LUGGAGE!!!! FUCK YEAH!!!!

write from last night

The prompt was 'write the world you live in.'

The overall rules of the writes are that all things are considered fiction.

The following piece briefly describes urinating and has sexual references. So skip it if you don't want to hear such things from your daughter/sister/friend/niece. . . 

There is a nasty looking spider in my bathroom. I don't want to be derogatory. I just mean it's big enough that I can clearly see all its legs and the bends in all its knee joints.

I know spiders don't have knees, but you know what I mean.

If it falls from the ceiling while I'm peeing, it will not land on me, and I'll have ample time to stop mid-stream, pull up my underwear and exit before it has time to scamper over to me.

This give me some peace at least.

I've come to not like bathrooms. They all have mirrors in them. I have enough mirrors - mirrors on the inside, mirrors on my fingers, mirrors in the gaze of others, mirrors in the non-gaze of others. I suppose the spider gives me a vacation from myself. I mean, I'm on vacation, but some things we take with us.

It is always this way- the mind is so crowded all the time. It's as if it's filled with furniture, and as I'm walking to the kitchen to get a glass of water, I'll inevitably smack my shin on the sharp angled edge of some fresh anxiety that juts out and spoils the trip.

For instance, I could be in the middle of a perfectly decent sexual fantasy but right when we're about to take our clothes off, we accidentally push ourselves through one of those sexy hotel windows and plummet to our deaths, completely spoiling the mood.

And for a quick aside, I'd like to mention I hear a faint tapping coming vaguely from the direction of the bathroom ceiling. In my mind, it's the spider, tapping its foot, while devising an evil plot against me. 

I know spiders don't have feet, but still. . .

I think it's safe to say all the mind-furniture is getting in the way of life journeys, both mental and actual. It's hard to really enjoy a rainbow when one is fixated on the presentation at work next week. It's really hard to enjoy a presentation at work, as if such a thing is even possible, when one has already imagined being labeled incompetent for the last three weeks. 

This all to say I don't like bathrooms with all the mirrors.

And I wish the spider didn't bother me so much. Which is to say, I wish that things you'd think were much smaller than me were not so scary.

I'd like to live in a world without spiders and without presentations at work and without big sexy hotel windows. Maybe there's part of me that would like to steer clear of lovers and rainbows as well. I've learned I could only avoid smacking my shin on the furniture in my mind, if I didn't first have a home to live in.

This metaphor might be going off the rails at this point.

I will say this - tonight I'll be back in that bathroom. The first thing I'll do is check to see if the spider has moved. I'll brush my teeth without looking in the mirror, I'll pee, all the while, with eyes towards the ceiling. Then I'll go to bed, after having taken down my hair and taken off my clothes in the dark. You can extract whatever meaning from that that you'd like.

trying to get this in before the wifi goes out

It has been lovely here. The women I am writing with are kind. Julie Maloney (in the pic below), who runs the retreat is really warm and easy to be around. The food is really. really good.
And I still don't have my luggage. I just washed my hair for the first time since Saturday morning before I left home. I'd wanted to wait until my shampoo got here but that didn't happen yesterday and I was starting to look like someone had rubbed a pork chop on my head. At this point it's no exaggeration to say I've spent hours trying to get my stuff back. Yesterday, it was given to a courier and the courier won't track it without a reference number and 2 more called to Air France has not produced a reference number. So my bag, and the bag of my retreat-mate Patty, is with a courier somewhere in France, with no way to locate it. At this point it's affecting my sleep. And I can't imagine it's doing much for my writing. I am starting to mentally say goodbye to the many things in that suitcase that were not expensive, but in no way can be replaced. And it just occurred to me about 4am this morning I'll have to get another night guard made.
Enough about that. Tuesday we spent the whole day here. I went to yoga, we wrote, I had a gentle foot massage, I went to the pool (courtesy of someone lending me a bathing suit) and did not swim (because, as you may know from earlier blogs, I'm a shitty swimmer). There was an evening stretch but I didn't partake.
Yesterday we wrote again, as we will every morning. I have decided to stop trying to get these writing prompts to fit my project and have fallen into writing mostly prose/fiction like mostly everyone else. It's way to much mental juggling to get in touch with my own process while and trying to negotiate a prompt and begin surrounded by other people who write very concretely. I try to write towards my project on my free time and it's probably not going that well. If I am feeling brave, I'll share something I wrote last night during a group write.
Also yesterday, we went on a hike to the Camino de Santiago which is the pilgrimage route to the shrine of the apostle St James in Spain. There are routes all over Europe and I guess this is one of the main ones. We really just went to look at the view and see the Pyrenees in the background (the mountain range that is between France and Spain). We came back and had a 'night write' after dinner, which is when I wrote the afore mentioned piece.
There is an option here to do a horse therapy session, where apparently you go hang with the horses and let them read your energy and do some kind of healing dance or something. So far three have done it- two had very good experiences and one had a negative experience. I didn't get details but apparently one had the horses surround her and then one rolled on the ground for her (that was one of the positive experiences). I don't feel as judgmental about it as a probably sound. But I won't be doing it. I am getting a massage tomorrow. And today we go to Carcassonne and eat dinner on a boat.
The dog below is named Luna (when I was a kid and played D&D my first character was Luna the Cleric). The room is where we write.
I'm not again on hold with Air France after being disconnected the first time. They have the most obnoxious on-hold music of all time and I'm pretty sure it's going to be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.

No sleep, slightly better wifi

In my usual travel-abroad fashion, the first night I slept like the dead. And tonight I've been awake since 1am. It's now about 4:30am and I'm about the junk the entire sleep-monday-night project entirely. I thought I would try to share a piece (in progress) from my Prague project. Hope the formatting works:

LIFE                                                   ART

Hair in a bandana                                        Sutures this mouth kiss

for writers to procrastinate                       All babies feed off one

to avoid an                                           empty belly

unfortunate connection between              trains

bandanas and pubic hair                           I’ll crush you

to avoid failure      all little army men

I stumbled into                                      Satan vs pervert

the Astronomical clock’s bigger than your

unreliable wifi war facade

and economic                                        bubblegum horses for

Texans sharing the Trojan 

short stay apartment breakfast catapult

A challenge is   a skull like a stopper

threatening  to self serving a peach umbilical cord to

esteem not  the messiah on Mars with

damp sweaty sandals no eyelids

for learning an extra sheepish

opportunity reading a penis like tea

the smokers still leave

(look) like smokers breasts like

stomach stings from                               a telescopes opens like

nougatty                                                 babies with switchblades 

techno became musak in their bonnets

I waited for them to turn to blob-fish

afternoon staying in                                   like spun glass

the tourist area                                       creepy sausage

my head smells                                      in the drawers 

lost in the road system of my fat rolls

I’m tired of cleaning myself                   with bleeding forks

Ok the formatting got a little jacked up but it's meant to be read in columns or straight across.

I am hoping to find a way to write towards my projects that doesn't always involve me getting up at 5am. When we do our workshopping, she gives us writing prompts, and although these things are always open, it's difficult for me to settle in the headspace of what I want to write when I've been given instructions to write something else.

Oh, apropos of absolutely nothing, I get a foot massage today. Yay!!

I also had a rather sweet conversation with the woman running this retreat- she asked me why I was so hungry and I had to explain that because I work out a lot, I tend to need more food than.... well some other people. (and the emergency Clif Bars I packed are, you guessed it, in my lost luggage). She told me to tell the chef to give me more food. I haven't had the nerve to do it yet. I heard my luggage, with my Clif Bars, is arriving today. The food has been really yummy though. 

I think it's safe to say I won't be sleeping through yoga this morning :) 

These are pictures of the breakfast buffet, the market and one of the dresses I bought because I have no clothes. 

Trying to settle in and figure out this app

I must say, the whole flying experience was quite pleasant. The couple sitting next to me on their way to Prague were friendly, but not too friendly. Those things in my airline chicken that I feared were maggots were probably just onions. I am reading Jeffery R Allen's latest novel (check out Rails Under my Back if you are in the mood to read one of Delia's favorite novels) and I got a ton of knitting done. Both flights were smooth, even though that 2nd plane was too small for my taste (anything that gets boarded by moving staircase gives me pause).
Then we got the 'bad news' that no luggage made it on the plane. The tracking system is down at the Amsterdam Airport (for just KLM?) and so a shitload of luggage is now missing. Another woman at this retreat is also luggage-less.
But I met my group and we drove back to this lovely retreat center. It's called Terra Nova Wellness Center and we are taking up the whole thing. There is a vegetarian chef (so much for my concern that I would spend the week eating fattening French food) who makes everything from stuff grown in the nearby farm. The food is very good and I hope to show you some pictures. Sorry mom, she just explained that she categorically does not use recipes. She states she cooks 'intuitively,' just like grandma!
There are horses for Equine therapy. I just heard one nearby. There is also a masseuse. I already scheduled a foot massage and a regular massage. at 40euros each, it's one of the few things that seem not as expensive as in the states.
I went into this trip with zero anxiety, and because anxiety is often what fills my mental space, this trip was not filling much mental space. that is probably a good thing because I am attending these writing workshops that are likely not geared towards my kind of writing. I don't feel a lot of attachment to what I get 'done' here. I came here to start my gender deconstruction project. I also brought both my Thailand and my Prague projects with me. Alas, they are both in my luggage, which I just confirmed is awaiting flight from Amsterdam to Toulouse and will hopefully be here tomorrow morning.
Today we did have a field trip to a market and I bought some toiletries and a couple of dresses to hold me over. the very nice women here have been offering me underwear and bathing suits- I will likely not take advantage (I hope I don't have to).

I'm doing this on my phone because the wifi sucks

hi everyone
This is just to let you know I arrived safely, although without luggage. The airport in Amsterdam is having technical problems and so everyone's luggage is lost. Not convenient.
I can't write a lot because we are going to a market which will be my only chance to buy all the toiletries I'm missing. Oh and I missed yoga this morning because I slept until 8:20, which is unheard of for me.
It's beautiful here and everyone is really nice.
More later.

Look familiar?

Kind of looks like the random luggage picture I sent in May of last year, when I was on my way to Prague.
Well now I'm on my way to France. The Cathar region to be precise (I have no idea what the Cathar region is, but I'm about to spend 10 days there).

This is what I am doing:
http://www.womenreadingaloud.org/retreat-calendar.html

Anyway, it's a writing and yoga retreat, although I am much more interested in the writing. There will also be wine tasting, a couple of day trips, something involving a canal, food (I'm assuming kinda Frenchy food). And there is going to be sun. I'm getting a little tired of this Fogust (I just learned this term) nonsense in SF. I looked up the weather and it's in the 80s every day.
There will probably not be as much to blog ABOUT since I won't be gallivanting all over the place. But I will check in from time to time to update you all and share some pictures.

Enjoy!!!