Monday, January 30, 2006

the embiggening

Last year some of Kel’s students gave her a massage as a thank-you gift when they left the school.  The masseur was a former student of hers, a professional massage therapist.  But Kel figured he might come back sometime for a brushup at the school and she didn’t want to complicate their pedagogic relationship with any taint of carnal overfamiliarity.  It just makes for a less effective teaching relationship when your student asks you in the middle of traffic testing, “so are you still clenching your left shoulder?  Did you do those exercises I gave you?”

I could understand her position.  I was especially understanding because it meant that I got the massage instead, and I really needed it.  All the yoga had made me hyper-aware of muscles that didn’t move, fists and knots that never unclenched.  I had craved bodywork for months with flesh-taunting specificity.  This was one re-gift that was right on target.  And if it helped Kel preserve the teacher-student relationship I was willing to jump on that grenade for her.  I’m all about respecting the bounds of tutelage. 

So I wound up with a certificate for a 90 minute massage from some guy I had never heard of, who works out of his home in San Rafael.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I had a brooding Zatoichi premonition.  This was not borne out by reality, which followed more the mold of a charming retired baker (with commensurately powerful forearms), severely visually impaired since early childhood, who lives in a cozy victorian and performs a special rare form of massage therapy called integration or gerrymandering or some damn thing.  I really don’t know what it was.  All I now for sure was that he worked me over but good and I was noticeable taller when he was done. 

And those knots and fists buried deep in my muscles, and the deep-seated misalignments of sinew and bone, he found and explained for me, even when they were not amenable to his ministrations within the short time we had.  He considers me a candidate for long-term treatment, which makes me inexplicably proud of myself.  But the thing I found most noteworthy was the embiggening.

At one point he was working on my calves.  He’d spent some time on one and then moved to the other, but expressed immediate surprise at the difference in their size.  His hand wrapped around the new calf but barely covered the back of the first one.  The calf he had yet to massage was about one-third smaller than the one he’d worked on.  We wasted a few minutes wondering how I’d accomplished such an unbalanced physique and then he just stopped fretting about it and laid into the second, atrophied calf. 

When he was ready to move on to massage me somewhere else, I asked him to re-check and confirm that my left calf was still so much bigger than my right.  It wasn’t.  The right side had swollen up to match the left.  I was bilaterally symmetrical again, and anyone who knows me well knows how much that means to me.

I was relieved that my body parts had evened out, and even the therapist said he’d never encountered anyone who expanded quite like I had on his table.  I wasn’t sure what it meant or what, if anything, it indicated about me.  I just thought that it was probably a good thing that I’d gotten myself enbiggened.  It’s strange how you can just shrivel up sometimes, but I’m glad that it’s possible to reverse the process too.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

All She’s Got

Here’s a little poem I wrote for Connie, my stepmom.  I’m sharing it here because I want it to generate as much positive energy as possible so it can all bounce back to her.  She could use the boost these days, I think.

All You’ve Got

Keep it rolling - don’t you let that engine falter
Just keep rolling - this time you’ll nail it to the altar
Rolling forward - throw your weight into the halter
To the pillars of Gibraltar
Now it’s forward that you’ll roll.

Keep on pushing - till your sinew turns to granite
Push it forward - till you split the pomegranate
Don’t stop pushing - you can change the course of planets
Your inferno’s lit so fan it
For it’s forward you must push.

You are a flaming arrow and the world’s a bale of hay
You’re a bunker buster and the world is bombs away
It’s the universal story of the power and the glory
You’re the infinite quiescence when there’s nothing left to say

Don’t stop trying - though your fingers shake and fumble
Keep on trying - though your voice is just a mumble
One more try now - though the trail makes you stumble
Your resolve will never crumble
When you give it all you’ve got.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

TMI

We’ve got one of those whistling teakettles.  It’s nothing fancy but it suffices to heat our water to 212 (100 celcius, or 3.2 hectares) reasonably efficiently.  I claim only “reasonable” efficiency, however, because the system has a gaping hole that is only sometimes adequately plugged.  To wit:

The kettle has a spout, naturally, which, when opened, allows water to be poured forth, and, when closed, forces built-up steam to escape through a sonorous pipe. The kettle also has, at the apex of its upthrust hemispherical design, a nice round hole fitted with a tight-fitting lid.  Remove the lid; fill the kettle.  Replace the lid and cover the spout with the whistling cap, and you’ve got a nice closed pressurization system.  The water, expanding as it boils and turns to vapor, builds up inside the envelope of air enclosed within the kettle, and forces piping-hot air ever more vigorously out the pipe at the spout.  This is your official notice that the water is hot enough to brew your tea, and sets the entire steeping process into motion.  It’s like the starter’s pistol for me on some bleary mornings, and there have been plenty of those lately - I hear the whistle and spring (or, rather, lurch) into action. 

Here’s the tricky bit, though: you’ve got to get the lid on properly for this to work.  Any significant breach of the air-seals at the top of the teakettle will divert so much of the escaping steam, that the interior pressure will only very slowly, if ever, reach the point where the whistle goes off.  It’s easy to tell if I’ve left the spout cap open; it’s a metal plate that juts from the lip of the spout, defying gravity with its jaunty upthrust.  But sometimes I don’t get the lid on properly.  It’s, well, askew.  And it just doesn’t work so well that way.  And I can be standing next to it, rubbing my eyes and denying reality, waiting for that whistle to bring me out of my reverie and galvanize me into action, and the water in the kettle is clearly boiling as hard as it can, rocking the broadbottomed pot on the stove, making the lid (askew) shudder and jiggle with small silvery clinks, and steam rises from the small hole in the spout cap but without enough pressure behind it to sound the whistle, and I am insensate to it all.

Eventually, the fog in the room forming warmly around my head from the escaping steam arouses my suspicions and I realize that I’ve already boiled the water so excessively that it’s not worth using for brewing tea.  Eurgh.  Flat, deoxygenated tea.  What a pathetic gesture with which to start one’s morning.  No, at this point I bestir myself of my own accord and refill the kettle, restart the process from scratch.  I find that tea made as a result of this whole process playing itself out, tastes no better than ordinary one-kettle tea.  It’s just a goddamn waste of time.

MORAL: Close cover before striking.  Anything.