Monthly Archives: September 2002

Life In The Bathtub

Ever have one of those days? One of those weeks? The kind where everything gets your back up, and you feel like you’re the only sane person in the world, and why can’t eveyone just understand what you’re getting at? You feel like every step you take is against a hurricane-force wind, uphill, through a crowd of people standing with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears as you try, through gritted teeth and bright smile, to communicate?

Oh, yeah. Often.

Kate, babe, I’m with you. You have my sympathy.

If we could only direct our lives from the bathtub. With a stack of good books, a cup of tea or a glass of wine (depending on the hour of the day), good music nearby. As an extra treat, a nice box of chocolates close by, but not too close so the warmth of the stress-bleeding bath melts them, or so that you don’t eat them too fast. (Can you tell I’ve managed to get this down to a science?)

Baths, however, in my world, no longer give me the relaxation I need. It’s odd, but somewhere over the past ten years or so I’ve been on my own, a bath has lost its charm. It used to be that when I was upset, I’d go into the bathroom, run a bath, add bubbles, oils, the whole nine yards. Book. Candles. Music. Cat. (No, not in the bath, next to the bath, and I didn’t put her there. She just likes to curl up next to the warm bathtub. Okay, and swish her tail around in the warm water. And play with bubbles.)

I’d sink in, and sigh. And just like that, I’d melt, and everything would be bearable.

Now, though, I’m just as tense in the tub as I am out of the tub. It’s really frustrating. You start the routine, get in, close your eyes, expect the warmth and the gentle aromas to start working, and you end up staring at the ceiling after half an hour, wondering why you’re not all soft and floaty.

It’s a relatively recent development, within the last four or five years, I’d say. Eight baths out of ten, I get next to no soft floaty relaxation.

I don’t think the quality of bath has decreased, which means it must be me. Am I too stressed for a bath to relax me? Is it living with someone? Do I need new towels?

Baths shouldn’t be work. Baths should be mindless comfort. Baths should not stress me because they are not relaxing me.

I think I’ll go play my cello. (Yeah, right. Like that will relax me.)

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See? Medieval legly goodness. And it was all for Marc. (The look on his face under the hat that makes him look like an apothecary says it all, don’t you think?)

I love these boots. They are my Jedi boots. They lace all the way up the front. I really don’t wear them often, but when I do, I feel amazing. Bring on the Dark Side! I’ll challenge it and preserve order and justice in the galaxy! Even in a medieval mini!

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I heard the geese flying overhead last night and this morning as I lay awake in bed. It’s fall.

I also know it’s fall because my overwhelming desire to move furniture around is still running high. We switched a couple of pictures around last night in an attempt to assuage it. The pictures look great, but I still want to rearrange sofas and tables and beds and desks for some reason. I think it’s connected to the Ikea urge, somehow; you know, that cocooning concept that revolves around the subconscious knowledge that you’ll be stuck inside most of winter so you might as well create the ideal nest to be trapped in.

I picked up that CD I had ordered four months ago from HMV, and it’s wonderful. I still find it a little odd that I, the woman who claims she doesn’t enjoy Mozart all that much, special-ordered a Mozart CD. Looking back over my orchestra-related blog entries, I can see that I enjoy playing Mozart as well. Perhaps I should upgrade my Mozartean value judgement from “indifferent” to “reluctant enjoyment of certain pieces”?

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Even in death, Andr�s continues to educate me musically. I sang three hymns in Latvian this afternoon. Interesting language; sort of a cross between Swedish and Ukranian.

No, don�t ask me what I sang. I have an odd linguistic talent that enables me to read a foreign language and make it sound like I know how to speak it. I don�t know how I do it; it involves accents somehow, though. I�m just good with words. It�s all in how it sounds to the ear.

Funerals are strange. If you want a seat, you have to arrive early, but no one wants to talk, so you sit in silence for ages until the family arrives. There are never enough seats (except at Eric�s funeral this spring; there was plenty of room in the synagogue, but that was the only funeral I�ve been to that had adequate seating), so people stand in the side aisles and at the back of the church. I�ve been paranoid about being late for funerals ever since the funeral of one of my best friends in my first year of university, where I arrived right on time and had to stand in a crowd at the back of the church, so today we arrived forty minutes early.

This service was one of the nicest I�ve been to. Even though Andr�s was taken from us so suddenly, the congregation was there to honour him, not for consolation. I wish more funerals could be as this one was: a commemoration instead of grieving. Yes, death is always a shock; yes, we are left, bereft and confused; but in the end, it is ourselves we weep for. If we gather, it should be to celebrate the deceased�s life and accomplishments. Mourning our loss always seems so selfish, somehow, when set against the brilliance and joy of the days and years lived by someone we all loved and respected.

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Proof of my good taste:

Ingredient listing for Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar: Milk Chocolate (sugar, milk ingredients, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, soya lecithin, natural and artificial flavour).

Ingredient listing for a Neilson Jersey Milk chocolate bar: Condensed milk, sugar, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, butter oil, soya lecithin, natural flavour.

No wonder I prefer Jersey Milk bars. They don’t add fake chocolate flavour to it. And what the heck is a “milk ingredient” anyway?

No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.