Carpooling With Chicks

After my past 3 posts, I need to reassure my readers that I don't need a prescription for Lexipro (just yet).
Okay, this is kind of funny in and of itself: I am becoming certified to teach Pilates. The fact that nobody can find my abs is not going to stop me. I suppose it is my love of the circus, contortionism, and authoritarianism which inspired this decision. The training began in April and will be completed in July. Thus far, it reminds me of most of the classes I've taken which are unaffiliated with a university or non-profit organization. Once they have your money, they do nothing more that market their products to their students...as if we haven't already paid $995 for the classes! Foolishly, I am under the impression when registering that I am actually going to learn what I've set out to learn. I should know better. That "beginner's mind" screws me again...
The endless promotion and marketing of $45 spiral bound books, DVDs, equipment, and more advanced classes takes up a good 30% of the class. The other students, riddled with panic and fear of being tested on the scant amount of material, will buy just about anything, making this a multi-million dollar industry. Call it group-mind, call it Pavlovian response - these people go off like traders on Wall Street every time a new product is mentioned. Today's fervor drove a fellow Pilates student to draft by hand a spreadsheet with everyone's order which she hurriedly delivered to our instructor. He was already on his celly dictating the order to one of the employees in the stockroom at their Costa Mesa HQ. One girl who is a personal trainer was reciting her Visa number to the instructor which I took as a cue to go use the rest room for a while.
I can tell you one name that was not on that spreadsheet. I was the one trying to shut down the shopping spree and suggesting that we get back to the program of learning how to teach Pilates. It goes without saying that I'm not too popular with this crowd.

Because I hate to drive in L.A. and still have to read each line of directions from Google maps when I go anywhere, I decided at the first session back in April to find a carpool buddy. Her name is Connie, and she lives about 8 minutes from me. Nice of me to consider our warming globe, right? This chick couldn't be more twasted and more hazardous to the drivers of L.A. I decided after yesterday's commute in her 1970s Volvo that I would no longer put myself in harm's way like that. It was my third time in the passenger's seat with Connie. Although she's lived in L.A. her whole life, she is still completely unfamiliar with the freeway system. Fine - as a chick, I understand that problem. BUT, if that's the case, you need to stay focused: NO MULTI-TASKING! Don't demonstrate Pilates poses while leaving the steering wheel to spin on its own. And how about leaving the windows up while speeding along at 80 MPH and conversing at the top of your lungs about your ex-fiancee. My blood pressure was climbing fast. I kept trying to use my hands to guide her eyes back to those dashed lines on the asphalt. I refused to make eye-contact, in order to dissuade her from this practice.

On Sunday morning I called her and made up a bogus excuse about how I was running late (due to the baby, of course!) and how I didn't want to make her late. She sounded a little put-off and told me that this was not news that she had anticipated or something equally non-compelling. Look, I did what I had to do. As luck would have it, I was not running late. I never am. When I arrived at the studio, the only other car in the lot was Connie's Volvo. Immediately, I left the lot and parked a block away. I wasted about 15 minutes, making an unnecessary call to Augie so that I could walk into the class appearing to have barely made it in on time. Oh, the tangled web we weave. After class, I'm driving away and see Connie making her way to her car. I thought I had a bit of a running start and could avoid any more possible discomfort about my weaseling out of carpooling with her. Somehow, it must have had something to do with the timing of the stoplights, twasted traffic patterns, or just my dumb luck - but we were driving cockpit-to-cockpit almost the entire way! I would slow down, speed up, stay in the right-most exiting lane - it didn't matter. It was like I had a side car, and neither of us wanted to make eye contact. If I'm not mistaken, I think she was even holding her cellphone up to her ear, just to make herself look more legitimately oblivious. My only pathetic retort was to scratch the side of my face a lot. It was such a chick moment. You guy readers probably don't understand these shenanigans
At some point, maybe I'll grow some girly balls and learn how to tell someone that I'm not going to carpool with them without all of the excuses and uncontrollable urge not to look like a bitch. Something to work up to along with the flat abs.

Birthday Doldrums

Try not to have a birthday on a Monday. It just gives off the wrong vibe.
Today was my 34th birthday. Now it's nighttime, and I can talk about this birthday and compare it with others. It was probably in the 15th percentile. As a new parent, you wind up using the word "percentile" a lot. You'd probably feel pretty dissappointed if a doctor so much as uttered the word 15th percentile around your baby.
But this is different. Birthdays are fucked up for adults.

Me? I am lucky. I have friends who make a fuss over me on my birthday. I've been taken out to dinner twice. I've gotten birthday cards, phone calls, e-mails, checks. If I weren't impossible to please, I might say it was a swell day. I am getting to the point where I like having birthdays behind me. I get nervous thinking about who might not call and how I'm going to handle it. Like I said, birthdays are fucked up for adults and even more so for 34 year old children.

Slab From The Past

I just got back from New Orleans on Monday. Good trip and all that, but I mostly wanted to share this image with you. For those of you who knew my childhood home at 5814 Bellaire Drive, you might remember our 1980s decor, especially this rockin' black and white tile. Well, as you can see ole' 5814 done got razed, and here's what's left. Oh, and there's the famous 17th Street canal behind the slab. While I was out snapping this photo, I met the young guy who had just bought the property. He had lost his home which was in St.Bernard Parish and decided to make a new home for himself here on our old property. It was kind of sweet- he had a wheelbarrow full of dirt and a shovel. He's really rebuilding from the ground up, starting with filling in some massive ditches in the backyard. Hard to believe that my old backyard was like an ocean floor after Katrina.
I remember on a few occasions, snakes, possum, raccoons, alligators, and once a gigantic sea turtle made appearances back there. There were 4 mammoth pecan trees bordering the fence .
If you attended our wedding or hung out with me between 1973 and 2004, then you likely spent some time out in the yard as well as on the black and white dance floor.

Remembering the Beast

Today is May 8, and it is the 64th birthday of my Uncle Beast. This is the first birthday since his recent passing, so I'll have to eat cake all by myself. Oh, and he'd probably want me to scare up some homemade ice-cream to go with it. He left this world last October just before Zev was born. The way I see it, they must have passed each other, as one was entering and the other exiting. My palm reader made an allusion to the idea that Beast and Zev share the same soul. I'd like to think that it's so. I sometimes place their pictures alongside each other and see a similarity in their cherubic faces.
His given name was Stuart, but to me and a few others in the family, he was the Beast. Why was he a Beast? Not sure, because the name was around before I was. He had a voracious appetite and loved to eat- maybe like a Beast would. He liked to wrestle and crack toes- again, maybe like a Beast would...but he was ferociously loving and loyal. So, maybe a Beast could be seen in many different ways.
Beast and I have millions of memories together, but we were mostly bonded by a shared burden: we loved two men that are tough to love- my grandfather, Izzy, and my father(his brother). Not that these two men are unlovable, but they just don't make it easy on anyone. Beast and I were continuously trying to impress my Dad and "earn" his love. With my grandfather, Beast was nurturing. And, Izzy is not the type to accept any kind of tenderness into his life. But Beast pushed on and continued to nurture his widowed father up until the last few months of his life. In fact, Beast kept his own diagnosis a secret from Izzy up until his last weeks here in this world. Izzy still insists that he knew all along. Who knows?
I can picture the two of them doing their grocery shopping together at all of the supermarkets in Margate, Florida: Beast holding Izzy's coupons while Izzy scanned all of the prices on the canned goods, in order to make sure that he was buying each item from the correct store. Izzy doesn't show love, but he did tell me once that he thought Beast was handsome like a movie-star.
Beast and I ate together , traveled overseas together, and gossiped a whole lot. Whenever I needed a pep-talk or someone to vent about my dad with- I knew who to go to.
He was a yo-yo dieter, sometimes bearded and always bespectacled. He wore a unicorn medallion necklace which came from a jewelery store in New Orleans. Beast had seen a lot of the world and was quite familiar with China. In fact, he took me there when I was a student in Acupuncture School. We stayed at a famous hotel near Beijing designed by I.M Pei. I introduced him to the joys of Hawthorne berry candies and salty-sour plums. He took me to have desert at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, just so I could see how fancy the ladies room was. I didn't have to do anything to make him love me, and that's what set him apart from the other men in our family.
Beast cooked, shopped and read trashy mysteries. He and his wife of 41 years, whom we call the Goose, watched their many t.v shows and baseball games together in their little wood paneled den. They read, solved cross-word puzzles and drank wine in their astro-turfed indoor porch. They were truly best friends, even though Beast would get in trouble for leaving a dirty dish here and there.
He and his pancreas(and also his liver) spent a year trying to figure out if they could live with cancer, or not. He sailed through several months strong and beastly , and we were all in denial of his bleak prognosis. I really can't feel cheated that he was taken away. Magical people like Beast appear few times in one's life, and you do whatever you can to share as much as possible with them. If you're smart, you grab every little morsel.
Anyway, Beast, happy birthday wherever you are.