Learning #19 : Yoga helps concentration

I regularly attend what can only be described as a strange Monday night yoga class.  Up until last week, the strangeness of this class was attributed to two main factors:

1) Big-name gyms have big-name-gym distractions.  Doing yoga while weights are dropped and the spin class next door does a hill climb to hip hop makes for a somewhat odd yoga environment.

2) The clientele can be really disruptive.  Or, more specifically, a specific subset of the clientele can be very disruptive.  Which is to say that this yoga class is routinely littered with gaggles of giggly teenagers, all grouped up and acting as though it were gym class.

Now, I have nothing against giggly teenage girls, who are generally somewhat sweet and nostalgic to watch.  But this bubbly teenagerness loses its shine during yoga, because right in the middle of a pose, these girls will suddenly start laughing and whispering to each other.  This just makes for a strange and disruptive yoga experience, because when I'm upside-down in a bind, the last thing I expect or want to hear is teenage whispering peppered with outright laughter.  Seriously, girls, I'm trying to concentrate on my breathing over here.  Shhhhh... hasati-asana isn't actually a pose, so... quiet.  (And namaste.)

In order to cope with these outbursts, I myself simply try to (a) concentrate really, really hard on my own practice, and (b) when that fails, fall back on a Zen technique I learned in birthing class, and mentally wish them well.

I do not envy the Monday night yoga teacher, who has to put up both with these unruly shenanigans, and with the annoyed huffing and puffing from the adults who are actually trying to practice yoga.  Some yoga teachers might ask these kids to separate, to be respectful of the others in class, or to leave - I have a hard time imagining any crunchy Berkeley teacher worth his or her salt just letting this go on - but my Monday night teacher, for whatever reason, has never said a word to them.  Instead, she seems to have come up with two very interesting techniques to deal with the situation:

1) Make class really, really challenging.

It's much more difficult to giggle when you're in horse for like 5 minutes straight, including various sumo-like arm gestures.  Seriously.  The only problem with this technique is that Monday night yoga is at 7:30, and the reason that I attend this class is to get a solid but mellow start to the week.  This class and teacher are generally known for being on the mellow side - this isn't your average big-name-gym yogaerobics vinyasa flow class.  So imagine my surprise when, out of the blue, on a night wherein there was not one but two separate groups of Gigglers, my teacher went on a Navy-Seal-Like tear that left my quads sore for 2 days.  But it worked - the girls were hushed until we started winding down for savasana, at which point, inevitably, the whispering and laughing started again.

And, thwarted by the actual need to end class with savasana, which gave The Gigglers enough breath to giggle anew, my teacher tried a new tactic the following week:

2) Use a soundtrack they might enjoy.

Whether it was the blown savasana or whether she decided that punishing everyone Navy Seal Style repeatedly was unfair, her new teenage crowd control technique made for a pretty interesting yoga experience.  I mean, hearing an Owl City song at the beginning of a yoga class just isn't the norm.

While other, older adults in class looked a bit puzzled by the change in music, I have to admit that I was rather enjoying the Coldplay and Death Cab while I dutifully performed my Warriors and whatnot.  And, truthfully, the kids seemed to be quieter than normal.

And this yoga class was going pretty smoothly for me, right up until we started going into Nataraja-asana, or King of the Dance pose.  This is a balancing pose, and it takes some concentration.

And this is why hearing the opening notes of "Chariots of Fire" while I was trying to get into the pose seemed really, really unlikely.

I thought I must be hearing the song wrong.  Was this teacher really expecting the class to be able to concentrate on this pose while listening to such a ridiculous song?

Yes.  Apparently she was.  Because those horns kept building, and the synthesizer kicked in, and then the piano started, and suddenly the entire class was wobbling into King of the Dance pose in the slow-motion manner required to enter this pose properly, while "Chariots of Fire" proudly and loudly trumpeted from the stereo.

It was at this point, watching the slow-mo pose entrances of my classmates, that I - rather fairly, I think - started to giggle.  Now, I only giggled a little - because it's pretty hard to stand on one leg and hold the other leg and giggle all at the same time.  But I did permit myself a look around the room via the mirror, and it was clear that I was not the only over-30 person in the room having the same challenge. The teenagers, on the other hand, didn't seem to have the foggiest recognition of this song.

And this is when I started to wonder whether we adults were simply pawns in our teacher's grand plan to annoy the teenagers by planting a private adult joke that would lead us all to burst out in uncontrollable giggles, thus distracting them in a somewhat challenging balancing pose.

Regrettably, if that was her plan, it failed.  The Monday night adult crew is pretty die-hard, and while there was some pretty hilarious eye contact in the mirror with others who seemed to acknowledge the absurdness of the soundtrack, we just as quickly looked away from each other in order to avoid an outburst.

It took all my concentration to focus inward, away from the trumpeting horns and delicate piano and wobbling neighbors, and just execute my King of the Dance.  But execute it I did, people, leg high and proud and not at all wobbly.  Which is to say that this class is becoming a master class in concentration.

I honestly have no idea what next week's class will hold.  But I hope it involves a monkey.

Learning #18 : Listen to your Mother

When I was a junior high school, I went to Palm Springs on Spring Break with my family and my friend Jenny.

Also, when I was a junior in high school, I was a teenage girl.

Here is why I mention this: a teenage girl in 1988 had lots of oversized, empowering accessories.  These include, but are not limited to: notably aerodynamic bangs, large dangly earrings, shoulder pads, slouchy sweaters, shoe-boots... the list goes on.

Being adorned with such festoonery demands, of course, a certain amount of sassy teenage attitude.  Hey, it's the costume.

Not the actual Volvo... (though I wish it were...)

In any case, upon our arrival in 1988 Palm Springs on Spring Break, Jenny and I decided to get on downtown immediately so that we could do what all teenage girls like to do, which is shop and chat and determine the best and/or closest place (depending on your shoes) to find some ice cream.  And, with this worthy plan in mind, we hopped into my Mom's shiny gold Volvo sedan (Mmm... the smell of aged, heated leather in the desert sun... Ouch!  Hot leather on my thighs!) and headed downtown.

We parked the car and got out.  And that's when Jenny saw something Very Exciting.  It was a sign.  A white sign, with block red lettering that looked very much like the angry protest signs that the Teamsters had been waving at us outside the front gates of school due to their diligent boycott of the movie production that was being filmed at our high school (did I mention that we grew up in L.A.?).

But this sign did not read... well, whatever it was that the Teamsters put on their signs.  I mean, I'm on my way to school, Teamsters, can you just move your sign-toting selves so I can get to Chemistry Lab on time?  I'm not thrilled to be out here before 8 either, thanks...  wait, what did that sign say, anyway?  Ugh, I'm late again - outta my way, Teamster!

This sign simply read:

BONO FOR MAYOR

Cool.

So we both started looking around and these signs were all over the place, mostly in shop windows and such.  And, as we started walking around, we became extremely excited about these signs for one reason, and that reason is:

We were both very big U2 fans.
And the posters didn't have a pronunciation guide.

And so, like any devout U2 fans would, we decided that we wanted a "BONO FOR MAYOR" sign as a keepsake of our awesomely timed Spring Break trip.

We went into a store and noticed a young-ish proprietor, who looked like an easy target.  He had super nice, tailored clothes and good hair, and and he was pretty cute too.  So, like any self-respecting 17-year-old girls with excellent hair volume ourselves even in that sweltering heat, we figured that we'd bat our eyelashes and sweetly ask if we could have one of his signs.

Instead of "Of course, girls!  Go right ahead" (which is what we expected), he said, "No, of course you can't have one of my signs."

We had not expected this.  We were, in fact, entirely unprepared for a rebuff, coiffed and cologne-scented or otherwise.  It should be noted here that, having been in Catholic school for the past several years, neither of us actually knew that we knew what a gay man looked and talked like - had we known, I'm sure we would have gone in with a better game plan.  In retrospect, of course, I'm sure we both realize that our Aerobics/French teacher - he taught both; he did not teach French Aerobics, though that sounds hilarious - who wore leg warmers and had a voice not unlike Richard Simmons reminded us of this shopkeeper, but at the time we were pretty much in the dark.

In the dark without a campaign sign.

We tried again, but our coquettish "Please?" did not sway this infuriatingly stubborn man to bend to our extremely reasonable requests.  So, somewhat defeated, I simply asked "Why not?" and he said, "Because when he wins I'm going to have Sonny sign them!"

Jenny and I looked at each other, wonderingly, but before we could say anything he said, "You know, you might just try campaign headquarters.  They might give you a sign.  It's right down the street," and he pointed us in the right direction.

So, feeling pretty excited about being one step closer to the coolest U2/Spring Break memento ever, and  figuring that Bono running for mayor meant that we might run into Larry Mullen, Jr., who was very high on the "dreamy" list at the time, we decided to head straightaway to Campaign Headquarters.

On the way, we had a brief discussion as to how odd it was that neither of us had known that Bono's first name was Sonny, but figured that he would just be using it for his political campaign, because having a mayor without a first and last name would be a little weird, and probably violated a statute or something.  We also conducted a brief analysis as to whether it was odd it was that an Irish singer would be running for Mayor of Palm Springs, but concluded that (a) Palm Springs probably didn't have the same rule that America had about how you have to be born there to run for the highest office, (b) lots of celebrities went to Palm Springs, (c) our President for the last 8 years had been an actor (that's Reagan, for the youths out there), and (d) Bono generally looked as though he'd seen about as much sun as the zombies in the "Thriller" video, and it was possible that he just needed a tan.  (Remember: we were from L.A.)

And as we finished these conclusions, we were suddenly at Campaign HQ!  OMG!

Which in those days was actually spelled out, so:

OhMyGod!

Was Bono in there?  Was a jam session happening in the background?  Were Bono's celebrity friends milling about and drinking things?  Was Bob Geldof there, planning another Africa-saving ballad with Bono and Larry Mullen, Jr. and - the other two guys - and aforementioned celebrity friends?  There was only one way to find out, and that way was to walk right on in there.

Adjust shoulder pads.  Shake earrings and hair.  Quick-check reflection in window.  Enter.

...And... huh.  This was a pretty boring-looking office for a rock star, but of course this was a rock star trying to be taken seriously as a public official, so... OK, Bono.  Got it.  But... no Bono at Bono for Mayor offices?  Not that we really expected him to be there, but... Oh, well.  We could still get a sign.

So we walked up to the counter and the guy behind it asked us if he could help us.  And the answer, of course, was "Yes, please, can we have a campaign sign?"

He gave us a slightly puzzled look, and asked why we wanted one.  And I said, "Well, we both really like U2."

And then he stared at us.  And, just maybe, one of the staff members giggled a little bit.  Oh, dear - apparently being ordinary fans wasn't enough to get a cool sign.  So we both figured we'd better demonstrate just how big of fans we were, and we started going on about how much we like U2 and Bono and ... um, so can we have a sign, Nice Mister, please?

The guy looked at us and said, "You know what?  You can have one, and I'll even have it signed for you.  Just let me go in the back here and get it signed."

Holy.  Moses.  Was this guy telling us that Bono was RIGHT THERE IN THE BACK ROOM?!  Right behind that door?!  No.  Way.  !!!!!!!!!!!!!

We couldn't contain ourselves.  We had to ask.  "Is he really back there?"

He nodded at us.  "Sonny is here today."

This Sonny business again.  Was Bono going to use this name from now on, or was this just for his political career?  Because, seriously, just Bono sounded a lot cooler than Sonny Bono or just Sonny.


And, with that, he walked into the back room with our sign.  And he was in there for kind of a long time, actually.  And, just maybe, we heard some laughing back there... no doubt from the raucous celebrity party that was taking place right behind that mystery door!

In the meantime, though, I was getting bored waiting - my attention span at 17 being somewhat like that of a caffeinated gnat - so while the front-office staffers smirked at us (something we expected from staffers working for a rock star, being L.A. trained and all), I decided to check out all the cool celebrity photos on the walls.

And this is when I noticed something strange.  There was a man in all these photos, but this man was not Bono.  This man had a mustache and questionable hair and looked, vaguely, like he might even be related to me.  (The great Nuccio tradition of an impressive Italian mustache was enthusiastically embraced throughout the '70's and '80's, and has only recently evolved to include a beard.)

And, as I was pondering this oddity, the guy came back out with our sign.  Our autographed sign!

He handed it to us, and our conversation went something like this:

Him: Here you go, girls.
Me: Wait - that's you in all these pictures.
Him: Yes, it is.
Me: But - why are you in all these pictures, and not Bono?
Him: [shrug]
Me: Oh, are you like running his campaign or something?
Him: Yes.  (Knowing Smile)
Me: (Why is this little man giving me this strange smile?)  Oh, cool.  Well, thanks a lot!

And, feeling very clever and gratified and extra sassy and saucy and otherwise pleased with ourselves and our new SIGNED (!!!) memento, and of course feeling extra tickled that we already had an autographed sign before the election, when that guy who wouldn't even give us a sign thought he was so cool...  well, Jenny and I headed back to the gold Volvo (Ouch!  Even hotter leather on my thighs!  Should I sit on this sign?  Hmm.. probably not...), and back to the house we went with our trophy.

We walked into the house to find my Mom so that we could tell her this awesome story.  But we didn't get very far, because as soon as we came to the part about how Jenny saw the "Bono for Mayor" sign, my Mom stopped me.  This conversation went something like this:

Mom: Girls, Bono is not running for Mayor of Palm Springs.  Sonny Bono is running for Mayor of Palm Springs.  (Pronounced: BOH-NO)
Me: Right, Bono!  Sonny is his first name!  (Pronounced: BAH-NO)
Mom: No, Leslie, Sonny Bono was married to Cher.
Me: Bono was married to Cher?  (I will permit myself a slightly anachronistic snark here to serve as representative of what I thought in the moment: If She Could Turn Back Time, indeed.)
Mom: No, Bono and Sonny Bono are not the same person.  Sonny Bono is the Sonny from Sonny and Cher, don't you remember watching that when you were little?
Me: Um... maybe... but... no, Bono is running for mayor, we were at his campaign headquarters!

It was at this point that I probably should have put 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 together to make 8.  But I just knew that I had to be right, because otherwise, who in the heck had signed our campaign sign?

So I argued with my Mom, in the way of 17-year-old girls who know that they're right (like always), by telling her about how we went to his campaign headquarters and how his campaign manager told us that Bono was there and how he went in the back to have the poster signed, and... and..

And my Mom, who started with patience and tried to be reasonable and explain this to me yet again, finally realized that ration was getting her nowhere, and threw down the gauntlet.

"I'll bet you $10 that you're wrong."

Oh, dear.  A bet.

My Mom rarely made bets - and she wasn't known for losing them, either.  And $10 was a whole week's allowance, so... was it possible that she knew something I didn't?  But... the sign!  And that man told us that Bono was there and that he signed it, didn't he?

So, of course, I took the bet.  But who could be the impartial arbitrator?  No, Dad was just siding with Mom because that's what parents do, so that of course doesn't count.  So how was this bet to be settled?

This critical dilemma was, fortuitously, solved shortly thereafter by the 5:00 evening news, which immediately launched into the story of Sonny Bono's current campaign for Mayor.

Sonny BOH-NO.  (And then they showed him campaigning through the street of Palm Springs.)

OH-NO.  (This man looked very familiar.)

My Mom pointed to the TV and said, "See, Leslie?  That's Sonny Bono!"

Jenny and I couldn't contain ourselves, and yelled, "That's the man we talked to at campaign headquarters!  He's the one who gave us the sign!"

And both of my parents just started at us, much as this supposed Sonny Bono character had started at us earlier.  And then they started to laugh.

And Jenny and I just started, unbelievingly, at the television report about this Sonny BOH-NO, who was either the identical twin of the man who'd given us the autographed poster, or was - it was suddenly all coming together now - actually the man himself!

This man was not, incidentally, Bono.  At.  All.

Damn!

And so I begrudgingly gave my mom the $10, feeling pretty tricked out of it by that Sonny Bono fellow who was pretty lucky that I wasn't 18 and living in Palm Springs, because tricking a voter out of $10... well, I never... but figuring that a story that gave my parents this much of a laugh was probably worth $10.

Jenny ended up with the sign (her rationale being that she was the one who'd had the idea to get a sign in the first place, which was entirely true), and I - swear to all that is Sonny Bono - eventually ended up with one of the Teamster's signs.  (Teamsters, as it turned out, were much more receptive to high school girlishness than that strangely unaffected but ultimately helpful store proprietor in Palm Springs.)

Learning #17 : Time is money.

In an effort to reduce clutter and try to keep myself organized, I recently decided to convert all my photos to digital by sending off 2 extremely large boxes to sunny Red Bluff, CA, home of the magical photo scanning elves at GoPhoto.

This rad picture, at left, is me on a pair of homemade stilts that my Uncle Bob gave to me one Christmas.  There is also a picture of my sister with a yellow pair of stilts, wearing the exact same powder blue Levi cords and fly OP shirt with the wood buttons, but I'll spare her by leaving that to the family archives.  I actually remember taking this picture, so it was fun to find it again.

It took me about 20 minutes to find all my old albums, find 2 boxes big enough to fit everything, print 2 labels, pack them in a semi-orderly fashion (emphasis on "semi" – good thing GoPhoto does negative scanning, because there were a fair amount of random envelopes full of mystery memories), find the packing tape, and tape them up. Then I drove them over to the UPS store, and off they went.

All told, I spent under an hour on my photo scanning project, and I had around 3500 photos and negatives that I needed to convert to digital. (While slide scanning is a pretty popular service 'round GoPhoto, I'm just slightly too young to have any of those.)

As I drove home from UPS, I did the math:

3500 images x $.37 = $1300 - 20% off (hey, I have a coupon) = $1040 if I keep all the scans, which is unlikely. Since you only pay for the scans you keep, I figure I can probably delete at least 500, so now we're at

3000 images x $.37 – 20% off = $888

Which seems like sort of a lot, except that I've literally just digitized and preserved my entire life's history. Which is, seriously, very cool once you're looking at it all on screen. Plus, if I want to spend less, I can delete more scans. Do I really need 4 different versions of essentially the same picture of me and my freshman year roommate wearing our sweet '90's sweaters and hats, looking vaguely Punky-Brewster-like, drinking some light beer swill?  Not really.

But I digress.  After doing the $$ math, I did this math:

3000 images x 3 minutes = 10,500 minutes = 175 hours

Now, keep in mind that 3 minutes each is a low estimate, because realistically I’m going to get distracted looking at photos and I’m going to have to take them out of albums and put them back and color correction/dust and scratch removal takes time, and I’m also probably going to get bored and space out and take even longer due to being generally annoyed with the project. But even at 3 minutes each…

That’s twenty-one 8-hour days of non-stop scanning. Which is 2.5 months of weekends.

And I have to buy the scanner anyway, so now we have to factor in $250 for a good scanner (which still isn’t as good a scanner as GoPhoto has), and suddenly I’m actually only paying myself $3.64 and hour (or $4.90 without a coupon). Do I want to pay myself less than $4/hour to miss 3 full weeks of weekends wherein I’m spending 8 full hours a day doing nothing but scanning photos?

Um, no. No, I really don’t.

And that’s the thing about photo scanning that people don’t realize: you think you can do it (and technically, you can), but you’re probably not going to. Because it’s a bigger project than you think it is, and you most likely have much better ways to spend your time.

So: although I’m a serial DIYer, when it comes to converting my own photos to digital, I’m really glad that I outsourced to a team in not-so-far-off Northern-Central-ish California. Because I only have so many weekends, and spending 10 of them curled up with a scanner isn’t the best or most enjoyable use of my time.

(This is, incidentally, the same reason that I’m not going to dig up the freaking oleander stumps in my back yard myself. Anyone who’s tried to dig in clay soil knows what I’m talking about.)

Learning #16 : Don't judge a book by its Berkeley

When I was pregnant, I immediately started reading books loaned to me by other mom friends.  In reading these books, it was painfully clear that I had some immediate homework to do - namely, to come up with a "birth plan."

This seemed like a lot of work.  I mean, I was really not aware that we would need a plan beyond "I'll go into labor, we'll head to the hospital, the baby will come out," but Ricki Lake definitely felt otherwise.

And so, somewhere toward the middle of my first trimester, I started interviewing doulas.

Now, at this point I was not hugely attuned to the difference between a doula and a midwife.  (In a nutshell, for those who haven't used either: a doula is a labor coach there to help you through labor.   This includes giving your partner a break, etc.  The midwife, like a doctor, is there to get the baby out.)

Living in the Bay Area means that you can pretty much swing a cat and hit a doula (though doing that around here might get both the animal rights and the doula rights people after you).  But I wanted to make sure that the person getting on-board to shepherd me through labor was a good personality fit, because, being my first pregnancy and all, we weren't exactly sure how things were going to shake out on The Big Day.

And so we ended up in Berkeley one sunny morning with Betsy Appell, who seemed to know what she was doing, had trained with midwives, had a toddler herself courtesy a homebirth with one of the midwives I'd interviewed, had a super mellow and nurturing energy, and - as an extra bonus - taught a Zen birthing class as part of her services.

Knowing even less about the Zen tradition that I did about birth ("The Art of Zen" having sat, untouched, on my bookshelf for years - right next to "The Art of War," actually, which I have read), I felt like I'd be in good hands with Berkeley Betsy, who was also a prenatal yoga teacher and probably a vegetarian or something and, therefore, we assumed (correctly) that she would be a nice calming influence when The Big Day arrived.

What I hadn't counted upon was the homework.  Betsy immediately sent us a CD that we were supposed to start listening to, like, immediately.  So, always one to do my homework on time, I uploaded the CD into my iTunes and set about this hypnobirthing prep business.

It should be noted here that I am frightfully nearsighted.  Without my contacts in or my glasses on I really can't see anything but suggestive shapes and blurs.  It's sort of like living in a Monet painting, with less color and far less water lilies - the last of which is a good thing, I suppose, because if I'm without my contacts next to a body of water, well... it just sounds like a bad idea.

It should also be noted here that we did not have an iPod docking station in the bedroom at the time.  And so, since we were supposed to listen to the CD before bed, we just used my laptop.

The Zen lesson started out normally enough: "Get into a comfortable position, and either close your eyes, or open your eyes, looking downward with a soft gaze..."

Details after that are fuzzy, because my partner generally fell asleep practically at the end of this sentence, and I was usually out by the time we were laying on my magical beach.

But then, there was the song.

Having usually drifted off to sleep before the talking ended, I started being awakened by this weird song at the end of the exercise.  It started out somewhat normally enough, with a sort of hippie-ish guitar that could definitely be the choice of a yoga teacher who lived in Berkeley.  But then the guy started singing, and the first lines of the song seemed just like a really odd choice for a Zen hypnobirthing practice CD:

She left her father, been 30 years

She drew some water to dry his tears

She said I'm sorry, I've been lonely.  I need another

Um... what?  What was Betsy trying to tell us with this song?  That we shouldn't cling to our child and make her look after us for 30 years?  That the baby was lucky to have 2 moms?  I wasn't sure, but the song went on:

She crossed through deserts and rivers wide

She walked through valleys and mountains high

She crossed the seas through storm and night

To find a lover

???????

Was Betsy trying to tell us that we need to nurture our child and teach her about love early, so that she doesn't have to circumnavigate the globe to find it?

Now, bear in mind that I'm half asleep here.  Not for long, though, because suddenly the song picks up tempo and the singer starts bellowing pretty loudly:

LOOOOOOOOOVE Bet-SAAAAAY

Somebody is going to love you someday

It was at this point that I figured that Betsy either hadn't really listened to the words of this song, or that she was in dire need of a hug.

The first explanation seemed more probable.  I figured that this song was her signoff.  Like, "Thanks for doing your Zen birthing homework!  Love, Betsy."  I mean, that seemed like a nice thing to do, something that maybe a Berkeley yogi might do.

And so, seeing as how she was a tea-drinking probable vegetarian Zen student prenatal yoga teacher from Berkeley, this explanation made sense to me.  And so we continued to listen to the lesson, every night, with my partner continuing to fall asleep within 5 minutes and me generally falling asleep at some point, only to be awakened by that freaking song.  And then I started dreading the song, so sometimes I didn't manage to fall asleep at all, and I started waiting for the perfect time to turn off the computer so that I could avoid that Stupid Freaking Song which made No Freaking Sense and was seriously putting a dent into My Freaking Zen.

I thought about talking to Betsy about this.  Maybe giving her a helpful tip, like,"You know... I like the lesson, but the song is just a wee bit disruptive..."  But I figured that Zenmaster Betsy knew what she was doing, so I let it be.

Her husband actually called us to reschedule our first birth class (Berkeley Betsy being at a Berkeley Birth), and I asked him about it.  I said, "We fall asleep before the CD is over - my partner falls asleep like 5 minutes in, and I usually fall asleep before the song," and he told me a funny story about how he fell asleep while she was making the CD.

No mention of the song.  And so I didn't mention it again.

And then, one day, I talked to my partner about this annoying, annoying song, and asked her if it bothered her at all.  Being the world's soundest sleeper and having never actually made it to the song, she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I pulled out my laptop and, having the benefit of my contact lenses in my eyes at this point, I realized something important:

The Freaking Song, as it turned out, wasn't actually part of the hypnobirthing lesson.  It was a Big Head Todd and the Monsters nong, called "Love Betsy."  And the reason that it played at the end of our hypnobirthing lesson is because, without the benefit of my contacts in or my glasses on (which is generally how I go to sleep), I was just squinting horribly at iTunes and typing "Betsy" into the search box primarily by muscle memory, assuming that the only thing that would come up would be Betsy Appell's Greatest Zen Birthing hits.  And I could sort of see that the search result was quite short, so it never occurred to me that some random, terrible Big Head Todd song had surfaced.  Hell, I didn't even know I had a Big Head Todd album, let alone a Big Head Todd album with the world's cheesiest song about a lonely Betsy who apparently lived with her father for 30 years before traveling the globe to find... well, to find another.

It was at this point that my partner began to laugh.  Reeeeeeally hard.  Once she listened to the song we were both just howling.

I then sent the song to Betsy, with an explanation of what had happened.  Apparently the Zen tradition allows for uncontrollable laughter, which is nice.

Namaste.

Learning #15 : Time ages everything

This photo, like me, aging over time...

Sometimes it's easy to forget that I was cute once.

Photo scanning being all the rage these days, my Dad was nice enough to scan this picture of me when I was around 3 months old, to compare with my then 3-month-old daughter. Here is a list of things we learned in this experience, in no particular order:

1) The hardest part about finding a matching yellow lion toy is that the sheer volume of plush lion toys is enough to make one wonder whether or not their numbers exceed real-life lions. So if you were worried about the status of the lion on the endangered plush-species list, don't be. Population: stable.

2) A single old photo scan takes kind of a long time, and it still looks about as comparatively good as the person in it after all that time. By the time my Dad scanned it, touched it up and emailed it to me, he'd spent 20 minutes on this. (And if he's saying 20, I'm saying 30...)

3) I was cute once. See? And I was way, way ahead of the fauxhawk trend.

4) Sending your child a decades-old baby photo that depicts her at the same age her first baby is makes it far too tempting to spend far too much time planning to take an identical-as-possible photo of her own baby.

And thus we arrive at the series of photos taken of my somewhat unwilling offspring after I spent an embarrassing chunk of a Saturday morning finding Just The Right Yellow Lion Toy for the occasion.


Now, I'm not exactly proud of myself for fancying up my child and subjecting her to the apparently unruly Mr. Yellow Lionface, but fancy her up I did.  She's in a frilly dress and everything.  Hey, we're making memories here, people.

After the ordeal, it then occurred to me that it might be nice to scan my whole baby book so that I might compare the 200-ish photos commemorating my entire childhood with the 2000-ish photos I managed to accrue in the first few months of my child's life.  Not to mention that, given the condition of my baby pic, it's probably a good idea to get these things scanned before they fade any more.

But man - the time it would take.  Do I want to spend an entire weekend scanning and touching up old photos?  Um... no way.  It was bad enough spending 2 hours looking for that lion.

And so, as I write this, I am waiting on my baby book to come back from Red Bluff, CA, home to the magical scanning elves at GoPhoto.  I sent 2 boxes, literally crammed with every piece of photography I could find: photo albums, random envelopes full of miscellaneous negatives, loose pictures - they all made the journey up North, along with my baby book.  I didn't bother sorting through anything; since you can delete any of the scans you don't keep and don't have to pay for them, I figured it's easier to sort through them online once everything's digitized.

(So once I decide that, perhaps, my Freshman 15 doesn't need to be immortalized quite so thoroughly, well, there's a handy delete button.)

As for the lion toy, he regrettably met a swift end at the paws (er, teeth...) of my dogs.  I'm just glad we got to commemorate his short, baby-slobbered life with a series of somewhat amateurish photographs.  Sleep well, Yellow Lion Toy.  And don't worry: Mr. Giraffe is still around to play with the baby.

Learning #14: read the safety instructions...

(...if you can see)

When an eye care company who makes a product for contact lenses knows that this product might, like, burn your cornea off your freaking eyeball if your eyeball comes into contact with it, you'd think that they'd:

1) Not make their bottle look like a saline bottle, and
2) Not pretend that they aren't making their bottle look like a saline bottle by putting a tiny red stripe on the label -

- since, after all, people using their product have contact lenses.  Which means that, in the course of using said product, it's very possible that some extremely nearsighted people will be in frightfully close proximity to a white-ish saline-shaped bottle that's next to the saline, because they were of course using this product when they took their contact lenses out and so the bottle is still sitting there, because who's cleaning the bathroom before bedtime when they can't even see?  And it's entirely possible, too, you know, that these people might then the next morning remove their lenses from their overnight sterile de-funking bubble bath, and then accidentally wash their lenses with this product and then actually insert a contact lens, thus relegating her their eyes to hostile, burning, stormy tornadoes of searing pain, and of course now these folks are going to have to go to the freaking optometrist and explain what happened while the desk staff sort of snickers behind their hands and everyone pretends that you these poor, poor, misled consumers aren't complete eejits -

And all this could be avoided with better packaging.  Make the entire freaking bottle red, people!  Don't try to invoke some fuzzy "this is good for your eyes" feeling by trying to make your bottle look like a Bausch & Lomb saline bottle.  Because this product isn't actually for the eyes, it's some crazed Lysol-like sterilizer for the actual lenses, and as such the packaging would be more appropriate if the bottle were shaped like a cleansing solution bottle.  Or a branding iron.

I mean, I'm just saying.

Learning #13 : Actually...

...Keeping track of these numbers isn't that difficult, since my dashboard lists them all for me.  I think I was just being lazy.  Or cranky.  Or both.