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#fridayflash – 1981


September 11, 1981

HE called. I was washing dishes. Not the right Cinderella moment, but up to my elbows in greasy suds is more authentic than a size ten threatening to shatter a glass slipper while the other waits for its prince to get on one knee and slice a toe off with the other.

A summer’s worth of eating tuna, celery and rice had paid off I thought when I heard HIS voice, a feathery tickle I’ve known since we were five. I ate so much tuna; I couldn’t go barefoot without the cat lapping at my toes. And my poor toes? Curled under, raw from being ground into the sidewalk every night. I ran the two miles to my old grade school playground, worked my way up to eleven real pull-ups over the course of the summer before tromping my fat ass home.

Twenty vanquished pounds later, HE calls. I can taste the three years of loserdom melting in my mouth. Romanceless fat best friend years, pining for HIM while HE dated every girl we knew and saved his secrets for me.

I thought.

Until tonight.

“It was me,” he said.

“What was you?” I asked.

Not the conversation I anticipated. That conversation gushed over my new appearance and how stupid he’d been to not notice I was so pretty in addition to being funny, smart and a good listener.

“What I told you about Stevie,” he said. “It wasn’t him, it was me.”

“Oh,” and that was all there was to say.

“We’re still friends?” he asked. “You don’t hate me, do you? I couldn’t stand it if you hated me.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

But we ‘re not friends anymore and I will hate him for a long time, I think.

We three were musketeers. Since kindergarten. Over the summer, they went off to band camp and when they came back, Stevie didn’t hang out with us anymore.

“Is something wrong?” I asked HIM. “Did something happen at camp between you guys?”

“Nah,” HE said. “You know Steve. He’s that way sometimes. Moody. Things’ll get back to normal eventually.”

But they didn’t. Stevie wouldn’t talk to me except to tell me I should ask HIM about IT and that I didn’t know HIM as well as I thought I did.

Eventually he explained that Stevie tried to kiss him one night when they’d gotten drunk off Boone’s Farm. He’d turned Stevie down, of course, and now Stevie was embarrassed and mad.

But it was both of them. Twinsies all along. I smelled like the cat bowl for nothing.

The fat girl inside gloated. Like the other girls who dated him and knew will. I can see it now. The looks they gave us this fall that weren’t really jealous at all.

I almost didn’t go for my nightly run, but I decided to punish my inner fat girl for her smugness and I skipped her breakfast this morning too for good measure.

I wrote this for a contest at Nathan Bransford’s blog. I didn’t make the semi’s or the honorable mention. Nathan listed some of the things he looked for and also traits that disqualified. One of notes concerned story that seemed to have a date stamped on in an attempt to make narrative look like a diary entry. I would say my piece resembles that, but this is how I kept my journals as a teen and into my late twenties. I would write about events from my day as if I were telling a first person story, transcribing them verbatim including whole dialogues with commentary interspersed.

The contest called for 500 words max which doomed me too because I needed about double to flesh it properly. I wanted to do that before posting, but I have done a yoga cleanse this week. Yoga sessions daily and twice on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I am beat. I also had some issues at the paying gig to wade through that distracted a bit. I will be back later today to post the revision.

Losing My Inner Yogina


An author who friended me on Facebook is beginning her new year using a Bikram yoga dvd to get in shape. Bikram is basically one of the “hot yoga’s”. It’s creator lives in L.A. and stews over the fact that he hasn’t been allowed to lay copyright to the asanas/postures that make up the Bikram practice. As nearly as I can understand it without having gone to a class, there are 26 asanas that do not change from one practice to the next and the yoga is practiced in environments of 105F with 40% humidity levels. Oh, and hydration is frowned upon.

Anyway, this author has been updating on her progress and made a comment on the difficulty of doing the program in front of a mirror.

And I went – mirrors? Because I have yet to see mirrors in a yoga studio or be told by a teacher to go watch myself in a mirror. Aerobics is done in front of a mirror. Weight-lifting. Super narcissistic stuff. But yoga, as I have been taught and as I have read, is an inward focus for several reasons but one of the better ones is that to safely get into the postures – you have to be paying attention to what your body is telling you. Something, I have found, that people don’t do much of when they are worried about how they look.

My comment on the mirrors and inward focus elicited this reply:

Bikram is not chanty, third eye, meditate on the pretty flower yoga. Bikram is HARD CORE yoga and your posture counts! Hence, the mirrors!

Whoa! Step back from your organic fiber Lululemon mat there Yoga Princess.

Of course, I didn’t take that advice and launched a reply in spite of Rob’s advice to just let it go. But afterwards, I wondered how yogina that was of me. I had spent the evening before reading B.K.S. Iyengar’s definitive book Light on Yoga and nearly all of what he had to say struck deep chords. I wasn’t getting off to a good start as a budding teacher myself if I could let someone else’s misinformation ruffle me, was I? And picking a bone on someone else’s Facebook profile is just bad form.

So I deleted the comment though this post is certainly not the highest of the roads I could have taken. A more enlightened person wouldn’t have even written about the incident. But I am not quite the hemp wearing navel gazer yet (though I got the most awesome hemp yoga pants from Rob for my birthday) and feel compelled to set the record straight.

I don’t chant. I barely meditate though my inner focus is improving. I am all about the breathing and listening to my body because I am more concerned with still being about to use this body 25 years from now than I am about being a certain size. And it’s not posture. It’s alignment and it matters because you can really hurt yourself if you aren’t properly aligned though anyone who is paying even the slightest attention can align themselves without having to gaze at themselves.

Oh and there are no fucking flowers involved. Flowers? That is so Beatles. That’s TM, not yoga, and a tired Hollywood propagated stereo-type that should have been left behind with 80’s sitcoms.

Competitive yoga is like turning to the dark side of the force, and we all know how well that turns out in the long run. But it was bad, bad, bad to take it personally. Gotta work on that.

R*E*S*P*E*C*T


I think it is interesting, at times frustrating, to ponder why we loathe to be labeled as “mommy bloggers” while at the same time demand to be respected as “mothers”.

I ran across this sentence via a comment to a post on a blog written by Jessica Gottlieb that pondered the uncomfortable nature of blogging and being recognized. The commenter blogs anonymously, which is something I find fascinating but wonder at its feasibility in the long term. Regardless, her musing intrigued me because I don’t like the mommy-blogger label or the fact that as a woman writer, who happens to blog, that I have to be a mommy blogger in order to find outlets on the web. It is a social media glass ceiling of sorts that condemns women to shilling for wampum by trading their cute kid stories and making fun of their husbands.*

How?

Because I’ve put my uterus to work just the one time, this has somehow made what I think about anything not related to child-rearing, housekeeping and female related consumerism irrelevant. My experiences and perspective are tainted by marriage and procreation. I am clearly not in my right mind.

Clearly this would have been the case anyway, but the second part – about needing to demand respect for the whole luck of the sperm bagging an egg thing – is not something I can wrap myself around.

Because I don’t care.

When I was teaching, I had occasion here and there to point out to a recalcitrant child, or classroom full of them, that teaching was not a democracy. I would not be polling them for input nor did I need their approval. Teaching them was my job. My decisions were in the best interest of their learning, and sometimes they would not agree and that really didn’t matter.

Parenting is not a democracy. Polling others for what they would or wouldn’t do with your child is something that adults charged with rearing babies to competent, independent adulthood shouldn’t do very often, if at all. What you think of my parenting is your business because my business is raising my child with the values and skill sets that my husband and I have decided upon. Other people don’t get a vote.

And there is also the fact that creating a baby is something that almost everyone can do without too much instruction (although I couldn’t but that’s another story) and that some of dumbest people I have ever met have created, birthed and sort of raised children to a tenuous independence or even a brilliant state of grown up. It’s not quantum physics. Which is probably a really good thing.

I suppose though that there is a kernel of truth to the idea that there are those among the parenting set who feel disrespected for their efforts and zeal, but respect can’t be wrung out of those who wouldn’t have made your choices in similar circumstances. The eye of the beholder  looks in more than it looks out.

An interesting perspective.

*I can tell a cute kid story with the best of them, but zinging my husband? Seriously? What material object could possibly be worth your marriage?