I blogged recently about the sad state of the boxing room at my current gym.  It’s a converted racquetball court.  The wooden blocks that make up the floor are coming loose or missing in spots.  There are no mirrors.  The punching dummy’s nose is coming off and leaking stuffing.  And the heavy bag is crooked and held together by duct tape.

Well, today when I went to do my boxing workout, the lights in the room weren’t working either.  The room was dark.  I did my cardio (treadmill) and jump roping (in the other racquetball court) and sit ups (incline bench), but didn’t get to punch anything.

Which is additionally sucky because I bought new heavy bag gloves yesterday and hoped to use them.

I’ll be SO glad when Powerhouse opens. 

I have finished adding new photos to My Bird Conpendium. 

Yesterday afternoon we had glorious weather here in Northern Virginia and I went on my first birding hike.  Burke Lake Park is a great place to do that.

I took 269 photos, including many of Barn Swallows (a lifer for me), a Heron (which I’d seen before but never gotten a photo of), Bluebirds (ditto), and some GREAT shots of a Red-Bellied Woodpecker.  I’ll be putting the best of those photos on my Bird Compendium in the next few days.

In the meantime, enjoy these.

Bluebird

And what trip to a lake would be complete without a float in a tree?

“You cannot box without committing yourself to being awake in your body; you cannot box without committing yourself to caring.  There is nothing nihilistic about boxing.  It is the opposite of cool.  There is no room for charade, no time for equivocation.  Boxing is a graphic confession of the desire to remain present and to persevere.”

“A long time ago I’d made a wrong turn and linked up freedom with abnegating the body.  Not such an unusual mistake, not for women, not for girls.  I’d had great hope in it, actually.  If only I could undo the knot binding self to flesh.  I’d had some success loosening it.  I just hadn’t quite figured out how to take that further step when I walked into the boxing gym, more or less by accident, and, not having words for anything yet, not understanding anything yet, I responded in a way that would force me to question all I thought I knew about being a woman.”

Today, in addition to the usual suspects, I saw….

Male and Female Cowbirds (only the second sighting of them so far this season)

a Nuthatch

and a happy happy surprise: 
A Red-Tailed Hawk!  That was exciting.

The weather is supposed to be really nice tomorrow afternoon, so I’m thinking I’ll head out to a nearby park with my camera for a birding hike.

“Like [Charles] Dicken’s dead-alive Florence Domby, for instance, Louisa May Alcott’s dying Beth March is a household saint, and the deathbed at which she surrenders herself to heaven is the ultimate shrine of the angel-woman’s mysteries.  At the same time, moreover, the aesthetic cult of ladylike fragility and delicate beauty – no doubt associated with the moral cult of the angel-woman – obliged ‘genteel’ women to ‘kill’ themselves…into art objects:  slim, pale, passive beings whose ‘charms’ eerily recalled the snowy, porcelain immobility of the dead.”

“Whether she becomes an objet d’art or a saint, however, it is the surrender of her self – of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both – that is the beautiful angel-woman’s key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms her both to death and to heaven.  For to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead.  A life that has no story…is really a life of death, a death-in-life.  The ideal of ‘contemplative purity’ evokes, finally, both heaven and the grave.”

The authors don’t use the character of Melanie Wilkes from Gone with the Wind as an example because the book only covers 19th century literature, but when I read all that it was Melanie Wilkes I thought of.  I’ve heard people say they would rather envy Melanie than Scarlett O’Hara, but I’ve never understood that.  Melanie might have been satisfied with her lot in life (unlike Scarlett), and something of a saint, but she became sickly and dead.  She was a pale passive being, the perfect angel-woman according to male fantasy, and then she died.

Scarlett lived.  Scarlett lived and was strong and independent.  And you don’t really live a strong independent life without wanting, striving, succeeding, and sometimes failing. 

My favorite time of day is the nebulous gray time between first emerging from a dream and actually getting out of bed.  Images from the dream are still fresh, allowing me to glean any significance that might exist in them.  The bed is warm, cozy, and soft.  But best of all, streams of ideas and language often bubble up into my conscious mind.

Sometimes those bubbling thoughts don’t amount to much.  Sometimes they’re amusing or just surreal.

Sometimes, though, there’s a raw thread of gold ore that works it’s way though those thoughts and into a poem or other piece of art.  Or as an insight that gets recorded in my journal.

I keep pen and paper by the bed to record these first thoughts.  I’ve done this for many many years.

Do you do this too?

After a great back workout at the gym yesterday which has left my back nicely sore and growing stronger, I laid on the couch all afternoon with my husband as we watched movies.  First up was Sweeney Todd (the new version with Johnny Depp – fantastic!), then Enchanted (silly but cute), then Memory (kinda dumb, but ok).  It was great fun. 

Today we’ll tend to more chores around the house, but mostly it will be puttering and relaxing.  No gym today.  I’ll get some writing done this afternoon. 

Oh, and I collected Baby from the vet yesterday morning.  She’s fine.  Excited to be home.  Her usual energetic, happy, dumb, tail-wagging self.  My big beautiful stinky girl.

“You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.”
     — Carly Simon

I may be wrong,  but I don’t think I expect that much from people who are my friends or loved ones and I don’t think my expectations are unreasonable.

I expect to be listened to and responded to.  This shouldn’t be a great burden on any of my friends or loved ones because I’m not a huge talker to begin with.  But when I am speaking, I want to be heard.  I don’t want the person to walk away, answer the phone or a text message, or start talking to someone else in the middle of my sentence. 

When I send an email, I hope to get a reply, even a short acknowledgement.  Especially when that email reports good or bad news updates on a topic of mutual interest or importance.  I don’t expect to have to remind the person the next day only to get a three word comment followed by 2 paragraphs about his boring work assignment.

I hope those who say they love me can be overjoyed by my successes and give me appropriate ego strokes for those successes, to the same copious degree I have given to them in the past and to the same degree that we’ve commiserated over setbacks and failures. 

Ah – on the other hand, although my expectations aren’t unreasonable, I can’t expect the scorpion to change his spots in the middle of the stream.  The scorpion will always act within his nature.  He will always sting the frog, killing them both halfway across. 

In the same way as the scorpion, some people will always simply be self-absorbed and it is in fact unreasonable to expect them to be otherwise.  They aren’t capable of seeing past their own dramas and obsessions.  They aren’t capable of being happy for others because somehow that threatens their own sense of security. 

The real problem is that they have no sense of security in the first place.  They are so insecure that they must focus all their concentration (hence, self-absorption) on keeping their own boat afloat.  They can’t be happy that my ship is sailing if they’re in constant fear of taking on water themselves.

Ok.  Enough mixed-up metaphors. 

I don’t email people who don’t email me back.  I don’t talk to people who don’t listen.  I don’t spend time with people who have no time for me.  I can’t be constantly giving to people who have nothing to give back.  It’s not complicated.

I called the vet clinic yesterday afternoon and they said Baby came through her surgery just fine.  She was awake, happy, and healthy.  No problems.  I’ll pick her up in the morning.

Today is boxing day at the gym.  I’ve got to set aside more time for boxing.  Once a week, on an off day from weightlifting, isn’t enough.  I’ll have to add a little to the other days, too.

Also, now that I’ve got this new book, I’m going to be refining my techniques rather than just trying to kill the rubber dummy.

If the new Powerhouse gym ever opens up… they’ve stalled their grand opening for 2 months now… but they’re supposed to have a whole specialized room of boxing equipment rather than just the make-shift converted raquetball court where I go now.  I’ll have access to a speed bag and a former boxer to help with training.  It’ll be very cool.

But for now, it’s the converted raquetball court with no mirrors, the wooden floor blocks coming up, the rubber dummy with the stuffing coming out his nose, and the crooked, duct taped, heavy bag.  It’s not even “old school.”  It’s just sad.