That guy

Remember how I shared about that guy from Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic”?

Well, I did as planned with the whole ‘one last purging cry’ to finish off all of the stress of the situation… for the next while, it was still a bit unsettling for me, but increasingly better every day that passed.

By the time I saw him again this week, I had truly let it all go out of the way – we had (at least, I had) and awesome time talking about this and that and being wonderful, somewhat silly people together… I got to have the friendship experience I truly want to have with wonderful people, especially wonderful men.

Eventually, I want to have a certain kind of awesome relationship with a my man in particular, but I want always to have these wonderful friendships with men otherwise – I think they are good for me and for the world.

And then, as I was considering today how it had gone so well with him this week, and I thought about the song again, I turned on the radio in the car for once… and would you guess what was playing on the station that came on?(!!!)

Yup.

“Ironic” by Alanis Morissette… and it was about five seconds before the exact line I’d been considering… talk about perfect timing.

I took it as a total sign of success on my part, that I’d done good. 😛

It was great. 😀

Post-a-day 2019

10,000 Steps

Some days, you rent a red 2013 beetle and, after spending four hours straight tutoring, drive two hours out of town to visit your cousin, who is in from… somewhere, anyway…, and you find yourself walking the neighborhood in the middle of the night together (even though you have to leave before seven the next morning), because you only reached 5,000 steps (of your required daily 10,000) in all of your tutoring and driving, and you find yourself, as you listen to Norah Jones to compare it with the Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys similar songs your cousin was playing on the piano, chuckling silently and inwardly at the silliness of the whole situation (including the part where you technically have two other vehicles sitting back at home right now), also wondering how that morning wake-up is going to go…

Oh, no… that, again, is just my some days… in particular, my today… 😛

Post-a-day 2019

T-shirts

To this day, I remember Kristin L— in the bathroom at middle school, saying that the ideal roll for a t-shirt sleeve was two rolls up…

To this day, I still agree with her…

And I think of her just about every time I roll or consider rolling my t-shirt sleeves…

And, every time I think of her in this scenario, I have a fleeting moment of physical memory of my nervousness, my sense of not-quite-adequacy I always had around her… I envied her, and, at times, longed to be her (she, of course)… I watched her, observed her, taking in the lessons.

What did I love so much about her?

Well, she was somewhat popular, but it wasn’t so much that as the qualities and attributes that made her popular that had me longing most.

She danced.

I eventually became a world champion dancer (yes, I have an actual world title).

She did the French tuck with her t-shirts, and rolled the sleeves up twice, always looking fabulous.

I now do that when I feel like with my t-shirts (instead of being too scared of declared to be “copying”, and then not doing it st all).

She wore bras that looked feminine.

I eventually got there, but have found my own version of balancing feminine with natural and with comfortable.

She was confident in life (mostly, anyway… an air of general confidence, we’ll say).

I am comfortable in who I am, and am generally confident in myself and about life as a whole (though the rough bits get to me at times).

She had a Jeep destined to her, horses to visit, and a determined location for college.

I had lots of openness and no-idea-ness for my far future, and kind of still do…, but I embrace it as a dream board to collage nowadays… and I’ve been interning with horses, learning to care for and ride them, too…

All of this made her gorgeous in my eyes.

The comfortable self-confidence projects radiance from my own eyes, and I find myself staring at smiling me in the mirror on many of the good days, and even on some of the not-too-good ones… the rest of my accomplishments have little to do with the beauty I see and admire in myself.

Yet, there is still something about her that makes my insides feel clenchy and hollow and longing, whenever I think about her or her life at present… I still little girl style long to be more like her (she)… to be her (she)… even though I know I want to be myself… that little girl still longs for something unsatisfied in the relationship, it seems, and I’m not sure what it is…

Perhaps I could write her a letter, read it aloud, as though to her (but not actually to her), and then let it all go… perhaps that would handle it all for me.

Yes, I think I’ll give that a go next week (because I still have final papers for this week to do).

Wish me luck and freedom! 😀

Post-a-day 2019

Some Nights

Some nights, we are calm and at ease, for we know we have accomplished our expected tasks for the day.

And some nights, we are not, because we haven’t…

Tonight is one of the latter “some nights”… The thing is, though, I’m actually really interested in all of this research I’ve been doing for this paper… I just don’t want to hassle with putting it all together in a paper… you know what I mean?

I think I do, anyway…

Well, back to the paper organizing, so I can get to the actual writing… which is due to be turned in and then presented tomorrow… oops 😛

Hashtag I’mANutJob, right?*

*If you haven’t seen it, check out Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake’s skit on hashtags… that’s what was on my mind just now with that line. 😛

Post-a-day 2019

Freudian slip-thoughts

(It kind of makes me think of slipcovers and slip dresses…slip-thoughts)

Do you ever notice yourself making a sort of Freudian slip in your mind?

I know we have them all over the place in our spoken, verbal language, but what about before the spoken part, before the words leave our lips… does it still count then?

Today, while driving to check on my friend’s lovely cat, I was considering a piece of a conversation I’d just had, one which has repeated often recently.

I live in a yoga studio.

When people discover this, they often ask if I do yoga there just all the time.

The answer, of course, is, “No.”

Why would my life be so predictable?… we know me well enough to know things are never quite so simple in my life.

Anyway, when this happens, I tell people how I actually prefer practicing a different type of yoga – there are certainly aspects of this one that I love and that I love doing, but I don’t love doing the typical class of this type of yoga… it’s just not my style when I’m looking for yoga.

Usually, when I’m looking for yoga, I’m looking for stretchy yoga.

And, if I’m looking for stretch practice or help, I think of stretchy yoga.

So the two ideas, yoga and stretch, usually go together for me.

The yoga where I live is a bit difficult to do, at times, and you never know if you’re walking into a really tough class or an easy one.

They’re great – don’t get me wrong – but a work-out is not what I have in mind when I’m thinking about doing some yoga… I’m thinking about stretching… a lot.

So, anyway, I explained this in the conversation, right?

Right.

Thinking about it in the car, afterward, I ended up pausing to focus on traffic and maneuvering through it with care, and I sort of held my place in the conversation analysis by repeating one particular phrase over and over again.

It became a sort of mantra, as often happens when I need to pause a mental analysis briefly.

I continued repeating it rather passively in my mind, not paying much attention to whatever was going on with the words inside my head, trusting that they’ll spark the right memory, whenever I return focus to them…

After a few blocks of driving, I was able to refocus on my inner dialogue.

… And I couldn’t quite figure out what on Earth I was talking about inside my head… it made no sense to me… what could I have been thinking about that gave me this particular thought.

“I always prefer the super sexy…”

What???

I quickly began to analyze how I could mean such a statement… and I also quickly discovered that such a statement is not really true in any general sense – I don’t usually prefer the super sexy anything … unless it’s men around me… in which case, I suppose I might just prefer the super sexy…

… so that could have been what was going on regarding thought process: I was thinking of having sexy men in my life… except that I wasn’t… it didn’t sound familiar at all…

So that had me thinking about that in the first place, I wonder?… where did sexy men come from?

And then it hit me, how I got to such a phrase.

“I always prefer the super stretchy yoga.”

That’s what I had said aloud earlier, and that is the phrase where I had paused in my mental review of the conversation… the phrase that had been out on repeat…

And so, I suppose my relaxed mind made easy associations and relaxations of words, as I passively repeated my bookmarked phrase, as has happened plenty in the past… “yoga” and the following phrase dropped off the end… “stretchy” turned slowly into “sexy”… and there you have it: I always prefer the super sexy.

It had me wonder: is that a Freudian slip of sorts?… Was my subconscious mind telling me something within my conscious mind?

Why bother with speaking aloud, when the brain can handle the whole thing on the inside, right?

I don’t know.

But it did make me laugh a whole bunch, when I discovered what had happened… I mean, how often does yoga turn into sexy stuff, eh? 😛

Haha

Post-a-day 2019

an Ouch of fitness

It all seems to hurt now… I’ve only taken a day off from the exercise, but all the muscles seem to hurt now.

My aunt adjusted one of my shoulders – deltoid was kind of up in the shoulder, thus some really odd feelings from time to time – today, and it feels loads better already.

However, it kind of just brought attention to how messy everything else is right now… no, they aren’t as bad as that shoulder was, but they all kind of suck right now, nonetheless.

I did an upper body chair yoga stretch class video just now, and I am acutely aware of what feels like a hundred plus tiny spots of tightness and soreness throughout my upper body… my neck feels absurdly tight on each side, all the muscles that connect along the sides of my spine seem to have knots in them, somewhere, and my left shoulder is just far too high (now that my right one is in its proper place)…

I feel like I need to be tossed like a rag doll into a trampoline, and then bounces around a while, so everything can be shaken up just enough to relax and, eventually, fall back into its proper place.

If only that were a viable option… as it is, it’s probably a good thing I have no trampoline access, because it wouldn’t work out as I’d like, anyway… 😛

Ugh!

God, please, heal my body tonight and tomorrow…. take full advantage of my two days off of exercise, and heal my body to a comfortable beauty, that I might better share your love in and with the world.

Amen

Post-a-day 2019

A doubly dry spell

The wells of the sky now seem to be dry.

And I,

Alone again in my room,

Singularly sigh.

“I feel you, skies… I feel you…

Today was not as expected,

And I can’t quite tell if I am preparing to burst into song – somewhere way in the near future – or am replenishing the water within, that I might, once again, let it all flow forth, releasing all of this ick inside that cannot abide…

Ugh…”

Post-a-day 2019

This storm inside has moved outside

Desperation seems to fill my insides…

My heart rate rises, ever so slowly,

As the rain pounds…

Kilos…

Down, and down, and down…

And the lighting in the sky lights my room through the skylights,

in full and varied, rapid, never-ceasing flashes…

And the fans blow,

Because this is Houston…

And the noise is like pressure on my chest, weighing me, pushing on me, toward the ground…

I hunch over, ever so slightly, at first,

And find myself, ten minutes later, almost in a seated ball, so hunched have I become…

Avoiding the pounds… kilos… of the rain overhead…

And I am tired, physically and mentally, and sleepy, with near/exhausted eyes…

Yet I cannot seem to turn out this little light of mine, this little lamp of warm, glowy, salt-lamp-covered light… my beacon in this night, my comfort, my accompaniment, my almost friend…

The storm reigns tonight, and the lighting has something to SAY, even if the thunder is only background… yes, this lightning has something to say, and it is saying it with much fervor and a demand to be noticed…

I can hear it, whether my eyes are watching it or not…

Yes, I can hear it…

She has much to say tonight…

Post-a-day 2019

Fatness

I entitled this “Fitness”, but the phone decided to change it to “Fatness”, when I went to click on the writing section, and the phone offered/suggested alternatives to what I’d written… it still somewhat applies, so I’m leaving it… it’s like a Freudian slip for the technology age. 😂

So, after class today, I was talking with one of the coaches about when I might expect to see visual results with my body from these workouts.

We talked briefly about my diet, and then he requested to speak honestly.

“Of course(!).”

“When you first came in here…[…], you looked kind of sedentary…[…] Now, you already have definition in your body… in your legs… in your – you look like an athlete…[…] before, …” (makes faces) “… Now, you look like an athlete.”

It’s been a month of these classes, and I’ve attended 23 of them so far.

I checked my activity log for running, walking, and biking – and I only log my bike ride to and from the workouts, as well as any runs of a mile or more in the workout, not the actual workouts themselves – and I already have almost half the number of activities and half the distance covered that I had in all of last year… and I’ve gotten almost all of that this past month.

I had one activity, a 3-mile hike/run through the hills in Redlands, California, when I went with a friend who was moving there, logged this year otherwise… nothing else.

So, in one month, I’m already almost halfway to all of my official exercise activities last year.

Pretty cool, huh?

I mean, totally bummer that I had so few last year, but we can’t change that, nor can we change the mental struggle that kind of ran the show regarding all of that…, we can, however, embrace the freedom that is the new state of affairs, where I am now governing my fitness and my fitness activities (not some mental freak-out), and I am actively pursuing genuine and somewhat intense physical fitness.

So, woohoo!

Yay!

And, though I’ve felt that my progress visually is slow – aka my belly and haunches and inner thighs still seem so ugh – it is nice to have the positive encouragement from the coach today, as well as my sneaky shoulder muscle for when I brush my teeth. 🙂

Yay, for mental and physical fitness! 🙂

Post-a-day 2019