The rage within

When I was a girl, I had a terrible relationship with my mother. Truly, it seemed as though she didn't like me, and the only way I could achieve a truce was to do it—everything—her way.

I wanted long hair; she cropped it brutally short. She wanted me to be unfailingly sweet-tempered and respectful; I rose to every provocation. She wanted me to do chores; I wanted to be untethered from anything having to do with home.

In college and beyond, I've mostly been able to do it my way: I wore my hair long and wild; I spoke my mind; I found a (mostly) stay-at-home partner and largely avoided household toil.

So one of the things that get under my skin when I head out for California and my quarterly stint of elder care is a certain sense of defeat. In the end, after all these years, she's won. Cancer has shorn my hair more harshly than her shears, and only a monster would be anything but kind and helpful in the face of her frailty.

Occupy NoHo

We were pretty excited a few years ago when the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated our part of NoHo a historic district.  “Oh, goody!” we thought. “NYU can’t plant any more purple flags in our area. We’ll be able to, you know, preserve the unique character of the neighborhood. Our property values will go up. We’ll be rich!”


Not.  Somehow it didn’t work out. NYU continues to buy up buildings and snatch zoning variances. Giant hotels and tony restaurants have squeezed out the flophouses and soup kitchens. And as for getting rich, we’re just getting poorer. Old-time residents now have to pay more—way more—and eat a whole lot of red tape just to maintain our shitty little homes. Our cost to replace two of the three windows overlooking the street doubled when we had to make an application—with architectural drawings—to the LPC for permission and discovered that the application would require us to replace the third window too, even though it is practically new and works just fine. 


Sucks.

Asanology, yogamatics

Yet another news story in the Times exclaims on the amazing possibility of a relationship between physical exercise and mental dexterity: “Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does.”


The connection seems so obvious to yogis and yoginis. One of the challenges of asana practice is the constant need to translate verbal instruction into physical expression. “Rotate your upper outer arms in and your lower inner arms out.” “Lift your chest and tuck your tailbone.” “Draw your hips toward the ceiling and drop your heels toward the floor.” 


Just like “Rub your tummy and pat your head,” these complicated instructions, which almost always come in opposing pairs, take a lot of brainpower to grok and even more to put into action. Of course it makes you smarter!

In front of my house

On aging

From “Hearing Secret Harmonies,” by Anthony Powell:


“The friendships of later life, in contrast with those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions. Probably thirty was placing the watershed too late for the age when both parties begin more or less to know (at least think they know) what the other is talking about; as opposed to those earlier friendships—not unlike love affairs, with all sexual elements removed—which can exist with scarcely an interest in common, mutual misunderstanding of character and motive all but absolute.”


“Two compensations for growing old are worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one’s own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add. The other mild advantage endorses a keener perception for the authenticities of mythology, not only of the traditional sort, but—when such are any good—the latterday mythologies of poetry and novel.”


“She began to speak disjointedly of Stringham. She was, I thought, perhaps a little mad now. As one gets older, one gets increasingly used to encountering this development in friends and acquaintances; causing periods of self-examination in a similar connexion.”


“One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.”

The more you trans, the more you form

I rarely take yoga at the unfortunately named Crunch gym anymore. My tastes and needs and available hours have narrowed, so gym yoga doesn’t usually work for me. But the yoga class I took today suited me in every way.


Not only did it incorporate safety (precise instructions) and adventure (handstands!), but it also included a good homily, a feature missing from much modern yoga. It’s a mystery to me how women half my age can sometimes deliver a little sermon that magically speaks to brain and body as it perambulates among the poses throughout the class. 


The theme today was change, how change is stressful, but no matter how unsettling it is, we clearly crave it because we practice yoga, which is all about transformation. 

The kindness of stylists

I just want to say that I have the kindest, smartest hair stylist in the world. This weekend when I got my hair cut, I told him I was worried that my very thin hair seemed to be falling out at a faster rate than usual. "Oh, don't worry about that," he said. "It's just the old hair making way for the new hair." He didn't skip a beat. How did he know to say this perfect thing?