but first...help me win a pink vespa (I mean, how fun is that?) Sign up for the Army of Women between now and November 23, 2009--go to armyofwomen.org, pick from the referral field "Vespa Contest," enter your email address in the corresponding field and you will not only be helping me win a pink vespa (...cool), you will be helping find the cure for breast cancer. Life is good. Thanks for your help...
On with the show, this is it...[Once again, Blogger and I are having some issues...I will try to resolve them one day, but in the meantime, pretend the formatting is right and that for whatever reason, part of this is not really little and in italics.]
PNewL PNewS
Volume 17 No. 3 “All the pnews that phits.” October 2009
Some days Up -- Some days Old
You are only as old as you feel, the saying goes, and I am feeling old. I know that many reading this are older but I have always felt that no matter what other people think, if it feels true for me, I have to accept and deal with it. Within the last couple weeks, I almost broke my toe as I jammed it into the magazine rack, dinged my knee when I fell trying to clear brush, and at the beginning of 15 hours of a yoga workshop, overdid it and I am sitting here with an ice pack, arnica, an ace bandage, and a stuffy nose from a pity party. Just feeling old.
A few weeks back, I was in a different yoga class where we spent a fair amount of time holding poses and Diane said, “Think about how your body feels.” I thought this was fabulous advice because she always told us to calm our monkey minds and be present and I knew I wasn't allowed to think about my grocery lists or what I was going to do with my day or what I wasn't going to get done and should, but I was never quite sure what I could be thinking about and now I know!
So each time we were supposed to calm our monkey minds, I started thinking about how my body felt and occasionally—nay usually—ran into judgments...about my body versus other bodies in the room and my body versus 10 years ago, and I thought—this is not productive and is all negative, which I know is not the intention. And then it came to me: I am really really really mad at my body. Each ache and pain, each joint that doesn’t work the way it once did. Each muscle that doesn’t stretch as it used to. News at the doctor never seems to be good…and there was the Aha! I am angry and sad. News stories about people getting older and old include people of my age. Obituaries include more people like me. When did this happen???
Granted, it’s not like my body couldn’t be mad right back—I’ve abused it along the way. But it seems this aha moment that exposed the most recent little storm is big. It’s something I can work on. The result is I joined the Y and am actually going, and that is a good thing.
It is ironic that the latest injury—the ankle as big as the Ritz—is yoga-related. In class this week, we were talking about falling down and how nice it is that toddlers are built so close to the ground, padded by diapers, since they tend to fall all the time. Falling down at 18 months is a lot different from falling at 52.
So I have recovered from the pity party. Time marches on (isn’t that what this is about?) and all the injuries have healed. I am back at yoga, Pilates, dog-walking, pumping iron and Zumba, not in any particular order. All of this old-ness has caused me to re-think my mantra. I have changed it from “Change is good” (which has served me well for 14 years) to “I do what I can." Onward.
Things I am Learning & Miscellaneous Observations
* A reminder to back it up: When I came home from from being away, I found that the three messages on my answering machine that I had saved of my father singing me Happy Birthday, wishing me a Happy Fourth of July and one other generic one (Hi Peggy, it’s your Daddy), along with a message from cousin Ann were all gone. I had meant to somehow transfer them to my computer but had never gotten around to it—now I won’t be able to…ever. Then a msg came across a listserv reminding us to back up our computers as the writer’s hard drive had crashed when she was installing new software. I thought it was a good reminder only I couldn’t remember where I hid my hard drive. Oops. I don’t know what it all means, but I thought I would share that with you. [Eventually, I did find the hard drive, but it’s a better story the other way.]
* We have had a charming stretch of rain—day-in/day-out—and so I finally left the house (having exhausted my Netflix options) to see a movie. I chose Julie & Julia, which started after a remarkable 20 minute stretch of trailers. I like a few trailers, especially if they are similar in genre to the movie I am settled into seeing, but enough is enough. So in the course of this epic series, I started thinking about the men and women in the various movies (that weren’t slasher type which were liberally sprinkled in the list and seemed like interesting movies to advertize to the Julie & Julia crowd). And I even remembered to look the following up:
Movie News: Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep, b 1949) was married to Paul Child (Stanley Tucci, b 1960) who was 10 years her senior. Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank, b. 1974) was married to George Putnam (Richard Gere, b. 1949), who was 10 years older. And that’s the real people. In another movie, coming out this holiday season, Meryl Streep (1949) is divorced from Alec Baldwin (1958) and dating both him and Steve Martin (1945), for what that’s worth.
* I saw my first bears in North Carolina! This morning, my dog Bear and I ran into the kids in the neighborhood who were arguing about how big real bears are. Then a mere 11½ hours later, I saw not one but THREE bears dart out onto the road directly in front of me. And if they weren’t all youngsters, then NC bears and my real Bear stand around the same height at the shoulder, but I think the fuzzy bears may have my Bear beat on weight. Cute factor? A draw.
* I have mentioned my problem with adult onset ADD in previous issues. I have some additional information that some of you might find interesting. There was an article in The Sun Magazine called “Computing the Cost: Nicholas Carr On How The Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains” by Arnie Cooper (March 2009, Issue #399—you can read it online). It’s about Carr’s theory that Google (among other browsers/search engines) is re-wiring our brains. I can’t remember if he described it like this but our thoughts are like pin-balls bouncing around as we get distracted by links and ads and Facebook and Word Drop and WE ARE ALL DOING IT…well, many of the folks I know are…and it was in some ways comforting and other ways terrifying. Carr (who originally wrote an article in July 2008’s Atlantic, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”). His fear is that “deep contemplation and reflection” is being lost. He could be right. There are some more basic concerns I have but I won’t go into them again.
* President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I just wanted to say it again.
* When I got home from dinner last night, one of the string of smoke alarms in my house was chirping. Bear, the 120 pound hound, was cowering in the corner. Neither of us react well to sudden loud noise.
I went online in search of the manual for these beasts, then stood under them to figure which one was the offender. I wound up taking down three smoke alarms and two carbon monoxide alarms because I was so frustrated and my dog was a wreck. Today, after buying a load of batteries, I started reinstalling them and realized they are networked and that part of the chirping isn’t dead batteries, it has to do with their relationship to each other or a button that was inadvertently touched and that disconnecting them doesn’t do anything any good. Meanwhile, the large hound is plastered up against the back door looking at me through bloodshot eyes. Why, pray tell, do things have to be so complicated?
* RIP Gourmet. I was sad to hear that Gourmet Magazine is another victim of the economy. I was a loyal reader of the magazine for several years… several years ago. I can blame (credit?) Gourmet for my traveling obsession. It was actually because of Gourmet that I came up with the World Tour back in the mid-90s. Originally, I read an article in Gourmet about a cooking school at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok and I wanted to go. But I thought that my first big trip should be to the land of my people and being a full-bred WASP, that land was England and Europe. But once I was there I was almost to Bangkok, and once I figured out how to get months off from my life, what difference would a few more months make? The irony was that when I got to Thailand, I had been living on nothing and it didn’t seem in sync with my life to spend $100/day on a cooking class. Apparently the folks agreed—when I went to look at the cooking school, they escorted me through the Hotel to the classroom—they didn’t seem to want riff-raff like me wandering around. Thanks for the memories and inspiration, Gourmet!
“The only thing you own in the end is your story.” Neil Fletcher, Australia (movie)
