It's Only A Paper Rose

On the one hand, going two-weeks-plus without a day off from physical activity (power yoga or massaging or both) was probably not the greatest idea that I've had. It would certainly explain why my quick nap a few days ago turned into a four-hour rest, as well as why, come Saturday, I woke up after a full night's sleep and an hour later wanted desperately to go back to bed. (I cancelled my yoga plans and instead booked myself a massage, and am consequently feeling much better today.)

On the other hand, just now I took a moment to really look at my arms in the mirror, and...damn. Maybe I should go on workout benders more often.

Interesting thing I learned today: my height (5'8") is actually significantly above average for a woman in the US. According to several studies, I'm a full four inches taller than the general female population (three for Caucasians specifically). And that's before heels.

I've long known I was on the tall side for a woman, but had always thought it was maybe an inch or two above the norm. It wasn't until someone wrote in to Dear Prudence today bemoaning her awful "mannish" height of (gasp!) 5'8" that it even occurred to me to Google.

Speaking of men, Brian (who's the same height as me - by his request, I wore ballet slippers rather than heels at our wedding) is a couple inches shorter than the average for men in the U.S. Though, I suspect, at-or-above average for men of Asian descent.

I don't really have any particular insights on this, other than perhaps something about how immediate population influences perception far more than statistics. I've always had a lot of tall friends, so I've never felt overgrown. (The woman who wrote in said she felt particularly self-conscious because she was dating a Jewish man and hanging out with his friends, all of whom were short. I couldn't help but laugh, as one of my good friends also has a short Jewish boyfriend, and she's 6'2". Get over it already.) I do remember one girl in high school asking me why I wore heels when I was already tall, but I just sort of shrugged and said it was because I liked looking down on people. (I was...kind of a jerk in high school.)

Over the past year or so, I've been making a conscious effort to stand taller - you can see in my Facebook photos that for several years I tended to slump forward. The results have become especially noticeable over the past six months, as my core strength has grown by leaps and bounds. I admit to admiring myself in shop windows now and then; I look much more confident and poised than I used to.

I have dated people shorter than me (male and female), but it's never really been a social issue, as they were always confident about their heights and didn't mind the discrepancy. As the old joke goes, women are all the same height lying down...though the same isn't necessarily true for men.

 Some random thoughts that are in that awkward "too big/too complainy for a Facebook post, too little for a blog post" zone:

• I'm not prone to squeamishness.  I can look at disgusting stuff (open wounds, rotting corpses, STD sores, centipedes, spiders), and not feel much more than a vague disgust.  (Once during my brief stint working at a vet clinic, I ate lunch while watching three doctors perform surgery on a dog through the observation window.  I thought it was fascinating, but several people who walked by were all "How can you eat while you watch that?"  Smells are a different beast altogether, but I don't think anyone's immune to them.)  My weak point?  Drug effects, especially nasty ones.  Of all the weird, strange things to have a physical reaction to, reading descriptions of drug effects is the one thing that will always raise my stress levels like crazy.  I made the mistake of reading an article on the use of and potential issues with nicotine gum on my phone while standing up, at a point when I hadn't eaten anything all day.  I actually had to sit down and put my head between my knees and breathe deep for a minute.  Weird.
• I got a letter from a friend of mine who just yesterday had surgery for ovarian cysts.  She is one of my oldest, dearest, and sweetest friends, and it was hard both hearing about the pain she'd been in (she'd written the letter last week) and the cost of the surgery (enough that she won't have any spare cash for the next six months, even with her insurance).  I think I'm going to have to see if I can visit her this year.  It might be a bit tricky to do so while sticking to our budget, but the last time I saw her was our first year in Arizona, and life's short enough. And in the meantime, at least I've got all sorts of fun cards to send her.
• If you're looking for something to read that's both edifying and elevating, I can't point you at much else better than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Annual Letter for this year.  It frustrates me to no end to hear people endlessly kvetching about how the world is getting worse and worse, when in fact, by many objective measures, it's in fact getting better.  But of course, complaining is easier than actually doing anything about it, whereas taking the positive view that our efforts are having an effect means that we have to continue to make efforts.  So it's perhaps not surprising, even if it's frustrating.  (Ever-manic author and vlogger John Green also did a great video talking about, in part, how increasing global wealth benefits everyone, not just the countries in question.)  Possibly my favorite pull-quote:  "When pollsters ask Americans what share of the budget goes to aid, the average response is '25 percent.' When asked how much the government should spend, people tend to say '10 percent.' [...] Here are the actual numbers...For the United States, it’s less than 1 percent."  So...maybe we should give the people what they want?
• This week's writing has so far been...less good.  I'm still doing it!  But so far it's just been the minimum, and it's not feeling as easy nor as inspired as last week.  And I'm having a devil of a time figuring out this rewrite.  Sigh.  I wish inspiration weren't quite so ephemeral as it is.  (Me and every other writer ever.)  I am meditating heavily on today's Terrible Minds entry:  "It Takes the Time That It Takes".
• I miss my old hairstylist.  Well, that's not quite true.  I do miss her, but mostly I miss her prices.  I love my pixie cut but when we're trying to stick to a budget I just can't justify spending the $60ish every month to maintain it.  My old stylist was $18 to $22, though I usually gave her $30 because she did a fantastic job and was far-better-than-Bisbee quality.)  I'm trying to promise myself that when I start bringing in an income I can use that, but it doesn't seem to be working as a motivator.  Grump.
• I just realized I'm about to go to bed and I totally had nothing but bourbon and chocolate for dinner.  Huh.  Well, I'm a grown-up, and can have booze and candy for dinner once in a while if I want.  Besides, it was dark chocolate.  So obviously it was good for me.

A friend from Sweden has recently been sharing with me a bunch of her favorite songs - although, as I'm aggressively monolingual like most Americans, she's had to translate them first. Needless to say, they lose a bit of punch along the way; as one of my favorite (if horrendously misogynist) quips goes, "A translation is like a wife - it can be beautiful, or it can be faithful, but not both."

However, this particular song entertained me enough that I decided to sit down with a rhyming dictionary and see if I could smooth her translation out into a decent English rendition. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out - maybe I'll add it to the guitar repertoire. (Slightly off-color lyrics follow, as you might guess from the title.)


The Incest Song

When I first met Marie-Louise, oh wow, I was in love.
I told my dad how she would make a wife I'd be proud of
But then he said "I'm sorry, Son, her mother will attest,
"I fathered her, you can't marry - 'cos that would be incest."

Then I met a new girl and we got a little wild.
It wasn't long until we found Linnéa was with child
But when her mother saw my dad she nearly went berserk
"You let him knock his sister up?" --it wasn't going to work.

Anita and Carina; Britt, Louise and Shawn. Oh a
hundred other girls who turned out were my father's spawn
I loved them all, but every time their mother knew my pop,
And our relation meant that our engagement was a flop.

I'm sure you understand, my friends, that I was getting pissed
I found that I was brother to every girl I'd ever kissed!
I had no more desire, my libido hit new lows
So I went to my mother to unburden all my woes.

"Oh, my beloved son," she said, "if you'll let me be frank,
"We all know that your dad's a jackass of the highest rank,
"So marry any girl you like - you see, you're really blessed,
"'Cos he's not actually your dad - so it won't be incest."

This morning I got a spam mail. Hardly unusual, of course, but the subject line made me giggle-snort into my coffee: "HERE BEST DRUGS!"

So...did that particular company hire Drunk Hulk to write their subject lines? I have to give them points for succinctness, at least.

On the other end of the literacy spectrum, my experiment in trying to write a bit of fiction each day has been off to a rocky start. I don't know if it's my self-sabotage instinct or what, but my inspiration/excitement about the idea (what little of it I had to begin with) seems to have dried right up. Maybe I should do some outlining, or work on a couple of sort (or short-short) stories. Or maybe now's just not the time to be forcing myself to do something I'm obviously not into. (The problem, of course, being that if now's not the time, when is the time?)

In music-literacy news, I've been toying with some original arrangements of songs that I like on the guitar. I'm quite proud of a couple of them, in fact; if they're not quite performance-ready yet, they're fun to practice, as I feel like I've contributed something to their creation. I keep saying I plan to record myself, but I appear to be as deathly afraid of video as I am of writing. Still, given that I picked each of the songs in part due to its significance to one of the pretty girls I've met recently (both of whom live, sadly, far away), perhaps I can motivate myself a bit by imagining how pleased they'll be. (Hopefully.) The biggest bright spot - my singing is improving markedly, and I'm feeling far less self-conscious about it. Amazing what regular practice will do.

In more show-offy literacy news, I also recently finished reading Cyrano de Bergerac. I'd...not been avoiding it, exactly, but I'd gotten the impression from the plot description that it was a silly tragic romance, so it hadn't been high on my priority list. But then I read this interview with one of my favorite authors, who quoted Cyrano as an inspiration for one of my favorite characters, and I decided to give it a read. I'm quite glad I did, too, even if (in the end) it was a silly tragic romance:

In more than a few ways, I feel like I'm a little too old to be reading this for the first time. The play's emotional hook, unsurprisingly, is rooted in admiration for the title character; and while I certainly admire his integrity, I just can't bring myself to subscribe to his fundamental value system. Call me cynical and unromantic, but I see little value in fighting a battle with no hope of winning, or robbing myself and my love of potential happiness simply to preserve her (false!) image of my dead friend. Had I read this when I was a decade younger, as it seems most of my friends did, I might swoon a little at his romantic devotion; as it is, I can only really smile sadly and shake my head at his antics.

All of that said, I still very much enjoyed the read. Cyrano's much-celebrated clever wordplay is truly worthy of its accolades, and his discourses on love are enough even to warm my twisted blackened heart. And even a pragmatist like me can't argue with the effectiveness of the major scenes in tugging one's heartstrings - I could absolutely see, in the hands of a skilled cast, crying my eyes out over this play. But ultimately I think the strongest feeling it inspires in me is relief - that I've grown enough to have a more rounded view of love, and the many forms it takes, and the silliness of hiding it when there's happiness within one's grasp. A-

Is it weird that I find myself wanting to write a blog post about a day where nothing much happened?

Normally I would have been working yesterday, but things have been so slow at the gallery lately (thanks, most likely, to the weird-ass weather - seriously, we woke up to another couple inches of snow on the ground this morning. Pretty, but not exactly a big draw for the tourists) that C decided to just have me in on Thursday this week. So, upon finding out that Brian was going to be driving out to do some work on a tower just over the border in New Mexico, I asked if I could come along.

I was in a very strange headspace all that day. I'd been dreaming all night about being in airports - not going anywhere, exactly (I only remember actually getting on a plane once), but just sort of wandering through them with my guitar, sometimes playing, sometimes just watching people. And that in-limbo feeling seemed to carry over into the day; I spent much of it sort of half-there, half-zoned-out. But hey, if you're going to be zoned out, there are worse things to stare at than the landscape around the Arizona/Mexico/New Mexico border. We even drove up into the Chiricahua Mountains by Portal, intending to go over them and get back to Bisbee through Willcox and Benson, but the pass ended up being closed (probably due to ice and/or snow - see above re: weird weather). Still, we got to see how things are coming back after the Horseshoe Two fire a year and a half ago, which was reassuring. The sky island forests are so unusual for Arizona climate and weather, and so beautiful.

And really...that was it. We came home, I had a nap, I finished the book I was reading and wrote up a review for it on GoodReads, I played my guitar a bit. Not a very interesting or accomplished day, but an oddly pleasant one nonetheless.

I don't think I've mentioned it more than tangentially here, but I've been keeping a sort of unofficial list of daily goals in a spreadsheet on Google Docs. Things like doing yoga, exercising in some manner that raises my heart rate, practicing guitar, stuff like that. There's no real reward associated with doing well at them over a particular day/week/month (other than a nice line of Os in the associated line or column), but it's a nice way to keep track of how I've been doing on the whole.

I'm thinking about adding a goal for writing in there, too. I've been encouraged by the success of my approach to guitar - one of the ideas that really encouraged me was that getting good at something didn't require hours and hours of time on a given day so much as consistency in giving it a little bit of time, every day (or nearly so). I've given guitar, on average, fifteen minutes a day over the past eight or nine months, and while I'm certainly not as good as I would be if I'd practiced an hour on each of those days, I've made pretty significant progress. So maybe I should try something similar for writing. Given the amount of improvement between my NNWM 2010 and 2011 output, despite almost no practice between the two (and even if the latter is still nothing resembling publishable), it seems likely that daily practice would have a pretty good effect.

I found a sticker recently, that I had initially intended to send to a friend, but it sort of made its way onto my guitar case last night - I'm not sure exactly why; it just felt right there. It certainly feels apropos, given recent events in my music career:



So I think I'm going to sign off here and place my feet somewhere useful. Like on my yoga mat in extended-side-angle pose. Or on the floor, sorting out laundry. Or in the kitchen to make a pie.

And maybe I'll write something today, too.

It's not unusual for it to snow in Bisbee; we're high enough in elevation that, come winter, it regularly gets below freezing at night. Sooner or later during the year, we'll get some precipitation on a cold night, and wake up to an inch or two of snow on the ground. Everyone gets pictures and makes snowmen before it melts later that day. No big deal.

It's somewhat less common to wake up to an entire foot of snow on the ground.

But this New Year's Eve, we were graced with a lovely blanket of snow. And while some of it melted during the day, there was enough of it to stick around for a few days. Even now, a week and a half later, there's patches of it on the hillsides. It's actually pretty entertaining - you can really see which parts of Bisbee get lots of sun during the day, and which stay in shade.

Unfortunately, being desert dwellers, our immune systems are not used to this kind of weather. Lo and behold, everyone in Bisbee has a case of the sniffles. It's one of those extra-nasty lingering bugs, too, that sticks around long after it should be gone. I've had it for a week now, and while I seem to be over the worst of it, the recovery is see-sawing around a lot more than I'd like. (Yesterday, despite a scratchy throat, I went out and ran errands and was generally productive. Today just walking to work was enough to give me that light-headed "you're overexerting yourself" feeling. But I still put in a good full day's worth of work. Eat that, cold virus.)

Nonetheless, New Year's was wonderful - cyrano came to visit, and brought the lovely lucia with him. We had a lovely dinner, and although our walking-about-town plans afterward were curtailed somewhat by the temperature and snow, we instead snuggled on the couch and watched Moulin Rouge. (I can report with near-100% certainty that, in addition to being beautiful, intelligent, and lovely to talk to, lucia is also deliciously soft and gives the sweetest snuggles.) I was sad to wave goodbye to them the next day, but life does get in the way of vacation. Alas.

My most recently completed project is replenishing my underwear drawer, which has been in a rather sad state for some time now. In the process, I discovered that I'm now a 34D - I guess that's the upside of having gained a fair amount of weight? I'm a little amused, though; if you told my barely-A-cup 18-year-old self that someday I'd be a D cup, I would've laughed myself sick. It certainly explained why none of my old bras seemed to fit, even aside from them being kind of raggedy and worn. Several trips to Victoria's Secret, a botched online order, a couple of returns, and a rather embarrassing amount of money later, I now have seven bras (five padded, two unpadded, in all sorts of pretty colors) and assorted matching undies, all brand-new, all extremely well-fitting, and several quite fancy. (I made the mistake of letting the salesgirl talk me into trying on one of their $50 bras as well as a $30 one...I figured it'd be nicer, but not $20 nicer. I was wrong.) I feel even more pleased than I expected about this. Wearing a poorly-fitting bra is hardly a life-ruining experience, but it is a constant low-level irritation. You get acclimated to it and eventually don't notice it anymore, but boy, you sure notice when it's gone.

Still waiting on a response from Berklee College of Music, although that's hardly surprising - they don't mail them out until the latter half of this month. I did get an email from their financial aid department, asking me to fill out the FAFSA so that, if I was accepted, they could determine what sort of awards I was eligible for. According to the government, I'm likely eligible for a $9,500 subsidized loan, which may be something to consider if they offer me a partial scholarship. It's inexpensive money (3.7% interest, which the government pays while I'm in school and for six months afterward), but on the other hand, that's between thirty and forty thousand dollars I would owe by the time I got my degree. That's a difficult financial hit to take. *And* it's less than a third of tuition alone. Sigh. I'd have to sell a lot of CDs to make that up.

In the meantime, though, I have Kalia back! I sent her back to Takamine for warranty service because the action on her lower frets was rather high, and the local guitar guy thought the neck was slightly skewed. They decided the neck was fine and she just needed a set-up and re-stringing, then sent her back. (Well, at least I got a new set of strings for my $44 in postage. Grr.) She's still a gorgeous guitar, though, and it's wonderful to have her back (...three months later), so I'm not holding any grudges. Mostly.

Speaking of which, I believe it's time I continued our getting reacquainted. If you'll pardon me...

I'm at work today, sitting at the desk up front so I can keep an eye on things while I do my usual office stuff. A fifty-something-looking dude, apparently waiting for his wife, wanders up and strikes up a conversation.

Fifty-something dude: "Are you emailing, there?"

Me: "Nope, doing inventory."

Dude: {sounding surprised} "Really?"

Me: {slightly perplexed} "Yeah, I'm the office person."

Dude: "Oh! Just like that Paul Ryan fellow."

Me: {now very perplexed} "…no, I'm pretty sure I have nothing in common with Paul Ryan."

Dude: "That's okay, we like Ron Paul anyway."

...Seriously. WTF?

Me, reading aloud from Cracked: "So he would get living subjects and tell them he wished to examine their vaginas, presumably while wearing every doctor-related item he could think of to demonstrate his legitimacy, including but not limited to wearing his Ph.D. around his neck like Flava Flav."

Brian: "Hey, if I had a Ph.D., I would totally wear it around my neck like Flava Flav."

Me: "Really?"

Brian: "Hells yes. That would be the most expensive piece of bling ever! 'Oh, you've got a gold-plated watch? I've got a piece of paper that cost more than several houses! Bee-yoootch! Post-graduate studiiieeeeees!'"

(TMI warning. Turn back now.)

( For srs. )