hot yoga / not yoga

today, i learned that hot yoga is not a good idea when 16 weeks pregnant. my neighbor told me about a new yoga center nice and close to my house (direct fast bus route close, hooray!) but they only do power (vinyasa) yoga, in hot rooms. i was all amped, b/c i'd heard great things about hot yoga and been wanting to try it. pierre got all worried and made me call the midwife, who heard about the heated room and was like, girl, sit your ass in the house and do a DVD!

paraphrasing, of course.

what she actually said was that raising yr body temp like that for any sustained period of time and then doing exercises was a super bad idea for combination dehydration/babycooking reasons; particularly this early on. that body temp regulation is a big reason you sweat more when you're preggo (which i haven't seen, but perhaps b/c it's winter) and why they say no saunas and don't languish in a hot bath.

sigh. so my bikram yoga dreams will have to remain deferred.

i had a cup of coffee at 11pm, which: why the heck did i do that? i am listening to my shuffling itunes and cleaning the basement and feeling all mentally alert which is ridiculous b/c i am actually exhausted.

fooey on hotmail

i keep an old hotmail account. it used to be my main one, back in the early days of my internet life, and was a bit of a gangster situation because it was just my-name-at-hotmail, which clearly signified that i was ahead of the curve with getting email addresses, wasn't i? no "my-name-plus-zip-code" or "name-plus-year-of-graduation" hotmail address for me, dammit. i am vanguard nerd. i am O.G. emailer. who runs this hotmail world, beeyotch? i do.

over time, of course, it became clogged with spam and useless, and besides in the interim i had gotten a yahoo address (way more storage; i used it to sign up to mailing lists i'd likely never read), built my own website and had my own domain-based address (way more fancy, even almost professional; it became my main address) and even most recently, gotten a gmail account (another moment of not being able to resist the uber nerdy chic since i got it super early when it was invite-only) (and yes, i know this matters to no one other than me, and only in that secret cyber place in my heart that is vain about my tech prowess. but don't worry because really, that's not what matters. it's how you USE it.)

so, the hotmail had become mainly a place to let myspace send its constant friend request emails, and it sat there collecting mailing lists i no longer read but feel nostalgic enough about to not unsubscribe from.

it also housed like, 10 years or so of my early internet communication history. if i ever wanted to chronicle the trajectory of certain relationships, revisit correspondence between myself and my sister when one or the other of us was living abroad, refresh for myself just exactly why my various exes are just that - i was secure in the knowledge that the historical effluvia was archived there for my personal posterity.

and then.

i go to login one time to doublecheck an amazon order status, and those bastards had dismantled my account! there was a screen where i had to reactivate it, and they tried to play like it was just some routine maintenance shit b/c i hadn't logged in in 30 days or whatever... and so i click the button that said, "yeah, assholes, i DO want this account, what kind of jerks are you guys anyway?"

and when i get in, i see that the entire history was wiped clean.

brand new.

inbox at zero.

spitwads.

a momentary lapse of silence

.
.

inspired by the hubbub around 3-6 mafia's oscar win.

copied from a comment made on kenji's blog.

b/c it is late and i am a lazy bastard.

-------------------------

for the record, i was disgruntled wayyy before the oscar win. black culture's strange fascination with pimpery is as inexplicable to me as its delight with black men cross dressing as their own grandmothers. i don't get it. and i think it all speaks to a discomfort and dysfunction we have around gender and sexuality that we really need to deal with in a responsible way if we are going to survive with our collective minds, families, intact.

but at the end of the day, i definitely think songs like the oscar-winner are a result of a deeper issue, not the cause.

or, is that a chicken and egg sort of distinction?

last night.

i most often fall asleep with my face inside my husband's neck; in that warm delicious crook where his chin and shoulder meet. the rest of us is often similarly entwined, with assorted variance required by mood temperament and pre-sleep activity; but this fact remains nearly constant. last night, (i had previously drunk coffee and was slightly wired) (and, to be honest, it was actually 7am this morning, when i finally wound down/finished work to an extent that i felt comfortable getting into the bed) his pulse seemed thunderous to me. insistent. i was struck with his intense aliveness, the juiciness and fluidity and solidness and heat of him. and felt in the core of me a huge gratitude and awe for this. but also felt like there was no way i could sleep with that much tireless rhythm right in my ear. i turned. and this is a thing about him that i love - his ability to have entire interaction and conversations with me in his sleep - when i gave him my back he curled right into me and pressed and held and instead of his bold intense heartbeat it was his deep and sweet breath in my ear. and i slept.

these boots. these boots.

i am not a wearer of heels but these sneaker-soled 2-inchers are totally working for me. the 4 star comfort rating comes from my internal discomfort with having half my foot off the ground; but the wide flared base of the heel is quite sturdy and i predict i'll be ok in a moment. the shoes get open stares and smiles from strangers, which is all i ask in a pink and yellow antique looking narrow-ankle boot. oh yes- the ankle is NARROW! i am a skinny-legged gurl and this is a point of chagrin in all moments of my life except when i rock these shoes. they were kind of built for me. hooray!

working at the counter.

a flurry of yellow leaves currently started raining past my kitchen window.

my very own!

kitchen!

window!


lol. i am loving this.

this is the thing (or: why i am undecided abt NaNoWriMo and november has already begun)

1. there are boxes everywhere. i mean, EVERYWHERE. who would have thunk that we had this much crap? it is all over the place. we are in need of major storage for books, VHS movies, DVDs, socks. but the good feeling is, it's OUR HOUSE!! we could pave the floors in books, VHS movies, DVDs and socks and who could tell us shit? nobody. nobody could tell us shit, that's who.

(maniacal laughter, insert here)


2. but still, inside my own need for equilibrium and daily beauty, there exists a situation where living on a carpet of accumulated crap is not acceptable. neither is it ok for said stuff to teeter at us from where it stands, stacked up against the wall in boxes we have yet to unpack because we have visions of the wall being a different color (that we have yet to choose) behind the bookshelves we have yet to design and build with tools we have yet to own and lumber we have yet to purchase.

i think we are going to have to suck it up and go to IKEA

but i say all that to say: aside from daily work, and catching up on the work that is backlogged from actually moving, is the daily work of reinstating order so that we can live and be creative in this new and wonderful space.


3. there is also the fact that this is the 2nd of november. i'm already 48 hrs behind when it comes to participating in NationalNovelWritingMonth, a national occasion of GROUPTHINK wherein thousands upon thousands of procrastination-prone individuals gather virtually to pretend to be writing novels, and a few thousand of them actually do so.

each november for the past, oh, say about 4 or 5 years, i have noted this passing fact with amusement, wistfulness, paranoia, dread, excitement, and wishful thinking. i use it as an occasion to pull out the various semi-conceived projects that are laid carefully in tissue-paper-lined compartments of my hard drive, blow off the dust, and leaf through their yellowed, crackling pages with fondness and pleased surprise. wow, i wrote THAT? i wish there was more of it. i'd sure like to read it.

it's hard for me to imagine being the same person who crafted those words that i find. i know that i did, because i recognize the brainwork. but my mind has fallen out of the writing habit and that's a problem.

NaNoWriMo is a neat idea b/c it consists of lots of [virtual] peer pressure and support and idea sharing and a place to go and whine about not having ideas or whatever; and is driven by the idea that no matter what, you should crank out a substantial amount of words every day, accumulating 50,000 by a chosen date, BECAUSE YOU CAN, DAMMIT.

but this is the thing: i am not so good with peer pressure. i am hard-wired against the grain and this becomes a problem when it comes down to certain circumstances, like following trends, joining food co-ops, popping my cherry earlier than i'm ready in a way i will come to regret, or joining mass writing movements. i have always found it difficult if not impossible to do any of it. perhaps this inability is linked to my distance from my writer-self?

*big dramatic sigh*

i really do wish that bitch would finish something though. it'd probably be good.

so, what the heck, maybe i'll blog again

i used to blog on xanga. we're talking like four, maybe 5 years ago. a few years ago i wandered away from it and put a few of my favorite pieces up here, just for safekeeping kind of.

but i just moved and need something to do between unpacking boxes, that is less immersive and addicting then the sims 2.

luciderotic dream w/strange expository essay ending

Me and like five other women were giggling, teasing each other. We were the first people to board a plane or some other conveyance and were spread out over many seats. They were airplane seats but ours faced each other like the center seats on the LIRR commuter train. We had on suits and hose; were dressed like either leaving for or coming from a convention of some kind, but felt like vacation. There were shoes kicked off, loud laughter, raunchy jokes. Part of me felt like I'd just met these women but the other part knew that we were intimates. Knew each other well.

I was reading a book with half my attention. It was excellent fluff- flirting and discovery, a romance disguised with literary undertones. I was about 20 pages in and was being pleasantly surprised and turned to my left to ask girlfriend #1 which of the other girlfriends had written it. (this is what made me think I hadn't known them for long. I knew their names, knew that one of them was a writer, but didn't know names + faces) she said "actually, joie wrote it" and pointed to a man sitting a couple of rows up. I was surprised and impressed at joie's insight into women's minds; the novel was reading really realistically. Joie wasn't part of our group. He sat ahead of us and apart, reading a magazine.

I was reading the novel word by word. If I'd written this down sooner after waking, I probably could have quoted it.

I was trying to find a place to lay down, but my girlfriends' purses and things were in the seat next to me. One of them (call her "Kathy") had been sitting there but she'd since moved opposite me, and left her purse. I threatened to lay on it, joked that she must've left it there for me to use as a pillow. She talked about all the breakable stuff that was in there. I flunxed a bit. Where was I supposed to lay down? Pulled the armrests up and flopped around the seats a little.

As I squirmed around, the plane was filling up. I had less and less room to squirm. Suddenly I was comfortable, and settled down to read. I noticed Kathy looking at me funny and looked around: my seat back was down to a full reclining position and gone. And one of my legs was stretched out, foot nestled in a warm spot near the hip of the man behind me.

I jumped and squealed and was embarrassed. "Oh my goodness, I'm sorry!" Looked at Kathy like she should have warned me from doing such mess. "Got me all intimate with strangers up in here, sorry about my crusty foot in your lap, lol…"

He smiled in a gentle/intense/directed way and said "Your foot isn't crusty and you know it." and he held out his hand like an invitation & a demand. I looked at Kathy with eyebrows raised. Well, oh-KAY and stretched back out on my stomach, put my foot into his hand, and started pretending to read my book.

He started massaging my foot.

I was wide-eyed.

I twisted onto my side, looked back at him. He was dressed in a suit, so were the two next to him, but one was sleeping and the other was politely pretending to look out the window. In the movie of my mind he was being played by taye diggs, but I'm going to try to ignore this embarrassing fact and will not reference it again. LOL. Instead, I'll call him SuitMan.

His hands were moving upward, to my ankle, to my calf. It was less about massage and more about feeling up my leg; and he looked directly into my eyes and wasn’t pretending otherwise. My girlfriends were in a fury of giggles and elbowing and knowing winks like we were on our way to vegas, like we were at a school dance, like I was scoring, not whoring. (ha HA! That just came to me now, I'm so damn clever). The chemistry between me and SuitMan was palpable.

I stretched my other leg out, and he immediately began stroking and kneading that one too, starting from the arch of my foot and moving upward. Ultimately, he pushed both my legs off his lap, grasped my hips, and smoothly pulled me back onto his lap. His right fingers interwove with mine and he did that junior high school thing, where he presses a hard stroke down the center of your palm, and by this time my panties were in a respectably junior high school level of froth.
With his other hand, he was pressing long and very slow strokes up and down my spine. Trailing tickling fingers upward, tracing firm rivers back down again. At this point, I was writhing on this man's lap and didn't care who saw.

The cart came by and he asked if I wanted a drink. I asked for a sweet rum and coke; I had it. my girlfriends were stealing glances and fanning themselves. I knew I was going to get teased mercilessly when we got where we were going but it was already worth it.

The plane was emptying now. It was like a bus or train, in that people got on and off at different points, but there was only sky outside the windows and I could hear murmurs of "mile-high club" around me. The thought was extremely attractive to me. I would have fucked that man then and there had he given me the signal. I was being played like a violin and loved it. I was pure response.

Kathy came back one row and stretched out next to the beautiful, tall guy sitting next to SuitMan, who was wearing a cream-colored dress coat which set off his red-chocolate skin like candy. They flirted for a while and then she switched away, looking back like an invitation and a challenge.

I looked at RedChocolate and he was watching me. Looking a little bit wistful. "Sebastian always gets his woman," he said. "Oh," I said, and turned in my seat to look at SuitMan. "Is that your name?" I told him mine. He nodded, a half-smile on his face. Before I could even articulate the thought of "always? So does 'Sebastian' do this kind of thing often?", RedChocolate had walked away after Kathy. Really what was on my mind, though, wasn't abt how often Sebastian seduced women on public transportation- I didn’t actually care. What was on my mind was trying to figure out what about his approach made it work; why exactly I had been sitting on this stranger's lap, two seconds from coming, for the past twenty minutes. RedChocolate seemed so perplexed about it and really he was foine, way finer than Sebastian. . . I wanted to make him understand the 'secret.'

I couldn't tell him b/c he was off to play flirting games with Kathy. So I turned to SuitMan/Sebastian and said "I don't know you, or anything." He did the seduction speech, about how we shouldn’t ignore what is there in favor of what's not - yet - and we have all this potential and truth in this moment and would I throw that away? "Absolutely not," I said. "I'm totally committed to the potential and truth in this moment, and more so to what your hands are doing. But I also want it understood that I recognize we don't know each other. I am responding to a lot of things right now. You’re beautiful, confident, demanding, respectful, insistent, direct and polite. It's an incredibly sexy combination and I would be a fool to deny what's building here. I am not a fool. I'm just saying that after this moment… I'm looking forward to that part, too."

At that point, I looked to my right, and across the aisle was a huge bedroom chamber with king-sized bed. One of the flight attendants was turning down the fluffy comforters and fluffing the pillows. "Ah," I thought, as if we'd ordered such a chamber and it was finally ready. "enough talking."

I had been keeping myself asleep to make sure I got to the conclusion of the adventure and at this point I woke up to write it down.

whew.