Open Letters

Dear Kind Stranger,
Although, like dear Ralph Waldo, I am bent on self-reliance, and like venerable Betsy, banner-builder, I grip the reins of my independence by its needle and thread, I offer you my deepest thanks for giving me your Metro seat this afternoon. I was not feeling well -- indeed, the horn call of my personal liberté, égalité, fraternité blared not from my bosom (see next letter) -- and was thankful to avoid the stomach-rupturing stench of the slob crammed aisle .
A thousand thanks,
Di

Dear Starbuck(s),
I supped last night on magnificent cuisine (of which the Proof was in the pudding, though I had none), and was, needless to say, unprepared to gorge myself on one of your one of your average-at-best pumpkin muffins during our morning routine. The shock to my system was truly earth-shattering; indeed, having choked down the brick, I felt as though I was doing damage to under-foot with every step as I plodded, pumpkin-esquely down the sidewalk. Were it not for that the Crisco sheen aided in the application of my cosmetics, I would have retributively left you the crumbs.
Resentfully,
Di

Home Again

I did a lot of running this past week down in Georgia, but not much yoga. So boy, was I feeling my hamstrings (and lower back, and calves, and shoulders) this morning in class. I purposefully took a Level I class because I knew I was going to need to ease back into things... god, I had it when my body is weak.

Two short weeks ahead, and a road trip to which I'm very much looking forward.

Ciao for now

I'm off for a week of top-secret training in a top-secret location.

Talk to y'all next weekend.

The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts...

I used to think that Christianity was stupid;

I used to think that in order to be perceived as having good taste I needed to criticize everything I saw/ate/read;

I used to hate olives;

I used to confuse arrogance and intelligence;

I used to think that being strong meant never needing anything from anyone;

I used to think that no one in the world was truly happy in their marriage.

..................................

I'm still afraid to answer a question unless I'm sure I know the answer;

I'm still afraid to try anything creative;

I still starve myself as punishment if I feel weak;

I still can't stop interrupting people on the phone;

I still can't do a yoga headstand;

I still enjoy dining in a restaurant by myself.

City Skyscape

She just can't get it quite right..

... so lately I have been taking the bus to work, which is actually quite nice. I like to look out the window and watch my city go by.

There is another woman who waits for the 6:36am bus with me, but she seems very confused and I don't think she actually checks the schedule. The bus, in my experience (and I don't take it every day) comes on time or within two minutes of being on time, yet this woman, right around 6:35, always starts to get really agitated and will give up on the bus. She'll hail a cab, and then the bus will usually come right after her cab has driven away.

She only takes the bus four blocks to the metro, anyway, so I don't see why she just doesn't walk... why take a $6 cab four blocks every day?

I've told her that the bus is supposed to come at 6:36, but I think she gets to the stop too early and feels like she's waited for ever, so she gets impatient.

I dunno, it's just a weird morning ritual to witness...

In Which Di Struggles To Keep Herself Intact

Lordy!

For some reason work has been really overwhelming all week. I have been falling asleep after work but still keeping up an evening yoga/running schedule, which is good, otherwise I would be turning into a completely useless lump.

The stress is enormous but the work (mostly) satisfying.

I need a moment of vanity to say the following: I'm so freaking competent at work. I rock. The volume and complexity of work I produce is truly awesome, the potential impact is life-saving, and I'm very, very proud of myself.

Run Report!

Today I began running again after an eight-month haitus. I ran a 3.3 mile route and finished in 36 minutes - not exactly a praiseworthy time, but I came in strong and felt great afterwards.

Mile 1: The beginning of my run was a struggle to run slow enough. Yep, that's right - slow enough. I'm trying to build my confidence again and set myself up to build a good base of endurance. The last thing I wanted to do was try to run my former pace and crash out early. The first part of my route is pretty much straight uphill, but I felt good.

Mile 2: The middle of the run was more difficult. My body kept trying to find it's own pace, which is ordinarily fine, except that my body's own pace was, for today, just too fast. So I consciously slowed myself down and distracted my mind by composing this post in my head.

Mile 3: By this time I had my second wind and was sailing right along - albeit slowly. I fought the urge to check my pace, fearing that knowledge of my slowness would cause me to try to speed up, which would then cause me to hit the wall and crash.

The finish: I just let my body open up for the last .3 miles or so. The finish is downhill and I was well into my second-wind at this point.

My plan is to take a yoga class tomorrow and try the same 3.3-mile route on Wednesday. I really need new running shoes, but the ones I have will do for another couple of weeks or so. I also need running clothes, being that I got rid of a lot of mine earlier this year, anticipating that when and if I started running again I would want to reinvent the wardrobe, anyway.

New Goal

I am blessedly (but, surely, momentarily) free of existential crises, so this post will be rather bland.

I'm thinking of putting on my running shoes again. My faithful readers will remember that I stopped running about six months ago to see if I could affect positive change in my hamstrings and thus open up my yoga practice.

The verdict? Uncertain. My hamstrings feel more open but I'm not sure if it's because I stopped running or because I increased the hours I spend on the yoga mat.

But with this lovely fall weather and the drop in humidity I find myself itching for a run, so I think I'll spend the rest of the year building up a good base of miles and after the First begin a serious training program to ready myself for the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler in April (thanks to Matt for the idea!).

I guess the dust hasn't cleared

Yesterday after work I hopped on the L2 bus to come home and found a young woman screaming at her toddler to take his time eating his cookie. Just after I sat down, she slapped him three times and took the cookie away because he wasn't 'eating it properly.'

The kid didn't flinch or whimper at all. His startle reflex has already burned out.

A few minutes later she was crooning happily to him and then announced to the bus that today was his birthday, he's turning one year old.

She gave the cookie back but still wasn't happy with how he was eating it, so she filled his bottle with some of her Diet Pepsi and shoved it in his mouth. He started crying and couldn't hold the cookie, bottle, and his blanket all at once so the bottle sort of fell in his lap. He continued to sob a little and his mother picked up the bottle, shoved it in his chest and shouted that the bottle is RIGHT THERE and she doesn't know what else he wants from her.

They got off the bus at the National Zoo and I thought that would be a nice birthday afternoon for a one-year old, but instead she crossed the street away from the zoo entrance. We were stopped at the light there and I watched her push the stroller into the liquor store.

My heart broke for that little boy and today I am still thinking about it today.

The Great Reminder

Plato said, "Be kind, for those who you meet are fighting a harder battle."

If there's one undercurrent to an education in the classics it's that anything meant to cultivate and improve the mind necessarily involves a certain amount of labor, and labor with no discernible end.

It's so easy to get absorbed in the work itself, the winter work of persistence and consistency and rhythm. The progress truly begins to come, however, with the realization that the fruits of all this labor lie outside of the labor itself. Disproportionate focus on the work is like looking at the finger pointing to the moon and missing the moon itself.

It's always been tempting for me to find my salvation in work, in the law, in the rules. Doing feels good, it feels productive and meaningful; in some ways it feels good to suffer and to punish myself for any perceived weakness.

Be gentler with me than I am with myself.

Trite

Sometimes you don't realize how valuable something is until it goes away, or almost does. I guess that's what's called 'taking for granted.'

I feel anxious and jittery. I've been cleaning and pacing. I'm not calm.

I miss yoga.

Wow, this feels more vulnerable than I thought it would...

Inspired by the resurgence of Matt's Primal Eloquence blog, I just attempted to outline my own two-week workout/weight loss plan right here in public.

But I just can't do it.

Matt, how do you make that sort of thing public and still... be okay??

Maybe it's just me, but - I hate talking about food in terms of dieting. Describe me a gorgeous eat-with-your-eyes-first haute cuisine dining experience and I'll beg you to go on forever, but talk to me about your low-cal this and non-fat that, how much you're eating and at what times of day and I just want to scream and poke my eyes out.

It's a horribly uncomfortable topic for me.

That said, Matt, I am following your adventures and you have my utmost support in your journey! Just don't ask me to talk about it with you over dinner the next time we go out, okay?

My Mood

Thanks to my Annapolitan for encapsulating it perfectly:

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

--W.B. Yeats

Relapse

The culmination of my exceptionally challenging and stressful day came about an hour ago via panic attack while at yoga. I was literally hyperventilating in Adho Mukha Svanasana. A few poses later, I told Keith that I wanted to go home. He asked me to finish the standing sequence, after which he let me go with the promise that I would leave this behind me and show up anew on Thursday.

Now I am home in my cluttered and filthy apartment. My body is clean but my mind is a wreck. I feel disgusing and useless. I'm afraid to practice the banjo because my confidence is so shaky that a few bad tunes make me feel like never playing again.

But my Annapolitan offered a keen insight: it's the days when you don't feel like practicing that practice is so important. We talked about how that sets serious musicians (and athletes, and academics, etc) apart from the masses: anyone can practice their talent when it suits them, when it's easy. It takes true dedication and discipline to practice when it's hard, when you don't have time, when it's not going well and when you feel like quitting instead.

I quit yoga for today, but I am going to pick up the pieces and try to make something productive out of the rest of my evening. Wish me luck.

Still Alive

It seems as though leaves of absence are going around in the blogosphere these days.

I've been absent from most things lately - yoga especially. And reading. And prayer.

The Music is alive and well in my life, though, and that is an immense comfort to me.

Onward.

Purging the Healthy Way

No Mom - I am not bulimic.

I am in a mood to throw things away. Getting rid of excess is not just for spring cleaning, you see. I think it's wise to continuously pare down one's belongings and evaluate one's attachments to what one owns.

The problem for me is my definition of excess and the way I view any sense of affection for my possessions as being unhealthy and in need of dissolution.

For example: I do not like having two of anything. This ranges from black skirts to place settings to easy chairs to bottles of shampoo (and sometimes to kittens... NATASHA WILL YOU QUIT RUNNING AROUND). Sometimes, though, a person really needs multiples of things. I have been trying to come to terms with this. I have four whole wine glasses and two plates. I have two mugs for tea. And I have three black skirts. Yes, this makes me anxious, but I am trying to be okay with it.

I am not very attached to anything I own except for my kittens and my instruments. In some ways, I would like to have very few possesions that are exactly what I want and that I love. In other ways, I would like to feel as though I could give absolutely anything I own (with the aforementioned exceptions) away to someone who needed them without shedding a tear or looking over my shoulder. Sometimes I test myself by getting rid of things that I like, just to see how it feels. If I feel sad, then I have a nice talk with myself about the important things in life and how you can't touch them.

I am hereby acknowledging that this behavior is extreme. That is why, istead of getting rid of my coffee table or something else that I could justify "needing," I have decided instead to clean out my closet and purge worn out yoga clothes, unwanted apparel, and other useless clutter. Clutter being the key word, not anything that I am actually using.

And then I am going to meet up with Matt for MONGOLIAN BARBECUE and he has a very mysterious 'favor' to ask me, and hopefully it won't be something that makes my boyfriend want to maim him...

Untitled

It can be really overwhelming to think about a significant event in my life by tracing all the little details that led me there. It's scary because sometimes events are set in motion in such a way that, upon looking back, it seems incredulous that it all actually worked out and that nothing got in the way, and had I been ten seconds later or hadn't felt well or burned my dinner, that it would not have worked out the way it did.

In times when I can't fathom how our Creator has set in motion the events that have been ordained for us since the day we were born, I remember that even the hairs on our head are numbered. We are the answer to His question, and the question that He answers.

I Can't Relax

We got home pretty damn late last night (near 2am) and yet I still managed to drag myself to work. The day was pretty intense, and when I got home I fell asleep for about two hours. Which brings me to now and I hate this feeling, like I should be springing into action to make up for my weak will and lazy body that just crashed in the middle of the day.

I frantically did the dishes. Now I am thinking of re-stringing my banjo. And my bouzouki. And I should do some yoga since I will probably be skipping class tonight. Is David going to disown me? He'll at least be disappointed. I should clean. I should study. I should watch a film and return it to Netflix. I should check my work email. I should jog up and down the stairs a bit. I should go grocery shopping. I should clean my closet.

I should take a hint from my kittens and stretch out in a sunbeam and scrunch shut my eyes and breathe deeply and do nothing at all for the rest of this evening which I've dedicated to myself alone.

Why isn't that, like, simple?

Home Again

I apologize for the absence, dear readers (or as Patrick would say, I haven't been blogging enough blogging blog), but I've been up in New England for the past few days helping my grandparents celebrate their 60th wedding anniverary.

Sixty years. Can you believe it?

I'm finally home, and while I wait for my Annapolitan I'll be investigating the mystery of the Two Cute Kittens Who Did Not Get Taken Care Of Like Claire Said They Would. I'm more than dismayed. When I arrived they had no food or water in their dishes and yet there was food left in the bag - and there shouldn't have been if they were fed yesterday. That should have been all of it. Also, Natasha has a bloody gash on her shoulder. Now, I know my little girls tussle with each other from time to time (they are sisters, after all), but I've never seen anything go down between them fierce enough to draw blood. They must have been in the state of agitation that shelter kittens can regress to when left with dry plates.

Poor little girls. I'm glad to be home.