childbearing hipster

Twenty-Five Things

There's this meme going around on Facebook--if you're on Facebook, you've undoubtedly seen it--where you list twenty-five random facts about yourself and then "tag" twenty-five of your friends to do the same.

I've been ignoring it for a week but now it's to the point where at least twenty-five people have tagged me and I feel like that's a sign of something. And signs aren't to be ignored, so I'm going to try to think of twenty-five little gems of information about myself or my family, and get myself off the hook.

1. I've known Dug since I was 18. We didn't think much of one another back then.

2. Our entire relationship was made possible by technology. IM let us keep in contact all day at work, mobile phones with free long distance let us talk all evening. Cheap airfare let us see each other on the weekends. We dated pretty much like normal people for several months while living 800 miles apart.

3. When I was a really little kid, four or five at the oldest, my mom taught me how to walk with an encyclopedia on my head. She said it was to teach me good posture and that it's how models, whatever they were, learned to walk. Thirty years later I can walk up and down stairs, sit and stand, turn and come back, for an almost unsettlingly long time all without the book slipping. To date, nobody has asked me to model.

4. There are very few foods that I've tried that I really dislike, and I'm very open to trying anything once. That willingness has led me to the knowledge that sea urchin tastes just like it looks (baby poop), but whelk, on the other hand, tastes like heaven. Not like crusty booger at all! You just don't know unless you try things.

5. Over the years I've been trying to learn to like foods that I've never cared for. I'm almost there with both melon and olives--before, with both, I couldn't even pick them out of something and then eat it for most of my life. Now I can do that fine, plus I'm starting to appreciate them on their own. So if I get stuck on a deserted island whose main sources of food are cantaloupe and Kalamatas, I'm golden.

6. I admit it: I'm really disappointed that neither of the kids have red hair, STILL. Which is ridiculous, because I hated my hair as a kid--hated how conspicuous it was, how adults cooed over it while kids mocked it. Basically all I wanted to be when I grew up was a brunette.

7. Funnily enough, brown is the only color I've never dyed my hair.

8. What I *really* wanted to be when I grew up was a fashion designer. And then I fell into the "doctor/lawyer" trap and never got out. Now I understand that I wasn't ever doctor/lawyer brainy and that I should have been encouraged to sit under trees and draw all I wanted, but back then who knew anything about anything? I was encouraged to grow up and be something that made a lot of money.

9. I did not grow up to be anything that made a lot of money. I did make a decent amount of money for a while, but that was purely by accident. Or rather, purely based on chutzpah. What can I say, there was a booming economy back then. Companies had "vice presidents of fun", for pete's sake. Charm could take you very far in the 1990s.

10. Lately I've been thinking about the future a lot, which by the way is not as bright in the post-VP-of-Fun years. What could I be that is creative, flexible, and brings in more money than it costs? Nothing's come to mind yet.

11. DID YOU KNOW? that I am a big Star Wars geek? The kind who says things like "Well, that's not really canon, it was only in the comics". The prequels made me hate George Lucas so hard. So hard that I sometimes look at Skywalker Ranch on Google Earth and plot my revenge.

12. The kids got American Girl dolls for Christmas because I wanted one so bad. I'm not the least bit ashamed of it, either.

13. Another doll-related thing I'm not ashamed of: I played with my Barbies practically until high school. Toward the end it was less pretend play, more "I wonder if I can dress ten Barbies up to represent the ten decades of the 20th century?" type thing. But still, undeniably playing with Barbies at fourteen.

14. I miss my nosering.

15. I wear aprons when I cook. I've probably got a dozen or so, mostly vintage. I rotate through them.

16. I don't listen to the same music I liked when I was younger. Or rather, the bands I loved the most just don't resonate with me anymore, and some of them even sound embarrassingly bad (sorry, Depeche Mode, but it's true, your lyrics in hindsight are as bad as the poetry they inspired me to write at the time).

17. I have a kayak, and my own ski equipment. It puzzles me, but I've got the stuff, all right.

18. Cars Dug and I have had since we've been together: late 80's Acura, '00 Mustang, '66 Mustang, '71 VW Squareback, '68 and '74 BMW (and a couple of parts cars for those), '03 Jetta, '05 Element, '86 VW Cabriolet, '06 Odyssey, and '70 Ford pickup. Also three motorcycles and a travel trailer. And I'm probably forgetting one. We should really get to use some kind of special "high volume" window at the DMV.

19. Bikes are the new car at our house. See that list above? Now just imagine instead of numbers and the make of a car, it says "purple bike, red bike, free bike, garage sale bike" and ends with a dot-dot-dot because it's obvious the bike onslaught is never going to end.

20. I pretty much eat chips and salsa every day, at least a little bit.

21. I make my own cleaning supplies. It's mostly that I got sad about all the plastic bottles. It's also about my penchant for pretty smelly things in nice packaging, and recognizing this as an area in which I can decrease consumption and marketing influence (Fuck you, Mrs. Meyers!).

Also, and this is important: it lets me go around saying "I make my own cleaning supplies".

22. I dye my eyelashes. I do it myself with contraband imported dye that I order online. I still wear mascara on the top ones for thickening purposes.

23. You know what? I don't really like to go out. There, I've said it. I'm usually okay once I am out, but I don't like the going out part. I pretty much dread the whole thing until I walk into the door of wherever I'm supposed to be. This is why I almost never inititate "girls' night out". Because I don't want to go. Until I'm there. Then it's fine.

24. The first time I ever got drunk was with my friend Carrie, on screwdrivers, which we drank out of plastic Thundercats cups. We were fifteen or so, and we danced around outside singing in the street in front of my house. Isn't it good, Norwegian Wood?

25. I would have liked to have named one of the girls after my sister, but her name doesn't go with our last name, and by that I mean, it really would have sounded stupid. Local anchorperson stupid. I hope the thought counts, at least.

Um, Om.

Last weekend I joined a gym. Although for one reason and another I was thwarted from actually going to the gym, until this morning when I went to my first studio yoga class in I can't remember how long.

I was all nervous and flustered because even though I practice pretty regularly at home, I don't think of myself as a real yogini because I don't have a studio practice, and I probably have a million bad habits to break. And I rode my bike, so there was a kind of flurry of looking for the bike lock and then trying to figure out how to carry all my crap and then realizing I was going to be late and feeling guilty for even thinking about just saying "fuck it" and driving the mile and a half to the gym, and then riding a little too fast and building up too much of a sweat and getting all jittery.

I did get there in time (you should always be early for yoga), although it was still hard to find a spot and I was all sweaty and thirsty instead of calm and centered.

I wasn't sure what to expect, because I've never been to a yoga class at a gym. I was kind of thinking it might be more Power Yoga oriented, where it was more about achieving a yoga butt than about achieving nirvana. I was kind of pleasantly surprised when the class turned out to have a full RDA of woo-woo. In fact, it almost didn't have enough focus on my butt, but that's okay, that's what the rest of the gym is for. I appreciated the emphasis on props, which I don't use nearly enough, because I think props help you remember that the point of yoga is not to win, it's to do it correctly. I used props to modify poses I do much more deeply at home, and I'm glad I did, because otherwise I'd have wasted a lot of mojo showing off that I would have needed for other parts of the class.

One thing that bugged the shit out of me was that people kept arriving after she had rung the bells to begin the session. Barring the door to latecomers is something I always appreciated in a studio because it's so fucking distracting to be trying to find your breath while people are shuffling around, having to move your mat to accommodate them when you want to be preparing your mind. But then again, I realized, part of practicing yoga with other people is...other people. If I can work through my practice with Daisy's helpful presence, I can learn to ignore the interruptions of strangers. Harder to ignore though, was the woman who stepped on my mat and that of my neighbor when she walked by on her way to get a strap. Who the fuck walks on someone else's mat? Breathe in peace, breathe out wanting to beat this woman to death with her own bolster. Next time, arrive earlier, try to find a lower-traffic spot in the room.

I had a bit of a breakthrough moment, staring at my belly during a shoulderstand, wondering if it would be weird to wear Spanx under my yoga pants (another thing you never worry about in a home practice: whether anyone can see your flaws the way you can). Anyway, what I realized was that I'd been in shoulderstand for a good five plus minutes without a waver, so really, who gives a shit about some belly flab? All in good time. Also, it occurs to me now that I didn't pay any attention at all to anyone in the room who wasn't either leading the class or stomping all over my mat, with the exception of observing some variations here and there.

In Savasana, I pretended I was floating on my back in water. It worked really well, but not long enough. I have a friend who just cannot handle what she calls the "naptime" part of yoga, and I am afraid I'm with her. I love the beginning, but it really just goes on too long. Eventually my brain refuses to believe that I'm really floating, then it somehow gets the message to my body, then all I want to do is wiggle and sigh with boredom. I skip naptime at home. 

Then I rode my bike home in the rain, cussing.

The Last Day of Holiday Break

Dug is spending it outside making sure the cars we're trying to sell are fit for being parked on El Camino and hopefully sold (hopefully quickly, I'm past embarrassment and well down the road to mortification over the number of cars we've got).

The kids spent half of it in pajamas watching The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe before being forcibly dressed and sent outside. Now they're drag racing in the toy ATV my sister brought them this weekend.

I spent the morning troubleshooting my iPhone (it only works when it's plugged in and does weird Exorcist-type things when it's not; I'm hoping it's a battery issue only because that is relatively cheap compared to anything else it could be. No, it's not under warranty any more).

I've spent the rest of the day getting my mom's old cast iron prepped for seasoning and making a wee dram o' stock out of the remains of last night's roast chicken. In between, I've been working on getting my kitchen organized: Dug put up some new shelving for me, and now I've got to contend with that strange phenomenon where your stuff expands to fill the space available. I have much more room, and still nowhere to put anything. HOW DOES THAT WORK? It leads me to the unhappy conclusion that I will have to clean out the pantry and probably cull some of the things that I swear I'll use someday and therefore have taking up space (lookin' at you, soufflé dish).

We can't go back to school tomorrow, because I'm too far behind on laundry.

Resolved.

--To learn some new things this year. I should really learn to grill just in case anything ever happens to Dug, and I should learn to cook eggs properly (I can scramble beautifully, but that's where my egg cookery ends). It might be useful to learn to fix something (some basic bike maintenance, perhaps?).

--To be more aggressive about taking time for myself, and for Dug and I as a couple.

--Keep working to make daily exercise part of my routine, and keep increasing the amount of vegetables and fruit we eat.

--One word: Vermicomposter.

--Spend more time outside.

--Create a workable daily schedule for myself. I work better with structure but am terrible at creating it for myself. I need to experiment with ways to change that.

--Figure out what I want to be when I grow up (no pressure).

--Write more. Stop thinking about this blog as a space to talk about my kids, start thinking about it as a place to write about whatever's on my mind.