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February 15, 2006
update 
I'm up to 25". My rewrite of the pattern says I just need to make it to 26". I can barely stand it! Arms!! I'm going to be knitting sleeves!
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Last night's pilates was a fiasco. I guess the instructor thought that because we were there, we were underloved, and thus needed to be punished. Obviously, we weren't off being wined and dined for Valentines Day. Well hell! Our anniversary is at the end of the week, so Valentines Day has always been a minor event, and anyways, I got wined and dined at lunch.
I was having a hell of a time. New exercises, very hard, ack. I started thinking about how I wanted to be able to do this stuff, not the adaptations, not an incomplete set—I wanted to be able to do them. End of story. Which turned into me bashing myself about gaining weight and taking a few months off of pilates and now being back at square one.
Yes, it's true, I am back at square one. I do the poses, and I find it hard to both "activate" my core and do the pose, and activating my core tends to mean that I tense all my muscles and don't breathe. Which, you know, sucks. I'm ready to remember how to isolate those muscles, how to do two things at once, no, three: tighten the abs, do the pose, and breathe. It's possible, I've done it before.
And I have to remember too, that even when I was super serious about pilates, I still generally wasn't doing full sets, and I still was using adaptions frequently. And it was still really hard. It was always really hard.
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Coming home on the bus last night, I passed the Valentine's Mocktails on the Bridge party. A local bike org does this monthly Breakfasts on the Bridge event, usually the last Friday of the month, and it's this totally amazing thing. You're greated by friendly faces inviting you to have a cup of coffee (or tea) (in a porcelain cup!) and a snacky-baked good, and gasp, talk to people you don't know. It's unnerving and wonderful. And the mocktails appeared to be even more of a success. I see stuff like this and it gets me all squishy. The whole random-acts-of-bike-love vibe is in full force, and it makes me feel like I need to grow into deserving it.
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Oh! I want to declutter. I want to declutter! It's kinda driving me nuts!
I've thought about taking some pictures of some of the bad areas of the house. These would be my bad areas—while my Sweetie is a packrat, he's got nothing on me. I think about posting them here, and then I think, no, no way, no way could I do that. But it might be good for me to just take some pictures, so that when I get something done, I have this visual reminder of how bad it originally was.
Right now, my yarn is stored in a cabinet. Not in any orderly fashion, certainly— it's in bins and grocery bags and luggage. Finding something requires trekking across a small patch of brush junk, and then you invariably have to take everything out to find what you were looking for. Some of these yarns are so incredibly gorgeous, it's a total shame that they are hidden away. Of course, with my lot of thieving animals, they at least need to be out of reach. But not necessarily out of sight.
I was checking out Knitty's Amy's blog and she's posted a photo of her knitting storage area. Sigh! She obviously has her stash under control. And I obviously don't.
It's interesting how, in the end, your possessions own you. I dream about the garage in the New Pornographers' Use It video because it represents what I want to be, but also because I need a place to store my lawnmower, my bicycle, and my scooter. And Sweetie needs a place to store his brewing setup.
How much time do I spend working to support my need to store stuff??
People joke about making a "clean" start, about starting from nothing. The closest I've come is moving across country with one (tercel-sized) carload. Even so, I had a huge amount of crap stored at my parents that I had to later weed down to another carload. Within six months, I lost the majority of that second carload in a flood. But then I bought a house...
In Amy's blog, she's mentioned knowing Jane Siberry (Dude!), and recently she points to this article about Jane 's break with the past, or why she's selling and/or giving away most of her possessions. For her, it's the need to reconnect with her creative self that has necessitated her paring down.
"This is the best I can do to keep my music alive. I'm operating on trust. I don't know what's ahead, but I do know that I can take whatever comes.
"I feel in harmony with... something. It's what I've been looking for all my life. I can't wait for the second half to begin."
Posted at February 15, 2006
Comments
which bridge was the mocktail event on? (i didn't ride on tuesday, so i didn't see 'em.)
Posted by: tszuj at February 16, 2006 9:36 AM
Maybe yoga is different than pilates. In yoga, we're always encouraged to do what we can, and then the minute that pose is over, to let it go and not judge it. Tomorrow is another day. A million things can determine whether or not you can do a pose well or less well. I like hearing that, it reminds me not to bash myself!
Also, interesting about decluttering! My problem is mostly at work, so I actually hired someone to help me get organized. Sad, but true. I threw out MOUNTAINS of paper yesterday. It felt sooooo good!
Posted by: jeanne at February 18, 2006 4:38 PM