The Other Dress

Reblogged from The Mercenary Researcher:

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I’m trying to figure out how to tell this story without completely embarrassing myself – especially considering that many people know who I am in REAL life… Oh well, I’ll just tell it…

I suspect that if I were a guy, I’d be proudly holding my head up high after the tale was told.

You’re thinking this story has something to do with flatulence, am I right?

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Yes,yes - I'm reblogging again... I swear I have more material running around in my head...right now I'm going through some crappy angst-y stuff that I cannot quite commit to 'paper' - so I leave you with an embarrassing story...

The Sweaty Chef – a Tale of the Lush

When I was in high school, I had a boyfriend, “Jon”, whose mom was a classic lush. I don’t know that I ever saw her sober. She was the kind of drunk that was either sobbing, screaming or laughing.  You never knew what you were in for when she had a whisky in her hand- which was always.  Even at 16, I knew it was really depressing – and there would be bad repercussions for the family in the future. Sad to say, said boyfriend became a heroin addict years later (our whirlwind romance lasted about 6 months before I ended it– I was smart about some things concerning guys).   But she did have one stellar stand out moment that will forever bring me horrors and laughter.

In the late 80s, Dom Deluise had put out a cookbook and was doing a meet & greet at the local department store, in the home goods section.  So Jon’s mother, all liquored up, begged us to take her to maul (sic) so she could meet Dom Deluise and get her cookbook signed.  At least she knew she was in no condition to be driving.  We were up for it – so off we went to Macy’s or Dillards – or one of those redonkulous  kinds o’places.

The entire home goods section was thronged with people.  They were queued up in a square around the up and down escalators – so even though we were in the back of the line, we could see Dom, in all his chef-ing glory.  At this point in his career, Dom was a big guy – and even from where we were standing we could see he was sweating bullets.  Jon’s mom, no Skinny Minnie by any stretch of the imagination, had taken a couple of shots before we left and they started to kick in during our wait… and she morphed into ‘loud mean drunk’.

She started slur-ranting in a very LOUD voice about what a ‘fucking fat fuck’ Dom Delusie was, and what the hell was she waiting in this god damn line to meet that ‘sweaty fat ass’ for anyway!?! These rhetorical questions were met with dead silence – and horror.  Dom looked up and made eye contact with us from across the entire store. I prayed for the floor to crack open and devour me.  I felt really bad for Jon – he was mortified and humiliated – then his mom outdid herself. She noticed Dom looking at us and she yelled right at him, “you probably stink too, you fat ass”.

Needless to say, we never made it to the “meet” given Jon’s mom’s special “greet” because security asked us if we could take her home and give her some coffee.   About a day later, I laughed – even though I felt bad for Dom Deluise – no one deserves that kind of abuse – but it was pretty hilarious in a ‘funny uh-oh’ kind o’way.

Walking it off... or not as the case may be ~

Reblogged from The Mercenary Researcher:

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Step – ouch! – Step – ouch! - Step – ouch!

Lisa asks me why I’m limping during our five mile walk around GORGEOUS San Francisco in July (and for anyone wondering, not a wing-nut in sight!).  I tell her my ankle’s hurting a little bit and I think I just need to ‘walk it off’.

We’re up here for the American Library Association annual conference (AKA ALA FYI). 

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It's a re-blog-athog kind o'day ... enjoy if you've not already... librarians everywhere - read! read! And non-librarians too!

Mom – The Bagel Lady

My mom jokes that according to my blog, she’s ruined my life. I laugh right back. She knows it’s not true – but she also knows that she’s taking a chance when she reads my posts because, as humans, we make mistakes. We all do – one day, I’ll be privy to all the things that I did to my son that ‘ruined his life’ – but he’ll still love me. And I still love my mom – and she most certainly did *NOT* ruin my life.

We don’t always see eye to eye on things  - like clothes, tattoos, piercings and hair…but she never told me I could not wear what I wanted. Ever.  Yes, she did stop speaking to me for a few months after she discovered my one ‘small’ tattoo turned into a back piece – but we worked that out.  And I will never forget coming home from a club at age 17 (one in which I was forbidden to go) and seeing her eyes glowing red as she sat in the dark in a chair waiting for me…  and she did freak out a little, OK, A LOT when I sported black and orange hair as a teenager… but in the scope of life – that’s pretty small.

My mom did a pretty amazing thing – she opened a business when I was 14 years old – a bagel bakery. She made the best bagels going at The Bagel Hearth. Because of that, I started working when I was 14, bought all my own clothing, bought my own car, paid for my own insurance and got to forego having to work at a fast food restaurant in my teen years. That’s pretty amazing.

Anyone that has any experience with a business in food service knows how hard it is – how much of a toll it takes on everyone’s lives. You don’t ever ‘leave’ your deli/bakery/restaurant when you go home at night – it’s always in your life – well, it becomes your life.   I won’t lie – the Bagel Hearth tore my world apart – and my Mom eventually had to shut things down for a variety of reasons.  I know she saw herself as a failure – but I want her to know she was NOT a failure.  She took a chance and showed what kind of steel she has in her spine to run a business that is in constant motion 24 hours a day.  Baking bagels is extremely complex. Everything from the bagels soaking in water to how many times it rotates around in the oven to when you flip them off the canvas bagel boards is about timing.  Do you know where many bakers learn to bake bagels? In jail.  So she’s starting off with a entirely unique segment of society as an added extra.

Out of all of it – yes, it tore our world apart – but everyone rebuilt it better than before.  I have a lot of different kinds of memories of my years at the Bagel Hearth – some bad and many fantastic.  But mostly it was of my mom taking a chance and showing everyone that a woman can run a business and make the best freakin’ bagels in Arizona.

Mom – I salute you this Mother’s Day – you are, and always will be, “The Bagel Lady”.

My Mom is one ‘hot property’

Collusion

Reblogged from The Mercenary Researcher:

Collusion: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose

(Yes, this is a repost from October, but the subject matter has come up in recent conversations and it made me want to post this again because it reminds me to be always aware of what's going on and it still makes me wonder about them)

For much of my life, I've had male friends.

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I'm doing a test on republishing vs re-posting and email notifications...but still read the post if you are inclined ~

Collusion

Collusion: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose

(Yes, this is a repost from October, but the subject matter has come up in recent conversations and it made me want to post this again because it reminds me to be always aware of what’s going on and it still makes me wonder about them)

For much of my life, I’ve had male friends. For some reason, I tend to gravitate towards guys; I connect with them and feel very comfortable just ‘hanging out’.  I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post that most of my friends are guys but my closest friends (except for Scott) are women.  For the most part, I’ve always felt safe with a group of guys – never threatened except for on one occasion.

I want to write about that experience, not because of any need for catharsis or to invite any kind of pity – but more because I’m curious about the sequence of events and what they meant and if they are even thought about by any of the people involved except myself.

During my senior year, I developed a crush on a guy that I’d met at a club – he went to another high school in my town as did several of his friends.  I used to go to this guy’s house (I’ll call him “Jon”) and hang out – typically there were other people there; sometimes not. Jon’s parents both worked so there was never any adult supervision – but we were 17, and it wasn’t a big deal.  Unfortunately, he was not interested in me in the same manner so we just remained friends (to my frustration).

One day I went over to Jon’s after school. Along with me, there were two other guys there – I knew them casually – we all hung out at the same club on the weekends but that’s about the extent of it. I didn’t know them well enough to initiate conversation if they weren’t hanging around the same people I was hanging around with, if you know what I mean.  They seemed like they were OK, they were not the macho type at all. They listened to The Cure & The Smiths, for god’s sake – they seemed so harmless.   It’s amazing how 30 seconds can change your whole life sometimes.

So for some reason or another, me and the other two guys (I’ll call them “Bill” – they both had the same first name) were sitting on the floor in Jon’s room and Jon was elsewhere in the house.  There was nothing outstanding about the conversation, I wasn’t flirting with either of them, there was no sexual innuendo going on, I felt no sexual tension, no one was drinking – nothing like that.  I went to get up to get some water and all of a sudden, the next thing I know is that the Bills have given each other  a “look” and one Bill has pushed me to the floor with one hand and is starting to pull on his belt with his other hand. Simultaneously, the other Bill is closing and locking Jon’s bedroom door.  It took me two seconds to realize what was happening before I started to scream. Jon came running to the room and started pound on the door.  Door-closing-Bill opened it for Jon and the other Bill continued pulling at his belt and trying to keep me down and force my knees apart.  Jon started yelling at him to get off me and I think it took a second for the Bills to realize that Jon was not going to allow this to happen.  The Bill on me quickly lets me go and stands up and at that point I got myself up, ran out of the room, grabbed my bag and got out of that house.  I never went back – Jon never said another word about it at the club when I saw him and I avoided the Bills.

Obviously, that experience shook me up- I completely lost control of the situation in mere seconds in a place where I thought I would have been safe. For a while afterwards, I felt shame and confusion.  But what I find to be completely baffling are sequence of events.  For years I thought it was just spontaneous, until I really thought about it. In retrospect, it seemed so ‘planned’.  It happened so fast, and the look they exchanged so ‘knowing’, and it was so well-timed. So what did this mean? Is this something they thought up together in the past? Is it something they were thinking they could do to any girl in that kind of situation? Had they done it before? Is it something they were going to do specifically to me?  But how could they know we’d be in a room together? Or was it just ‘well-timed’ group behavior?  All those scenarios are disturbing on so many levels.  The most disturbing scenario to me is the idea of a general kind of gang rape if the circumstances are right – happening to any unsuspecting girl.

So here’s the kicker. A couple years later I hear that belt-pulling-Bill has given away all his music and gotten religion. From what I heard, he started off as spiritual/new-age then a few years later he became ‘born again’. I can’t help but wonder if his foray into attempted rape had anything to do with that conversion.

During his spiritual/new age ‘awakening’ I was working as a baker in a trendy breakfast restaurant and one of the other bakers happened to know both Bills. She would talk about how great they both were – and especially how ‘spiritual’ belt-pulling-Bill was; it was obvious she admired him.  I can’t even describe my utter contempt for both of those guys and to listen to her go on and on about how ‘in touch’ belt-pulling- Bill was more than I could stomach. Anyway, I eventually reached my tipping point with hearing about them and the whole story just spewed out of my mouth – in front of all the people working in bakery and prep area.  That’s not so surprising – restaurant people tend to disclose a lot of personal information. But I was shocked at all the anger, hurt, and fear I had locked up inside that just literally flew out of my mouth.  I think I rendered her dumbstruck.

So I wonder if the Bills ever think of that incident. Is it just a bleep in their memory banks? Did it affect their lives? How they saw themselves? What kind of people they were? I have to say it affected my life. Not as tragically as if the whole scene had played itself out – but enough to make me feel vulnerable and combined with some other scary experiences, I insulated myself with ‘fat’ for years and felt that any guy that liked me must have something wrong with them.  I’m not that same person anymore. But I just want to know – do they realize that 25 years later it is still a memory I can’t quite shake?

A Shawl for Camel

The Killer Pose
Photo Credit: simplypassionateme.blogspot.com

No, this is not about a book – although it sounds like a good title for one. It’s what came out of my Bikram instructor’s mouth today during the Saturday 8AM class. You see, the heat broke on Friday.  So instead of hot yoga (or hot yogurt, as my husband likes to refer to it), it was just mildly stuffy yoga.

Things happen for a reason, I do not doubt.  I’m actually quite grateful for 85 degree (F) yoga we have until Monday.

I am coming off an injury (again).

Yes, the red thing connected to my arse-region.
Photo Credit: runnersconnect.net

It’s the connector hamstring –  I did something alarming to it during an unusually enthusiastic game of whirlpool sploosh-ball wars with my son.  What is a whirlpool sploosh-ball war you ask?  Well, it’s played in a round pool with about 18 sploosh-balls.  We put the ladder in the middle of the pool (it’s an above ground kind) and start a whirlpool going. As we do that we bean each other with sploosh-balls at a high velocity. The only real rule (besides no direct smashes to the face) is that you have to keep going in a circle. I like to run as fast as I can around the 18′ pool – and in this instance, I slipped forward and felt something pop right under my butt.  It was totally an “OH MY FREAKIN’ GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE??” kind of moment.  Needless to say, I was a little nervous about going to hot Yoga because I tend to be a bit on the rubber-bandy side and the heat just makes me more stretchy. So I was worried about how to hold back.

But working thru the routine in a warm (or cold room as Bonnie, the instructor, called it) was a god-send.

Bonnie brought, as a joke, some mittens and a scarf – and she would drape it around someone’s neck if they were sneezing. The joke was who would get the shawl (scarf) for camel pose.  We were a little goofy in class today -

Overall – we’re kind of goofy regardless of the actual temperature. That’s one of the things I really love about this particular studio – Yoga Vida in Tucson, AZ.

All of the instructors are amazing and attuned to the participants in the class. There is no forcing of movement for those that are not ready – there is always encouragement and gentle correction if you’re the kind of student that wants it.  And if you’re me, some abject humiliation with a smile.

When I started Bikram Yoga, it was with trepidation.  A friend had warned me it was a silent practice, no talking (I’m a chatterbox, I don’t deny it), no extraneous chatter from the instructor, very serious, hot room, focus, don’t stand in the front etc, etc, etc. I went to the studio on a Saturday morning at 7:30AM, plenty of time to get into the right head space before the 8AM class began.  I waited in line to get set up – and a voice rapidly fired the following questions to me:

Bonnie: Have you been here before? 
Me: No
Bonnie: Do you know it’s hot? 
Me: Yes
Bonnie: Do you know it’s 90 minutes?
Me: Yes (I was  getting nervous, because I didn’t know there were test questions to answer before being admitted into the sacred, hot, silent room)
Bonnie: Did you bring a towel?
Me: Yes
Bonnie: A really big towel? 
Me: Yes
Bonnie: Did you bring water?
Me: Yes
Bonnie: Ok – you’re in!  
This is when the big smile came. And I knew I was in like Flynn.

So in I go – with the warning that it was silent (there’s a picture of a guy with the ‘shush’ finger on the hot room’s door) and don’t stand in the front.  No worries – I headed RIGHT to the back.

I was early – and it was fascinating to watch the room fill with about 30 bodies – it was hot and humid – so I just followed the others and laid down to get myself ready.

Bonnie comes in like a powerhouse and starts to talk – she points out that I’m new and welcomes me. I’m terrified to even respond with my voice. Then she asks me about my last name – how do you pronounce it. I’m shocked because this would require me to SPEAK. My friend said NO TALKING…but I pronounced it. She said “oh, what an interesting last name, is it Italian and what does it mean?”  Uh-oh…I dreaded answering that particular question in this ‘serious’ atmoshere; so in a very little voice I stated that it was actually German and Old Icelandic…and that it meant  illegitimate male child - yes, my last name means “Bastard”…. the entire class erupted into laughter.  Bonnie laughed and started the class.  She spoke the ENTIRE time.  I don’t know what my friend was on about; there was NOTHING silent about the class AT ALL.  But it was was freakin’ spectacular (ok – the silent part is from the students).  I was hooked within the first 10 minutes.

I have since been going back for a 4-5 times a week practice for that last two months. I have even started to refer to it as ‘my practice’ – which makes me a bona fide Bikram Yoga geek.

I love everything about it. As I round the corner of the building on my bike I start to smell the incense that they burn in a planter outside. At the front desk, I am greeted by name and there’s a little chitchat. I get my place in the hot room – I even love the smell of the hot room. It’s got a funk that I can’t quite describe but I like it. It smells right.

And I love the instruction – all the visualizations that each instructor uses. A place for my mind to focus on whilst I contort myself into postures with sweat running out of every pore in my body. I never have to go beyond 90 minutes – but I can work as hard or easy as I need to for that given time – and then later I can just do it again.  Unlike running or lifting weights, you always have to go farther, longer, harder etc – with Bikram, all I need is 90 minutes. There are so many things to work on in each posture – it is never static. Ever. I love that – I work harder within my practice not longer within the day. That is something sustainable that I can do over the course of my life.

I have to talk a little about the instructors. They are all amazing. Each one brings something different to my practice – even though the routine of the series is the same – the thing each instructor emphasis is completely different – and having a mix of them allows me to glean a variety of ways to think about my pose and move within it. They all bring out the best in me – they make me want to do the poses as thoughtfully and well as I can.

Bonnie – she’s the owner and is a dynamic woman who reminds me of a nice version of Jillian Michaels.  She’s all about stretching from the waist – her classes make me feel powerful and energized. She’s also very funny – any new student would do well to have her for their introduction class.

Greg – I love his class. Greg is light, thin and muscular – a dancer’s body for sure. He has a soft voice with a calm presence. For whatever reason, his classes make me SWEAT – and often times I’m rather stenchy afterwards – maybe he’s a toxin-whisperer…. I like to think of him as “Greg-Maybe-You-Can-Get-There-And-Maybe-You-Cannot-And-That’s-OK” – but he always encourages you to find a little more within yourself. And you want to.

Chris – I also love his classes (ok – I love them ALL). He sort of has a runner’s body. Long and lean as well. Chris is all about being mindful and finding space. He brings out my limber-self. I’m jealous of the space he has in his torso region. I laugh when we do a pose that requires our bellies to rest on our thighs and he always says “If your belly has disconnected from your thighs – put it back” – I can’t imagine them NOT staying connected when I’m folded forward. I guess I have more belly because mine birthed a baby and his did not.  The thighs? I got nothing – I’m a well-thighed lady… I also like his voice – It’s easy to just get into what he’s saying and move along.

Jodi – at first I was a little intimidated by her class – she’s smaller than me (I’m only 5’4″) and there’s not an extra ounce of fat on her muscular physique – and she’s powerful.  If Jody says put your forehead to your knee, you wouldn’t imagine not doing it. You just wouldn’t. And don’t even think of letting someone into the after class starts – woe unto you if you do.  I now love her class – she makes me want to BE better.

And last but not least – Bridgette. She is great at explaining just how to lift your arches – because without her I’d have had no idea. I always giggle a little when she tells us to put our feet together, heels and big toes touching and thighs if we can.  IF WE CAN? My thighs absolutely touch when my heels touch…even when my heels aren’t touching….I wish I could fit a boat through the space between my thighs, hell, I’d even be happy to have enough space for a sheet of paper, but alas, that is not in my reality.

So what’s the point exactly? Wasn’t this about a shawl for a camel ~ not really. It was just the segue to talk about how much I love Bikram  and what each instructor brings to the table.

As a side note, my friend is HORRIFIED that not only do I talk to the instructors but that I talk to the other students in the changing room. I can’t help it – I’m a social beast.