Get the hell out of my way

Who hasn't wanted to say that at some point in their life? Maybe a shopper has lodged his cart in the aisle exactly in front of the Paul Newman pasta sauce and is contemplating the relative merits of marinara or basil with garlic, and all you want is to grab some sauce so you can go home and have a late dinner and you're already cranky because you're so very hungry. Maybe a grandma is driving especially slow in front of you because her arthritis is acting up, and if you somehow divined the reason you might be more sympathetic, but as it is you're already late and she's made you miss two lights. Or maybe you're a woman who has worked long hours for a company in the hope that you might get that coveted promotion, only to be passed over again and again by a suit who's younger and less experienced than you.

Or maybe you're Hillary Clinton, and you've worked your whole damn adult life to make real, positive change in the lives of poor families, overworked mothers, undocumented workers, and abused children. You've been skewered for putting career before the gentler arts of baking cookies and supporting your husband, the Governor, the President. You've been excoriated for staying with him even when the scandal of his infidelities must have made you both furious and mortified. You've been called a feminazi; you've been told you're not a good feminist.

So you, Dear Reader, are not Hillary, obviously, but Hillary is Hillary, and after all the shit she's gone through, she's still in the game. She knows international diplomacy, health care, and the law inside out. She knows how to deal with haters. She may not be charismatic, but she listens to people and apparently she's got a good sense of humor, and she's got an actionable five-part solution to every problem, whether it's to organize the White House egg hunt or crush ISIS.

So, look. Bernie Sanders is terrific. He's galvanized young people, brought awareness to the democratic socialist platform. You know that, the Berners know that, Bernie knows that. But, Bernie, you lost. The New York Times reports that you lost by any measure--popular vote, caucuses, people-who-might-have-voted-but-couldn't-get-to-the-caucus. You lost. Please do not try to ride that dead horse to Washington. The system may not always be fair, but can you verify categorically that it is rigged enough to compensate for the millions, millions of votes that she got and you didn't? With all due respect, you've had your moment. Now get the hell out of her way. In fact, do more than that. Support her. Implore your followers to support her. Shout out the good things she has done and will do. You have the charisma; she has the chops. Figure it out before it's too late.

P.S. New York magazine has a really interesting profile of her; I recommend it.

Pee

Forgive me if my subject is the puppy again. She takes up a lot of my time because 1) she's so adorable to watch and play with, and 2) the world is a big chew toy for her. This morning at five a.m. she was raring to play or, if not to play, then to chew. On a coffee-table book about the Musée d'Orsay or, when I took that away, on the coffee table. Her teeth are tiny white baby teeth, not strong enough yet to cause irreparable damage to the furniture, at least. But I can tell by the way she savors the plant table (one piece of furniture I spent real money on) that she is developing her palate. Testing....

Ice cubes are underrated. They're free, readily available, and puppies can either chase them like a hockey puck or chaw on them like a jawbreaker. The dollar store has a variety of dog toys for--oh!--one dollar each. A cardboard box from the recycling is distracting. All of these are prime chewable objects, but the trouble is that each one only lasts about 15 seconds. That's pretty steep entertainment value even for the dollar store.

One inimitable, priceless chewable object is Juno's sister, Lucy. By the same token, Juno is Lucy's chewable object. One or both of them is going to have a pierced ear. I think a pirate ring might be appropriate.

I take Juno outside about every three minutes. I praise her when she pees as though she's discovered unobtainium. But still, there are puddles ink the house. On the door mat. In the hall. At a random spot on the wood floor. Hey! I just watched you pee outside! I praised you like you discovered a new freaking planet! You woke me up at five o'clock and made me play with you, and you owe me!

Ah, you clever thing. Your cuteness. It's your only and unassailable defense. Why don't you gambol and make my heart feel light. Run to me and let me put my face in your furry fluffiness. We'll try again tomorrow, but right now I need to go to bed.

Dogs

...is there anything they can't do?

They can't stop being cute! I got a new puppy today--more on that later--and she has distracted me so that I didn't write today's post. Here she is, Juno: so adorable that you're glad for the substitution.

six words

Hate to cook; eat chocolate instead.

In recent years, I've started off my freshman comp classes with this mini-assignment: Write your story in six words. The "memoir" can reflect your personality, the present moment, or what's been on your mind lately. Funny, soulful, weird, whatever. The exercise is meant to break the ice and make writing immediate, accessible, and potentially even evocative. 

(This is by no means my invention. According to their website, SMITH Magazine first started the six-word memoir project in November 2006. You can read about it here: http://sixwordmemoirs.com/.) 

So my contribution, the memoir I share with students, is this: Hate to cook; eat chocolate instead. 

The beauty of the genre is that it says so much more than it says. These six words reveal not only that I'm lazy about cooking, I'm so lazy I can't be bothered to write more than six words about my laziness. So lazy I don't even use the pronoun "I." 

I wish I did like to cook. I envy people who get excited by Korean barbecue, designer cocktails, or grilled pizza. I'd like to benefit from the nutritional explosion that is kale or mustard greens. I'd like to find bliss at the farmer's market and fulfillment in that first taste of whatever's on the stove. But even though I wander the grocery store aisles hungry and willing to respond to whatever calls to me, I leave with a single sweet potato and strawberries. Maybe a frozen meal of curried peas and dal, if I'm feeling adventurous and/or desperate. And I remind myself that just about anything goes well with red wine. 

It's On

This is the story I tell about Kim. 

When I got pregnant for the first time, at 36, I called my friend Kim, whom I've known since 8th (?) grade. 

Me: Well, I called to tell you I'm pregnant!

Kim: That's funny!

Me: thinking, That is an odd thing to say. 

Kim: ... Me, too!

Our sons were born within 18 days of each other. When the boys were four months, we met up in LA, where she lives. I believe her reaction was, "Oh, my God!" It's true, Cosmo was a chunky baby, a "Christmas ham," as one of our neighbors said. "Magnificent," said my mother-in-law. I developed some impressive biceps carrying that boy around. 

Her boy was regular-sized. 

(The story is in the coincidence, not the comparison. I've just added details for interest.) 

Now those sons are 18 and heading to college in the fall. The mothers will keenly feel their absence. All of our lives will change. Kim already has a dog, and I'm getting a puppy, god help me.  

A talented painter and fiber artist, she'll now have more time to devote her art. In fact, she has set herself the challenge of doing a painting a day--evidence of which she's posting in her fabulous blog. She's already done five paintings since, yes, June 1. 

Check it out here: http://kimzimart.blogspot.com/ 

So she has also challenged me to meet her blog-a-day. It's not about competition (anyway, I'm not a competitive person, despite my seeming baby-comparing), more about solidarity and encouragement. When a friend gives a shout-out in the name of art and the creativite process, one must answer the call.

Cheers. 

Hippy Twist

published in neutrons/protons magazine July 27, 2015 http://neutronsprotons.com/?s=michele+hanson 

Hippy Twist

I’ve recently been introduced to acroyoga, which, as you might infer, combines acrobatics with yoga. No trapeze or safety net required, though: to fly you have only to ask a partner to lie on her back, place her feet at your pelvic bones, hold your hands, and push you up. If you can plank, staying parallel to the ground—and she can maintain stability, keeping her torso and legs at a right angle—then you’re in Bird. Maybe you tried this as a kid; my sister and I did, and were mostly unsuccessful. It’s tricky at first, but with a few tries you’ll get the hang of it.

From there, the poses are an exploration of the many ways the base can use her feet and hands to hold the flyer up by her hips, hands, belly, butt, armpit, or shoulders: pretty much any and all body parts are recruited for the endeavor. You can move from relatively stationary poses to flow series, in which the flyer might spin, twist, rock, roll, or turn upside down, from one pose to another, in a continuous movement for as many times as you want. The generic name for these is washing machines—I suppose because they function as a cycle and the movements might resemble agitation. Part of the analogy is lost on me, however, because what washing machine can both spin your clothes around and simultaneously rotisserie them? The London Spin, for example, involves the flyer rotating on a plane parallel to the ground and rolling from face down to face up—all while shifting around on someone else’s feet. Also, some acro washing machines include the flyer standing on the base’s hands, or the two players might stack hand-to-hand or foot-to-foot. Try that, Maytag.

When I was in elementary school, girls were not allowed to wear pants, until the rules changed in my sixth grade. Pants were then permitted, but my mother—a woman who coordinated her pumps and purse to match her outfit and had boxes of hats on the top shelf of her closet—limited pants to only once a week. An image of me in jeans and a striped t-shirt, playing four-square and being every bit as good as the boys, shimmers in the recess of my mind.

            Oh, yes. Even in a dress, in those days I modestly dominated the playground. I could blast around the bases, pivot nimbly on the handball court, power my way through a tetherball contest, fly over monkey bars, and catch the kickball in the outfield. I was often team captain or one of the first to be picked. All of this active play (and the possibility that some boy might try to lift up my skirt) meant that I always wore a pair of shorts underneath.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved those dresses, many of which my mom made. These early memories would be lackluster without them. One of my favorites was a long-sleeved dress that zipped up the front and featured a mod Nehru collar, in a dusty purple fabric with subtle blue stripes. Mom used that same fabric to make my Barbie a dress, and the same pattern for an Easter dress, white with stripes of flowers. A tweed skirt and vest set, in purple plaid with a yellow accent thread, was too dressy for school, so I could only wear it to church. But purple plaid! What could be cooler? Mom also sewed for my two older sisters until they learned to do it themselves, as I would soon enough. A photo of the three of us shows our matching short-sleeved dresses with big patch pockets. The photo is in black and white, but I know the fabric was spot-on sixties, with a pattern of bright pink, yellow, green and orange diamond shapes. I was probably eight, and at the time I would have said that dress was boss.

Because for me the sixties were all about color: The Yellow Submarine, psychedelic Peter Max posters, the groovy set on Laugh-In. I had some vague notion that the hippies were responsible for coloring our world, spreading rainbow love and day-glo peace symbols, and so I naturally aspired to hippiedom. In suburban Los Angeles, I didn’t come across actual hippies, so my oldest sister, Nancy, was my closest role model. She qualified because she painted her room apple green, had a clear plastic inflatable chair, and wore her long, straight hair parted in the middle. She collected piles of soda-can tabs (which was quite a feat since we hardly ever had soda in our house) and hooked them together, hanging six or eight long strands over her doorway: a do-it-yourself bead curtain. I think she even burned incense, or maybe that was just once to mask the cigarette she was sneaking when my parents were out. Me? I had flower-power stickers on the walls of my backyard playhouse and doodled happy-faces on my Pee-Chee folders. (Before emojis, it need hardly be said.)

Once I got to junior high, the bright yellow happy faces lost their charm. I, the Queen of the Monkey Bars, became just another hunched-over naked girl in the locker room, calling out a number to get credit for taking a shower. We were issued scratchy little towels that smelled inexplicably like graham crackers, and I went through creative contortions to use mine as a cover-up, putting on my clothes with a minimum of exposure. I had to ask my mom to buy me a training bra. How could she not know I needed it, even if I didn’t need it? And what exactly was that bra training me to be? The humiliations of growing up were small but persistent.

Most of my junior high memories have retreated into a repressed past, but one in particular marks a defining shift from adept girl to untethered soul. It involves a pretty dress my mother made me, brown with white flowers and big red ladybugs; it had puffy sleeves and was complemented by a bright yellow pinafore that buttoned at the bodice. As if she hadn’t worked hard enough, Mom had even taken one of the ladybugs from the dress fabric and appliquéd it onto a patch pocket. White knee socks, perhaps held up by an elastic band adorned with a yellow fringy thing, would have completed the ensemble.

That day a boy I didn’t know said something to me that I knew was crudely sexual, even if I wasn’t clear on the details. I ignored him but was mortified. Suddenly the bright yellow pinafore was ludicrous. Puffy sleeves. Ladybugs. How had I not realized this before? My sense of self was already precarious, and now my timid sense of fashion was turned upside-down. From then on, I wore Mom’s dresses less and less often. I managed to add a pair of hip-huggers to my wardrobe—even though, regrettably, I had no hips. I was growing taller, too, so invariably my pants, hip or not, became high-waters.

In junior high, girls took home ec classes. Did you know there’s a protocol for washing dishes? Or that a peanut butter-mayonnaise-and-relish sandwich breaks the monotony of pb&j? By the year I graduated junior high, a few brave girls had chosen shop classes over sewing. Title IX became law in 1972; Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs fought “The Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. (She won, famously, against that “chauvinist pig,” although there have been recent accusations that Riggs threw the match to cover his gambling debts.) Sometimes I’d go to school on the weekends to hit the tennis ball against the wall, but besides regular PE I didn’t play any sports in high school. My participation on the drill team is yet another experience better left with the litter under the bleachers. If you don’t count my grad school stint on an intramural volleyball team that won the B Division championship, thereby earning me a too-small t-shirt, my exercise routines have been consistent but unremarkable.

Hatha yoga—whether Iyengar, Astanga, or other style—encourages the practitioner to pay attention to her body, its capabilities and limitations, its muscles working discretely and in concert, its response to conscious breathing. You might practice in a roomful of people and share a common purpose, but you are essentially responsible for your own sweet self. In fact, if you’re like me, reining in your ego—training yourself not to observe others and make comparisons—is a continuous process.

In contrast, the core number of acroyogis is three—the base, the flyer, and the spotter—and they are all responsible for one another. Three is a community; three dimensions create depth; and three contributes to a dynamic exchange. As acroyogi extraordinaire Daniel Scott says, he enjoys “moving and being moved.” He describes acro as being “not about basing and flying, but giving and receiving.” The base receives the flyer’s weight and trust; the flyer contributes her strength and focus. The spotter is the intermediary, the support service, because he can see what the other two can’t. He can make suggestions for a different foot placement, say, or direct the flyer to either engage or relax.

Acro isn’t meant to take the place of a regular yoga practice but to offer new territory for physical expression and personal interaction. When you practice yoga as an individual, you have a pretty good sense of where you are in space. But in acro, directions and the ability to move effectively can get squirrelly. For instance, as the base, your right is often the flyer’s left. You press up with your hands; she presses down. You might feel pretty confident basing a light and bony flyer, and then your success is challenged by a heavier or floppier one. As a flyer, you might need your base to shift a toe that’s poking you in the gut. Or perhaps you simply have to trust that his feet are there to catch you when you pop from Throne to Bird. As a spotter, you closely observe alignment, maybe narrate the movement, and stay stable enough to nudge a wayward pose back to rights. Communication—physical, visual, and verbal—ensures you work as a unit.

Lacking the opportunity to fly you myself, let me walk you through a pose as an example. Let’s start with Star. The base, as usual, lies on his back, and you, the flyer, stand facing him with your feet on either side of his head. He tucks his feet up, and you round your shoulders down so that the top of your shoulders rest on the bottoms of his feet. You grasp his hands, jump up in a tuck, and, hup! You’re upside-down, your shoulders held up by his feet and your position steadied by his hands. When you arrive, you transition to a straddle pike to make the pose more stable. You’re in a kind of floating tripod headstand, except that the head isn’t standing.

But then the spotter says, Move your hips move back so they’re stacked over the base’s hips.

What do you mean, back? Where are his hips? this way?

Yes, but now you’re leaning left. You’re losing the pike And now your balance. Try not to step on his face as you land.

Wonderfully, there’s a word that explains this spatial disconnect: proprioception. That’s an easy word to dismantle: proprio, or the self, combined with perception. This is not a psychological term, but a physiological one: it refers to sensory receptors in the muscles and tendons that send the central nervous system feedback on how far your muscles are extending, how quickly, and with how much force. Whereas a sense of balance is regulated by the vestibular system (fluids in the inner ear), proprioception keeps track of your joints and limbs in space. It’s what allows us to walk or drive a car without having to watch how our feet are performing. It’s what enables you to close your eyes and touch your nose to prove you’re sober. It’s how figure skaters train themselves to stay upright after completing their dizzying spins. Part of learning acroyoga, then, is exercising and developing proprioceptive awareness. Each new pose begins with uncertainty and progresses to a heightened sensitivity not only to how you move but how you move in relation to someone else. Eventually you may feel a subtle “aha”—a click, like tumblers in a combination lock, and the safe is cracked, the limbs are aligned. The pose finds its own integrity, though you may not be fully aware of how it got there. 

To warm up for acro we sometimes do the Hippie Twist. Whereas the more active poses require you to maintain core strength as the flyer, this is a therapeutic pose where you let go and let the base do the work. From Bird, flop forward and straddle your legs, letting them be heavy. The soles of your feet come together (a suspended baddha konasana, if you will), and forearms stack behind you at your lower back. Pushing up on your shoulders, the base bends her right leg and left elbow (and yes, we beginner bases still have to consciously say that to ourselves), pushing your hip away with the straight leg and pushing your shoulder away with her straight arm. It’s a dishrag effect, basically, and you get a deep, freeing spinal twist.

The names of the poses are imaginative, almost silly—like Hangle Dangle, Straddle Bat, and Flying Whale. The name Hippie Twist seemed appropriate, I thought, because not only does it feel good, it also embodies the hippie ethos of freedom of movement, of stretching yourself beyond self-imposed limitations. It was only recently that something clicked, and I suddenly realized that the name refers to hips. The pelvic area. It’s spelled, in fact, “Hippy Twist.” This is something else I appreciate about acro: the reminder that a simple twist in our perception can reveal how our expectations and assumptions affect our understanding, whether of a word, the self, or another person.

When I first tried acro with a small group of people, I came away thinking it was fun. For some reason “fun” was a rusty sensation to me, faintly disorienting. That might be a function of age since I’m older than others in the group by as much as twenty years, or simply because I’m not usually one to jump into collective activities with both feet, literally or figuratively. Also, I wondered just what was fun about this. It’s awkward and clumsy. Like any contact sport, it can hurt, and you fall more often than not. You find yourself in overly intimate positions with people you scarcely know. But the general consensus among the players is that “fun” is the motivating factor. Recently a new recruit joined us, and from the get-go she was thrilled. “This is so fun!” she exclaimed repeatedly. As her name was also Michelle, I couldn’t help but feel she represented my alter ego: young, enthusiastic, athletic, game for trying anything.

Fun is a part of why acroyoga appeals to me, but there’s more to it. I think I do it because I can. The opportunity is available. As Daniel Scott says, “Live forever or die trying.” So I try. And even though the practice stirs up self-doubts about my capabilities and my place in the group, when the flow of poses works, there is strength and satisfaction.

In elementary school we had a set of rings, maybe ten of them hanging in a circle around a pole. You jumped up to grab the first ring, maybe got a push from the next person in line. Then you learned to fall back in order to swing forward to catch the next ring or even—if you were good at it (and I was)—skip past one ring to reach for the next. Drop back, swing forward, one hand after another, building momentum. I was on the rings a lot because it was fun, and since I wore shorts under my dress, I had no reason to hesitate, and every reason to fly. 

Random paranoid thoughts re: Zoosk

What the hell kind of name is Zoosk?

Sorry, where is the off switch for men with profile photos of them standing proudly next to their truck/ dead deer/ Harley/ four-wheeler?

On usernames: "Zoosk Member" does not win points for originality.

Nor does "Hooter Man" win points for sensitivity, even if you just really like owls. And "Peckerwood"? Really?

One wonders about the moniker “geterdone.” If “’er” constitutes a colloquial allusion to “her,” why does this mean a manly project like pouring concrete or mowing an acre of lawn or roofing a house? Is it in the same genre as her being used to refer to a boat or car  one drives or a country over which one rules? Or is it more specifically a reference to doing a woman? In any case—oh, never mind.

Zoosk asks, "Why are you deactivating your account?" Well, in the ten minutes I tentatively scrolled through my "matches," three men—oh, now four—looked at my profile, and you, Zoosk, giddily shared this information in real time. You want to know why I'm deactivating my account? Let me put it this way: Where's the option to convey, I'm kinda creeped out?