Nebulous Mooch

The most surprising thing about living in England is that the English haven’t yet mastered the language that bears their name.

First of all, they don’t know how to spell. It’s not just a few cases either. I see misspellings everywhere. They’re even in the newspaper. The mistakes are small, like for some reason most everyone seems to think that when spelling words like labor and favor, they should add a random u that just doesn’t belong. They also tend to replace z with s in words like realize. I tried to point this mistake out to someone once, and that’s when I discovered that part of the problem is that no one ever taught them the proper names for the letters in the alphabet. I don’t know what this zed thing is, but it needs to be corrected.

We have a dampness problem in our flat. It’s damp and cold. When I get clothes out of my drawer, they’re damp and they were dry when I put them in–really, they were. So we decided to get a dehumidifier to remedy the problem.

After doing some shopping around, we settled on a sleek, white Ebac 2650e. Now this is a good machine. It dehumidifies three rooms, has an auto-shut-off feature, is “noiseless,” and only costs 2 pence a day to run.

The noiseless part is completely untrue. The steady hum of the fan makes it hard for me to think. I don’t know about the auto-shut-off feature because I’m so excited to see how much moisture it’s sucked out of the air that I empty the tank every two hours. I’ve been watching the pounds tick off our pay-as-you-go electricity meter, and I’d say it costs a lot more than 2 pence a day to run. This is true though, it really does suck the moisture out of our small two bedroom flat. It also sucks the moisture right out of my eyes. It doesn’t say anything about that in the instruction manual.

Needless to say, I’m not loving the dehumidifier, but my husband is committed. He doesn’t seem to mind dry eyes.

So I decided to dread my hair. I’ve had dreads before. I lived and Korea for six years and hair products suitable for my hair were hard to come by, so I decided to dread it. My reason for dreading my hair now was just because I wanted a change.

I spent a little over hour putting two-strand twists in my hair to start my dreads. A week later, I decided I didn’t like the look of my twists and I took them out and spent about two hours carefully parting my hair and putting new two-strand twists in.

That was a week ago. This morning I decided that growing dreadlocks would be too much of a hassle at this point in my life. I took the twists out while I did the research for the latest page I added to my massage website.

To demonstrate my commitment not to dread my hair, I bought a hairbrush this afternoon. Here are some exciting pictures of me after using my new hairbrush.

I ate cereal for breakfast this morning.

We had kale greens with our lunch today.

Me: I love greens. They’re my favorite food.

My husband: That’s not true.

Me: Yes it is. I love greens.

My husband: How many times a day do you think about eating greens?

Me: I don’t know. None.

My husband: How many times a day do you think about eating cereal?

Me: Maybe six or seven.

My husband: Looks like cereal is your favorite food.

Me: Silently thinking about eating some cereal.

My husband’s not eating grains these days. It has something to do with his digestion. He started out not eating wheat and a few weeks ago it progressed to eating no grains at all. This makes cooking dinner a pain because we used to eat a lot of rice. He was trying to eat only raw food originally, but that only lasted a day and a half. He’s so quick to go on an extreme diet. He’s not trying to lose weight. If he lost any weight he might disappear.

I’m not disciplined or motivated enough to join him in his dietary experiment, but I have decided to look at my own eating habits. Upon examination, I’ve decided to stop eating cereal. I used to never eat cereal, but now I’m addicted to it. Between meals, I want to eat a bowl of cereal. Late at night, I want cereal. Right now, I’m thinking about eating cereal. Seriously, just writing about cereal makes me imagine a delicious bowl of it with raisins and bananas. Yum. I figure that anything that I want to eat all the time must not be very good for me.

I’ve been off cereal for ten days now and it’s been hard. The other day I nearly fell off the wagon. I took the cereal box out of the cabinet and stared at it for a few minutes. Then I poured a bowl. Then I poured the bowl back into the box and ate a banana and some walnuts. It just wasn’t the same.

When my husband came home a few minutes later he said, “Smells like someone’s been eating cereal in here.”

Can you smell cereal?

This website is an example of the kinds of things that are parts of bodywork. Watch the video in the top left corner. She mentions the relaxing aroma of yak butter lamps. Come on.

Some of you may know that I’m a massage therapist. I no longer practice. I’m not licensed to do massage here in the UK, and I don’t feel like going back to massage school to get re-licensed. So I’ve been doing some writing. I’m also working on a website about massage. For it I write descriptions of different types of massage therapy and bodywork. My goal is to have to most comprehensive site on the web about massage.

Anyway, every time I read about a different type of massage I think, That’s fascinating. Maybe I should learn to do that. Last week I was going to learn polarity therapy, and the week before that shiatsu.

Today I wrote an article about Alexander technique–that isn’t really a form of massage, but it does fall under bodywork. It’s a method of correcting your posture. So the whole time I’m writing about it, I’m trying to sit up as straight as possible and thinking, Maybe I should learn how to teach Alexander technique. Meanwhile, my back is aching from my rigid posture, but I soldiered through until I was done writing the page.

Now that I’ve resumed my normal slouchy blogging posture, my back is killing me and my future as an Alexander technique teacher is over. I need a massage.