Drive Up Flu Shot

I did the drive up flu shot thing today. I went to my Kaiser office and drove up to a station of nurses, who asked me if I were allergic to eggs or flu shots. I said no, they stuck me with the needle, bandaged me up, and sent me on my way.

I didn't even have to take off my seat belt. I did anyway, just because it seemed, well, strange to be strapped in while some one was giving you a shot of something. It seemed very A Clockwork Orange to me.

There was a continuous line of cars, all packed with families. I was one of the few people who came alone. I had never done the drive up clinic before, so I was unprepared for the feeling it gave me. My heart was full to be part of a huge public health initiative (put on, of course, by an HMO, but hey, keeping costs down this way prevents people from getting sick). I felt like I was a part of the community, doing my part to make sure that the fewest number of people possible become sick from influenza this winter. It was such a contrast from the times I go in to get my shot in the doctor's office. There, I'm in a little room. It seems almost trivial to be getting a shot that way -- almost paranoid, almost selfish.

Getting the flu shot at the drive up clinic today make me feel like I feel when I'm voting. When I'm voting, I'm there with all my neighbors, making important decisions. It was the same exact feeling today.

Adam Smith's Invisibility Cloak

The financial crisis is the invisible hand giving us a slap down.

Esquire

So. About a year ago, Calderoj and I were driving down I-76 toward Brighton. I don't know what we were talking about, but it might have been a recent Supreme Court decision, or even it could have been me sharing about one of my greatest regrets in life (we were a new couple then) -- not having bought the Supreme Court paper dolls I saw at Waldenbooks back in 1993.* Anyway, I just remember saying, "Being a Supreme Court justice would be the best job in the world." After all, what could be better than thinking and arguing about ideas all day long and then writing about them? What could be better than having a direct affect on people by turning theory into praxis?

Calderoj said, "You like reading huge amounts of really dry, complex material?" He didn't know me then.

I responded, "I went to grad school for English because I like literary theory."

This was enough for Calderoj. "Why not go to law school, then?"

Dear Reader, it was as if the Angel Gabriel had possessed Calderoj; for Calderoj's suggestion sounded to me like a message from the Almighty. In fact, it was at that very moment that the idea of being a lawyer began to grow in me.

Indeed, why not? The LSAT? The expense? The time? My non-traditional age? My current career? All of that is bosh -- excuses not to shift into another shape -- excuses not to see another true incarnation of myself.

Dear Reader, this moment was momentous. I do not remember what I wore that day.

With Calderoj's help I did nicely on the LSAT, found the money, remembered that when Mozart was my age he was dead for two years so I'm living on borrowed time anyway, and figured out a way to teach high school and study law concurrently.

All of this means that in addition to all of the things that I already am -- teacher, doggie mommy, girlfriend, daughter, sister, friend, fashionista, aristocrat of taste, Pilates enthusiast -- I am also going to be a lawyer.


*Another of my great life regrets is not having bought Vivienne Tam's Mao skirt when it was in the Neiman Marcus catalogue back in the mid-90s. I am sure I could get these items on eBay, but then how could I savor the regret the way regret is meant to be savored?

Fashionista on a Budget: She Does a Little Comparison Shopping

This evening, for entertainment, I went to Target. Now, I have not been to Target in a while, nor have I shopped seriously at Target in several years, but I wanted to check out what was new in "Design for All."

One of the reasons I like Target is that it has this design for all mission. It isn't "Design Within Reach," which is just the Sharper Image of the early twenty-first century. Instead it really believes that the masses might like good design, instead of make-do design. I have several artifacts of this experiment, including my Michael Graves paper shredder, Michael Graves can opener, Michael Graves vegetable peeler, and Michael Graves surge protectors. All of these everyday objects are useful, comfortable, and pleasing to the eye (Calderoj's brother even complimented the surge protectors). Even as I write, form and function are making beautiful music together in my utility drawer.

While all of the aforementioned products have stood the test of time, I have not been impressed by the durability of clothing on offer at Target. I learned about this problem a few years ago when I noticed that Target has cute clothing for cheap. This was shortly after Isaac Mizrahi made Target cool. I bought some items. The shirts ripped at the seams, the sweaters pilled. The knitwear shrunk in the wash. Not only was the durability bad, but the form, while pleasing to the eye, was not so pleasing to the body. Jackets puckered and were strangely sized. I realized that in clothing you really do get what you pay for. Target clothes retail mostly for below $25 per item.

Is the idea that the buyer will wear it once and then throw it away? This never seemed to be the case with Geranimals, which is how I started out wearing Target clothes. Though my mother does consider shopping a raison d'etre, thirty years ago she was, nevertheless, practical, so I don't think she would have bought us stuff that would fall apart. But there is a difference in quality in women's apparel from Target and, say apparel by Stella McCartney. Target clothes don't last the week. Stella designs clothes so your daughter can wear them as vintage decades from now.

But Stella McCartney and Target do have something in common. That thing is Pleather. Neither one of them uses the word. Instead, both prefer to make the word "patent" into a noun, as in "Patent Ombre Handbag." And both of them market products made from "faux suede." I'm not sure about this, but weren't earlier incarnations of faux suede called Naugahyde and Ultrasuede, respectively?

I am not looking down on these retailers. No. I have several pieces by excellent designers that use faux fur.* Indeed, SM uses faux skins and fur because she is a vegetarian and wishes to translate her eating choices into her design aesthetic, which I applaud. The interesting thing is that when you buy a Stella boot in faux suede, you pay 100 times more than you would to buy a Target boot in faux suede.

So when I went to Target, I decided to check out the difference. I tried on a Stella boot yesterday. This evening, I tried on a Target ballet flat. I had to go up a size in both. Pleather must not stretch as well as its natural, cruel counterpart.

*My Rebecca Taylor faux leopard jacket is one of my favorite pieces. Calderoj thinks it makes me look like a streetwalker. This fall I'm going to wear it with a black pashmina scarf and gloves and jeans for a casual look. Mmm, mmm, mmm.

Rearranging the Chi

Yesterday I wrote about the transformative powers of Yoga. Today I'm going to write about house cleaning. Dear Reader, they are the same thing!

My third revelation about Yoga -- and my big revelation about life as a human being -- is that we are all shape shifters and we don't even know it. In fact, we resent it. As children, it literally hurts to grow -- remember all of those achy nights when your bones were growing? Adolescence is scary because we are literally changing form. Later on we find it so difficult to stay en forme. And how many people do I see looking wistfully at the bodies of young people and remembering when? I never hear middle aged people saying things like, "Yeah, my skin doesn't glow like it used to, but now I finally feel at home in it." And that's not even what happens to us emotionally and spiritually.

I think of my surroundings as an extension of my self. It isn't that I find validation in my book shelf, or I think that because I have this very cool PowerMac that I am really cool, too. No, it's because my surroundings are the space in which I live. They determine what shape I take on a daily basis. Am I cramped? Am I able to expand? Am I hording old things that I no longer use?

Since I have been teaching the summers have become a time of cleaning. Calderoj thinks I'm obsessed, and that since I'm smart I need stimulation and I'm really bored and am channelling my anxiety into rearranging the closets. I think he's right about the anxiety -- he's a perceptive guy, that Calderoj. But I think he attributes it to the wrong cause. It is the anxiety that comes with the excitement and anticipation of a new vision of oneself. That's what house cleaning and rearranging is -- a new vision of who you are -- a different space to occupy in a different shape.

Yesterday I wrote about how taking different shapes in Yoga channels the spiritual energy of the universe through your body in different ways, releasing emotions and leading to epiphanies. I think that rearranging the closets and cleaning the house does the same thing. It lets the spiritual energy flow through the house in a different way, through a different channel.

Standing On My Head, Seeing God, Death, and Eternity

Once again, Yoga has proven to me that the soul and body cannot be separated.

Some background. I have been doing Yoga for over ten years now. I have not been an entirely faithful Yoga practitioner, and so my practice has not advanced very far. I still attend level 1-2 classes (there are 3 levels in the tradition I study). My slow advancement is not because I lack discipline or inherently don't like to exercise. Those of you who know me know that the only times in seven years that I have missed Pilates lessons is when I have had pneumonia. I used to run almost five miles every morning before work until I got tired of my hair freezing in winter weather and bought an elliptical machine, which I do every morning before work. I really, really like physical activity. More than physical activity, I like the results of physical activity. I like that I am in my late thirties and I am strong and flexible. I like that I don't have chronic injuries that have been brought about by inactivity. I like that I don't view my body as a burden, and that I look at the years to come with dread because I know that there is a correlation between movement and quality of life.

My practice is slow to develop because Yoga scares me. I first started doing Yoga because I understood it to be a gentle form of exercise that I could do safely when I was 80. I understood it to be just another form of exercise, one that would relax me and increase my flexibility. My first class showed me that it was something else entirely. I practice in the Iyengar tradition, which means that, at the low levels at least, there is really no discussion of what the guru, B.K.S. Iyengar calls the rest of the "tree of yoga," the spiritual path to enlightenment in which the positions are only a small part. In other words, there was no Yoga evangelism, only an earnest desire on the part of my teacher for us to understand that Yoga was more than gentle flexibility, but instead required a great deal of attention to parts of our bodies we had previously no awareness of. I learned that Yoga was a lot harder than it looked.

In that first set of classes, I also came to an understanding of what Yoga promises. After learning some of the poses and then reading a few books about the poses, I began to understand the Kama Sutra. It isn't that I became expert at The Congress of the Crow, this certainly wasn't the case. Instead, it means that I began to understand that the asanas of Yoga and the erotic positions in the Kama Sutra were all about the flow of spiritual energy through the body. That such positions, whether performed alone as in Yoga, or together with a partner in bed, were about an engagement with the Cosmos that other things that we do in life don't necessarily encourage.

After my first initial course, I went to class whenever I could afford it. In these years I was afraid of the positions themselves. I was suspicious of any inversion. Head Stand and Shoulder Stand would surely lead me to break my neck, a fate that my mother was sure to befall any one who participated in activities that were even partially dangerous, from walking down stairs to wearing high heels. I didn't want to advance because that meant that I'd have to spend an increasing amount of class upside down.

It was about two or three years into practice when I had my second realization about Yoga. We were doing Camel, and as I bent back and exposed my chest to the world, I felt fear sweep through me in wave after wave. It was the most intense fear I had ever experienced. Worse, it was totally unexplainable. It was attached to nothing -- no memory, no situation. Because it was so detached, I couldn't even talk about it. I was in therapy at the time because I was bulimic, and both my therapist and I struggled to understand it. We never got it. I didn't go back to Yoga for years.

When I went back it was because I had made friends with an incredible human being who happened to teach Yoga. She started doing a workshop for teachers at our school, and I felt safe with her. Earlier in the year, she had given me my third insight into Yoga. I had recently had treatment for Graves Disease and one day woke up to notice that I'd put on weight and so I couldn't get my jeans zipped. This threw me into a panic, and I expressed my anxiety to my friend. She already understood what I had come to realize that morning. In awe I told her, "We are shape shifters and we don't even know it."

Yoga still wasn't easy, but not because it hurt or was difficult to perform. I was really liking standing on my head. Instead, it was difficult to deal with the spiritual energy that I now realized my body was conducting when I went in to the asanas. I went to class for a while, but then I dropped out.

When I met my boyfriend, Calderoj, and we began a relationship that had a spiritual component, I suggested that we go to Yoga class together. As with all aspects of my life, I am a Yoga snob. I insisted that we study Iyengar. We found a good school run by a husband and wife.

Perhaps that was too much background for you. However, it was necessary to explain my revelation of Saturday morning. The class I attended was great. We did several standing poses and a lot of Downward Dog. I stood on my head for what was a long time for me. For those of you who don't know much about Yoga practice, at the end of each session you do Shivasana, literally Corpse Pose. In Shivasana the practitioner lies on her back, muscles relaxed, eyes closed, mind in a meditative state. The idea behind the pose is that it is like death, and that because they practice it often, yogis are prepared when they meet death.

The teacher had us starting off in another pose where we were lightly touching the wall with our feet. Then, when we moved into Shivasana, he told us to push ourselves away from the wall. I was struck by the affect of pushing away from the wall. Suddenly, other than the fact that I was lying on the floor, I was touching nothing. I had the sensation of floating in space. I thought, "This must be one aspect of death. The dead have no relationship with any object." It was an epiphany. Moreover, I greeted this forth understanding about Yoga with curiosity.

In the end, the class had released happiness in me in the same way that the camel class had released fear years ago. I made a fifth realization, as well. Because advancing in Yoga is about developing your soul as well as your body you have to be an adult on an emotional level to advance. You have to realize that fear and anger happen, just in the same way that happiness happens. An adult doesn't run from these feelings. An adult confronts them.

Pestilence

So I am back to battling the Horseman of Pestilence. As alert readers will remember, I have been wrestling with God about this situation lately. Is my fitness, as demonstrated by my ability to use the information I read on the CSU extension website to defeat my enemy, moral? Am I justified in murdering moths and their larvae because that is the natural order of things?

This weekend at a family gathering, my brother and sister in law were talking about their mouse problem. They had mice last summer under their deck. They didn't do anything about the mice because, as they said, they thought they were "cute." Now that the mice have entered their home, B and S.I.L. don't think they are cute any more. They are, in fact, rather distressing. My brother put it this way: "They're not cute. Now when I set the traps I look forward to seeing their little backs broken."

Dear brother, I have felt the same way. Years ago in my married house, there were mice. They were everywhere. They ate the dog's food, they built a nest under the refrigerator. They darted out from dark corners when I was least expecting them. I was at my wit's end. But we had to live, and to do that, they couldn't live. We called in an exterminator.

Other "pests" have provoked reactions from me that are simply mammalian. At the same married house, there was a cactus in the garden. The puppy went out in the night and stepped on the cactus. We pulled the stickers from his paws. The next day I went out with rose gloves and pruning shears and cut the cactus to bits. Don't mess with my babies.

Recently, I came home to find wasps building a next just outside our front door. One came into the house. I panicked. I implored J to do something. He leaped to my rescue, smashed the inside wasp, then, using the only weapon he could find, sprayed WD40 on the nest.

Similarly, I do not feel sentimental about roaches. We don't have roaches, but occasionally I see a beetle that I've never seen before and imagine that we do.

So, here I am again, devising ways to conquer the moths. I am not sure what I am doing is right, I am only sure that it is animal.

Re: Of Moths and Fashionistas

My dear, dear, friend Herm commented that my victory over the fabric moths was somehow "decently Darwinian." I'm not sure I felt decent after this victory. Survival of the fittest does not leave room for a conscience. Why are my clothes (my shelter and my sexual allure, which might, at this point, aid in the conception of only one or possibly two human young) any more important than that moth's offspring, and, in fact, the work of her entire, short life?

Garden

So. Having dropped off a bunch of clothes that I never wear, I was walking out of the consignment shop today and I saw that it was raining. I was so surprised that I thought in French, "La mousson a arrive." For it is 17 July, and it was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and up until then the day had been oppressively hot. But the rain was cool, and in the great, front-range tradition, lasted for about five minutes.

Something about it inspired me, though. On my way to my next errand I remembered that there is a small public garden just next to the amusement park and just off the bike path that goes along the river. I have wanted to have a look at it for a while, but I never made a time, and whenever I am passing by it seems that the garden is closed -- it closes at 5pm each day, a travesty if you ask me. The hours just before the sun goes down are the best times for walking in gardens. I had twenty minutes.

Centennial Gardens was designed and is maintained by the Denver Botanic Gardens. It is laid out in a formal style, and the signs in the park refer to Versailles and to Kensington Gardens. However, the designers have taken care to use native plants or species that do not take up much water. The hedges are made of native fernwood and mountain mahogany. One section is comprised of lavender plants (and, it looks like, bees), and one has huge rose bushes. Instead of cypress, there are juniper.

The gardens are laid out in nine equal squares, with a colonnade stretching down most of the east side of the garden, and bosques of linden on the north and the south sides, respectively. The linden smell wonderful. I walked through the whole garden, then sat underneath the colonnade and enjoyed a rare 5pm breeze.

For the most part I was the only one in the garden. I saw several groups of people stop in and look from the front, but they left quickly, I think to ride the roller coaster. The only other people in the garden were a middle school-aged couple, the girl sitting literally astride the boy, who lay in the grass under the lindens. When I walked by them, they looked at me with huge, sheepish grins. Then, for the rest of the time I was in the garden, they kept looking over toward me, as if I were some figure of authority from whom they were trying to hide their bad behavior. "When is she going to leave?" They looked like they were saying. "It is irritating trying to have to pretend to be doing nothing." Such behavior is archetypal in gardens, I know.

Of Moths and Fashionistas

This past Spring I had a fabric moth problem. One day I just started seeing these tiny moths flying through my closet and I knew what I was up against. A few years ago moths had eaten through most of my cashmere and my response this time was sort of like the Bush administration response to 9/11: total war. I even demonized them. They were not an axis of evil, but they were certainly the Horseman of Pestilence.

I'm against mothballs -- you can't sell them in California because they're that toxic and not just to moths -- so I did everything else I could to make the environment in my home inhospitable to moths. I dry cleaned and laundered everything. I lined every sweater box with cedar and lavender. I encased the vulnerable clothing in plastic. I did this even as J was laughing at my quixotic efforts. Then I encased his jackets in plastic, as well.

It was months before we stopped seeing the little, plain creatures flying through the house the way they do -- like Woodstock on his way to see Snoopy. Each time I saw them I would seethe.

For a long time I couldn't figure out where the infestation was. I finally narrowed it down to the coat closet. However, I have not seen moths in a while.

The other day I was in the coat closet rearranging the towels and blankets when I found a dead fabric moth. The moths themselves do not eat holes in cloth, it is their larvae that cause the damage. The moths do not eat, instead they stay alive just long enough to lay their eggs and then die. Fabric moth larvae can only get adequate nutrition if they live on natural, animal hair-based fabrics like wool, alpaca, and fur itself. This moth laid her eggs on one of our cotton towels. I saw the tiny, glistening eggs not far away from the moth, whose body was so dry that one of her wings was barely attached. The cotton would not give the larvae the kind of food it needed, but she had no other place to lay the eggs -- all of the wool was packed in plastic. If that isn't tragic enough, I knew that the eggs would be destroyed as soon as I put the towel in the wash.

I was staring at a triumph of Darwinian proportions. I had done the things I was put on earth to do -- preserved my home and my ability to produce offspring. I was the fittest.

Garden

We are planting a garden, my J and I. J has cleared out the back yard of the sumac that until this summer had claimed the yard as its own, and we have dedicated an entire third of the space to herbs and vegetables. We have a bed of strawberries and cantaloupe. We have two rows of corn, one of cucumber, beets, and chard, each. There are two rows of radishes ("French Breakfast" radishes, tres chic) and four of spinach and carrots, planted together a la francaise for the spinach to break up the soil so the carrots can reach deeper into the ground (c'est le plus chic). We have tomato plants -- two varieties, and several varieties of pepper -- hot and sweet, planted far apart, so as not to cross germinate.

The herb garden takes up a small, triangular bed by the door to the mud room. There, planted around an old tree stump, are thyme, chives, and rosemary. The bed is bordered on one side by purple allysum, and in the more acute angle of the bed I planted lavender, Spanish and French (une fragrance tres sensuel).

I have not gardened in years, since I lived in my married house on Pearl Street, where I had grapevine and moneywort. In my days as a gay divorcee, I lived in a penthouse flat where I grew nothing, though I did take a class on indoor composting, hoping to preserve the gardening spirit in a closet or under the kitchen sink. There was never any room to compost in my flat, and anyway when you are cultivating a single-girl lifestyle, there is hardly room for any type of horticulture in your life. Your refrigerator is full of water, supplements, and doggie bags containing the remains of meals that restaurants have passed off as single portions but you know could each give you three lunches, at least. In circumstances such as these, your herb garden is dried and in jars on the spice shelf, awaiting an occasion when you and the date du jour might stay in. There were a couple of times when I helped boyfriends du jour in their gardens, but there was nothing of me in those gardens. I was just a couple of hands skilled at extracting a weed's whole root.

This new garden is an adventure. It is a review and it is new material. I'm remembering how to compost -- that there are greens and browns and there is a ratio. I am remembering that planing is easier when the ground has been watered the night before and is still moist, but no longer mud. From J, I learned how to plant seeds in little mounds, and not straight in the soil.

Indeed, the best part of this whole garden thing is that J and I are doing it together. I would have waited to plant a garden until at least next year -- until we could solve some vexing landscaping issues that now burden the yard (the huge concrete slab is just the largest of the problems back there). But J is a leader of people, one reason being that his enthusiasm for a project is his most convincing argument to pursue it. He is ambitious and confident in his ambition, so much so that everything he endeavors to do seems destined for success. For him, making a garden is a risk that will pay off. I am timid, and think of it as an experiment -- "Do we really have the fortitude to plant it, grow it, harvest it, preserve it, and eat it?" I am timid, therefore I reflect the light of J's confidence. The seeds will germinate, the plants will thrive, and their leaves and fruits will be delicious.

There is also something really ancient about making a garden -- something that connects us to our ancestors of a thousand generations past. Taking a rest from planting the chives, I looked up to see J on his knees, gently covering the seeds he'd just sewn with a light layer of dirt. I though to myself, "How many other couples have done this same thing we are doing?" I considered this question and concluded that garden-making feels so ancient (and I mean ancient, not primal, just old) because is one of the reasons couples are together in the first place. Garden-making is the first thing you need to do to survive, and it is easier to do it when you have help -- not help who you pay or who lend a hand occasionally -- but help that is dedicated to the same endeavors you are, and whose own survival matters not just to your survival, but also to your happiness.

May Ritual

When May comes around, those of us in education don our robes and make the obligatory trek down the aisle to the sound of the band playing "Pomp and Circumstance." This is not an inherently "fun" activity. In seven years of teaching I have attended six graduations. (Last year I was getting a CT scan on graduation Saturday, an activity that prevented me from paying my respects to the class of 2007, and one that is also on the relatively short list of things I would rather not do than attend graduation -- attending a funeral is one, fighting a war is another). I have heard commencement addresses -- at least two per year -- and I have heard nothing new. I have listened to my colleagues read the first, middle, and last names of hundreds of children in that slow, ta, tata, ta, rhythm (followed by a single hand clap) -- a meter I am sure is dedicated only to graduation ceremonies. And of course we all love the students and of course we are all so pleased to see them succeed and go on to what we hope will be productive lives far away, but let's face it, sitting in the broiling sun in a black, polyester gown while representing with dignity your school and your profession is no one's idea of a good time. So you have to make it fun.

I am convinced that the master's robe is the most useful robe for having fun at a graduation. You have the hood, of course, which makes things even hotter than if you had just stopped with a bachelor's, but then you have the massive sleeves, in which, one of my colleagues insists, can be hidden a full pack of cigarettes. Not a smoker, I have tended to use my sleeves for a makeup bag. Though this year I had the idea to hide my iPod in them, along with my cell phone, so that during the ceremony I could run the cord up beneath my blouse, put one of the buds in my ear, share the other with the colleague sitting next to me, and listen to music and text to my heart's content. Not wishing to be meanspirited by mimicking the former students' whose day this was, I chose not to do the iPod/text thing. Instead, I sat with my ponytailed colleague J and he pointed out to me the birds by species as they flew through the amphitheater. We watched some falcons for some time.

On Staving Off The Apocalypse for You

The Genius of Pestilence has appeared in my closet. I am sure it is he, as he has come in the form of small, brownish-white moths with dark brown heads. And isn't it written somewhere that when clothes moths infest a fashionista's closet this is surely a Sign of the End? Here we are on the last night of Passover -- we should remember how God sent ten plagues to Egypt -- blood, frogs, locusts, the death of the firstborn, the discovery of holes in cashmere sweaters....Isn't it supposed to be the End when I have found seven garments each with seven holes?

Dear Reader, please know that I am doing something about this. I am staving off the Apocalypse for you. I have with great diligence removed every piece of wool clothing from my closet, and took it to the cleaners. Then, I purchased plastic garment bags and cedar wood drenched with lavender oil. When I got my clothes back from the cleaner, I stored them in these bags, with the wood. Other sweaters I put in plastic sweater boxes, along with the wood.

Gentle Reader, I am a thorough and detail oriented woman. I also have quite a large wardrobe, so the logistics of this project have taken two weeks to plan and execute. I had to secure funding. I had to create a war plan. One cannot win the heart and mind of a moth, let alone a Horseman, so this had to be Total War. My boyfriend, to my dismay, is a man of little faith. He has watched me with glee, laughing, as I arrange and rearrange, as I go on alert when a moth flies by us, bobbing up and down a little and trying to avoid the light (that's how you know it is the Horseman, it doesn't like light). He makes light of my -- and your -- misfortune. He belittles my mission. He laughs in the face of the Horseman. Ah, but he will stop laughing, for, as I have secured my closet, it is time to move on to his.