Ordinary Canary

My life, rather like most people’s (I suspect), is rather circular in nature. This feeling has been coming up on me in part with the coming of Mother’s Day in the U.S., which translates into one of the bigger marketing campaigns of the year and always throws me into a reflective mind.  My e-mail inbox has been inundated with basically every store that I’ve ever bought anything from (and there are a lot) trying to convince me that buying their stuff would make my mom happy. Only my mother is no longer in a place where material goods will do much for her — and has been for nearly five years, so this makes me rather grumpy.  My mean streak enjoys making reference of this to every cashier who tries to convince me that my mom would really like a cheap bright pink travel mug for Mother’s Day (they never knew *my* mother – obviously), but mostly I’m trying to wait out the holiday with patience.  Still, the constant references keep putting memories that I hadn’t thought of for most of the years she was alive back in my head.  Death is a funny thing.  I had mostly given up on having much of a relationship with her when she was living, which must have made me more angry than I ever let myself consciously know, because I never thought about the good times when she was alive. But now they’re mostly what I remember when I think about her now.

Most of the good memories come from my pre-teen years.  By the time I hit about thirteen, the distance between us was well established.  But there were a lot of years there where my mom was my favorite person.  I didn’t have a lot of friends as a kid, since I always seemed to stick out.  (My utter fondness for the game of Frisbee aside, I just didn’t have a lot of interests in common with kids, since they weren’t into trying to stuff every possible fact they could find into their heads.  I actually had a goal of reading every book in the library at one point…yeah. Nerd.)  We were close, but then something happened.  Maybe it was just that our basic personalities were so disparate that we probably never had a chance. 

But there were good years, years filled with Friday nights on the fold out couch eating popcorn and watching movies, years where she put the piano in my room and let me play the same songs over and over again, years where we spent hours upon hours discussing the cats and playing Tetris.  I remember stealing her ice skates from her closet and walking around on them in the apartment complex grass, wishing that I lived in a place where you could go ice skating, the way she’d grown up doing.  I used to hide in her closet and look through the photographs and put on her dresses from when we lived in Japan.  I used to pass the hours just waiting for her to come home so that we could sit and have our subpar dinner, neither of us being much in the way of cooks. Then there were the nights we spent baking things out of the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, brownies and cookies. Baking we had down.

And then there were the rest of the years, where we were strangers to each other, where I learned not to look for her company or approval.  When I was a teenager, we more or less lived as roommates (I was obviously the freeloading kind).  I was such an independent beast that when I was sixteen, I planned a trip to Scotland to go look at universities on my own, she let me set everything up and took me to the airport.  I was independent just like she was.  Once I moved out two years later, she and I would often go months without any kind of contact.  I made a lot of effort to try and include her in my life when I first moved out, but it wasn’t long before we only got together to introduce each other to our various boyfriends and respond to family emergencies.  I don’t think either of us had any idea how to have a mother-daughter relationship.  When she first died, it was tough for me to sometimes remember that she was dead, because our everyday relationship was so similar to when she was alive.  I think that with time that we probably would have worked it out; there’s nothing like raising a teenager yourself to give you perspective on your own teen years.  We just ran out of time about twenty years sooner than we should have.

Life is funny like that.  No guarantees.

This last year we’ve had the roommate that mattered from my twenties living with us.  He’s going to be moving out at the end of the month, which sweeps me back to when I decided to move to New York and left him behind.  I don’t know how conscious I was of it in my early twenties, but he was a huge part of the replacement family I formed to replace my own when it became clear that mine wasn’t going to be around.  This time he’s only going about fifteen miles away, but I am still a little sad about it all, as it’s been nice to go back to earlier days.  I think part of it is knowing that I’m not really in the carefree roommate phase of my life anymore; that I will be married, which is, I imagine, going to change everything, even though my Beloved and I have agreed that he’ll always have a place in our home if he wants it.  But it’s not us; it’s the way my friends are reacting to us.  Part of his reason for moving out is that I will no longer just be his friend – I will be someone’s *wife*.  This is a time of transition and change, even though we’ve already been operating as a family since the day the Kid showed up three years ago.  The way others treat us is going to change entirely.  Just being engaged has been a lesson in that.

Five years ago, when my mom died, I was in a period of slash and burn.  I’d ended a relationship, just finally finished off my college degree (useless, but satisfying), made the move to switch jobs and had just watched my friend that’s about to move out now move out of the apartment we were living in at the time.  Then my mom died, which turned my whole world upside down.  I started the new job, found my Beloved, bought a house and settled in.  And here we are, five years later, with nothing but change on the horizon.  It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just how things are.  It’s also rather deja-vu familiar.

So here’s to my mom and the other moms of the world. Happy mother’s day. I hope you didn’t end up with lots of cheap crap the commercial world tried to foist on your offspring as some way in which to thank you for all the sacrifices that you made.

Last weekend was one of the busiest weekends of my life, in which I was barely able to accomplish half of what I wanted to do.  (Clearly I ought to learn how to set realistic expectations.) My house had gotten to a point of distress, so I spent the Saturday not just cleaning, but also taking the time to buy storage for the sheets and organizing them, as well as getting rid of things and switching out winter clothes for summer clothes and dealing with the mounds of laundry that have piled up.

I really don’t have any idea how people with neat houses do it; I also have no idea how to make my house stay clean and still have time to do anything else.  I do live with three people that have greater thresholds for mess than I do, so I do (probably a lot) more than my twenty-five percent, which contributes, but it’s still a mystery.  Even after working all weekend, there are still a ton of messy spots in the house; the bathroom I scrubbed top to bottom two weeks ago needs scrubbing again.  From a time management perspective, short of quitting my job and spending all of my time keeping up with the house, it seems impossible.  I presume that there are ways to make cleaning less labor intensive, so I’ve been focusing on setting up things in that vein, like getting the sheets sorted into nice storage bins and setting up cleaning supplies on every floor of the house.  The best that I’ve got is to keep trying to be more efficient, because I’m just not willing to give up the things I’d rather be doing just to have more time to keep the house clean.  Though I do love coming home to a clean house – the Saturday didn’t feel wasted, because the house seems so much fresher and restful now for all the decluttering and scrubbing that I did.  The process of turning chaos into order is a little bit magical, even though I’m not one to normally love cleaning.  On Saturday, though, it just felt like the right thing to be doing.

On the Sunday I made time to go out cycling, doing a 16 mile training ride in preparation for the 5 Boro Bike Tour, which we’re riding tomorrow.  Cycling is a funny sport for me.  I never want to actually go, but once I’m on a bike and past the first mile, I am filled with such a joy for the freedom that a bicycle brings. There’s really no other transport like it.  Cars rush you by so fast that you can barely take in your surroundings.  Walking is so slow that you barely get anywhere.  But on a bicycle, you can cover a decent amount of ground in a short enough period of time to really get somewhere, but you’re going slow enough that you have time to look around and really see where you are.  It’s a delightful mishmash of situation.  It’s freedom and adventure.  It always fills me with a wonder of the universe, as I get to see my surroundings in an entirely new way.

I tend to take a trail that runs from Massepequa to, I learned, Bethpage.  I was at the north end of the trail when a tall man with a rather impressively extended pot belly walked up to me.  He’d come to the park on foot.  He asked me if I knew how to get to some particular surrounding street.  I told him I had no idea even what town I was in, since I always start at the opposite end of the trail.  He looked at me in surprise, his eyebrows shooting upwards.  “You didn’t know this was Bethpage until I told you right now?”  Not at all, I assured him.  He looked amazed and chuckled, then walked away.  That’s the adventure of cycling; I managed to bike several towns away without even knowing where I was.  The town I was passing through was so irrelevant; but conversely I actually did know exactly where I was, in a different sense.  I knew the trees and the park and the water fountains and I knew how to get there.  What’s in a name?  It’s about the adventure.

I read a recent Time magazine article with Julia Luis Dreyfuss, who most of the world probably knows as Elaine from Seinfield. She’s apparently on a new show called Veep, in which she plays the vice-president.  As a feminist, I probably should have known about that and should probably even watch it.  As a me, I have failed once again at pop culture.  But the very last question they asked her was, “What would you change about your life if you had it to do over again?”  She said, brilliantly, “I would wear more sunblock.”

I am so inspired, Julia Luis Dreyfuss.  To the cycles and the pedals and the cleaning. I hope to live a life where I regret nothing and no time wasted. Here’s to the adventure and wonder of it all.

It is my birthday this week and I will be turning thirty-two, which depending on how you look at it, is either kind of old or very young.  I’m not typically one to get very excited about birthdays, so I don’t have much planned, but I have taken the day off of work.  This is something that I’ve never done before.

I am looking forward to my day off.  I’ve been very carefully not making plans, but I suspect that I’ll spend most of the day working on some fiction that I’ve been inching out train ride by train ride.  I began writing on the train when I got my Gtab, which was why I bought it, and it has worked out very nicely.  (In fact, these words are being written somewhere between Jamaica and Penn.)  In some ways, the train is a productive way to write in that I get two hours of dedicated time per day to do it, but it’s also a distracting way, because it is only an hour at once.  Inevitably, time is lost in trying to figure out where I left off and what I’m expecting my characters to be doing, though it does lead me to spending my work day daydreaming about what’s going to happen next.  Not all ideas being equal, this frequently leads to indecision, but it’s been good to work through these struggles day after day after day.  As with everything, it’s practice, practice, practice.

Having a birthday does make one reflect on one’s life accomplishments – if you’d told my ten year old self that I’d be turning thirty-two without ever having completed a draft of a novel, I would have stomped out of the room.  If you told my thirty-one year old self that I needed to write one, she would utterly panic at the idea of trying to find the time.  From a writing perspective, I have wasted so many years in not writing, because I have let myself get busy with all the other aspects of my life.  Getting established in a career and earning my college degree while working full time didn’t leave a lot of room for imaginative fiction outside of my creative writing classes, but I don’t think my ten year old self would want to hear it.  These are all very reasonable excuses, but they point out that I am not living the sort of free life that I always imagined that writing would lead to.  After all, everyone around me told me what a talented writer I was, so clearly that was what I was meant to be.

Sometimes I wonder if the drive to keep writing just comes from that expectation that was set on me at that age.  There are so many days where the hours of the days pass without a single word being written and, yet, when the writing goes well, nothing else matters at all.  When I can reach that meditative state of writing and, even more miraculously, stay there, it all makes sense.  That’s my birthday meditation.  I have it every year.  So now that that’s out of the way, I can think about all the other birthday things.

The most glorious, of course, being that my birthday is April 25th, a day that falls in the same week as Earth Day, Pot Day, Shakespeare’s birthday and the blooming of the cherry blossoms.  It almost always rains, which would discomfit most people, but is something that I love.  Today is a gray rainy thing, which just makes me want to sit on a train with my Gtab and work on writing while looking out the window.  It is absolutely perfect, even as pools form against my kitchen floor from the truly epic amount of water that’s come down from the sky and lashes in under the back door.  Rain in the spring brings the promise of bounty and I am still enough of a pagan to appreciate that on a very visceral level.  It just makes me happy.

Spring is productivity.  It is writing.  It is watching the ocean crash in to the shore with the passion that spring storms bring.  it is watching the garden get doused with water and knowing that will make the grass grow longer and the roses bloom better.  It is the beginning of abundance, of fertility, for whatever that means to you.  So that’s my birthday wish to the world; go forth and be creative, in whatever way that means to you.  Maybe it’s scribbling the words of characters who only exist in your head.  Maybe it’s blogging about whatever your interest is.  Maybe it’s planting flowers in a garden, maybe it’s writing code.  Maybe it’s making films, or painting or dancing or just dreaming.  This is the season of promise, where everything is beginning all over again.  Then come tell me all about it, because you are my inspiration.

I spent Easter Sunday doing a lot of research into the year 1943, which is the setting for a piece of fiction that I’ve been working on for a while now.  It was a quiet day and I wasn’t feeling too well, so instead of writing, I decided to read the Internet until my headache demanded otherwise.

I came across several interesting stories, but the one that seemed most appropriate for this very holy weekend of Good Friday, Passover and Easter was that of the Four Chaplains.  The four chaplains were a rabbi, a priest and two Protestant ministers that were shipping out to Greenland on their way towards an undisclosed location in 1943.  They were on board the USAT Dorchester, a cruise-liner-turned-transport ship with slightly over 900 sailors aboard.  The Dorchester was torpedoed by a German submarine when it was off the coast of Newfoundland and had to be abandoned.  The four chaplains organized the evacuation to get as many sailors into rescue boats as possible, while getting as many of the rest into life jackets as they could.  When the life jackets ran out, they gave their own life jackets up for others.  Survivors reported that while the ship went down, the Four Chaplains had their arms linked and were praying together for the safety of the sailors, most of whom died.  Hundreds lost their lives to hypothermia, even though the Dorchester was being escorted by three other ships.  just over two hundred of the nine hundred survived, which are numbers that are hard to even imagine.

I am not a faithful person – I was raised without a faith and have never been able to find one that felt like it fit me.  I’ve flirted with a few over time, but seem to be mostly drawn to those that don’t require a firm committment from me to a particular set of ideology, which seems like it misses the point of it all.  I don’t believe in God, mostly because it’s a difficult practice to begin when you weren’t raised surrounded by other people who do believe.  But, unlike a lot of athiests who do come out of religious homes, I have a really deep respect for people who do.  I strongly believe in the value of having a faith practice and a faith community.  I’ve always been jealous of people who come to that naturally — even having a religion to rebel against gives you a cultural identity that I just don’t have.  And while I have a deep respect for the practitioners, I have an even deeper respect and admiration for the leaders in faith communities, because their committment to God seems so unshakable.  We do not live in a world in which much is unshakable.

So, in reading about these four men of God, each from a different faith, who were joined and bonded in that faith as they died together, absolutely gave me chills.  It was nearly seventy years ago that they died, but the way they died and the way that they lived, choosing a dangerous life of service, has touched me.  So here’s to the Four Chaplains, to unshakable faith, to people who willingly sacrifice their own lives so that others may live.  And here’s to interfaith service and four men who died praying in three different languages.  There are so many different lessons in their story for all of us.

It’s been a weekend filled with preparations for the wedding, as we’re starting to get close enough to the date that we can no longer delay taking care of anything with a lead time.  In the last week, we’ve ordered our invitations, done the bridesmaid Kickass Women of Honor dresses, ordered the pig for the day-after barbeque  and started our gift registry.  (Easy enough to start – just pick a store that sells Caphalon and hope for the best).  In possibly the biggest vanity point of all our wedding preparations, I also signed up to go to a tanning salon, because my dress has a rather dramatic dropped back and, living in a beach town as I do, I manage to get burned early enough every year to develop weird tan lines that don’t go away all summer.  One year, due to a rather unfortunate incident with the last dregs of a bottle of spray on sunblock, I even managed polka dots.

So vanity must be appeased, as that dress cost way too much for me to walk down the aisle in August with polka dot skin.

I’m sure tanning salons are no big deal for a lot of people, but they’re totally foreign experiences to me and, to be honest, intimidating.  So the first night I went in just to ask questions and sign up for a package of sessions. I asked so many questions that a rather long line formed behind me of very, very tan people.  As this was early March, I was clearly in the right place.  And, although I shocked the counter desk teenager by not having the slightest idea what a bronzer is for, I made it through.  I then retreated and went to my knitting circle, realizing that if I didn’t go for the first appointment within a week, I’d probably never make it back.

That Saturday, I dutifully put bronzer all over.  And I mean all over.  I put on a dress, since I’ve never liked putting jeans on over skin with lotion on it.  It was not warm enough for a dress, as I quickly found out, but it did making walking into the salon a little easier.  Putting on a dress makes me feel like a person in disguise, like the sort of person that might just be comfortable in a tanning salon.

I mentioned it was my first time tanning ever.  The teens behind the counter squealed in delight.  They fussed over me enough to set me at my ease.  One of them introduced herself and showed me back to a room with a bed.  She pointed out the big blue button that I was to press to start the experience.  She also mentioned that it was going to go on automatically in seven minutes.  This was the sort of talk that I needed, as I respond extremely well to deadlines.  She left and I, realizing there was an objective to be met within a timeframe, got down to business.  Within a minute, I was rather exposed and staring up at the heavy lamps above my head through the weird eye protection sunglasses that you must must wear.  And then I realized how claustrophobic I am.  I inched the top of the bed down a few inches, which was very brave indeed.  Then, after several minutes of arguing with myself, I pushed the damn blue button and scrunched up my eyes and waited.  For a moment nothing happened, then I was suddenly lying on a beach, so long as I closed my eyes and ignored the loud buzz of the lamps and worked aggressively on using my imagination.  Which is to say that I could see how it could *become* relaxing, but that I wasn’t quite there yet.  In fact, I was pretty damn convinced that the second I stopped looking, the tanning bed lid was going to come flying down on me and smoosh me and burn me to bits.  So i kept an eye on the trixy thing, instead of relaxing like I suspect you’re supposed to.

My guide had mentioned that if I didn’t turn over, there was a good chance I wouldn’t tan between my upper thigh and tush, as there’s a bit of a shadow there when you’re lying on it.  I’ve been back again, but I still haven’t mustered the courage.  That lid needs watching.  (So far, I have settled into trying to smash my skin about in such a way as to alleviate shadows.  Who wants a pale strip across their butt?)  I have eight more sessions in the package I bought and, after two sessions, i have the bare beginnings of a little tan.  It’s certainly respectable for April, anyway, though I would probably be blistered if it were July.  It is joyously even, with no weird marks, which is kind of addictive.  I can see why people are into this.

Really, after all the out of character things that planning a wedding has lead me into, I’m starting to feel like marriage will be a breeze.  Our life now is a mock marriage; we share the household tasks and function as a family.  Marrying Himself is a natural course of action, a mere extension of the life that we’re already living.  Being engaged has certainly deepened our bond, because it raised the stakes, and I expect that when we’re actually married, this will happen again.  But none of that is nearly as frightening as getting into a tanning bed for the first time and pressing that big blue button.

A few years back, my mother died quite suddenly of MRSA, in part of an epidemic that killed several children in the D.C. area. She was the only adult to die from it and, being a teacher, her death got national attention. Peter Jennings ran a report that featured her. The night she died, I went home to her empty house and was greeted by news crews. Very few people get to honor their parents in such a public way, so I talked to every media outlet that wanted an interview and ended up on TV, in the Washington Post and on some radio show somewhere. It was a great gift to be able to say nice things about her to such a wide audience.

Last week I was contacted by her church, who are starting up a scholarship in her name. They asked me to write an academic biography, as the recipients of the scholarship are high school seniors from her church that are carrying 4.0 GPAs. There’s really no better role model than my mom for academic excellence. We come from a family of academic overachievers; I am at least third in a direct line of women who believed in education above all things. My mother takes the cake, though, so it’s been fun going through her records and realizing that while I may be an unbelievable prat, she was even more so. My favorite part has been finding a letter from her to my grandmother in which she was worried that her average in military language school could drop from a 98% to a 95%. Mom, we are too much alike.

I am beyond honored at the scholarship and will be supporting it. I can think of no greater tribute. My mother was the classic case of a student that was overqualified to go to college, but had no money for it, but wasn’t going to let reality stop her. She joined the Army for the tuition benefits and started her first university classes while eight months pregnant with me and working full-time. This was after she had graduated from military linguist school, where she learned Russian well enough to be commended repeatedly for her contributions in translating military radio transmissions. By the time she was twenty-three, she was separated from my father, my primary caretaker and a sophomore in college. She went on to graduate Cum Laude with a Bachelors in Psychology and then a Masters in Education, all while being a single parent. In other words, my mother was a badass.

Writing her biography has reminded me of all the way I grew up on the University of Maryland campus, going to the library with her and helping her Xerox papers. I learned to read books and roam the library stacks to entertain myself while she was in classes. (True fact: university library stacks still give me shivers of absolute delight.) I sat by her night after night as she read textbooks and wrote papers on her electric typewriter that she bought for $295 in 1980. She’d had to put it on credit, but she paid it off month after month. Even when it was extremely difficult, my mother pursued her education. In doing so, she made me an unbelievable prat with the same curiosity for the world that she had. Writing about her has been an awful lot like finding myself. It has been a great deal of fun.

So, hey, thanks Mom. Thanks for it all.

I never posted pictures of the Narragansett sweater that I made.  The design is Thea Coleman, who is BabyCocktails on Ravelry.  This was, like most of my sweater pattern choices, a quick knit. I think I made it in about two weeks.  It should be understood that I spend two hours a day commuting on a train, so that probably translates into something like twenty hours of work.  It’s a seamless top down pullover, which is pretty much the fastest knit that you’re going to find.  It’s also majority stockinette, so you should choose a yarn with some visual interest, though too much visual interest will make it overwhelm.  I chose Yarn of the Andes heather tweed, because I adore heathered tweeds.  I think the fabric came out nicely.  My picture is crappy, so you’ll just have to believe me.  (It’s hard to control the photography when you’re also the model and your photographer has a very short attention span for fiber projects.)

I made it too big.  it’s supposed to fit as it does in the pictures, but when I wear it, the neckline moves up and begins to choke a bit.  I have a 36″ bust, so not wanting it to be too small, and having learned to differentiate between my size and garment size, I went for the next size up, which was 42″.  Six inches of ease, I thought, would make certain that even if my gauge were off, the sweater would still get over my frame.  Well, it does, with enough room to spare that it’s not as flattering as it should be.  Whoops,  lesson learned.  This was before I went to the lecture by Debbie Bliss, where I learned that knitting fabric stretches a lot, so you’d be surprised who a 36″ sweater will fit.  The next sweater will be for a 36″ bust and we’ll see how we do.  If I ever finish the socks I’m working on.

I’ve been having serious focus problems with my knitting lately.  I find that when I’m facing challenges in the rest of my life that it often does translate into a sort of artistic angst with my needlework.  When I’m stressed from work (the current issue), suddenly nothing I’m doing on the needles is right.  I tear out projects, doubt my yarn choices and feel completely unable to actually accomplish anything worthwhile.  The creative reserves are depleted; my beloved fiber work becomes a source of distress.   Augh.  Recognizing this does seem to help me stop the madness and I think that I’ve just reached that point.  My work stress is unlikely to resolve soon, since it’s dependent on several large projects that are going to be slow to complete (even though I am a rock star), but the least I can do is turn it off when I get home and actually enjoy the things that are supposed to give me pleasure.  This week I turned the heel on that damn sock and for this week, that is just going to have to be enough.

My obsession with my Gtab continues; so I used the opportunity of needing a case for it to use up some of my early handspun yarns. Lately I seem to be too impatient to bother with finding other people’s patterns,so I just sort of made it up as I went along.  I knew that I wanted to use stranded knitting to make the bag thick and I happen to really enjoy alternating yarns over 1 stitch (i.e. *K1 MC, K1 CC, rep from *), so that’s what I did.  One of the yarns that I chose was the last thing I spun before going to SOAR – it is overtwisted and overplied, which makes for yarn with the basic consistency of bundles of straw.  Not very pleasant.  The second yarn I used was yarn that I spun in Maggie Casey’s class at SOAR from a fleece that we handcarded ourselves.  In comparison, it is the softest and fluffiest yarn that you could imagine.  Even standing alone, it’s a yarn that I can actually knit with, which differentiates it quite a bit from all of the yarn that I made before taking her class.

My bag is scratchy and scruffy and rough, but it absolutely does the job.  And how many Gtabs get to be carried around in a hand carded, hand spun, hand knitted bag?  At the end of the day, that’s what all of this fiber madness is about.  My bag might be a little rough and unfinished looking, but every single scrap of it is the reward of the labor of my hands.  I go to bed satisfied that I have brought something into this very mass-produced, commercialized world that is totally unique and mine.  And I had a lot of fun doing it, though knitting with my pre-SOAR yarn did contribute to a carpal tunnel flare.  I’m really looking forward to knitting with some of the other yarns that I’ve made since, since I can tell by their feel that they’re nice and soft.

The holiday weekend was filled with pure, unadulterated laziness. With Himself out of town, I thought that I might find the three days off rather oppressive, but I mostly found that even with three days basically to myself, there still  wasn’t enough time to do half of what I wanted to.  Clearly the problem is not external.

I started out the weekend with an early morning yoga class, which I followed up on Sunday with a two hour yoga inversions workshop.  Basically I learned that I am not very good at being upside down.  I also learned that three hours of yoga in two days when your practice has not been particularly dedicated over the last year will turn your thighs into rock. It will take an actual volcanic explosion to make them molten enough to want to move again.  But I’m sure it was good for me; you’ve just gotta’ see my one-legged crow.  Maybe some day I’ll take the leap of faith and get that second leg off of the ground. 

Yogic inversions are suppposed to be good for the soul because they make you face your fears (and the strength limitations of your biceps).  I must concur.  It is scary to stand on your head with only a thin yoga mat between you and the floor.  And the floor hurts.  There are a couple of ways to work through this.  One, you acknnowledge the fear and then let it go.  Headstand.  Two, you learn how to position your body in a sensible way so that you master the physics.  This creates a body awareness.  The hip bone is connected to the leg bone.  Arms are easier to rest on if they’re positioned vertically enough that they turn into gravity supported shelves.  Crow.  Or, three, my method; find a wall, put your head on the mat, hop around a bit a la Gollum and pray.

You can be the judge of which method is the most spiritual.  I can tell you from experience that the last will eventually yield results, though it helps if you mix the first two in as well.  I find that yoga provides a lot of metaphors for dealing with life in general. Learning to acknowledge and bypass fear is only one of them.

The most valuable thing that I have learned in yoga is that success is rarely the correct object by which to measure achievement. It’s actually a rather shallow measurement, because it misses all the detail of the journey.  And if I’m worried about success, even when my yoga neighbor does a perfect unassisted middle of the room headstand (again), I’m never going to get that second foot off the ground.  And isn’t it the fact that I keep trying to fly despite failure really the important truth?

In an unrelated adventure, I also met Cheeks the Quaker parrot this weekend.  (He does not actually wear a Quaker broadcloth suit.  I was disappointed.) Cheeks is approximately one pound, with semi-clipped wings, which he still waves around a lot.  And Cheeks crossed the entire living room to climb up my pants leg, using beak and claw, to sit on my knee and try to pick up the three pound ball of yarn I was knitting with.  He must have tried at least a dozen times, with each attempt winning him a few more inches before he’d have to put it back down and rest.  But he kept trying, which kind of makes that heart-filled creature my yoga hero.

At least untill he shows up in my yoga class and does a perfect unassisted middle of the room headstand.  Then the bastard is on his own

      I’m writing this post from a new toy, which means I am typing rather slower than usual, or perhaps rather faster than usual, given that the only appendages in use are my thumbs and all they ordinarily have to do is slam the space bar in a very impressive and, if I’m lucky in my keyboard, noisy fashion.  So really, this is going much faster than it ought.

I took a Cisco test this weekend, so have been busy pushing obscure facts about BGP in my head for a few weeks.  I passed, which renewed my CCNP for three years, so I decided to celebrate by replacing my ZaReason Ubuntu netbook with a Viewsonic GTablet, which being the cheapskate that I am, I bought second-hand off Ebay.  I gave the netbook to our House Teenager, thus fulfilling my linux nerd quota of forcing others to use an operating system they’ve never heard of.

I will make a nerd of him yet.

The Gtablet runs Android, which I admit to a certain nerdly interest in, though mostly because I just have to play with new stuff.  The fun part of this is that people go off and write their own ROMs, so the look and feel of your tablet can vary quite a lot.  So can its functionality, so swapping around ROMs is not for the faint of heart.  There was a moment earlier today where my Gtablet lost its internal hard drive, which was my fault.  So I found it again.  This may not be an experience that everyone enjoys, but I sure do.

The ROM that the Gtab ships with begins by having you set up your account in a group called Family, which would indicate that I’m supposed to share my new toy.  Clearly a fundamental misunderstanding, so it just had to go.

I started with Vegan Ginger, but couldn’t access the Android market and, as we all know, it is all about the apps.  I bought it with the intention of being able to get more writing done and to take better advantage of my long train commute.  (So far, so good.) So I’ve been playing with productivity apps, like list makers and WordPress and simple writing editors.  All of which I’ll be using.  But I also found an app where I get to raise sheep and throw them around.  I’m a knitter and a spinner, I just can’t help myself.

Although my Gtab and me are still in the honeymoon phase, I can tell we’re going to last.  The netbook never really worked for me the way I’d hoped because I primarily want to use it on my commute, which is an hour long train ride.  It only had an hour long battery life if I kept the wifi off and the form factor didn’t work well for being scrunched up in a seat with a stranger sitting right next to you.  The tablet is a little more public to work on, but by being smaller and working on a touch screen with a normal size keyboard, is actually easier to use.  And the apps are there to help streamline the process.  Ahh, the apps.