"While stars sit in bars and decide what they're drinking…"
For some reason, I like to interpret that lyric literally. Like…stars, as in the massive-sphere-of-plasma kind. They don't sit on bar stools, silly, but sparkle outside all firefly-style, projected on a big screen like at a drive-in, tinkling and twinkling.
I unfairly blamed this magnificent spider for the lil' bites I got on the tops of my feet in Kennebunkport last month. I snapped this photo after I found him/her lounging around my bed. My coworkers told me it was probably 'skeeters biting me, dining and whining like AM radio waves. That may be, but I really wanted to know why the bites got crazy-maddeningly-clawingly itchy days after I got back, and remained as such for a week?
I dedicate this post to delayed reactions of all kinds. Sure, some people are great at witty retorts and badinage--these types can make lots of money doing, say, consulting work. I myself need a few hours minimum to come up with a good response, though a day or two of ruminating brings best results. Kinda like a spider, you know, with her built-in silk factory. You think she's hanging out doing nothing, and then boom… here comes a silken string-thought that launches her into the sky and outta there like a balloon.
OF COURSE I like Count Five's the best, but this video is so...quaint!
I know some cats enjoy watching TV, but do you think that includes, say, Eight Is Enough? I, for one, was greatly irritated and just plain flummoxed by this series. Dick Van Patten as Tom Bradford was childish, uptight and a poor decision-maker (though he made up for it with his great line of cat food!). Add to that a heinous theme song, sneakily weaving in enough of an ersatz disco beat to squash any old-tyme Little House on the Prairie vibes created by all the hotel carpet-colored calico and plaid they wore. And the worst offender, in my eyes, the little bratty, ratty one with the bowl cut. You know he was the type of child to be unkind to his not-as-cute classmates, naturally good at making fun of the chubby girls and the gawkward boys.
Oh my, I never realized the depth of my disdain for this program!
True, I am being a little over the top (well, it WAS a drama/comedy), but probably what bothered me the most, and I didn't realize it until I read this on Wikipedia, was one of the things that made the show unique: it was one of the few hour-long television series to use a laugh track. You know you're doing something wrong if you have to tell the audience when to laugh. Or did they think we were too slow to get the jokes?
To be fair, I do have to say that Willie Aames, shown here with a teeny meezer who's displaying the classic feline body language known as steer ear, was the least offensive of the Bradfords. Great job, Willie, and if that's not your real last name, that's pretty smart to start it with not only one A, but two. That ensures you're always on the top of the list when things are organized in alphabetical order. Assuming you want to be first.
A lady wore a dress to yoga on Friday night. Who gives a shift (snort!), you ask? Well, apparently I did, and I guess I just need to write it out to figure it out.
From the get-go, I could tell it was gonna be a weird class. There was a lot of space in the room so I had a hard time locating my—for lack of a better term—“power” spot, and it took me 3 tries to get it right. Then, there were a bunch of people who put their mats facing the “wrong” direction, which I was delighted about because it made a few others all huffy-puffy. (Some shim-sham take on schadenfreude? Heck if I know, I’m just a total amateur human being as of late.) So I decided to turn the “wrong” way, too, because otherwise I would have been directly facing the lady with the dress, which I knew would be a distraction. Our very earnest teacher went with the flow.
Actually, I didn’t realize she was wearing a dress (super short, loose, striped, more like a night shirt) until we started moving around, when it was falling down and riding up and revealing her granny panties. So…it’s not just me, that’s sort of curious, right? Would it give you pause? Now, I’m ashamed to admit it but I’ll do it anyway, but I was initially disgusted by what my fear-biting imagination perceived as an overwhelming need for attention on her part. (Hello?! Solipsism-colored glasses much?) Then, I felt awful about myself for having such a nasty thought, so I tried to immediately cue up a positive one (there’s a fancy name for that process, but I’m not sure what it is-- don’t worry, it’s not “life coach” tho!).
It must have worked, because all of a sudden the dress was no longer a threat (what?! Like the cockroach in the elevator last night?!), and I concluded that, even if she either had simply forgotten her pants and/or was just clueless, she clearly really wanted to be in class and was a very joyous practitioner (I could feel it--she was right next to me, remember?)—plus I heard her say “Wow!” when she was leaving—so I couldn’t care less if she was wearing a skunk suit and playing the xylophone.
On the bus home my thoughts returned to the dress. For one, it made me think about the general effect for you and everyone else should you wear something inappropriate/out of context for a situation. At the very least, doing so can re-frame the situation and your experience of it, and to me there’s something very exciting about that. I couldn’t come up with any really good examples, but I did remember that I wore a rose-patterned table cloth to a Pogues concert once. And for years I wore standard-issue all-black to jazz class, until I switched up one day and began to wear…Pink! Red! Green! It actually felt like a new me in a new space, which is kinda cool if the space is a place where you are trying to grow and learn. And clothing is an easy “Reframing for Dummies” way to do it, but heck, I’m still at the intro level for sure.
And the other thing the dress made me think of… there’s always something really cool and brave about showing up to something new with your…granny panties?! No!! With your open mind and willingness to learn. As a kid I didn’t London (my new word—a verb!—for trying something you’ve never done before) very much, and I didn’t fail a lot because I only did things I knew I’d be good at. I literally never got back on the horse when he bucked me off (his name was Blue) and dang me if I’m not trying to make up for it now.
I think it’s good to suck at something because you can’t go anywhere but up. Case in point, the video we made for the Feline Forum in Chicago, September 2009. There’s Bing in a top hat (Sweetie! He just sat there doing exactly what I wanted him to do while I floundered around trying to film), and Elyse and Cindy belting it out. In this case, I was the one with the granny panties in the singing dept. (I’m so bad!), but Elyse was such a firm but gentle production manager, and I always trust the creative process, so the whole thing took on a life of its own. For me, the Londoning wasn’t in the doing, but in the documenting. I always think I look like such a doofus, so I’d rather remember how it felt doing it than how I looked doing it. So far this has served me pretty well and allowed me to make random experiments (i.e. wearing a table cloth). I wish I’d figured out you’re supposed to look at the camera, though, even if you are wearing a cat mask and wagging your tail.
The cosmos offers so many opportunities to London:
P.S. Aha! Perhaps the dress/GPs was one reason why our teacher suggested we do many of the poses with our eyes closed. A whole different world! I wonder, but not too much.
Does anyone remember Sartre likening a woman's naughty bits to "a gaping mouth that devours the man?" I can't find the exact quote, but this is the gist of his lovely sentiment and will have to do for now: The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which 'gapes' open.
Nice, right? Geesh. Like it really helps to ponder stuff like that. Anyway, there's nothing new about the analogy of eating/ingesting=wanting to possess/be one with something. Case in point #1: Robert Smith singing "I could eat your face" in "Dressing Up." Case in point #2, and in my biz I see this a lot: "That kitten is so cute I could just eat him." Case in point #3, smoking. Which I haven't thought about in years, really, until last Saturday when a woman on the street asked me if I had a cigarette. Why'd she ask ME? Could she see the ghostly puff-puff cloud of a Parliament surrounding me? Or did I, in my flip flops and jeans with a hole in the knee, look like someone who didn't care enough not to poison themselves? Or did I just look helpful and smiley?
I first started smoking (Benson & Hedges Ultralights!) during the summer before college, and I didn't even know how to inhale. That's the time when you're all free to start your life, and instead of getting drunk and puking all over the place like the rest of my classmates did, I would go to clubs and dance all night long to really bad music, drinking only water and every once in awhile blowing out smoke like some sort of stuttering teapot. I really didn't care, because it was really all about the shiny gold packaging, and I thought they were just so freakin' pretty, all soft and white like women's arms. (Well, women's arms in a film noir.) And I was like the biggest poseur around (see what you did, Mrs. B!), so it's no wonder I cottoned on to it. And besides, look who else did it, too..
Nicotine's a nasty b*tch, but she has her charms for the vain. You can eat all the ice cream you want (and, ahem, bowls of fresh whipped cream) and still weigh less than you would if you were on a diet. But really, I can't tell you how decadent is the slide and glide when a match is struck, the bump and suck of a cigarette being lit. My dirty old loves, 20 to a pack and only wanting to be held gently between my fingers. The inhale, the exhale.
Inhale and exhale?!!! Ah, so maybe that's what making me so bird-mad and causing me to listen to "Sister Morphine" for the, as I write this, 13th time in a row.
Tonight I did this breathing practice in yoga that I'd never done before, and it totally made me all high, way better than nicotine ever could. You exhale and then plie (yeah, i'm adding a little ballet in here, why not?) while your abdominals go up against the wall with your spine, and then you do this rapid abdominal flappy thing. OMG! It was nuts! My hip creases got all tingly and I felt like I was on fire. I LOVE this stuff! Talk to me about subtle energy centers and burning up toxins and opening your heart and it makes me so happy I have to laugh. Well, actually I couldn't laugh, 'cause I was retaining my breath. And what does this have to do with Parliaments?
Well, if yogic breathing and smoking are in the Inhale Exhale family, then smoking is like the inbred cousin who plays dueling banjos in Deliverance. And the first time I tried that practice--the standard version, not with the abdominal flapping thing--was probably like 7 or 8 or so years ago, right before I went cold turkey for the 2nd time, and I must not have had the lung capacity or ab strength or otherwise not been ready to do it, 'cause it released something that got me all agitated and crankadelic for like 5 hours and think I even had a nasty confrontation in the laundry room. I was "cutting back," in the hopes that my nicotine addiction would sort of just fade away. It was basically torture--10 a day, down to 5 a day, down to 1 a day, down to 1 every other day, down to 1 cigarette 3 times a week, down to 1 a week, down to 1 every 2 weeks, down to 1 a month…No, dudes, I'm not kidding, I'm pretty embarrassed to say. I even marked it on the calendar and everything.
I'll save the phlegmy details for another post, but nicotine, the best thing I ever did was kick your honky a$$ to the curb long ago. You try uddiyana bandha and tell me how it goes. You don't even have abs!
Remember I was ragging on that stoopid book about what sort of make-up and accessories all women should have? Well, it went into great detail about something I had never thought about before. Apparently, if you're shorter rather than taller, you ought to have a corresponding petite-sized bag or you will look all wonky. I'm sure I'm committing all sortsa sins with this...
P.S. Yes, the telephone really works!
P.S.S. It's kinda pop-arty, hence the wormhole we go down with this:
Like most cats, Puff was all about living in the present (face it, they pretty much have us beat on that one)—so it does feel a little weird to me to be writing a special post on the anniversary of her death. But I did buy roses for her today, a whispery purple that looked in the gray afternoon light like the velveteen backs of her ears…my favorite part of Puffer.
When I brought them home they blushed under the brighter lamp in the living room, a demure and decidedly baby pink…and I thought of the first time I saw Miss P, on what was just her third day in the world, and again on the day she came to join our family.
My song for her then and my song for her now:
P.S. Puffelina is editor-in-chief emeritus of this blog.
