Open Up and Say Ohhmmmm

Looking at Karen R's stuff, especially her energizing crystals, got me thinking about my Tibetan singing bowl. I bought one off the Internet a few years ago. It's awesome. If you hit it like a gong, the resonance is so strong and long-lasting, you can just "drink" the energy in. I think it's interesting because to make it "sing" you have to relax and just let it sit in the palm of your hand. If you hold it tightly, it can't vibrate and sing. I like doing Yoga and meditation because I love the feeling of being relaxed. When I mediate to the right music, I can get into a zone that feels so wonderful. Just like my body craves relaxation, my soul does, too. I'm trying not to let others pressure me and control me. I like to be free and things turn out for the best for everyone that way.

Home Away From Home

Here's my cubical at work....complete with fan for hot flashes, family photos, gurgling water fountain, and 5 year old bamboo shoots for good luck.

There's a guy in an office upstairs who must be in for a streak of bad karma. His bamboo shoots are sitting in scummy brown water and they are dead. I printed up a biohazard sign and put it on his bamboo plant vase. We admin girls thought it was really funny since we are an environmental agency. So far, the guy hasn't seemed to notice the sign on his plants. I guess that's why they went bad in the first place.

Rose and I take care of the plants around the office. We get lots of compliments on how great the plants in the atrium look.

Poor Brad (I'm not talking about Brad Pitt) - he's the new guy and he's already broken the window in the agency pickup truck when he was moving some file cabinets. His cubical is next to mine - the only male downstairs with 4 women. We girls have had downstairs to ourselves for almost a year so we forget that Brad's there. Today we urged Kevin to get into his wild and crazy mode and he was making loud suggestive comments. Brad peeped over his cubical wall to see what was going on. Good thing we don't take Kevin seriously or he could get into a lot of trouble. Earlier in the week, there was talk of an unplanned pregnancy for one of the downstairs girls......more intimate girl talk. I wonder what Brad tells his wife when he goes home from work.

It Only Hurts When I Don't Laugh

Karen R and I have exchanged a few e-mails about how humor gets you through the hard times. I must interact on a regular basis with a woman who constantly plays life as a drama instead of a comedy. She’s tiresome and frustrating! Besides, if I wanted to vie with her for the title of Drama Queen - drama for trauma- I would leave her behind eating my dust.

A good sense of humor lets you get outside yourself and view circumstances from a different perspective. It lets you take a situation that isn’t fun and make it funny. For example, I had radiation therapy for a gynological cancer. I’ve never felt so vulnerable in all my life – having strange doctors examine and prod my most private parts while I was in a most undignified position, being isolated and radiated. Fortunately, my oncologist’s nurse, Debbie, was a young earth angel. She did her best to make me feel comfortable physically and mentally. Before the radiation treatments began, she asked me how I reacted to being nervous to see if I felt I needed any sedation. I connected with the sparkle in her eyes so I knew she would appreciate my tale about my nervousness during my teenage dating years. Once my stomach churned so furiously while on a date with an extremely handsome young man that I threw up when he kissed me. Debbie and I laughed until we cried over that one.

In the pre-therapy instructional appointment, I asked Debbie to show me a probe like the one that would be inserted into my vagina for my therapy. She showed me a small Lexan cylinder about the size of a tampon. Whew…what a relief – having that inserted would be “no sweat.” When I actually got “fitted” for my probe, the doctors were very careful to make sure I didn’t see the probe. I had a feeling that it was quite a bit larger than I had been led to believe. After my first radiation session, I told Debbie that she’d better level with me because I felt like the probe was actually the size of the business end of a baseball bat. She said she usually refuses show anyone their actual probe until they were finished with all their radiation sessions, but she thought she could trust me not to freak out. It WAS really big. It was so big that it looked ridiculous and we laughed. Who in the world would get that ultra small size? It was just for demonstration purposes. I oughta sue for misrepresentation!

Then, there was the tight spandex panties with the split crotch and wide Velcro strap designed to keep the probe in place during the radiation session. Debbie said the panties were covered by my insurance and that I could keep them. Woo-hoo!! We referred to them as my Frederick’s of Hollywood panties. I showed them to my husband. He wasn’t excited.

See….radiation therapy is a hoot! My friend Danna has a monolog about going to the sleep lab for sleep apnea that will have you in stitches. Laughter not only boosts the feel-good brain chemical Serotonin and releases tension, but it liberates us. The ordinary is made extraordinary, the real becomes surreal.

Telling Tales Out of School

I know that my 7th grade Home Economics teacher, Miss Eckersley, would be appalled by my use of the word "butt" in my Legends of the Fall post. She stressed to her students that cultured young ladies should use the word "derriere" when referring to their backside. Miss Eckersley had no sense of humor and her comment made our sides ache from holding in the laughter. I guess there wasn't a cultured young lady in the whole class. We thought she was saying that you should call your butt "your dairy air."

"Hey, speak for yourself, Eckersley! We don't smell like cows. We take a bath every day. "

Miss Eckersley's own personal hygiene habits were suspect since we speculated that she washed her hair only on Saturday nights. This was the mid 60s with teased bouffant hairdos. Back then, women would go to the salon to get their hair teased up once a week and then do everything to try to preserve the hairdo until the next hairdresser's appointment. Some women wrapped their heads in toilet paper and slept on a special neck pillow that kept your hairdo suspended in mid-air to keep it from being smashed in your sleep. Urban legends about women with spider nests in their hair were rampant.

When Miss Eckersley showed us how to sew in a zipper, we all stood around behind her as she sat and took command of her sewing machine. Someone got the devilish notion to insert sewing pins into Miss Eckersley's teased and lacquered hairdo while she was busy demonstrating proper sewing techniques. For every sewing demonstration, Miss Eckersley must have acquired about 100 pins in her hair. She never said anything about finding pins in her hair. I think she got her revenge on us by requiring the each girl in class to use the same pattern to make a shapeless dress with a drawstring neckline. Think potato sack with raglan sleeves. To really humble us, she said that our grade on our dress project would be cut if we didn't wear the dress we made to school at least once. Most of us procrastinated until the last day of school for our fashion parade. That day, you would have thought we the Ringling Brothers Circus was in town. Dozens of girls in my class were wearing the buffoonish drawstring bag dresses in assorted bright floral prints. My friends' class had a more challenging outfit - a modest-length skirt with a zipper and a blouse with a plain rounded neckline involving sewing on neck facing. Zippers were skewed and facings were hanging out like ruffled clown collars. I'm sure that Miss Eckersley had the last laugh.