I sing in the shower

Cyndi Lauper keeps me company while I get ready for the day. Together we sing about our hat full of stars. I think we might cry a little, and I'm not sure why.

I multi-task, cleaning my contacts while doing silly exercises to slim down my butt. Twenty-five leg lifts for twenty-five seconds of rubbing solution onto my contacts.

I can't stop singing while I do it, and then I discover something new: I can visualise numbers. I have never been able to do that before, not while doing anything else.

So we sing together, Cyndi and I, and we cry and clean our contacts and visualise numbers while exercising. I feel rather productive, doing all that stuff at once.

Now I won't have to take time out of the rest of my day to cry or meditate or sing.

There's a stranger inside me

Five minutes ago I sat down to write my life story.

Only, it wasn't five minutes ago and it wasn't my life. It is the life of the woman who wears my skin. She's sort of a bitch, distant and mean.

She closes herself off and shuts others out. She makes up stories in her head, and the people in her brain never act the way she wants them to.

She never acts the way she wants to. She doesn't know how, and watching her try to learn is like watching a small child try to turn a screw with a hammer.

Confession

I need a confessional. With a priest and some Hail Marys. I have sins, badness inside me. Most of the time I am okay with my badness but sometimes... oh, sometimes it just claws up my insides, like a cat trying desperately to cover up its own shit with too little sand, it claws and scratches and tears at the inside of my soul.

I have mean thoughts about people, wish misfortune on people who irritate me in traffic; I do not practice loving-kindness all the time. I take God's name in vain. I have lustful thoughts about my neighbour's wife.

Frustration, like the badness inside me, wells up out of nowhere today. I have no patience, only mean-spirited thoughts. I have even less compassion than normal. I want to cry and pull my hair out of my scalp. I want to grind something fat under my heel until it bursts into a bloody mess.

Only I won't do any of that. Look at how I'm practicing such good self-control.

Starting over

I started over meditating today. I peed, put on comfortable yoga pants, applied lip balm, and did 42 different things that would begin to bother me about ten seconds into the meditation if I didn't do them beforehand...

I set the timer for five minutes: I didn't think I could handle much more than that. I sat down, closed my eyes, and tried to clear my mind.

Anyone who has been meditating for any amount of time knows just how.fucking.hard that is. My mind refused to be cleared, simply would not cooperate with all the whirly thoughts in my head.

I also started over with a new-old friend: I went to lunch with an old girlfriend today, and now I'm flooded with memories I haven't dragged out of the back of my mind in over a decade. We weren't together long, but she was an important element during a pivotal period of my life.

And now, I think she'll be a good friend. I feel like Harry, of When Harry Met Sally... "Hmmm. A woman friend."

And just as I started to get control of my racing thoughts and really focus on my breathing and do the whole present moment awareness thing, the bloody timer sounded. Go figure.

After the meditation I did some really great downward-facing dog to plank to cat/cow series that makes my body heat up from head to toe and my triceps ache in a delicious way.

My broken heart

I was talking to a friend the other day; his wife was upset at him and he was describing her behaviour, how she would come into the room to hand him things but wouldn't speak to him. I told him how that's a trick women do, something to make our husbands aware of our presence and how very mad we are while not speaking, just to build up some tension.

I was thinking about that today while I was getting ready; I remember when Colin and I were first together and I was so very young. I had no idea how to be in a relationship but I did angry martyr really well. And I would do that thing... stomping around the house stony-faced and mad and not saying a word. I remember the first time I really knew that I loved Colin; he said something that hurt my feelings and I did some silent, sullen stomping until he poked me in the arm and said, "I'm not going to play your game. If you have something to say just say it."

I cried today in the shower when I remembered that, cried like I did that first morning when I woke up in a new day and realised he really wasn't here anymore.

Nearly nine years dead and he can still break my heart.