of our own, much thanks to all the suggestions of you, dear internet, and various circumstances have pushed that trip back a little anyway — we’re thinking London and Amsterdam, sometime in the fall. So really, why shouldn’t I go to Italy in June? Isn’t skipping an opportunity like this because of guilt over leaving one’s spouse just as dysfunctional as traveling without said spouse?
A while ago my mother told me that one of her yoga instructors was planning a similar trip to Greece, and she (my mother) was ready to pack her bags and hop on board, but a shoulder injury and several family weddings intervened. She’s the person I generally turn to when I need problems fixed or questions answered, and I’m pretty sure her response would be, Are you kidding me? You have the time, the money, and the understanding of your husband, why the hell would you say no?
I like to channel her when it’s convienent for my cause.
I mention my mother because she called me earlier this week with news that really shouldn’t affect me that much, but instead left me emotionally reeling — her job, which she loves and is good at — is moving to Texas, which means that she is too, at least temporarily, while she looks for something on the west coast. Or, something someplace entirely different — layered with the fear of having my parents live somewhere that isn’t California is the little twinge in the back of my head saying, What if she ended up HERE…
It’s not outside of the realm of possibility. And frankly, while I can’t easily picture my parents living somewhere that isn’t California, New York is the city to which I could most easily imagine them deciding to relocate. They love it here, and a large part of me thinks it would be kind of awesome to have my parents closer to me. But ‘closer’, when compared to California, could be a lot of different things. I keep imagining my mother telling me that she’s coming to work in Manhattan, possibly even in my industry, and I’m cueing the opening credits of a movie starring Diane Keaton and, oh, I don’t know…Zooey Deschanel or Drew Barrymore as the mother-daughter duo struggling to redefine their relationship as they find themselves working together for the first time in their lives. Hijinx would ensue, there would be tears, there would be a big fight, music by Bright Eyes and Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens would play. Lessons would be learned.
These are lessons I’m not fully prepared to learn; California has never felt that far because I can always go home. It’s easy to have a good relationship with my parents because they’re not all up in my grill on a daily basis. This is the way I like it. Not having my parents’ home in California available to me feels like the entire state would fall off the face of the earth. I like my independence, but crucial to that independence is the comfortable knowledge that California is always there, a soft place to fall, should I need it.
(Maybe “Changes” by David Bowie would be in my movie. Turn and face the change and all that, right?)
Probably a week on the beach in Sicily would help me adjust, no?
[Edited to add that I did speak to my mother, and I did tell her about the yoga retreat, and the first thing she said was, How does Kent feel about you going to Italy without him? Is that THAT weird to take a solo - solo, with 10 other people - trip? I acknowledge that living in a two-weeks-off-per-year-and-not-a-day-more society, vacation time is precious and rare, so to take half of mine and spend it without my husband might seems selfish, but seriously...why does it matter so much?]
March 4th, 2007
I may talk a good game but I really only made one New Year’s resolution this year, and it might sound kind of silly. I resolved to use fewer paper towels. I’m eco-minded and I buy local and Al Gore scared the crap out of me last year too…but I am also lazy, and a creature of comforts, so I figured that starting small was better than not starting at all, and I am stongly encouraging all those in my household to use kitchen towels and cloth napkins in place of paper towels, which had been used as sponges, plates, napkins, and yes even mops. It’s only January 9th, so we’ll see how this goes, but I wanted something tangible to work towards, and there you have it – fewer paper towels.
It being the first half of the first month of a new year, others are still holding tight to their resolutions as well, and yoga classes have been jam packed. Tonight I sat in between two big hairy men while the instructor actually reminded me of my resolution. She said some guy had really pissed her off earlier today – she had been walking over towards the studio from her neighborhood and this guy jogged past her. She said he looked like a typical Park Slope ‘libbie-arty type’, was wearing his VOTE t-shirt and listening to his iPod. And as he passed her, he came across an empty one-gallon Poland Springs water bottle sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. When he got to it, he kicked it into the middle of the street. My teacher got pissed off and kind of indignant and marched up to the bottle and pulled it from the gutter and sauntered off, dropping the water bottle in the nearest recycling bin. “And I got all judgemental,” she said, “Like, What an asshole.”
Later, she stopped for coffee and as she grabbed her cup, she did what she always does, which is reach for a big stack of napkins and stuff them in her purse, using maybe one of them. “I realized that I had basically done exactly the same thing as the jogging guy, only in reverse,” she said. “And then I remembered what my guru [only she used his name, which is really long and really Indian and I cannot remember it at all, so my apologies to Swami whatever] told us over and over again — Mind your own business.”
I figure if I can just focus on paper towels, the obsessive need to judge and analyze might let up a little.
January 9th, 2007
On Saturday, Angela began class with the following story:
She said that she had recently taught a class in which two women were a little bit chatty. As the instructor, she was privvy to background information about all of the people in the class, so she happened to know that the two chatty women were friends, and that one had recently gone through a difficult time, and that the other was being very supportive and protective of her. The chattiness was really mostly words of encouragement and comfort. Still, after class, another woman from class came up to Angela and said, “I don’t know HOW you can teach a class when people are talking like that.” Angela sort of nodded and said she knows how distracting it can be, but then explained the situation (discretely) to the complainer. Immediately, the complainer blanched and apologized.
It happens all the time. Our instinct is to hate or gossip or judge or complain; someone takes too long at the MetroCard kiosk and we get mad at them for making us miss our train in the morning, someone pushes in front of us in line at the movies and we end up filled with rage. Someone posts something on the internet and we get in line to bash it, someone snaps at us on the street and we carry it around all day. But really, as soon as we know the story, we become compassionate. As soon as the woman who complained to Angela heard why the other women were chatty in class, she was filled with compassion. That compassion is there, instinctively.
It’s the other instincts that sometimes circumvent the compassion, the instinct to email my friends and bitch and say OH MY GOD CAN YOU BELIEVE MY MOTHER IN LAW DID THIS or OH MY GOD CAN YOU BELIEVE SOANDSO WROTE THAT. But generally, as soon as someone is humanized, we can be kind.
(True story — growing up, I went through that snotty teenage girl phase that all teenage girls go through, and during those years I thought that family was like, SO LAME…and I acted accordingly. I was a bitchy little eye-roller, basically, and my mother used to tell me, “I wish you could treat your family the way you treat strangers. Just pretend we’re strangers.” Because apparently I held on to that ability to be kind to my fellow humans, just so long as the humans in question were not responsible for driving me to and from school in the ‘ohmygod what if someone sees me’ family van.)
So this is what I’m going to work on. I don’t know if I want to call it a resolution or not, but I’m thinking ‘judgy gossiping whore bitch’ might not be the persona I want to embrace in 2007. (Even though I really, really, REALLY love to gossip.)
[Ahem. 12/20 Editorial note...yesterday, before writing this post, I spent a few minutes all huffing and puffing and silently cursing FUCK THE FUCKING F TRAIN MOTHERFUCKERS only to read online today that my train was delayed last night because someone committed suicide at West 4th by jumping in front of the F Train. So in case my above message was not clear enough, HOLD OFF ON THE SILENT RAGE UNTIL YOU KNOW THE WHOLE STORY BECAUSE WHILE YOU MAY BE LATE FOR YOGA AT LEAST YOU ARE NOT TRACK PIZZA, YOU SELFISH YUPPIE CUNT. Or C*NT. I haven't really tested that word with you guys yet...but back to the resolutions]
Also, will get file cabinet organized, go to yoga four times a week, blow dry my hair every [work] morning, walk the dog more frequently, go to Ohio with husband on non-holiday weekend, purge closet, submit book proposal, and eat more leafy greens.
And, I’m giving myself a little vacation — no blogging til after the holidays. Cheers to my near and dear!!
December 19th, 2006
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