The Budding Optimist

The world has been unbelievably cruel lately. Nothing makes sense. Birdie and all her children were killed earlier this week. That was horrific enough. She was such an amazing, incredible person.  And now investigators have determined that my friend killed herself  and her 4 children in a murder-suicide... and that's why none of them got out of that house fire. Birdie was a good person. Now the story will be that she murdered her children. That's not it. She was completely trapped by a system she couldn't escape and men who were determined to destroy her. What do you do with this much evil and horror? How do you bear up under it? I don't know. I'm not strong enough. I was thinking recently about how much I hate vulnerability. It hurts when you take a new job and fail at it, or speak honestly and lose someone's friendship, or open your heart a bit and get rejected. Those things are painful, particularly when they happen all at once. But what do you do in a world...

In 2019, Netflix released a  documentary on Bikram Choudhury , founder and guru of Bikram Yoga (in the wake of the scandal, this style is now known primarily as 26-2 or simply "hot yoga.") Beginning in 2013, former students of Bikram -- all women -- began coming forward to file lawsuits against him for everything from sexual assault to rape. Ultimately, the only case to go to trial was the one by his former legal adviser. When she insisted on investigating the rape and assault allegations, he forced her to resign.  Despite being ordered to pay $7.4 million in damages (reports vary), Bikram declared bankruptcy, fled the country, and still continues to teach his enormously popular style of yoga to those students who are willing to pay $10,000 each.  Bikram was famous for wearing only his Speedo  and a Rolex during classes. For many women, the most astounding piece of the Bikram scandal was the complicity of his ex-wife, Rajashree. Although she refused to publicly comme...

                              Last summer on my travels, the best location I visited was Lake Bled in the Julien Alps of Slovenia. What a wild place! Slovenia hadn't even been on my radar, but then I stumbled upon an opportunity to visit what appeared to be the most beautiful place on earth and I was all, yes, sign me up! And, I kid you not, it was absolutely as intense and beautiful and surreal a place as you can imagine. BUT (of course there was a but  because this is The Budding  Optimist) there were independent artists set up in a small lot near the lake. I was thrilled at the opportunity to buy a Christmas ornament to commemorate my adventure. That's when the OCD kicked in and -- I kid you not -- I spent MOST of my trip to Lake Bled maniacally changing my mind on which Christmas ornament I should get. I think the lady selling them finally got to the point where sh...

I rarely re-read books, but I'm re-reading The Midnight Library. It's about a woman who tries to kill herself after her cat dies and her job goes south (did I mention that's in trouble, too?) and she realizes she's alone. She winds up in the in-between, not quite alive, not quite dead, in a place called the Midnight Library, where all the decisions she's ever made are housed in a multiverse that looks like a library. By choosing to rescind any given choice, she can open a book and be transported to another universe to see how her life would be different there. I wish I could do that. I'm not doing very well. In the first week of November, Mocha died. In the second week, I gave Graysee to a neighbor and didn't even get to tell her goodbye. I tried texting the neighbor, asking if I could keep her for a few more weeks until I settled from Mocha's death, but didn't get a response. Yesterday, I had to leave school because I wasn't functioning well fro...

I read once somewhere that teachers make around 3,000 decisions per day. I have no idea whether or not that's true, but it certainly sounds impressive, doesn't it? Therapy Elsa says that some of the judgments I have made as a teacher have led to consequences. When I signed my contract for this year, the contracted start time of school at my building was 7:05 a.m. and the contracted end time was 2:20. This meant I had plenty of time to log onto my laptop for my 2:30 medical telehealth appointments every other week. Only... they decided to change the start and end times of school. This meant I had to tell my brand new boss -- brought in special by the Superintendent -- that I had medical appointments that interfered with my assigned bus duty and various meetings two days a month. He did not like this. He didn't say that, of course. But he repeatedly asked me to ask my medical provider for a different time (although I explained several times that there was no other time). It b...

  My therapist says I am undergoing an existential crisis. Again. What a trope. I feel like a caricature of a human being. For weeks now, I have been trying to make sense of life and death. I've been thinking a lot about transitions lately. I hate instability. I hate change. I'd much rather be instantly transported from Point A to Point B than have to suffer through the uncertainty and instability of the in-between. I keep thinking about butterflies and what a short time they live. Did you know that those pretty yellow brimstone butterflies only live 2 days? What a fucking tragedy. As an English teacher, I feel like my mind only operates in themes, so I've chosen one pose a month as a yoga focus, and then every class is a variation on that theme. January was lunges. February was binds. March was Mermaid. April was figure 4's. May was core-focused. For June-July, we did splits.  And then came August. Like many of Life's lessons, I didn't know what I was writing o...

According to the ancient Greeks, there are 7 basic types of love. There's love that encompasses general goodwill to all of humanity ( agape ); love that is rooted in duty ( pragma ); love that is based on friendship ( philia) ... There's also love that is familial - storge . I find myself wondering how the Greeks would characterize love of family members that is also rooted in duty?                                                                 Yesterday, we celebrated my Dad's 78th birthday. He asked for the same thing he asks for every birthday and every Father's Day: for the family to watch a video of his choosing together.  One year, it might be a video about how the earth is only 5,000 years old.  The next year, it might be one about how the complexity of the human eyeball proves uneq...