Home Fires Burning

It's very quiet. And still. And gray. The quiet is beginning to freak me out. I'm trying not to worry about tomorrow because as I'm fond of telling people, "50 percent of the stuff you worry about never happens." That's right. Never happens at ALL. So if I spend the rest of tonight envisioning hell and brimstone at my parent's house tomorrow, it won't make it any more or less likely to unfold that way. Maybe we'll all sit around cooing over little Marlon? And listening with shining eyes to the Marines tell heart-warming stories of patriotism?

Yeah, right. And maybe I won't eat too much pie.

My NIA class today had about half its usual members. Still, I was surprised it had that many. I told them that the theme for the day was thankfulness. And that one of the things they could be thankful for was the ability to ignore my theme completely. :) I made them laugh a little bit with that. Which I was thankful for (get it?) because normally there's no laughing in NIA. Well, there is, but not before the music starts and that, too, freaks me out.

Last night David and I went to yoga for the second Tuesday in a row. Once upon a time this would not have been unusual but since we've moved far away from our studio in Bay Park, we haven't made it as often. I think also that we're gearing up for not being able to go at all, if that makes any sense. I told David, "On weekday evenings we're going to be busy helping Jarrah with her homework," and he said, "She won't be doing any homework for quite a while, I imagine." That was very funny, and very David. :)

I first started yoga many years ago after a hideous breakup (I was having difficulty breathing) and during a particularly sweltering summer. Three times a week I rolled out a towel in the lobby of an apartment complex in PB, where a delightful, diminutive woman named Sissy led a class in blessed air conditioning that was equal parts standing on our heads and laying in the dark, listening to her soothing voice. She was like my angel. Later when Sissy fell out of favor with the management and we were ousted (following a series of awkward face-offs in which apartment-dwellers watched "Friends" and drank beer mere inches from our prone bodies) my friend Mike told me about Ken and our current studio. Man, we loved Ken. Around this time David came on the scene and he loved Ken, too. Ken used to share fabulous stories about his yoga studies in India; for instance, one of his teachers told him that "Westerners have too much darkness between their pumpkins" by which she meant our bum cheeks. He had a way of explaining difficult poses that encouraged enlightenment along the lines of "You know, I think I CAN turn my thighs 90 degrees without moving my feet!" Years went by and Ken moved to Kauai (lucky Ken!) and we've had a series of other teachers since then, all proficient but somehow not the same.

Yesterday I had to take an on-line tutorial about sexual harassment for one of my jobs. No joke, it took almost two and a half hours, because you couldn't press the "next" button until a stentorious gentleman read every single freakin' word on the screen, even instructions for pressing the "next" button. Every few pages, there would be a quiz, with questions like this:

"Mike is Tim's boss at the warehouse. Mike told Tim he would fire him if Tim didn't have sex with him. Tim was offended. What should Tim do?
A) Tim should report Mike to Human Resources, or B) Tim should have sex with Mike and keep his mouth shut. It's not a good idea to make waves with the boss."

Even better, each question was accompanied by a tiny photo of people wearing glasses and bad suits and shaking their finger at someone, or putting their hands over their mouths in mock-shock as a nearby co-worker gleefully downloads some porn.

After about an hour, I started going through bills and doing my filing while this was going on. Without ever looking at the screen during the "lecture" portion, I could answer the quiz questions correctly. Which really concerned me, because who, exactly, was this tutorial designed for? Are there actually people out there who would be sweating over this quiz, scratching their heads in confusion over whether Tim ought to sleep with Mike? And if these people are out there, how do they find their way to work each day?