Things I don't understand (a work in progress)

Theorems
Risk: the board game
Risk: financial/banking
The popularity of the Millennium Trilogy
The phrase 'if you want to make an omelet, you have to crack some eggs.'
Kindergarten naps at the end of yoga classes
How divers don't smack their heads on the board when they flip
How it got to be so late so fast
Why I think 11 pm is late
My metabolic cycle

Summer Activities

If you are wondering what I am keeping busy with this summer, let me direct you to this fabulous google calendar, highlighting nearly every event Chicago has to offer:

https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=chicagosummercalendar%40gmail.com&ctz=America/Chicago

It's one of the more comprehensive summer calendars I've seen, but doesn't include nearly all my summer activities. If I am not engaged in whatever's on the calendar for the day, you can probably find me:

Sunning on my porch
Sunning on the beach
Sunning at Holstein Park
Swimming/sunning at Holstein Pool
Eating at an al fresco BYOB
Yoga
Watching trashy summer TV
Playing Words with Friends/DrawSomething
Thrifting
Reading beach mysteries

Oh yeah, aaaaaaand I might be doing a little bit of work. At my job. It's tough being a grown up.

Soul Shapes

I'm back on the yoga wagon, at least for ten classes since that's how many came in the Groupon package I bought. Maybe some day I'll wise up and read my own blog to remind myself some sort of breathing/stretching/meditative activity is beneficial to my life.

Our teacher tonight started by asking us to notice the space our bodies took up in the world, then specifically our kidneys. I think the point was to focus inwards, but it kind of made me have to pee.

Yoga is about super awareness--of the body, the breath, and how those two are linked with our thoughts. The final thing the teacher discussed before we started class was going further than noticing our physical beings. She asked us to consider the shape of our souls in the world.

I don't know what my soul shape is, but if I could describe my ideal soul shape it would be more nebulous rather than rigid, and more thick than light or wispy. I want a soul that has presence, but also adapts to different environments.

I guess I'm treating my soul like a personality: flexible, yet solid. Our souls are essentially personalities, eternal cores of our beings, and hopefully the truest parts of who we are.

I'll end with the class invocation:

'I open myself to receive those teachings that reveal the light of knowledge in me.'

Summer Sounds Like...

The neighborhood ice cream truck playing The Entertainer
Police sirens circling Humboldt Park
My neighbor's sprinkler on her new lawn
The Blue Line making its stop at Western
Passenger planes returning to the city
Fireworks every night

Emerging from my Burrow

Last night I had a dream that I was on a gigantic space station. A lot of people lived there--it had libraries and classrooms and bedrooms and kitchens and it was all very colorful. At one point, the space station lost power and we were going to crash into Earth. Something/someone saved us just in time, but I have no idea how, because as soon as Dream Rachel learned that the station was going down, she began collecting every pillow, blanket, and mattress aboard in one room where she then nestled in and awaited impact. And yes, in my dreams I can carry and throw mattresses.

When I told J about this dream, he laughed and said that's what I would do in real life too. It's true--when faced with impending doom, it's second nature for me to curl up in a ball, swaddle myself, and hide under all my blankets where I wait out the catastrophe, emerging once it's gone. Anytime I was stressed out about a paper or test in college, my solution was to take a nap and hope I was smarter when I woke up.

My last post gives an idea of what I've been stressing over lately: my bike, my closet, my back. My room won't rearrange itself into something with feng shui, M and I started several hefty painting and gardening projects at work and he has a very short attention span, and we always seem to have dirty dishes at home. All of these petty things have piled up on each other and attached to my big fear as of late: that I have no idea what I want to do with my future. Friends, Brit and Brooke can attest to you that I am in bed before the nightly news is over.

Alas, there comes a point when More Naps is not the answer (SO HARD TO BELIEVE I KNOW)...and I've recently taken steps to emerge from the minor hermit lifestyle I've lived in these past few weeks. An amazing man named Jose came last week and re-installed my closet. He also HAND MADE our screens. I started seeing a chiropractor about my back/neck problems. Waking up with headaches was no bueno and after some testing, it turns out I'm in Phase I of Spinal Crapping Outage. So Dr. Estelle & I are taking care of that. This past Saturday, Brit and I hauled the infamous Schwinns up to Bryn Mawr and our lovely bike men, where they spent about three hours reattaching my seat.

I am fixing things that are stressing me out, blogging again, adjusting to my summer schedule, and overall being alive again. Alas, don't think that emerging from this burrow means I'm not still going to bed early...as soon as this posts, I'm crashing.

[Something we have started in my community, ending with a note of gratitude: for bike lanes, Dave Matthews,  our new foot scrubber, our porch garden in the shopping cart, and that summer fireworks have started and I can hear them from my bedroom.]

Weak

Things in my life that can't hold the weight required of them:

My closet shelf
My bike seat
One of the chairs in my dining room
My arms when they lift things over my head

Why is everything too heavy?