Spirituality from a teabag

The tag on my teabag says "An attitude of gratitude brings opportunities."

Even my tea thinks it has the right to interfere with my careful cultivation of negative psychic tensions.

It should read "An attitude of gratitude can lead one into platitude."

zoo

I took a run to the zoo. Today the weather was unusually clouded and murky, and everything looked more mysteriously beautiful than it does in our everyday glare.

Inside the zoo I visited the coatis and the slender loris, and then stumbled upon an area I've never found in my several visits. Yes, it was Outsize Bird World. And in it was a pair of secretary birds, perhaps the most unlikely looking birds I've ever seen, an amalgamation of chicken, pheasant, seagull and hawk stuck unconvincingly on top of a pair of heron's legs and dressed in knee-length black trousers.

If I ever try to make my way back there, I will no doubt find that they have disappeared without trace.

Negative psychic tension

I've just come back from a yoga class, for which there was a substitute teacher today. The class was fine except that right at the beginning, while we were supposed to be concentrating on regulating our breathing, the teacher told us to keep repeating to ourselves "I deeply wish to release any negative psychic tension." Once she'd said this a few times I'd lost all ability to focus on my breath and was convulsed by extremely negative psychic tension and the urge to run screaming from the room. This is just the kind of thing that made me resist taking up yoga for so long. Since I've started, though, I've been fortunate to have teachers who keep the spiritual stuff to a minimum, letting me get from yoga what I want from it: flexibility, focus, and less physical tension.

I was also reminded by this little mantra of Harry Potter: "I do solemnly swear that I am up to no good." I spent the rest of the class reflecting on the fact that the Harry Potter incantation at least shows a sense of poetic metre, something completely lacking in "I deeply wish to release any negative psychic tension."

To compound this, the teacher later told us to ask the universe for what we need, because the universe would provide. I'd like the universe to take care of some of my grading and class preparation this afternoon, but unfortunately I suspect it has more important things to be getting on with.

Marinading my trousers

I did nothing of any particular import today, and it was great. After spending the whole of my non-teaching Friday yesterday doing things for my classes, today I had time to breathe. I keep promising myself a real day out somewhere, but perhaps it is just important to have a slow-paced day with slow-paced thought and an afternoon nap in the middle of it.

In the morning I took my bike out for the first time since moving to Denver, and went down to the Farmers' Market at Cherry Creek. I met up with one of my new colleagues there, shopped, and then sat and talked over tamales. I came home and marinaded my trousers and spent a long time cooking myself dinner.

I'm writing this entry in English English, because "I marinaded my pants" would sound eccentric.

Just before the semester began I went out on a desperate hunt for something to supplement my meagre wardrobe of work clothes, and as usual had difficulties running to ground anything long enough that wasn't made for somebody much larger than me, quite the opposite problem from the one I had in Japan. After trying on every pair of trousers in Tall Girl (I've unfortunately yet to discover the whereabouts of Just a Little Taller Than Most Stores Make Clothes For Woman), I settled on my present pair as the only ones even barely acceptable. But as I've worn them, I've found that the fabric - a mix of artificial fibres - has a mild but strangely unpleasant smell that haunts me through the day. I keep washing them in the hope that it will get better, but it never does. I was going to buy an essential oil to add to the washing water today, but then was too horrified by the price of such things. So instead I have marinaded them in a mixture of clove oil, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and bay leaf. Who knows what effect it will have?

It reminded me, though, of a time when I unwittingly marinaded myself. In London some years ago my landlady was having her bay tree cut back severely, and I collected branches of leaves and put them in my bath. It was wonderful. But when I came out and was sitting in my room, my then familiar - my landlady's cat - got visibly confused as he sniffed at my leg - "It's one of my humans. But it smells so good! But it's one of my humans, isn't it? No, it must be food if it smells like that." He made to take a bite of my shin, and jumped in surprise as I interrupted him.

This evening I took those things I bought at the Farmers' Market, which included fresh tortillas and roasted chiles, and made - for the first time in weeks, it feels like - a good dinner: mushroom, courgette and bean burritos with both tomato and tomatillo salsas. I have enough salsa to last me for days. I got red wine, too. There hasn't been enough of that of late - or if there has, I haven't had time to appreciate it. Tonight I have the time, though I know tomorrow I will have to start worrying about the coming week and the things I need to do. But for tonight...

"A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and..."

Wait - isn't something missing?

Oh no, there you are! Just in time. Come in, come in! Have a glass of Stump Jump. A burrito too, if you want one. How are things going?

Bad carma

I got my first parking violation ticket. So harried again this week I completely forgot to move my car for street-sweeping day.

Bad karma

After a relentlessly awful week where I was always a step behind myself and working from early morning to late at night, I finally made it to the weekend. But it hasn't lived up to expectations so far.

I should admit first that I have a three day weekend - no classes on Friday - which makes me luckier than most people; except that in reality much of the weekend is filled with nagging anxiety about the things that need to be done before Monday, or with the doing of those things.

Yesterday, Friday, I cleaned all day. Last weekend I got back from a conference in Utah on Sunday evening and tipped the contents of my case over my bedroom floor, which was already in a state of advanced degradation after the previous week of teaching and writing. It got worse and worse as the week went on, so that by Thursday it felt as if I was walking over a particularly well-populated stretch of seabed, with miscellaneous seaweeds wrapping themselves around my ankles, carpet sharks nipping at my toes, and well-camouflaged but unfortunately fragile shellfish crunching underfoot. Something had to be done. I didn't expect it to take quite so many hours, though.

Today my alarm woke me at 7, and I had the by now familiar wave of anxiety followed by immense relief at the realisation that it was the weekend. The relief is shortlived at the moment, though, with so many things waiting to be done.

Still, I had some coffee and then went out for a run, and afterwards went to a pilates class - trying to make up for a week of physical inactivity in a day. Then I decided to go to the Mercury Cafe for brunch. I'd never been there, but I'd passed it on runs and have read about it on Happy Cow. I liked it - the interior makes the best of having no windows by having strings of little lights and interesting decor, and if like me you are sick to death of the monotonous sunny glare of Colorado it is nice to find yourself inside an enchanted cave.

The food was pretty good, I'd say. Only, I had huevos rancheros, the dish I can never resist on a menu in the way that my mother can never resist steak and kidney pie. She is almost always disappointed by it, as I am with my huevos. The problem for me is that I always want it to be what I had at the Stockyard Cafe in Bozeman, Montana before I had ever heard of huevos rancheros. It was called huevos gringos, and was (as far as I remember) black beans and eggs sandwiched between flour tortillas and covered in salsa and cheese. It was the first time that I could see a point to a cooked breakfast. It's the cold salsa that makes the difference. Every time my huevos rancheros arrives and is smothered in some kind of hot chile I realise it isn't what I was hoping for.

And there was (typically) far too much. I ate half of it, and then packed the other half into a little box to take home. I don't want to take my food home! I want to eat the whole thing and perhaps feel that I had just a little more than I needed. I don't want to eat more than I needed and then still have half a plate left. What to do? I can't bear the waste of leaving it and having it thrown out. But who wants to face breakfast again later in the day? I carried it dutifully around town, and then when I was almost home a couple of men asked me if I could help them out with something to eat, and I handed it over to them. Presumably they meant, can you give us some money? And maybe this is where my bad karma began today; but as I see it, if they really needed the food then they have something that was burdensome to me; and if they really meant, can you give us some money so that we can go across to one of those dodgy stores on Colfax and buy some cheap beer, then they can throw my breakfast away and we are none of us really any worse off than before.

But here is the real bad karma story:

I went out in the late afternoon and got my car, came back and picked up my mountains of dirty washing, and drove down to the coin laundry on 11th. It's opposite Wild Oats, so I can do my heavy shopping at the same time. Once it was all done and I was ready to go home, I tried to pull out of the rather cramped parking lot, and as I did so I heard a slight sound as I was swinging around the back bumper of the black car next to me. It was so slight, though, I didn't think much of it - either I'd driven over something scrunchy, or I'd just touched lightly on my neighbour's bumper. On the way home I wondered more and more about it, though, and once back I looked at my front bumper and found it scratched and with faint lines of black... so, being the infuriatingly (to me) morally upright and honest person my parents have saddled me with being, I got back in the car and drove back to the laundry to see if I could find the person and apologize and offer to pay for it. He'd gone, though. I hung around in front of the place grading papers for half an hour or so hoping he'd come back and free me from my evening's burden of guilt; but he never did. I had to ring Uncle Eric to get him to try to make me feel better about it.

Earlier in the day I had a text message from someone I haven't been in touch with for some time now. She said she hoped all was well, since she had had "the same dramatic dream" about me two nights in a row. I almost hesitated to get into my car earlier, but did it in part because I thought I would lose respect for myself if I let this kind of Ides of March nonsense influence my actions at all. Let it be noted now that even if I die tonight I would still call it coincidence; and that if something worse had happened earlier, then it would either have been coincidence or an accident brought on by jumpiness because of the message itself. Supposed prescience can cause all sorts of things it predicts, I think.

So, how can I so easily dismiss prescience, but not karma? For me karma isn't something supernatural - it is an entirely practical matter. If I left that parking lot, and the owner of the car came back a moment later and noticed that scratches had just appeared across his bumper and that the person who did it didn't bother to stop and apologize, then I think it would be reasonable for him to be angry about it, and I am responsible for causing just a little more anger to be released into the world. Like the old thing about a butterfly flapping its wings causing a storm thousands of miles away, it seems to me that just that small amount of anger could, in the end, contribute to wars or genocide...

OK, it probably won't. But I'm sorry, anonymous person in black car!

Making the weekend lived

I know I have no time to write this - 21:15 on a Sunday, an as yet unprepared lecture to give at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, and a paper that had to be written a week and two days ago... but not to let the weekend go by as if never lived:

Yesterday I was on a bus with a woman who was talking to herself in sign language.

It reminded me of being on a ship in Japan in a big tatami room with a large number of people, among which was a group of deaf people with their hearing children. At night the children ran riot while their parents slept soundly, until someone else took the initiative and told them to be quiet. But I particularly remember a small girl falling over during the day and then making a completely silent crying face to her parents.

In the last three days I have done much essential shopping - alarm clocks, toilet brushes, shoes, that kind of thing. And I have ascertained finally that the blank stares I meet with any time I ask to be directed to the cotton wool is not because of my pronunciation, but because the term doesn't exist here. If you think about it, it must sound rather strange if you've never heard it before.

I also discovered the difficulty of asking to be directed to the other cheese counter in King Soopers. They have, for some reason, the bog-standard American cheese at one end of the supermarket, and the things you might consider eating at the other end. If you haven't thought it out in advance, then when the man asks you, "What kind of cheese are you looking for?" it is difficult to find a reply that people around won't find offensive: "Something edible." "Something that doesn't taste like plastic and glow bright orange." Cheddar, Muenster, Swiss, Provolone... perhaps someone American can tell me the difference, since to me the only discernible one is the colour. Oh, and then there is "American" which in my thankfully limited experience is reminiscent of the semi-digested milk someone's baby once threw up on me, only orange again.

When you think about it, it's amazing that I should have reached this age and only been thrown up on by a baby once.

I also found acceptable tissues at last. As recommended, the source is Target. They have those small almost cubic boxes in single plain colours: burgundy, navy, and Regency green (my term - I have no idea what that shade is really called). Now I am prepared to catch horrible colds in winter and not be made to feel worse by the sight of nasty floral tissue boxes.