Everything is energy

[resonant]

Day two of the retro journaling challenge. I've had both yoga and caffeine today, so the whole world is a very fine place.

1. I have a new favorite yoga instructor. She hits just the right balance between the spontaneity extremes (where at one end you do the same thing every time and at the other end the instructor is so in the moment that you do things on the left and forget to do them on the right) and also between the yoga-ness extremes (where at one end this is just another workout and at the other end you spend twenty minutes sitting on a mat while the instructor talks about chakras).

Also she has a sweet English accent, which doesn't hurt.



2. A while back, I went to the independent cafe that's widely reputed to be the best in town and ... I hated their mocha so much I couldn't finish it. They were using some kind of syrup with a distinctly artificial flavor to it. I would rather have had Starbucks. (There are no Starbucks here except inside grocery stores.)

Today I tried another independent cafe and had much better results.

They had a drink on the menu called a Sludge Cup. I am deeply tempted.

3. I also went to the downtown farmer's market.

Corntown had two farmer's markets. One of them was near my house and open every day but Sunday, but placed no limits on where the venders could come from or what they could sell, with the result that the place was full of avocadoes and lemons and other things that do not grow in the Midwest. The other was downtown, only on Saturdays, heavily regulated to keep the produce local -- very lovely but very expensive. Also a good two-thirds of the stalls were handmade stuff or bakery goods rather than produce, but that's OK.

In New Town, the Saturday market is downtown, but instead of taking up a big parking lot, it's spraddled all up and down four or five streets, which makes it difficult to feel that you've seen everything and to go back again and find that place that had the peaches.

Where Corntown's arts stalls were sort of curated (meaning they ended up having high quality but high prices), New Town's arts stalls might have some grandma selling hats she crocheted out of grocery bags.

I didn't see any produce that couldn't have been local.

I saw strange flat cabbages the size and shape of sleeping cats and a kohlrabi as big as my head.

Farmer's markets are where I find my people -- the long-haired, tattooed women in shapeless dresses handing out fliers for a Farm Crawl and a food co-op. I wonder why I'm not a long-haired, tattooed woman in a shapeless dress? My personal style may be costing me all sorts of hippie conversation, man.

The people in New Town haven't yet figured out that you can charge a lot more than $1 a pound for organic heirloom tomatoes!

4. In related news, I had corn, canteloupe, and caprese salad for lunch.

5. I have a new hairstylist. She's a very cute little twentysomething, and she loves her hometown so much that she can't stop talking about it.

The salon is in a building that used to be a tiny church, which is strange but beautiful.

My hair has some natural curl. I have limited patience for performing femininity in the morning (or any time, really); I will use product, but I won't mess around with blowdryers and flatirons. My old stylist kept wanting to give me same-length curls all around, which makes me look like a little old lady who gets her hair set once a week, and the color I got was always halfway between what I asked for (the cool medium brown I used to have before I went gray) and what she really wanted me to be (ash blonde).

That paragraph is basically what I told my new stylist. I left her salon looking like Dan and Phil.

Well, at least I didn't have to say, "Not so matronly, if you don't mind"! And once I washed six styling products out of it and styled it the way I like it, I ended up with a pretty decent hairstyle.

Comments

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

I remember that salon. I only managed to afford to go there once, but it was worth it, they do good work.

[resonant]

These dispatches must be very strange to read when they're about a town that's familiar to you! Everything's so strange to me, since I'm new, and of course every town has its quirks. (No Baskin-Robbins?! I mean, don't get me wrong, I've had Betty Jane ice cream and it's amazing, but no Baskin-Robbins?!)

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

Not actually a town I knew well, as I never had any spending money and school was very bubble-ish. (And when my classmates went out, it was often for drinking, and as I don´t and the smell nauseates me, I didn´t join them.) The local ice cream place is great, I remember vaguely, but I couldn´t tell you how to get there or what it looks like as I was there all of three times. I can´t suggest restaurants because the only times I went out to eat was once a month when I treated myself to Burger King down by the river. The Aldi is pretty good though.

And I fucking hated driving on those hills in winter. All three years I was there they had some of the worst winters they´d ever had, which is a habit with me- I go somewhere and the blizzards arrive by the dozens. It´s happened consistently since seminary. I imagine your winters there will be better.

[resonant]

Sounds like you had a miserable time here.

I'll check out the Aldi. I'm not nuts about Hy-Vee, but don't know where else to shop. (I hate a grocery store that only offers huge thick-skinned lemons, among other things.)

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

The hyvee up by kohl's is probably still better than the one on 20. And yeah, but it wasn't the town's fault.

[panisdead]

I think I've met all of those yoga teachers!

[resonant]

There are definite patterns to the way things fail to be as I want them to be!

[jesse_the_k]

SIX!

You'd have to get a mortgage-backed-security loan just to buy the new bathroom cabinet and bottles.

So have you ever prepared kohlrabi? Is there any food where bigger/more strangely shaped = tastier?

[resonant]

You'd have to get a mortgage-backed-security loan just to buy the new bathroom cabinet and bottles.

And another one to pay salon prices for styling gel!

Is there any food where bigger/more strangely shaped = tastier?

Delicious heirloom tomatoes are often very strangely shaped. As far as size, I find that I tend to assume everything tastes better if it's smaller, but I have no idea whether reality bears that out or not. (The canteloupe I bought today was about the size of a softball and, alas, smelled very good but had little flavor.)

[king_touchy]

I moved to my current town ten years ago and some days I feel like I'm still settling in. Also, I empathize with your hair styling story. Where is the balance? I don't want hobbit hair, but I don't want to look like a soccer mom, and that's my stylist's range. When she hits the right balance, I like my hair.

[resonant]

For years I had to fight against automatically getting the fat-girl hairstyle (weirdly tall on top, as if somehow they were going to improve my weight/height proportion by increasing my height by three inches of hair), and then as soon as I began going gray, I had to fight against automatically getting the old-lady hairstyle.

I actually look really good in the style I think of as "sorority bob" -- chin-length and curly. Maybe I'll grow it back out to that length if I ever stop having hot flashes.

[princessofgeeks]

hurray for yoga!

[resonant]

It makes me so happy. I have no idea why I don't do it every day.

[china_shop]

And once I washed six styling products out of it and styled it the way I like it, I ended up with a pretty decent hairstyle.

Hee! That's kind of the story of my life.

I like the idea of farmers' markets, except for how they seem to happen early in the morning and are full of people. *is generally sleepy and crowd-averse* Um.

[resonant]

I'm a semi-morning person -- in the absence of an alarm clock I'll usually wake up at seven no matter what time I went to bed. The spouse and the kidlet are both late sleepers, and I think I evolved that schedule so I could have lovely solitude in the mornings!

[myalexandria]

This all sounds great! Also I'm taking the Dan and Phil photo to my next haircut.

[resonant]

Maintaining the Dan and Phil look requires a flat-iron and so much product that everything crunches. (I have a feeling that the artificial dark brown is also not very sustainable, but it's too soon to tell.) But that cut, minus the straightening, is still pretty cute.

[jedusaur]

I had a haircut yesterday at a new place, and the stylist was very attentive to my requests and asked questions to ensure that she was doing what I wanted the whole time. Then when I was paying, she muttered to herself, "Hmmm, what the heck do we call this? I'm just gonna put '90s Halle Berry in the notes." Which cracked me up, because it's so perfect. How many not-quite-right haircuts could I have avoided by just saying "'90s Halle Berry, please"?

[resonant]

I love it! '90s Halle Berry. My best-ever hairstyle for a long time was '70s Dorothy Hammill, but that was before I lost my willingness to blow-dry.

[jedusaur]

I have never in my life owned a blow-dryer. I think I have owned one bottle of hair product, ever, that wasn't shampoo or conditioner, and that was neon green hair gel that I made a lot of bad decisions with as a teenager. XD I also had my best hair ever back then, though, so my choices weren't all bad.

(ahahahaha, I have just noticed that picture of 16-year-old me trying to be all dramatic-selfie has my baby brother riding a wooden airplane in the background. Nice camera aim, teenage me.)

[glymr]

Organic heirloom tomatoes for $1 a POUND?

I. Am. So. Jealous.

[isis]

My thoughts exactly. *cries with envy*

[resonant]

Can you believe it? They're multicolored and charmingly weird-looking and delicious!

[isis]

"The ones that look the weirdest taste the best!"

http://davidgans.bandcamp.com/track/the-bounty-of-the-county

($5 here. Sigh. I buy them anyway, partly because I've become friends with the people who grow the best selection. They toss in some for free, and sometimes I just buy their 'seconds' for $2.50/pound, but I can only dream of $1/pound heirloom tomatoes.)