Day 45 Miss Communication
Once upon a time, I did a brief stint as a cosmetics commando. You know the company, rhymes with Tammy Faye. I was all a-quiver, anticipating my meteoric rise to make-up fame! Not only would I get pots of money and good skin, I’d learn to speak! In public!
Despite of hours of practice, smiling and gesturing at the mirror, I was a mass of trembling nerves before my first party. My hostess directed me to the coffee table where I set out my things, centred myself, took a deep breath … and choked. Literally. This was no little coughing fit. My wide-eyed hostess whacked me on the back, pushed glasses of water at me and finally led me to the washroom where I spent the first ten minutes of my perfect speech hacking up a lung.
When I eventually emerged, she was waiting for me, white-faced, a straw in one hand and a steak knife in the other, preparing I guess for some sort of desperate meatball surgery. Her friends had fled the scene.
My voice gone, my good skin mottled blue and red, my expensive mascara dripping off my chin, I ended my first party and my cosmetics-sales career by throwing some samples at her and croaking, “Try these, (gasp) they’re great.”
But spit-valve malfunctions aside, one of my biggest life challenges is to use words properly, directly, and clearly.
“Miss Communication!” I declared to my husband one night. “That’s my goal!”
“Congratulations,” he said, not looking up from the sports highlights. “You miscommunicate with the best of them.”
(To be fair, ever since our conversation about a neurotic dream of mine, he hasn’t been terribly motivated to pay attention. “You had an erotic dream?” he answered, perking up his ears. “Was I in it?”
“You sure were!” I responded, bursting into tears.)
Language is important. For instance, some of Bikram’s flowing dialogue is just weird. “Breathing is normal,” the instructor intones. Well, unless you’re a fish, duh. It took me weeks to figure out that what they intend is not a declarative, but a directive: they’re telling us to breathe normally.
There was an older gentleman in Tuesday’s class who was definitely not breathing normally. In fact, he was gasping rather alarmingly. Then I remembered that I’ve seen him before and he keeps returning, alive and well, so I guess that’s his baseline. Maybe for him, gasping is normal.
Bikram’s instructions have other strange content, such as: the mysterious Japanese Ham Sandwich. That’s what I’m supposed to look like when I bend forward and (try to) rest my face against my shins.
And why do we have to put our “exactly foreheads” to our knees? How about “put your forehead exactly on your knees.”
I’m aware that such loosely played language is my particular nails-on-chalkboard. I actually enjoyed grammar in high-school, what can I say? I don’t judge those of you who can’t spell or deconstruct sentences. I may laugh at you in private, but know that I do it with love.
Experts say there are many interpretations for every statement: what I meant to say, what I actually said, what you heard, what you understood … and on and on. Do we ever truly say what we mean? Do we even know what we mean? No wonder communication is the basis for relationships – and conflict. Language is a miracle.
So much lies hidden under the surface of smiles, clothing and mannerisms, waiting for the words that will reveal the person within. Those words may be different for each of us, but emotions are universal. We all feel frightened, joyful, inadequate, loved, lonely, enraged; we all struggle towards expression. Having the courage to be honest builds strength in relationships. Sharing our feelings through words is what makes us human.
So I keep trying. Speak. Explain. Apologize. Try again. Words strung together into sentences, sentences woven into relationships, a blanket to warm the wordless core of each of us.
“I don’t know why it’s so important to me,” I said to my husband later that same day. “I guess it’s just part of my artistic nature.”
His head came up at that, his eyes widened, then softened in compassion.
“Honey,” he said, reaching for my hand. “You’re not autistic.”
Day 43 Why Women Can’t Sleep
How I wish it wasn’t so… last night at about 2 am, while listening to my beloved gargle on his tonsils, planning my week and making mental lists, I remembered this ditty, passed on to me by my friend Tracy. It’s been making the rounds, so if you’ve already seen it, just humor me, okay? I’m tired.
Have you ever wondered how a woman’s brain works? Well…..it’s finally explained here in one, easy-to-understand illustration:
Everyone of those little blue balls is a thought about something that needs to be done, a decision or a problem that needs to be solved.
A man only has only two balls. They consume all his thoughts, and he sleeps like a baby.
Day 37 Reduce, Reuse, Recycle… Reinvent?
When I was a kid, we lived by many rules, one of which was “use it up, wear it out, make do or do without.” Yes, we were environmentalists before it was cool. My people can stretch a dime, an onion, a teabag, a pair of jeans, like you wouldn’t believe. My mother sewed our clothes, patched holes, let down hems, and when the garments were truly unwearable, cut them into squares for quilts. And despite their deep distrust of all things artistic, Mennonites make quilts of breath-taking beauty.
Long-time tillers of the earth, we also take pride in growing and/or creating our own food. (Which leads to an aspect of stretching-the-jeans that isn’t so admirable.) I love to garden, but I’m married to a pave-paradise-put-up-a-tennis-court kind of guy with a deep distrust of things without UPC codes, so I mostly keep this to myself.
Crunchy-granola type things just excite me, though. I can’t help it. It’s in my genes.
I’ve been reading Katrina Kenison‘s memoir, The Gift of An Ordinary Day, recently, in which the author transplants her family from their comfortable urban home to a tumble-down rural saltbox, to live a “simpler” life. Their house is quickly deemed unliveable, however, and the project takes on a raze-and-rebuild complication, which she describes with guilt and mourning, as if it’s a kind of euthanasia. At the last second, however, they are able to salvage some of the 200-year old bones to incorporate into the new structure.
Perhaps because I spent a few formative years in a rehabbed school-house, I can understand this desire to “rescue” a building. (I’m a sucker for lost causes. Always have been. I once tried to save an abandoned, epileptic Pomeranian puppy, who turned out to be a nasty little land-shark. Sweetest, most adorable ball of fluff you’ve ever seen in your life – when he wasn’t convulsing or trying to take your hand off.)
So I was intrigued this morning to read in the Vancouver Sun about Barry Joneson. A self-described skid-row addict who dissolved after the death of his little boy, he now combines “social reconstruction” with his “deconstruction” project, in which houses slated for landfill are instead salvaged, and kids heading down a rough road are given a crowbar and a second chance. Talk about your reusing and recycling – and social justice too! This guy could be Mennonite!
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By the way, for those of you joining me recently, this day marks 37 consecutive days of Bikram yoga, my personal foray into fitness, personal growth, self-awareness and mid-life inner peace. 90 minutes every day in a room kept at a minimum temperature of 104 degrees, and 40% humidity. It’s hell on hamstrings, but that’s kind of the point.
I’ve reached a stage in my life where I need to change things up, body and mind. A rescue-and-reconstruction project on myself, you might say, and this is where I’m documenting the journey. Thanks for joining me.