My Little Golden Book of Phobias

yoga part deux. Yesterday I went to yoga class again. This time it was a teacher with a red beard. All the other people in the class weighed about #12 and were made of rubber. Seriously. They could lick the floor backward. I still dripped with sweat. I sat out a few poses involving standing one one toe and kissing your own ass. The teacher came over a few times to 'correct' my posture. He told me to 'lift my heart' which is technically impossible. I tried, however. You would have been proud of me. He reminded everyone not to do a shoulder stand if they were on the first three days of their periods. Umm, so the blood won't run down their stomachs and their nice leotards??

At night, Patti and I went to Mimi's poetry thang. We were late so we missed some of the poetry but the end was reserved for a performance artist. Ok, I am so not hip. No way. I don't get it. So there is this lady lying on the floor with her face covered with a piece of paper. All around her are clothes pins, blue plastic dowels, poker chips, chunks of wood, ball bearings, round wooden coasters and two light boxes with photos on them. She sits up and starts talking about garbage, it used to mean something to someone, the discards and she's walking about and picking up stuff and looking at it like it's the holy grail and sometimes she steps on stuff which is, I think, an accident. Then she tells a story about a sweater she wrassled from a snow bank and she washed it and now she wears it even though it is a little stained (eewww) and we should love our junk, our garbage and the dump. The dump. Well, I have some serious garbage in my basement and sometimes I go down there armed with garbage bags and my intention to CLEAN IT UP, DAMMIT and after a few hours I come back upstairs defeated. A trip to the dump is cathartic, a divesting, a giving forth, it ain't precious anymore. And I can recycle and feel righteous.

So.

After, Patti and I went to her house and drank wine. She was a real sport about the performance artist. She might even go with me again sometime. We talked about suicide and trauma and it was the end to a perfect evening.