What a girl wants

As I sat in my Italian Fango Mud Bath at the Mermaid Spa in Sebastapol for the second half hour of my “treatment”, I had to admit that the only way to describe this intense self-pleasure was: love. Taking a bath in a commercial establishment, for US$65 an hour, at first may seem weird. I know it did to every man I told my plans to, including the Hertz reservations guy at the San Jose Marriott. And honestly, it even seemed a bit off to me when I initially sank in the tub and wondered why this was so different from doing it at home, given that I have no kids, pets or significant others to interrupt my me-time anyway.

At home when I take a tub, or anywhere besides the Mermaid Spa when I’ve prepared myself a hot bath, I’m usually not in it for more than 15 or 20 minutes, tops. I suppose I get bored, fidgety, and anxious to move on to the next thing, even when I have a book. Here, I had paid to give myself one full hour of pleasure, whether I enjoyed it or not. For the first half hour, I have to say, I was kind of looking forward to the woman walking in and telling me it was half over. I had been left in a room with a beautiful deep tub, candles, a glass of flavoured water, an apricot face scrub, a washcloth and a bucket of ice water to cool myself off with. Being the insufferable stoic that I am, I immediately told myself I wouldn’t be needing the ice water. Ha. Hahaha. HAHAHA. I was trying so hard to relax the way I imagined one should. Lying just so, as though when the woman came back I would be judged on how correctly I was relaxing. That’s so me.

After she did knock –and did not give me an approving or disapproving look, one way or the other- and the second half hour began, that’s when I really got into it. I threw the whole “ought to” idea of relaxation out the non-existent window and just gave in to whatever I wanted to do. I took pictures of myself (see my Flickr account for one), I sat up, I rolled over. I turned on the jets. I lay incredibly still and watched the reflection of the ceiling lamp until I felt I might not exist at all. I soaked the washcloth in ice water and just left it on my head. I was a mess. I was one, big, happy as love mess. It was amazing. And when the woman came back to tell me the hour was up, I couldn’t help but respond “noooo…”. I would have stayed in that tub forever. The only reason I accepted to get out was because she promised to end my hour with a foot rub and my feet were simply too tempted to pass it up. They were laughing, they were so happy.

Other highlights of Napa’s Weekend of Indulgence; finally getting a chance to tan by the hotel pool and sit in the wicked hot Jacuzzi; drink 3 glasses of champagne –sorry, sparkling wine- atop a French-style castle overlooking endless vineyards; rolling over the countryside in a Spyder convertible; eating bread and cheese in the park in Sonoma; and buying a floppy, colourful sunhat in a boutique full of beautiful things. Not to mention, spending the time with Elvira, the most awesomest travel companion.

Work to Indulge

Two of these kids are doing the same thing
Two of these kids are one and the same

Josh (far left) and I quit our jobs. We have different reasons and we're going different ways, but I thought I should say that now. He's gone and I'm leaving after my next show, in New Orleans at the end of July.

I got a really fabulous job thanks to a friend of my parents. Out of the blue; I didn't think I could really get it, but I did. And the best part was all the support I got from friends and family. Who knew? I'm like one of those Tibetan sand drawings: you tell me how much you love me, and soon after I've let the wind wipe that away and I'm wondering all over again. Lovely, isn't it? :)

Anyway. I am beating this Mercury retrogade like Toshiro Mifune.

After an unnecessary and stressful ordeal during the first days onsite here in San Jose, I made a Sarita-worthy decision (Sarita's my mom) and received a lot of welcome support and help from my co-workers. You guys are awesome! Things went smoothly from then on. In an unrelated decision, I finally got to put into practice the idea that shifts and decent hours make for better overall moods and dispositions. Worked for me!

So now I'm getting ready to pick up a rental, drive across the Golden Gate bridge, and lounge by an authentic California pool until my best friend from high school, Elvira, shows up tomorrow afternoon in her... convertible! Yeah! We reserved one hour fancy-schmancy mud baths at the Mermaid Spa. On Saturday we will create our own version of the movie Sideways. I guess I can repeat my favourite line:

Miles: [while tasting wine] It tastes like the back of a fucking L.A. school bus. Now they probably didn't de-stem, hoping for some semblance of concentration, crushed it up with leaves and mice, and then wound up with this rancid tar and turpentine bullshit. Fuckin' Raid.
Jack: Tastes pretty good to me.

That's us. We're Jack. We took a one week vacation in San Francisco in 2004 and it was great. It went pretty much like this:

"Hey, what do you feel like doing now?"
"Hm, I was sort of thinking of this, what do you think?"
"Sounds good to me!"

I'll see you when I get back.

update 06/21/07

Such a weird Summer, I can just feel it in my bones. Is Summer the weirdest season of all? How come so much important stuff happens in Summer?

Anyway: guy downstairs moved out apparently, not without first *stealing* all of his (ex?) girlfriend's stuff. She had a handful of cops listening to her cry on Tuesday. Mostly about her shoes. Then she called him and accused him of sending "that bitch" over to do the stealing. I don't think he denied that. I was hoping she had finally washed that man right out of her hair, but she caved and said she'd give him "whatever" he wanted as long as he returned all her stuff ASAP. She told him to come over that night; that she'd be "waiting". That made me sad for her. I guess breaking up really is hard to do, even when you're in a corrupted relationship between an idiot and an asshole. Was that too harsh? I do feel sorry for them, but man...

Canada Post messed up my passport delivery. They mailed it to me but didn't notify me of it's delivery, so I never knew and eventually they declared it "undeliverable" and sent it back to Passport Canada. It was still in transit on Tuesday, so I had to change my flight and rent a car to drive to Burlington. I'm liking Burlington. The border was a breeze, with only me and an elderly customs agent who was as friendly as you'd expect a Vermonter to be. Way better than New York! And the Burlington airport is small and efficient, with no line-ups or hassle. You should have seen how amiable the security was. And I'm sure they all do their jobs just as well as mean-faced people in airports everywhere else.

I'm in San Jose, California, waiting to set up my registration area. My tech is lost in transit. He missed his flight, and I'm not going to give any details here because that wouldn't be fair. It just got me thinking: what would happen if the tech never showed up? What if the tech died on the way to the meeting? Anyway...

There is no pool in our hotel. I'm wondering what kind of a California hotel doesn't have a pool? My top-floor room does have an iPod docking station, a 16:9 flat screen tv, a Melitta One:One coffee/tea maker, and sleeping aids like eye mask, ear plugs and a soothing CD soundtrack. I don't need this. I wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis. I obviously don't want to miss ONE SECOND of this crazy Summer.

The violence of summer

“Why do we keep shrieking when we mean soft things? We should be whispering all the time.”

-Magnetic Fields, 100.000 Fireflies

The couple that lives downstairs from me is infiltrating the rest of my life, both waking and asleep. They continue to have yelling matches, throwing competitions, and God-knows what other forms of violence at any hour of the day or night. On Saturday morning, they woke me up at 8. Monday morning I got a 4am wake-up call. But it could be two in the afternoon for all they care.

I’m somewhere past the point of this being about my annoyance with their total lack of concern for the people around them. I’m becoming worried that one or both of them is going to get hurt, and I don’t just mean emotionally. I heard her yell “you can’t even throw things right!” one time. And this weekend there was a hallway shout out about a knife. There’s also a lot of swearing involved. Don’t ask me why they don’t just break up, because I wonder that ALL the time.

Because of them, I’ve become sensitive to the other violence around me, on the streets, everywhere. Sunday night, as I walked out of Eduardo’s Italian Restaurant, I saw someone shove a drunk young man so that he toppled into the street, like a pile of newspapers. “Are we joking?” I said, shocked. I couldn’t help but say it out loud. The two girls standing with the pusher guy giggled and made weak disapproving comments. They all thought it was hilarious.

Earlier that day in Carre Saint Louis, the bums were swarming over the beautiful ladies, serenading them and otherwise trying to start up conversations. The man in the photo with Amy was so beat up, his knee was protruding at a strange angle. I think he was missing his front teeth. He was trying to play guitar with her, but he would lose his train of thought in the middle of a sentence and somehow seemed to require her to do or say what he wanted. To me, he seemed to have the exact sense of self-centered entitlement that drunk men at bars and dance clubs have. As though all women should be available to listen to them and dance with them, because that’s what they want, and if the woman isn’t interested, she’s a bitch. Amy seemed alright with him, though. Sometimes I'm too protective.


“There’s a plane flying over my head, so you may not be able to hear everything I’m saying right now”, the man said to Amy. I wanted to point out to him that it was flying over all our heads, not just his.

Is it clear that I don’t think of aggressiveness exclusively in physical terms? People who invade your space and expect things from you make me feel just as threatened. Loud people. People who leave anonymous personal insults on blogs. People who accuse you. People who make underhanded comments. People who break your heart and then act like they had nothing to do with it. People who become instantly defensive and retaliatory.

I definitely acknowledge having acted in the all the above ways at times. If you think I make your life difficult now, you should have met me when I was 16. I have my own history of violence, and I guess that made me more reactive than others. I learned to protect myself (and others) in my own way, but I suppose the fear is latent in me, that somehow, someday, the violence will come back and I’ll be powerless against it. The downstairs couple is reminding me of that constantly, in a very uncomfortable way. I'm no hippie; I believe violence has a place in fiction and in real life, but I was sort of hoping that we could all do our best to try to make it easy instead of hard.

Impatient re: Patience

I can feel the earth begin to move
I hear my needle hit the groove
And spiral through another day
I hear my song begin to say
Kiss me where the sun don't shine
The past was yours
But the future's mine
You're all out of time

-She Bangs the Drums, Stone Roses

I have never been a patient person. Somewhere along the way it became very obvious to me that there is no reason on earth why I shouldn’t have what I want when I want it. It’s not that I was particularly spoiled. On the contrary, I have just spent a lot of my time being frustrated, I guess. I never got to disappear in a pool of coloured plastic balls (still a fantasy); I never got one of those plastic cars with the yellow plastic roof I wanted; my mother wouldn’t buy me a black leather mini-skirt no matter how much I promised that I would *only* wear it for Halloween (yeah, right); a gazillion people have passed by my life for varying amounts of time and I never got what I wanted from them. Kind of sucks.

So sometime during my university years I did a little reading on Buddhism, and that seemed like an interesting way to calm those urges. And sometime after those years, I took up yoga and that seemed to calm me down a lot. A man who read my birth chart recommended I “sweat” (yoga being an acceptable method) and live by the sea. I haven’t managed the second yet.

My dad says I’m too rigid; that I expect people to be a certain way (ie exactly how I want them to be) and if they’re not I don’t bend. I probably got mad when he said that. My brother and I have chatted about how demanding we are with others, particularly the people we date. We laugh about how ridiculously picky and hopeless we are. I sometimes wonder which of us is really worse. I have certain un-stated quotas of how much attention has to be paid to me (re: answer my emails, call me, make me feel like a priority). My brother is so stern that if someone, say, cuts him off in traffic, he’ll follow the car and somehow –don’t ask me how- he’ll try to “teach them their lesson”. I have a list of people I wish I could teach a lesson to. It keeps growing too.

Today, for instance, I’m blaming my impatience partially on my downstairs neighbours. They’re new, and I’ll bet they have woken me up 50% of the nights they’ve been living below me. They’re either fighting or having sex, usually one followed by the other (and not in the order you’d expect, either). The walls in my apartment are so thin, I can quote parts of their arguments and I can say for a fact that when they screw, it’s over faster than when they argue. Whenever they wake me, I begin drafting a letter in my head that I’ll slip under their door to “teach them a lesson”.

I’m impatient at work when my deadline is coming up and other parts of the project are behind. I try to calm down that anxiety by rationalizing that it can still get done on time… that venting will not help… that it’s not anyone in particular’s fault.

But no matter how much rationalizing and slow breathing I do, no matter how much I control my impulse to throw a huge fit, I can't stop the impatience inside. I’m impatient with people who block the sidewalk and walk too slow. I’m impatient with people who actually drag their feet when they walk. I’m impatient with people who decide it’s time to count their coins when they get to the cash. I’m impatient with people who hold the elevator for other people who are taking forever. I’m impatient with people who can’t make up their minds when it’s time to. I’m impatient with small dogs. I’m impatient with people who don’t get back to me. I’m impatient with friends who obsess about anything that’s not interesting to me. I’m impatient with cashiers and servers who “ignore” me (that’s how I see it anyway). I’m impatient with the week, because it’s not the weekend. I’m impatient with websites where I can’t find the answers to my questions. I’m impatient with people who tell me what’s wrong with me. I’m impatient with strangers’ babies who make a lot of noise for no reason. I'm impatient with people who yell, honk or play the car radio really loud. I’m impatient with noise in general.

Regular yoga, reminding myself that people are not obliged to behave in the Isabel-approved way (but wouldn’t that be great?) and some forms of mental distraction are helpful. But like U2 said, some days are better than others. Sometimes I am just sooo tired of being patient, and that’s when I know it counts the most.