stress

I’m home alone until Saturday night - Ben is in Las Vegas all week covering a fight. I thought it would be especially hard this time around since I would usually be at work every day interacting with friends and getting out of the house. I thought that this week I would basically be in solitary confinement for me, while at the same time, I would be getting picture messages from Ben of his overflowing buffet plates and of him posing with Hooters girls.

Instead, though, I seemed to have found a sure-fire cure for loneliness: extreme stress.

In my deep fear of not having enough freelance work to keep me busy and pay the bills, I got myself into a mountain of work. And if you don’t think it’s confusing to spend an hour writing about dry cleaning methods and the next writing about 18-wheeler spinal cord injury settlements and the next hour writing about auriculotherapy (look it up - I know I had to), then you would be wrong.

I thought I might spend the week wistfully sighing and conjuring images of our post-wedding winter cabin, complete with crackling logs and wine and snow falling silently outside. And no deadlines. Instead, though, I’m spending every single second worrying about how the hell one writes a joint venture business plan.

It’s a weird feeling - I constantly feel like I’m back in high school and about to take a test I haven’t studied for. The feeling of all of your brain cells lining up and preparing to bullshit to the fullest extent of their ability. Have I ever written about the herbal treatment protocol for smoking cessation? Of course I have! I’m a living, breathing copywriter, aren’t I? I can’t even watch TV or call my friends - I’m just constantly thinking on how I can possibly pull these things off and save my ass.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m enjoying the crap out of my new job. Sure, I might be a bit stressed and more than a little over my head, but on the other hand I’m doing stuff I love, I’m actually getting to make my own decisions and think and voice my opinions, and I wore a wifebeater without a bra all day.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: if stress is cure for loneliness, could a takeout chicken parmesan sandwich and a beer be a cure for stress?

There’s only one way to find out.

I’m feeling a little stressed today - although my freelance load is picking up, I’ve still got to show up at work during the day. It makes for some close deadlines and this constant feeling that I should be doing something other than what I’m doing. And so today I found myself “pulling Hilarys” at even the smallest things.

Here are a few things that made me well up today - things that I would usually ridicule someone else for almost crying about:

1. A commercial about a hospice. Violins and the fragility of life were involved. Fair enough.
2. Ordering New England clam chowder and receiving Manhattan clam chowder. While this would normally be seen as a simple misunderstanding, especially considering we were in Manhattan, tonight I treated it as if the waitress was being an unfeeling regional-ist whore. Fair enough?
3. Ben teasing me.
4. Ben saying something neutral to me.
5. Ben saying something nice to me.
6. Ben asking me if something is wrong.
7. Looking at the falling snow. It was so beautiful! Sniff, sniff.
8. Looking at a picture of an email forwarded to me that featured a dog with a heart-shaped brown spot on it.
9. Not looking at a picture of an email forwarded to me that featured a dog with a heart-shaped brown spot on it, but merely thinking back on it.

Somehow I got all the way up to this afternoon without ever doing yoga. I’m not sure what turned me off about it - I suppose I’m a little wary of the Western appropriation of Eastern culture, and maybe a little hesitant to put myself in a group with my former coworker, Lump, whose favorite activity was yoga (next to comfort eating and one-night stands with yoga instructors). You know, she was the kind of person who claimed to “work out” and “be into Buddhism” when what she really meant was that she did yoga twice a week. In general, yoga looked kind of slow and boring and pseudo-spiritual. In short, it looked like a hobby for pussies.

Then I met Ben and he informed me that yoga was not for pussies. He tried it, he told me, after reading about NFL player Eddie George’s enthusiasm for yoga  — George credited eight injury-free seasons to the art. It increased flexibility, muscle tone, joint health, balance, and endurance. It battled stress. It was challenging. I could ignore the harmony and oneness stuff, if I so wished.

Then I forgot about yoga for a while. I didn’t really feel the need for it. In Montana, it was easier to be active in a variety of ways - instead of just going to the gym, Ben and I played softball, driveway basketball, backyard horseshoes and croquet, and front yard whiffle ball. We rode bikes. Ben played intramural football, played pick-up basketball, lifted weights, practiced jujitsu and fighting, and took a yoga class. I jogged along the Clark Fork River and went on long hikes. In New York, however, we’ve been much more limited. More or less, when we aren’t at the gym, we aren’t active. We needed something active that was different from the gym but that didn’t require a backyard or a mountain. We needed variety.

Now flash forward again to this afternoon, as we popped in our new yoga DVD, Power Yoga by Bryan Kest (I can only assume that the Y in Bryan stands for “Yoga”). It seemed like the perfect choice for Ben and me - he could introduce me to yoga in the only way I could accept it: through an instructor with a ridiculous cascade of shining brown locks and a penchant for pairing American workout buzzwords with ancient Asian concepts (two examples: “maximum Ashtanga” and “total-body downward dog”. I could learn the basics of yoga and ridicule Bryan Kest, all from the comfort of our own living room.

And, I have to say, it was pretty awesome. Even though it doesn’t look like you’re moving much, my muscles really got a workout - I was sweating by the end. Not only that, but it truly challenged my flexibility and balance.

More importantly than that, though, it was a huge stress reliever, especially doing it immediately upon returning home from a day of receiving emoticon-littered emails from my new manager (every single one marked with the obnoxious high-importance red exclamation mark). In 45 minutes, I went from being on the verge of frustrated tears (new manager translation: ) to making fun of the divine harmony that Bryan’s mind, body, spirit, and hair had reached(new manager translation: ).

Nothing that I had feared about yoga panned out - the new-age stereotypes that I had associated with it were either not true or utterly true and really fun and campy to go along with. I can’t tell you how relaxing and fun it was to stretch and hang out on the floor for the better part of an hour (I might not have been enlightened in any sort of spiritual way, but I was enlightened to the dust bunny situation under my furniture). I would never replace my regular workouts with it, but it was a great break from my normal gym routines and just as mentally soothing.

God, am I going to start using words like “soothing” now? In a serious manner? I’m going to have to be careful not to have a one-night stand with Bryan Kest.