Composed Elements

I hate restrooms at work. I’m not talking about my office specifically, but all offices in general. It’s awkward and weird. You know what I’m talking about.

On a segment of This American Life (my favorite radio program), a reporter was talking about how she hated small talk, but the worst kind of small talk was restroom small talk. I never know when it’s appropriate to talk to someone in the restroom. And it weirds me out sometimes when I’m forced to talk through the stall door with someone I don’t know very well. The worst is when you walk into the restroom and someone is obviously taking a dump in there. I don’t care if someone is doing that because everyone shits. I just feel so awkward because I know the person in there is feeling embarrassed and then there’s all this sudden tension and extreme silence.

At my old job, there was this older lady with pink hair that we called “The Hummer.” I swear she had IBS or something. She was always in the restroom. ALWAYS. The way I’d know she was in the restroom was that I’d see her Egyptian-style sandals peeking out from under the stall walls and then there would be a stack of magazines on the floor spilling over into the next stall. Seriously, there were at least five magazines each time she was in there. How long was she planning on staying in there?? Whenever somebody was lucky enough to be in there alone with her, she would hum a little tune…just to creep us out. Sometimes she’d cough, sometimes she’d sing, and sometimes, just sometimes, she would talk to herself.

When I went to my yoga class the other day, I found out that my gym had switched instructors on me. Actually, I hadn’t been to class in about a month, so who knows how long this new spaced-out yoga instructor has been floating around. Now, I have nothing against spiritual people who share their wisdom while teaching cool ways to contort your body. I welcome these people. I welcome them with a warm glass of milk and peanut brittle. However, I find it hard to respect people that spew out words with no filter system and have a thick valley girl accent. Add a pinch of bossiness to that too. This was my new instructor. Like, totally, gag me with a spoon!

We were all doing this one move where you needed to “tuck your belly button in.” If you haven’t done yoga before, the position is basically curling your back like those scared-looking black cats in Halloween pictures with their fur spiked up in the air. (Apple Bottom Jeans, Boots with the fur…sorry, couldn’t resist.) She started off with, “Don’t do this move if you’re pregnant of if you’re on the third day of your moon cycle.” We all stopped breathing for a second. Did she just say what we thought she said? And then she felt compelled to repeat it slower like she was speaking to somebody who doesn’t speak English, “Your moooooon cycle.” Oh no she did-n’t! It felt like my parents had just walked in on me watching some R-rated movie, at the exact moment there was that 5-second sex scene, but I couldn’t explain, “Mom, I wasn’t watching porn!” because it was that awkward, so I just sat there in silence. There were plenty of guys in the class shifting around and looking down. “Does everyone know what your ‘moon cycle’ is?” she continued. After a long pause and in a whisper that was equivalent to your 7-year old neice telling a secret, “It’s your period.” I softly shook my head. Way to alienate the guys in the yoga class. Shortly after her menstruation speech, one of the male students packed up and left the room.

Breathing is also an essential part of yoga and I did appreciate her reminding us to do that regularly. At one point, she said, “Remember, breath like the ocean.” But you have to imagine it in a whiny voice with rising and dropping intonations. “Reee MEM burrrrrr, breath LIKE the OH-cean.”

Oh man.

I know the spring season began on March 20th, but it really hit me over the weekend. It was so hot that I actually got delirious strolling down Melrose Blvd. The only other time I get that crazy is after I’ve eaten some really spicy Indian curry. My friends were confused by my babbling, I couldn’t walk straight, and then I dropped by 7-Eleven to buy a Wild Cherry Slurpee for the first time since I was in high school. All year long, Los Angeles can only be described as really hot, kinda hot or not-so-hot. Why is this town so obsessed with the weather report? I have no idea.

So, on the kinda hot day of last weekend, I went out to Malibu beach for some fine dining with my family. Sometimes I forget the differences between the beaches in Southern California. A beach is a beach, right? Wrong. Eh eh (turntable sound effect), wrong. The water was actually blue, there weren’t any broken glass bottles on the sand, and there were beautiful three-story beach houses along the shore. Were people better looking too? Yes. There was this super hot gay couple walking their dogs and all I could see were their bulging biceps and glistening chests. They looked like some extremely happy couple from a travel catalogue. We all stopped to stare at them and I knew we were all jealous of something. I was thinking, damn, why are they so hot and why can’t one of them be straight? Then my brother-in-law said, “Man, I wish I was gay. Look at how buff they are.”

When I was a kid, my family rarely went to the beach. I didn’t really have a swimsuit for some time in my adolescent years and would just jump in the ocean fully-clothed. We didn’t really care. But when we went to Long Beach, people had taken “jump in your own clothes” to a new level. Maybe it was just that day, maybe it’s like that everyday, but there were tons of people in the ocean stripped down to their whitie-tighties. Seriously, just a sea of yellowed-out white underwear.

White underwear + Water + Cold Temperature = Bad Times

Of course I stared at the ocean in shock, as if I were viewing a horrible train wreck. This little girl came up to me and broke my concentration (which I was thankful for – seriously hypnotized). She had lost her little brother and asked if I had seen him. I asked her, “What does he look like?” She replied, “About four-years old, dark hair…I don’t know….white underwear?”