Om

Ready for the latest in what has become quite the series of self-improvement schemes? First it was the labelmaker, then it was the naturopath, and now...meditation! I started taking a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class on Monday. My stress level has been through the roof lately, because of my job, which, although no one's life depends on my doing my job well, still involves keeping about 10,000 different balls in the air at any given moment, dropping any of which will cause (relative) disaster. And my new boss is always tossing in more balls for me to juggle along with the rest.

All of which causes heart-pounding, stomach-churning, and 2:00 a.m. mind-racing. So when I learned of the MBSR class on a Friday, I was signed up by the following Monday. The class meets once a week for eight weeks, plus one whole Saturday in May, plus daily homework. This week's homework is listening to a 40-minute CD every night that guides you through an exercise called a "body scan." I swear, my instructor's voice on that CD is perfectly calibrated to cause instant sleep, which is not the intent. Today I did it in the morning and that worked out better.

I didn't really know what I was getting into with this class, because it is hard to describe if you're not doing it, and for the same reason I don't really know how to describe it now, but I like it. I normally have a running narrative in my head of the past and future—all the (stupid, of course) things I've done and all the (insurmountable, of course) things I need to do—but it's very hard to keep that narrative going if you're told to focus on your toes.

I'm sure that this class will be about more than that as it continues, but just that in itself is a pretty good payoff.

Amazing Beautiful

If you're sick of whiny, trivial blogs (ahem), I recommend you hie yourself immediately over to Me and Cancer: One of Us Must Go. Alex and I went to high school together, and we were the only two of our graduating class to choose the college we chose, so I feel like that made us educational twins in a sense. He went on to law school and became a partner in a law firm, so alas for me, the educational twinship didn't last.

Prepare to be amazed at how courageous a person can be.

How Disgusting Is Your House?

Martin, erstwhile Best Intern Ever, alerted me to this TV show: How Clean Is Your House? I Tivo-ed it because I thought it might provide some tips I could use, like a Real Simple magazine in TV show form, but it's oh so much better than that. It's a gross-out fest.

The pattern is: two British S/M mavens scrape up goo from the floor and berate the homeowners, and then clean their house. The first show Mr. Flossie and I saw, at first I was saying, "Yeah, I grew up in a house like that," and he was saying, "Yeah, me too," and then as we watched further we were both like, "EWWWWW!" We didn't know how good we had it. The featured couple had seven children and did not appear to have cleaned AT ALL since the first was born. And then after the house had been cleaned from top to bottom, they were all casual, like "sure, there's more space to move around now, I guess," and you know they're totally going back to their slovenly ways.

Speaking of guilty pleasure TV, the reason it has taken me two hours to write this post is that Mr. F is over on the other couch watching VH1's nostalgia show "I Love the New Millennium." Geez, why does 2006 seem so dated already?

#26 Visit a botanical garden

I spent last weekend in St. Louis with my mother, and we went to one of my favorite places in town, the Missouri Botanical Garden. It was a beautiful sunny day, in the 60s, and the magnolias were in bloom.