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Monday, November 17, 2003
I’m not sure if I’m ready to let my baby go. I’ve nurtured it, crooned away its cranky fits, come home early to spend time with it and gotten up late so as not to more times than I care to remember. But I think the day is finally nearing. It is time for my little baby, my heart of hearts, my darling, darling article on pubic hair to leave my hands and make its way along the unfathomable airwaves of electronic communication to a complete stranger who holds my article, sensitive ego, and life in his or her hands. He or she better like it.
Lately I’ve decided that it’s time to do things 110%. It’s like my yoga instructor says when my muscles are shaking, my eyeballs are swimming in sweat, and I’m dangerously close to not giving a fuck – stretch, stretch, stretch beyond your flexibility. It must have been one of those times when I wasn’t stretching that far that I actually had the brain capacity to absorb what the instructor was saying. Beyond my flexibility?! I was tempted to gurgle back hysterically. And yet, it makes sense. Because, as I discovered, my conception of what I can and cannot do is mostly in my mind, and the moment that phrase finally clicked in was the moment my head touched my knees, which were no longer shaking. On to the next pose.
Aside from the fact that yoga instructors are hot as hell, there are other reasons to pay attention to what they’re saying. I’m shrooming on yoga lately – yoga is life, man. It doesn’t make sense to me to sit in one place for eight hours and then cram all exercise into one hour-and-a-half-long session, followed by mental detox in front of the TV (if it can be called that). Ideally I’d be a farmer with splendid shoulder blades and a healthy appetite for organic greens (or an aching back and a farmer tan), so that exercising the mind would be integrated with exercising the body. But things being as they are, and me planting the seeds of gainful employment and harvesting my monthly paychecks, I’m given to appreciate the opportunity to sweat balls (and believe me when I say these are serious cojones) as I’m contorting my body into positions with unpronounceable names. It gives me a chance to build the wherewithal to surpass the exhilarating angst of being 23.
I’m practicing embracing my tweenerness. 110%. Do I go shopping on the weekends, or would that be giving in to the gratuitous superficiality of Southern California living? Or is my shabby, frumpy, limited style an offense to any aesthetic sense of self? – Embrace it. Own it, as a former director of mine used to say. I may not be 110% Southern Californian or 110% world-rejecting ascetic, but I own 110% of my ambivalence toward both. Did I just waste five months griping about how I would never be a writer because I couldn’t write, was too lazy to, or would never be good enough? Doesn’t matter, I embrace every moment of guilty procrastination and chocolate and anxiety attacks that it took to get the article from a gleam in my eye to a thoughtful and personal arrangement of 1,616 words about pubic hair. Everything I did is exactly what needed to be done!
That being said, it’s time to embrace the scariness of the possibility that all my careful planning and crow-feet-inducing fretting will result in absolutely nothing. I have two and a half potential markets for my article, the half because some editors may not accept my baby with the unconditional love that I have given it. That is, they want it to like, have something to do with their magazine. (Details details.)
Perhaps I am indeed a failure. Perhaps I will never be writer. Perhaps I will be known by a select group of individuals as the person who once bothered them incessantly to tell her how they felt about pubic hair. These are distinct possibilities. As is the possibility that I will be hired as a fashion consultant for Playboy – who knows where this article may take me? I’m certainly not going to set limits. I plan to construct my own personal marquis to advertise my accomplishments as soon as I have anything to brag about. It will never be said that I never had my name in lights, I’m making damn sure of that. Even if they were 40-Watt bulbs I bought at Target.
Yes, my baby’s growing up. Soon it won’t need me any more to attend to its tenter tantrums. If I’m lucky, it will go out and do good in the world, will find fame, fortune, and spiritual contentment, and will deliver it to me along with a shopping spree at South Coast Plaza, a year-long pass to Bikram yoga, and other things I will never be able to afford if I succeed in realizing my life-long dream of being a writer. Who knows? Anything is possible.
Lately I’ve decided that it’s time to do things 110%. It’s like my yoga instructor says when my muscles are shaking, my eyeballs are swimming in sweat, and I’m dangerously close to not giving a fuck – stretch, stretch, stretch beyond your flexibility. It must have been one of those times when I wasn’t stretching that far that I actually had the brain capacity to absorb what the instructor was saying. Beyond my flexibility?! I was tempted to gurgle back hysterically. And yet, it makes sense. Because, as I discovered, my conception of what I can and cannot do is mostly in my mind, and the moment that phrase finally clicked in was the moment my head touched my knees, which were no longer shaking. On to the next pose.
Aside from the fact that yoga instructors are hot as hell, there are other reasons to pay attention to what they’re saying. I’m shrooming on yoga lately – yoga is life, man. It doesn’t make sense to me to sit in one place for eight hours and then cram all exercise into one hour-and-a-half-long session, followed by mental detox in front of the TV (if it can be called that). Ideally I’d be a farmer with splendid shoulder blades and a healthy appetite for organic greens (or an aching back and a farmer tan), so that exercising the mind would be integrated with exercising the body. But things being as they are, and me planting the seeds of gainful employment and harvesting my monthly paychecks, I’m given to appreciate the opportunity to sweat balls (and believe me when I say these are serious cojones) as I’m contorting my body into positions with unpronounceable names. It gives me a chance to build the wherewithal to surpass the exhilarating angst of being 23.
I’m practicing embracing my tweenerness. 110%. Do I go shopping on the weekends, or would that be giving in to the gratuitous superficiality of Southern California living? Or is my shabby, frumpy, limited style an offense to any aesthetic sense of self? – Embrace it. Own it, as a former director of mine used to say. I may not be 110% Southern Californian or 110% world-rejecting ascetic, but I own 110% of my ambivalence toward both. Did I just waste five months griping about how I would never be a writer because I couldn’t write, was too lazy to, or would never be good enough? Doesn’t matter, I embrace every moment of guilty procrastination and chocolate and anxiety attacks that it took to get the article from a gleam in my eye to a thoughtful and personal arrangement of 1,616 words about pubic hair. Everything I did is exactly what needed to be done!
That being said, it’s time to embrace the scariness of the possibility that all my careful planning and crow-feet-inducing fretting will result in absolutely nothing. I have two and a half potential markets for my article, the half because some editors may not accept my baby with the unconditional love that I have given it. That is, they want it to like, have something to do with their magazine. (Details details.)
Perhaps I am indeed a failure. Perhaps I will never be writer. Perhaps I will be known by a select group of individuals as the person who once bothered them incessantly to tell her how they felt about pubic hair. These are distinct possibilities. As is the possibility that I will be hired as a fashion consultant for Playboy – who knows where this article may take me? I’m certainly not going to set limits. I plan to construct my own personal marquis to advertise my accomplishments as soon as I have anything to brag about. It will never be said that I never had my name in lights, I’m making damn sure of that. Even if they were 40-Watt bulbs I bought at Target.
Yes, my baby’s growing up. Soon it won’t need me any more to attend to its tenter tantrums. If I’m lucky, it will go out and do good in the world, will find fame, fortune, and spiritual contentment, and will deliver it to me along with a shopping spree at South Coast Plaza, a year-long pass to Bikram yoga, and other things I will never be able to afford if I succeed in realizing my life-long dream of being a writer. Who knows? Anything is possible.
