Day 51: My arms remember

The good news: I make excellent chex mix. The bad news: I have no self-restraint when it comes to chex mix. Ate too much of it today and regretting it now.

Financial meeting was for tomorrow, it turns out, so I still have that to look forward to, and just to put things in perspective I also have a funeral to attend. My cousin’s grandma was 93 and not always lucid, so I hope she’s in a better place. It certainly makes me realize that a semi-annoying financial advisor is what might charitably be called a luxury problem.

Half of the people coming to today’s guild meeting didn’t show, and only one of them let me know ahead of time. I realized too late that I’d scheduled the meeting during a time when the moon was void of course, which I’m sure didn’t help. That and my wishing it would somehow magically get canceled because the idea of having it was stressing me out so much. I did get the downstairs very clean in anticipation of people coming over, so that’s a bonus.

To calm myself down today before they arrived, I tried to do some Shiva Nata. When I first saw the video of Havi doing it, I thought, hey, that looks so pretty and fun and graceful. It would be totally awesome to be able to do that, especially if one side effect of Shiva Nata is frequent visits to epiphany city. I have had some good epiphanies, it’s true, but mostly I have had this other thing.

Since I don’t do it very often (I think I got the DVD back at the end of July and have used it maybe 12 times?), I always start myself off on the slow setting. But it gives me these flashbacks to my least favorite punishment as a kid. I’m joking, I didn’t have a favorite punishment. Let’s call it the most twisted punishment.

Usually this particular punishment was in response to someone hitting someone. I grew up in a not-very-well-blended step-family. Such occasions were frequent.

My dad had what he liked to call an alter-ego (I’m sure there are other words for it) named Igor, and it was Igor who punished us. As in, Igor’s coming out of the closet! As in, be afraid, be very afraid.

I think Igor learned this little trick when my dad he was in the army, and it involves holding your arms stretched out to your sides, perpendicular to your body and parallel to the floor. It was usually accompanied by the admonition, If you kids want to hit each other, let’s make sure you’re good and strong so you can really do some damage!

You know what? Doing that arms-out-to-the-side thing fucking hurt like hell. Dad/Igor would tell us we had to stay like that for half an hour. I doubt we ever made it more than 10 minutes before my stepmother came in and told us we could stop but to stay the hell out of my dad’s line of sight for the rest of the day.

So Shiva Nata on the slow setting involves a fair bit of variations on the arms out to your sides theme. It might make perfect sense that I don’t do it very often. It’s just not a memory I want to stir up. Getting my epiphanies with a side order of unresolved anger is not exactly the stress reliever one might hope.

Still, luxury problems. I’ve got arms and the energy to move them. I’ve got creature comforts enough to have a DVD and more than one place in the house to play it. I’ve got the luxury of time to write about this wacky arm thing. And I’ve got the rest of Bramwell Season 2 to go watch. I think I’ll go do that now.