Oscar or Felix?

Yesterday was one of those days that support the argument that I should not be allowed to live with other human beings. To make things worse, it was the kids that got the brunt of my nastiness. They were just being kids - shrieking, running around, not listening, wrestling with each other, doing whatever else they could think of to get attention - and I poured a good deal of cranky on the poor things. At one point, my niece even said to me "Pretend like you aren't family, okay?" Because only family would even consider snapping at such adorable little kids. I hate my grumblywhydoeseveryonekeepdoingthesethings days. They're part of why I moved away from my parents. I kept biting my mom's head off for every little thing she did that was even slightly annoying. Not even annoying sometimes. A lot of the time she was just trying to help. She doesn't need that kind of crap. She has enough real troubles to worry about. But no matter how bad (pretty bad sometimes) I felt about sniping at her, I kept doing it. So, in part, for her sanity as well as mine, I moved in with my sister's family. Guess what? I still get unreasonably snappy, and I still feel bad about. I should not subject my loved ones to this. . . Maybe I should take the J.D. Salinger route, become a hermit writer that no one is really sure is still alive. . .

That last line is sarcasm everyone. I'm just now starting to test the shallow end of the pool of the living, and the water's pretty good. I don't want to get out of it just yet. One of these days I'm going to try that 30-meter diving board.

The irony (maybe not irony, I'm never sure) about my mood yesterday is that I had yoga class in the morning. To start every class, we have a centering time to clear our minds and set a personal goal for that yoga session. My goal? To be more open and understanding with people. Heh. Seems I should work a bit harder on that one. But it was a really good yoga session. None of the elderly women showed up; it was just me and a couple women in their late thirties or forties, so the instructor kind of kicked our asses. Before class, the instructor was telling me about how her baby girl was getting her first tooth and how that made her realize that everything was still new for her. They had taken her to the store, and everything she saw, the people, the products, the lights, everything, was new to her. The instructor said that she was thinking about how when you get older and jaded things often tend to get mundane and redundant. She had decided that for yesterday's class she was going to try to demonstrate how you can battle the mundane by adding a few new poses and by simply altering some of the poses that we do on a more regular basis. Yeah, many of the new poses seriously kicked my ass. The bow comes immediately to mind. She would announce, "Okay, now hold it for three more breaths," and I would think, 'we're supposed to be able to breathe?' I actually felt really good when we came out of the pose, though. We also did the pigeon, which is a pose we do fairly regularly. But she changed it up by having us stay in it for what must've been three to five minutes on each side. The pigeon is not a difficult pose for me, but by the end of it I was probably sweating more than I ever have while doing yoga. I think part of it may be because as part of the pose you rest your head on your hands on the floor. So my body heat and hot breath were collecting in the ring formed by my arms. Once I was able to relax my body and mind into it, however, it felt really good to be laying there, stretched into the pose.

Also, yesterday, as a sort of escape, I started reading for the first time since I got here. I don't know why I haven't been reading. It's something that's always been good for my mental, emotional, and spiritual state. Plus, as a writer I should always be reading something. I don't know why I had taken so much time off. But it felt good to be back at it. The book I've started is Going After Cacciato, by Tim O'Brien. I love the way O'Brien writes. If I were to try to model my writing on any writer, it would probably be him. Of course, I'm trying to develop my own voice, but his is quite compelling. It's been a bit since I've quoted anything, so here's something for you all:

"Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination."

Sounds familiar.

I'm grateful that the son of one of my occasionallurkers got his cast removed a few days ago (20).