Yoga, Massage, and the Art of Relaxation

My friend Mindy told me the other day that I need to either try yoga or get a massage because I text in CAPS too much, and that shows that I’m stressed out. To be fair, I am a little stressed out, but that’s because I’m teaching full-time and taking classes full time. I’m actually kind of impressed that I haven’t begun hyperventilating yet.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN I’M WOUND UP TOO TIGHT!?!?!?” I texted Mindy. “IT STRESSES ME OUT WHEN PEOPLE TELL ME I’M STRESSED OUT!!!!!”

She was all, “Um, chill. I didn’t say you were wound too tight. I just suggested you take measures to relax.”

I considered the massage, but immediately rejected it. This is how a massage would go for me:

10 a.m. – lie on table

10:01 – start to get tickled by stranger

10:02 – try desperately to suppress laughter, so as not to hurt stranger’s feelings

10:03 – clench all muscles together in an effort to make self less ticklish

10:04 – narrowly avoid falling off table because squirming too much to get away from tickling

10:05 – fart on masseuse because of all clenching, tickling, and squirming

10:06 – crawl out door in shame

So that is out.

Then I considered yoga. Whoever invented yoga is making a fortune right now. I wish it had been me. I would be all, “Now I want you to bend your left arm around your right elbow and stand on the third toe of one foot while you breathe deeply and think of lotuses. Namaste. That will be $20.”

As you may have surmised, I have never tried yoga, that is just how I envision it going.

Yoga is one of those things that is really hip and mainstream right now, like eating sushi and wearing rompers. It’s like the in-thing to slap on some spandex and have a yoga mat slung over one shoulder, and I get that, okay? Part of me even wants to buy a yoga mat, just so I can sling it over one shoulder and walk around Clayton-DeMun looking like, “Yeah. I just came from yoga. Admire me.”

Why don’t I just GO to yoga, you ask? I am incredibly uncoordinated. I blame this on my maternal grandfather and his size 14 feet. While my feet are not as big as his, they are quite large for someone who is only 5’6’’ on a good day. Combined with the fact that they are also 3A narrow, I look kind of like a flag pole balancing on skis when I'm just standing still. So you see, the idea of trying to balance on only ONE ski, while wearing spandex and contorting into strange shapes in front of an audience does not appeal to me.

I decided to go look at art instead. Art is relaxing; I would go to the Art Museum. Plus, I would get points in my own head for being cool and cultured as opposed to hip and mainstream.

It turns out art is stressful. There is just SO MUCH OF IT AND IT IS EVERYWHERE!!! And it has all these paragraphs that I feel like I should read so that I can really “understand” the piece and what it is trying to say to me. And then if I give up and don’t read the captions, I KNOW that I am missing huge chunks of both form and sense! But then sometimes when I DO read the paragraphs, I still don’t understand what the hell is going on!!

Take Voyage of Life – Old Age. I tried to just look at that, but then I was like, “Is that angel his guardian angel? Or does it represent his soul leaving his body? Or—oh gosh!—is it the ornament from the helm of his ship and it has broken off and entered the realm of reality because he’s ready for the spiritual world? OH MY GOSH I BETTER READ THE PARAGRAPH TO FIND OUT WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN THIS PAINTING RIGHT NOW BUT THERE ARE LIKE 5,000 OTHER PAINTINGS IN THIS BUILDING THAT I NEED TO LOOK AT TOO AND NOW MY HEAD IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE!!!!!!!!!!!!

That’s what happens when I visit an Art Museum. The Met nearly killed me.

And so, now that I have ruled out massages, yoga, and art, it is on to margaritas… 

Train Wreck

I first tried alcohol in my twenties. My roommates gave me a wine cooler, not realizing that I hadn’t eaten that day, weighed 120 pounds, and had a compulsive personality.

“THIS IS FANTASTIC!” I announced. “I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS!!!”

They took it away after I drank half. 

I didn’t drink again for a long time, but after I started teaching in North County, I wanted to be like everyone else. It’s no fun going out to happy hours on Friday with the rest of the staff if you’re just going to order water. But I didn’t know the “rules” of drinking, so I asked the guy who teaches next to me. He is a 6’4’’ black man covered in tattoos.

“I know you’re not supposed to drive drunk,” I began, “but how do I know when I’m drunk? Is it obvious?”

“Listen, E, here’s what you do. You go home and drink until you pass out. When you wake up, you cut that number in half. That’s your limit.”

That sounded mathematical enough. 

It took six other teachers vehemently refuting this theory to convince me that it was not an accurate way to measure how alcohol would affect me.

But how would I have known that? Not only had I never experimented with booze as a teenager, but most of my friends in college didn’t drink either. My siblings drank plenty, but they always felt they had to protect me from the knowledge of their transgressions. So I never really interacted much with Extremely Drunk People.

Until recently.

A friend called me and asked what I was doing.

“Making salsa,” I said.

“Why would you be making salsa right now?” he demanded. 

“I don’t know. I wanted some, so I decided to make it. What are you doing?” 

“I am calling to tell you that you are f***ing gorgeous. Like, I seriously just broke up with my girlfriend for you! Do you know how f***d up that is?! I woke up this morning and you were the first thing I thought of. You have F***D. ME. UP. Like, you are one of the 3 coolest people I know, and you don’t even know how great you are! But... you just don’t understand LIFE!”

I was nonplussed, horrified, and thrilled all at the same time. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, except a train wreck I actually cared about. I couldn’t remember having ever talked to a drunk friend before and I didn’t know what to do. Or what not to do. Or how to tell HOW drunk someone actually was.

“Okay,” I said. “Why don’t I understand Life?”

“EXACTLY!!!” he said. “And that is why we will never be together!”

“Okay,” I said again, stupidly.

“Look,” he continued, “I don’t even have central air conditioning in my house. I have one of those little boxes that blows cold air. It’s like… a box. So there’s that. And you would get tired of living where I live. Plus, you just don’t get life!!”

“Wait, is there more to the air conditioner analogy, or was that it?” I asked, trying to follow along.

“I’M PAINTING A PICTURE RIGHT NOW!” he bellowed. “I can’t fly you all over the country and I wouldn’t even if I could! I’m a guy’s guy. I like working in the dirt. And you… you like… Frontenac. You just don’t even know. You don’t get it. It’s like… we’re the same person, but you just don’t get it.”

“What don’t I get?!” I demanded.

He responded, “If you don’t get over here right now, we are THROUGH!” That made me laugh because it was so preposterous. Laughing is apparently the wrong thing to do when someone is drunk. It just made him mad.

“Look,” I finally said. “I’m not really sure what this call is about. You are clearly drunk, and this conversation is going nowhere. If you would like to ask me out on a date when you are sober, I will say yes.” And then I hung up.

A couple hours later, the text messages started, and those were equally as nuts.

That was several days ago. Since I hadn’t heard from the friend, I finally texted, “Are we still friends?”

“What? Why wouldn’t we be?” he replied.

Turns out he was “blackout drunk” that day and deleted his entire text history, as well as his Facebook page (I guess to avoid seeing whatever he had said or done). He said he’s even in the doghouse with his girlfriend over how blitzed he got.

That gave me pause. “Wait. So you didn’t break up with her?” I clarified.

“No, I did. Well…it’s complicated. Look, I can see I must owe you an apology for something I said or did when I was blacked out. I don’t know what it was, but I’m sorry. I don’t apologize often, but I must need to here.”

And that was that. How do you get a friendship back on track after something like that? He has NO memory of any of it. And I can’t erase any the memories I got stuck with!