As if that weren’t enough, Ted’s COMPLETE DOMINANCE OF THE INTERWEBS has caused a tenfold jump in traffic on this here blog, and the day is not even over yet.

So, hi everyone! Thanks for stopping by. Now that all of these people are looking, I am having a bit of performance anxiety. Ok. Deep breath. Funny and thought provoking in 3…2…1…

Victoria’s Secret finally got around to making more than three bras in my size. As I have lamented many times, being a little woman with big boobs is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Comfy bra tops and dresses are out, it is difficult to find cute bras that fit, and the ones that are out there are usually extremely expensive and often uncomfortable. Victoria’s Secret caught on, at least to the extent that they now make lots of cute bras in my size, but unfortunately, they don’t have them in stores. So, last week I ordered a bunch of bras online to try on at home.

Of the four, two fit nicely, one did not, and one’s promise of “ultimate lift” ultimately made me look like I have four boobs.

The crazy thing about the tittimonster from boobulon 4 bra was that it included these:

That’s right. Implants. Only they get implanted in the bra, instead of in the boob. I am a D cup. The last thing I need is an extra set of boobs in my bra, in addition to the copious padding already in these contraptions. Apparently the “secret” of Victoria’s Secret is the secret ingredient: a full roll of toilet paper in every cup.

That aside, I am delighted to have options from another major retailer. Victoria’s Secret, for all of your puffy lipped models and thoroughly unnatural hooter hoisting, I salute you, and on behalf of all little women with big boobs, I thank you for your support.

I am sort of kidding about this, but the more I think about it, the more I think there is something to it. The doshas are one of a zillion different frameworks out there for making sense of the play between mind, body, and the rest of the world. And now I know: Vata is my dosha of misbehaving, and also the dosha of underpants.

As for my actual misbehaving today, I took a nice long time getting myself moving this morning, sleeping in with wonderful, gorgeous dreams that have no business on a reputable blog, or this one either. But, oh, there were… things. Dream things. My vata garments for the misbehaving day were purple, as were my seasonally inappropriate open-toe shoes. I shirked the mountain of work before me this afternoon in favor of painting my toenails and talking with an old friend for an hour and six minutes. (Hi, Josh!) I tried very hard to buy some festive underthings, but it just didn’t work out. I stopped at Target for sanitizing wipes, and spent some time perusing the undie bins, but alas the stash was somewhat disappointing. For one thing, many of the funkier styles are either thongs or have seams up the back, and I just cannot bring myself to wear anything engineered to give me a wedgie. Call me old fashioned, but as far as I am concerned, wearing a thong is like putting a middle school bully in my pants.

I write about underwear a lot. Well, I like it. And shoes. In fact, with fabulous things on beneath and below, I think I could very happily wear the same jeans and shirt every day (Ok, throw in a vintage sundress from time to time. With fabulous underthings and shoes. That, too. Is it summer yet?)

And so another Misbehaving Tuesday draws to a close. Vata is balanced, and it is time to dig into some of that work before I go back to those gorgeous dreams.

And that, my friends, is how dog poop got on my laptop while I was typing.

The lesson for the weekend is that pranayama kicks my butt. There are other lessons, too, such as after a day of training, it is really better for me not to be around people, and sitting on a wood floor for an entire day hurts, and that a completely amazing, intense, focused, athletic practice interrupted by an overflowing toilet is still a completely amazing, intense, focused, athletic practice. And a thousand other things, too.

After all of the breath work this weekend, I understand why it has always been a part of the practice I resisted. During a session today I came close to a total meltdown, which is pretty cool, actually. It felt horrendous as it happened, but every new understanding of how to reverse engineer emotions in the body is worth the temporary discomfort. I cannot put my finger on exactly what the emotion was that did me in today; it is something to which I may need to return.

Since last night, in my time out of the studio I have been intermittently high as a kite and angry as hell. While I know well that it is all stuff that needs to be released, rise, and fall, it definitely does not make me better company. (For now, anyway.)

Tomorrow, back to teaching, work, and all of the things that were sidelined this weekend for the training. Chop wood, carry water as it were.

I was more nervous practice teaching for five minutes this morning than I have been since I taught my first full class. Of course, as I always remember twenty minutes too late, the nervousness is my problem, my own ridiculous invention. It is not as if my classes will be revoked if I trip over my words or assist some one on the wrong side. My nerves about leading a workshop were allayed also, when I was reminded that this is supposed to be fun. Fun! Right! Teaching is fun, duh.

On that note: July 11, 12:00 – 2:00 pm, CCY Midtown. I’ll be leading a workshop on hip openers and lotus variations. How much does that rock? Lots, I say. Lots. And, it will be only $6.00. That’s right, SIX DOLLARS, people, for a two hour hip opener workshop. Even if I suck, there is no way two hours of hip openers won’t be amazing.

The training is a gift. If nothing else, during this crazy, crazy time, it is a commitment that at least once a month I will get in two practices over the weekend, plus a decent amount of time in meditation.

I need the meditation. Oh, do I need the meditation.

There will be another seven hours of this business tomorrow. My back hurts from sitting on the wood floor, I’m tired because I barely sleep on these weekends (conveniently forgot that part when I signed up for this), my guts feel all weird from a dynamic meditation after eating and my total GI-distress-germ-phobia, and I have that weird, swimmy, hungover feeling that comes from lots of energetic work. I kind of want to run around the block, write love poetry to the world, and pass out all at the same time.

In other words, all is well.

That aside, the 500 hour training started tonight. When I signed up for it back in December, putting it in the queue with the thousand other things I am doing this semester, my teacher told me that it will support my other work. Tonight I understood what she meant. While I am a little nervous about the practice teaching workshops later in the training, sitting in the room tonight was a refuge. The past six months have been chaos in my head. It has been beautiful, creative, and left me feeling thoroughly broken. I am ready for what is next: beauty, creativity, and even the brokenness- but finding grace in it. Grace in the chaos. I don’t know how that is going to happen, all I know is that as our practice closed tonight I knew I was in the right place.

Other notes from the evening:

1. The proportion of men in the training is much greater than in the 200 hour, which makes the opening invocation sound very, very different.
2. Learning names will be much easier this time around. I already know seven of the sixteen other participants.
3. I was so dang happy to see everyone in that room tonight. If I could have hugged everyone at once, I would have.
4. I must, must, must put something under my head when we do yoga nidra on a wood floor. Owie.

One of this week’s readings for class was about the importance of place in fiction. There were two wonderful quotes from an article about setting by Richard Russo. The first:

“Now that I’ve lived in Maine for several years, I’m often asked by virtue of my address when I’ll be writing a novel set in Maine. They don’t realize what they’re probably asking is when I plan to leave the state.”

Having lived in eight metro areas, this made me smile. Baltimore is the only place I have ever felt comfortable writing and occupying a the same time. All of this moving and coming home has been a strange blessing for my writing. I was away long enough – from age eight to thirty-two – that I have some distance from it, but at the same time I have always had family here, there have always been visits, and it has always been home. Even though I did most of my growing up around Philly, it never felt quite right to me, and even when I visit places in Philly that I enjoy, I am at my center agitated (or, less judiciously but more accurately, trips to Philly make me really, really bitchy). Baltimore is in my guts, so I can write about it without sounding like a tourist, but at the same time, I have enough distance to do it justice, or so I would like to think. And lucky me, I think it could be my favorite place to write about, other than weird little towns in Pennsylvania.

“Writers have to recognize and accept an essential artistic paradox – that the more specific and individual things become, the more universal they feel.”

This applies to the arts overall, and I do not have much to add. It is another lovely way of saying that at our core, we all have common stuff, and the more honest and bare we are in our art, the more we have to offer and the more likely we are to be accepted (maybe not by everyone, but it helps), if not understood.

So, I considered my options. It is, after all, Misbehaving Tuesday, and a crucial component of misbehaving is wearing underthings that put a spring in my step on an otherwise unstimulating weekday – what would be the third date underwear if I were single. However, I am not dating my doctor. It took some thinking, but I came up with the Missouri Compromise of underpants: one of those innocent looking girly pairs that women look at and say, “oh my god, those are so cute!” and men look at a say, “Hwwwuh.” Yeah, we know exactly what we’re doing with those, fellas. We are forming an independent state constitution north of the 36th parallel, if you catch my meaning. Ladies, am I right? Behold, the power of Missouri Compromise underpants.

Do not try this at home. Taking a picture of one's own shoulder can cause muscle strain and dropping things.

My appointment went just fine and was behavior filled. Also, I was thoroughly poked: I got an H1N1 vaccine, and I had the usual bloodwork drawn, which for me includes a couple of extras. As I was sitting in the poking chair with my arm twitching, I watched the lab tech review the form, take a vial from the supply, and then another vial, and then another… seven vials in all for me to fill. “Good lord,” I said. “That’s a lot of vials.”

“No it’s not,” she replied.

Touche, lab tech.

I went home, put on my misbehaving socks, and carried on through the rest of the day: errands, homework, and regenerating blood cells. Perhaps not the most exciting Misbehaving Tuesday ever, but I would like to think that as I write this, my shiny new blood cells are getting down and funky, maybe having a little party in the marrow, yo.

Guess how long that lasted?

I had this idea about painting on a person that rattled around in my head for more than a decade, and it just happened to fit in with the assignment and characters I was writing for class. Also, shoes are of course involved. The instructor noted that if I chose to develop the story, it could evolve either into erotica or literary fiction depending on what I did with it, and that the difference is that in literary fiction the characters have something at stake. What the characters had at stake, at this early point in the story, was unclear.

(Of course, a lot of erotica centers around infidelity, so technically, the characters have something at stake, but it is a tacit agreement between the writer and reader in erotica that the characters will not get caught, unless it is that kind of story, in which case, the same idea applies. All bets are off in literary fiction.)

I had not given much thought to what differentiated literary fiction with lots of sex from pure fantasy. I figured it was character development plain and simple and was taking more of an “I know it when I see it,” approach. Consequently, I have a handful of stories from the past six months that probably sit right at the edge between erotica and literary fiction.

So, this gives me a framework for moving forward with the story I started for class, but the concept of what is at stake as a defining characteristic of fiction relative to fantasy also has me looking a little deeper. It has been said that literary fiction is a culture’s conversation with itself about itself. Fantasy is fantasy, and exists purely for pleasure. In the epic that is a life, how do we determine the difference between the stories that we tell ourselves everyday in order to define ourselves, and the stories we tell ourselves purely for pleasure? It is easy in the extreme: we know that telling ourselves the story that, say, our job is important supports our identity and keeps the status quo humming along, and we know that imagining the barista at Starbucks straddling the counter and serving up a double tall handjob is a flight of fancy. If we lose the barista there is always another fantasy object. If we lose the job, there is so much more at stake – identity, world view, etc..

But, what happens when the lines get muddied between the stories that do the work of defining us and the stories that are simply passing pleasures? What happens when you can’t tell the difference?

What happens, I think, is that life gets interesting. Whether it is sex or food or cars or some other object of obsession, in this messy, smokey area of things that should be light and fancy but are tightly, dearly, deeply held there is tension, darkness, energy to be found. Wanting, compressed by time, forms a thick vein of coal at the center of a being. Everything is at stake with that much fuel sitting there; release it, life could blow up. If we’re brave, we throw in a match from time to time. If we’re a little less brave, we let some one else strike the match.

Regardless of how a person ignites, in fiction as in life, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are only as interesting as what is at stake if they turn out not to be true.

When I found out this weekend that a young person close to me was recommended for anti-depressants, I had my habitual reaction, which is to freak out a little, demand second opinions that aren’t mine to demand, and rant about how anti-depressants are wildly over-prescribed. It is not that I think there is anything wrong with anti-depressants, per se. Sometimes they save lives. Unfortunately, though, it seems that more often than not they are used to mask the source of the problem. At least, that was my experience.

Right after I turned twenty-five I quit a short-lived, unpleasant job in St. Louis and moved back to my parents’ house in Philly. The plan was to work for my mom for a few months, until I made enough money to move to New York. I wanted to write and I wanted to work in the music business – I didn’t really care how, I would have been happy to answer phones at a record label. I had a plan.

Then, a bunch of stuff happened. My parents’ marriage was disintegrating right in front of me, I met up with an ex-boyfriend with whom I still had a spark, and started escaping to him whenever I could. He asked me to move in with him and I did. Six weeks after we moved in together, my parents separated. A month or so after that I went to the doctor, feeling lousy. I was exhausted all the time, getting dizzy for no reason, had no sex drive, and I would look for any excuse to run errands in the middle of the work day that would allow me to go home and sit on my couch for twenty minutes because I was just so tired. He told me he thought I was depressed, and recommended a low dose of zoloft. He didn’t recommend therapy, or nutritional counseling, or exercise (none of which I was doing), just a drug.

I should have known better, but I was so relieved just to be able to get through the day, that I stuck with the zoloft. I stuck with it right through my ex getting laid off, stuck with it through getting engaged, married, and divorced. When I started having bizarre impulses to throw myself off my balcony, I tried to go off it. I had horrible withdrawal, and after a couple of weeks off the zoloft I couldn’t get off the couch anymore. (This was either right before or right after it went public that sometimes anti-depressants actually increased suicide risk in adolescents, but I don’t remember the exact timing.) I trusted that I was generally sane enough that my good sense would override any bizarre, impulsive side effects from the drug, and went back on it for almost another year. I didn’t have a regular physician when I finally decided that I’d had enough. I went off it cold tofu, went through the withdrawal again, and sucked down a lot of St. John’s Wort to get myself through the experience.

Writing this is the first I have ever given voice to the weird side effects (or any of this, for that matter), but it is far enough in the past now that I am comfortable talking about it, sort of. At the time it was embarrassing, and it freaked me the fuck out. It occurs to me that if I am going to be looking for employment any time soon, I probably should hide this post. And, really, the rest of my blog. But I digress.

I think about this experience whenever I hear of some one I know taking an anti-depressant. In my case, it helped with the physical part of depression, but it compounded the cause. In retrospect, it would have been far more helpful to have a professional demanding an answer about why I snuffed out my dreams. I was in a job that didn’t suit me, in a relationship that didn’t bring out the best in either of us, and dealing with family drama. I probably would have benefited from a breakdown. Sometimes the soul needs everything to fall apart.

That is what has been on my mind today, that sometimes the soul needs a breakdown. Also, I just realized today that the big void of writing in my late twenties matches up to my time on zoloft. I went off it at the end of January or early February of 2004. In April of 2004, I started blogging, and in July I went to the workshop in Iowa.

I am not certain why it is that I feel the need to tell this story now. I am not trying to rally anti-anti-depressant support – like I said, anti-depressants can save lives. I suppose that being reminded of it made me realize that it is far enough in the past now that I can share it, and perhaps it can be of benefit to some one.