Um- What's My Name Again?, or, The Night Shift Can Suck

On Wednesday, I had tons of things to do. I finally got to bed at 6 and enjoying the idea of four gloius hours of sleep when my cell phone rang. I live in a studio apartment and slepp in a small loft area, so I went downstairs and hunted down my phone. I answered it.

It was my agency, asking me ever so sweetly if I could go into work at 8 PM. Yes. 8PM. And what time is 8 PM if your usual bedtime is 2 PM, and you usually wake up at 10PM?

At this point the thought of flushing my phone down the toilet passed through my head, but a little voice said 'OK', and my fate was sealed.

I assume this little voice is having a psychotic break from reality or something. That she speaks to both Joan of Arc and Elvis. Because why anyone would say, 'Why yes, I would love to come to work on the subway at 8 PM after having spent the day writing down my entire life history and feeling like the poster girl for a female proctology exam, especially since I have a class to teach the next day!' in that cheery voice one usually associates with Disney princesses and automated bill collectors, is beyond me. Unless that person is completely, mind-numbingly INSANE.

Which, fortunately, I am, or you wouldn't find all this so entertaining.

So, after one hour's worth of sleep, I got up, got dressed, and went in, because some muckety-muck at The Firm had a Very Important Document that had to be proofread and it Simply Couldn't Wait until the proofreader was conscious and not seeing spots.

When I got in, I found out that I had arrived four hours early for a job where the muckety-muck had changed his mind- the document needed more work. In fact, it probably wouldn't be ready for proofing until around noon.

Sooo. I found a chair, sat down, clocked in (ka-ching! $100 dollars for me to sit around doing zip for four hours) and played solitaire. In a room where the lights were so bright I thought a police officer was going to walk in and work me over with a rubber hose.

And now you know why I like night shift- because what is normal lighting for most fully-awake people makes me feel like acid has been thrown in my eyes.

Imagine however, that I am not fully awake. Imagine for a moment that I have only had one hour of sleep, and that the night before I'd only had four. Imagine that the lights are stressing me out. Imagine that I am annoyed and am putting a brave face on it.

In other words, while I am being so calm and nice on the outside, inside I am praying to whatever Deity might be listening to Please Kill Me Now Before I Get a Gun and Shoot Everyone In The Office.

Somehow I made it until midnight, when the people who are in the office where I work in what is near-darkness to a normal person leave, and I can go to my cave without clawing out my pupils with my bare hands at which point I fled. Work came in- a ton. I have no idea what any of it said. I'm not sure it was in English. Then in the morning, when there was an evil yellow thing in the sky and it was freezing enough to make one's parts fall off, I went to Port Authority, caught my bus to Westchester, and tried to find a quiet place on campus where I could sleep- but no basements with unhallowed earth and a large rectangular box or two could be found. So I tried to hid in my office, which was doing a good imitation of Grand Central Station at rush hour, since all the adjuncts have to share it.

Somehow I managed to avoid murdering a single student, although I did give them a rather colorful togue-lashing during which words like 'moron' and 'nimrod' might have popped up- they haven't been good about handing in work on time.

then I came home, got four hours' sleep, went back to the Firm, had a job that lasted six straight hours while I was exhausted, and then went to the Spa.

Sometimes I wish I could scream without being put in a straitjacket.

I will write more tomorrow, and put up some lovely pictures. But right now, I'm going to sleep, and I don't care who knows it, especially since my life-changing exam is being administered to me tomorrow.

Love.

Valentine's Day wasn't a big whoop around here. My sweetie lives out of state, and between ice, snow, and fog we haven't seen each other in a bit.way right now, driving up to be with me. Yay!

I played hookey on the big day and stayed home, baked a cake from a box (unusual for me- I felt lazy) and did some crochet (what a surprise). I should have slept, but no. I spoke to my mother the night before (she called me in the middle of my sleep cycle, effectively waking me at what for me was 3 in the morning and wanting to have a conversation), went to work, came home, and decided my ankle was sprained. It was fun not going to School.

The best part of the day, however, was saying smoochy stuff to my sweetie. For thise of you underthe age of thirty, it might be a shock that old people such as myself still get romantic. Even more shcoking is that I can get romantic after having been widowed. Yes, widowed. As in, Having The Love Of Your Life Drop Dead.

The truth is, people obsess over the wrong thing, like the divorce rate. Yes, people get divorced, and that's rough. Horrible, even. But falling in love, being happy and then having that person die- that's the fate which faces exactly 50% of those who marched down the ailse and worked it out. Loving someone- really, truly loving someone- means that you may very well have to bury the one you love, and not always when you are 93, either. The good news is that widows and widowers not only have a high rate of remarriage, but a lower rate of divorce in in the new marriage than do those whose first marriage ended in divorce. So in case you thought there are no second chances- there are. Frequently. You just have to want them.

My sweetie is wonderful in very different ways than was my husband, but both were and are very funny guys with skewed sense of humor. They both work(ed) hard and sometimes forget that I need attention- but I'm a workaholic and more than a bit of a misanthrope, so it all works out. Both were/are romantic souls who try to hide it. I love them both in very different ways, but I'm honored to have had not one, but two very special men want to be in my life. It's all good.

I Saw Bobby Flay, and I Didn't Kick Him in the Shins.

I've had rough week. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it wasn't a picnic. One of the operators at the Firm had his hours cut, and another one is in an understandable depression because his 16 year-old cat died last week. There were some bright spots, though. For instance, at School I explained the concept of culture this week, and used it as an excuse to throw Mardi Gras beads at my students on Tuesday, and to demonstrate my spindle on Thursday. Plus, I received a ridiculously large bag of goodies from an acquaintance that included lots of wool to spin. I'm going to be an expert in no time.

Last year around this time, if I'd had a rough week I would just have come home and slept, and then tried to eat everything in the kitchen. However, I made a resolution to take care of my stress in more healthful ways. In my case, that meant going to the spa again. I'm loving that place- I want to marry it. I want to move in, be a spa slave, and bear its children. Fridays are perfect for going there, because the place doesn't get busy until around 4pm. When I got there this morning at 10am (after working all night on some complex jobs and then checking my bank account and receiving the cheering news that the School hadn't sent out my paycheck due to some missing paperwork that I didn't need to fill out), I was stressed and a little... testy. Ok, a lot testy. I'd even go so far as miffed. So I did what anyone in my position would do- I changed into my spa uniform of shorts and tee-shirt, went to the third floor, rented a bathing suit and a robe, changed again and got in an outdoor pool of water that was delightfully warm and bubbly. After ten minutes I actually began to giggle.

More spa-age occurred, and a small nap was taken. I no longer wanted to punch the entire Human Resources staff at School in the head. I came home by subway, and just as I came above ground- there he was. One of the most annoying people on the Food Network, Bobby Flay himself.

My subway stop happens to be right at the location of the Union Square Greenmarket, which was open today. And there was old Bobby with fawning camera crew, preparing for another episode of his obnoxious show, 'Bobby Flay's Smackdown'.

This is how you know you are a New Yorker- any other person would have asked for his autograph, or stared for more than the minute I spent ogling until I could figure out what was going on. A tiny unrelaxed part of me wanted to challenge him to making sweet potato pudding without his having an entire truck full of supplies or a month of preparation, but the Spa Gods soothed my brow and got me to hold my tongue. It's amazing what a little warm water can do.

Spinning and Bathing

As an adjunct I've taught many things. One subject I've taught has been Greek mythology. Inevitably, at some point in each course, some student usually comes up to me after a class and makes a confession; that he or she is beginning to wonder if the Greek gods are real. Over the past few years I've had to admit to them that they might very well be, and that I've secretly been saying prayers to Athena for years, especially when learning something new or finishing a crocheting project.

However, we all learn things about ourselves when our perspectives get changed, as I found out this past week. for instance, I'm now pretty sure that I'm going to have to add statues of Athena, Artemis and the Three Fates to the small altar space in my apartment, the one that has a Black Madonna and a picture of the Buddha on it.

I was sitting up in bed this Saturday-into-Sunday, teaching myself more about drop-spinning, when I stopped worrying if i was doing it right and just allowed the yarn to take over. The tv was on in the background and it was late by normal human standards- about two am. I was tired, and I'd had a long day, but the purple wool I was spinning was so beautiful, and it had a silvery sheen that made it irresistable. I found myself staring at the spindle and watching it spin, my left hand above my head, my right occasionally stopping the spindle or guiding its speed. And all of a sudden- I got it. I pictured a photo in one of the books I've used with students- it shows a group of Greek peasant women with drop spindles, and the caption says that women in Greece have used this method since ancient times. All of a sudden, sitting up in bed, I felt like I was sitting on the floor of a West African hut on a chilly night, the fire glowing nearby, as I spun the spring wool into thread for weaving into cloth for my husband's clothing. Or perhaps I was seated on a three-legged stool, like a woman in a medieval painting, spinning linen for the local church's altar-cloth. Or perhaps I was in any other of a number of places around the world, standing or sitting, spinning wool, flax, cotton, silk, goat, yak. After years of talking about women and crafting, and how in order to understand women in Greek mythology we need to understand why so many of them are weaving or spinning, I finally understood the universality and primalness of it myself. And it felt good.

I think it happened because I'd had another primal moment earlier inthe day. I'd gone to a local Korean healthspa that is rather like an old Roman bathhouse, only without the live entertainment and shopping arcades. The week before I'd gone on a Friday, when the crowd was mostly women and chidren, but it was fairly quiet. On this Saturday afternoon, however, the place was jumping. I picked up my key (an electronic watchlinke thing that one uses to open one's locker and tally one's food and drink), changed out of my street clothes, and headed for the hot tubs and saunas-

and was floored.

In the US, we hardly ever think about bathing and its meaning. for instance, exept when we are little, most of us never bathe with people of the same sex for non-sexual purposes. In fact, if you think about it, it's kind of odd that people consider the idea of seeing bodies that have all the same parts as their own to be horrifying and dirty. It's gotten to the point that in the US, you can be investigated for taking pictures of your own children playing naked in their bathwater, even if it's obvious that there's no sexualized content whatsoever. The only time that it's ok to be naked nowadays it seems, is if there are overt sexual or violent overtones; for some reason that's beyond me, heroes in violent movies usually end up in some state of undress and get covered with more effluvia than an Abercrombie and Fitch underwear model.

When I first went to the spa the week before, there were women there, but not as many. I remember undressing next to another American-born woman who was white, and she commented on her nervousness at having to be naked in front of strangers. I remember nodding, wondering exactly what beastly things she thought were going to happen during a shvitz. Being naked is something that hasn't bothered me in a long time, to the point where it's hard for me to remember when it did. The only person around I feel uncomfortable naked is my mother, and that's because she makes hurtful comments about my weight. However, like most americans, live nudity with no sexual context is a rarity for me. So imagine how I felt on saturday afternoon when I took off my spa uniform and looked through the open glass doors at the hot tub area and saw
Nude.
Women.
Everywhere.

Nude fat women. Nude thin women. Old women who sagged. women with newly-budded breasts. Women holding squirming babies in the kiddie tub. Women with tattoos. Little naked girls putting their hands between their legs and laughing. Little boys under the age of four clambering over their mothers' laps. Korean woman. Chinese women. Indian women. Russian women. Black women. White women. Brown women.

And not a single towel in sight.

Some had towels- around their heads. On the left side of the room, women were scrubbing and soaping, while sitting at low spigots with wooden buckets, and then rinsing themselves off. On the right, women were using European-style showers with no stalls. Women casually walked into and out of the saunas, climbed in and out of the tubs, talked, held babies in their laps, scrubbed each others' back, scraped their feet.

When I was growing up, I remember being fascinated by the concept of women bathing together. The Old Master paintings of Artemis and her train always fascinated me, even though I knew I was seeing a man's view of women. I also grew up in a neighborhood where at least some of my female neighbors went once a month to the ritual Jewish bath. When I grew up and moved to Manhattan, I saw old city-run bathhouses that had been set up for the working classes during the 19th century which had been turned into municipal health clubs. I have friends who have lived in the Near East who have gone to hamams. but I never thought I would walk into what seemed like a painting form my childhood, only with real, imperfect human bodies and genital hair.

I felt overwhelmed, and very safe. For the first time in a while, my aging body felt normal, not ugly. My rubenesque curves and rolls garnered no negative comments or looks. not only that, but after I showered, saunaed, soaked, plunged in cold water, and then began to scrub, I felt like a goddess. It was very Zenlike to be in a room where no one was staring, but no one was looking away, either. Quite frankly I had to look- watching television and seeing magazines had dulled my memory of what real women look like when naked. A group of young white women sat next to me, scrubbing each other's backs, while an equally young black woman loofahed her arms and legs. Eventually she asked one of them to scrub her back; she and I had been eyeing each other, unsure of the protocol and too shy to speak. I got up enough nerve and asked one of the women if she could scrub my back also, and we all laughed at how we'd not known what to say. we wondered if the men in their section of the bathhouse were avoiding looking at each other too. and there we were, starring in our own living tableau, and feeling terribly clean and beautiful, like the Virgin Goddess of Crafting relaxing after a long day of spinning and weaving.

So here I am, at the age of 46, rediscovering womanhood and feminity. Not the kind my mother taught me, which other had to do with body shame; not the kind my father tried to imposed, where I was supposed to proetend to be ignorant to reassure men; not thekind many of my teachers valorized, where in order to be a feminist I was supposed to turn my back on the simple artistic pleasures of cooking and crafting; but a much older femininity, in which women don't hate the body as it goes through stages, can be kind to each other without being at odds of being consious of class, race, or marital status, and can sit and spin and feel the golden thread that runs from us to our ancestors without apology.

Working and Dreaming

I just got in from my second job today. We'll call it The School. It's a university teaching job somewhere in New Jersey, where I sling cultural anthropology the way short order cooks sling hash. Today was a good day- I slept in the School library's faculty study room for a few hours before class, and looked at a couple of books on American textiles. Now I'll sleep for four hours and go into the Job, which is a major law firm where I do proofreading on the night shift. This is my life every Tuesday and Thursday until May.

I'm hoping I'll have time to crochet tonight while at work because I'm trying to finish up a large doily that will act as a placemat on my desk. The pattern is this one. I'm making with with a green bamboo yarn, which is very soft and nice. Thinking about crochet is one of the few things that keeps me sane. My dreams seem to be filled with wool.