Waiting to Exhale

I tried yoga once but took off for the mall halfway through class, as I had a sudden craving for a soft pretzel and world peace. 

~Terri Guillemets



In the past few weeks, I have been under a stress load that mechanical engineers would have a hard time finding a logical answer to the equation of "how is it  possible to hold that kind of load." 

Life changing news has come about which I'm not at liberty to share at this time, I'm 100 pages into my first full-length novel and self-doubt and worry is running amok, my mother's health is troublesome, my daughters are starting to take test runs from the nest and other things are going on between home and work that have me wondering if I'm made of elastic and what the ultimate breaking point is.  I think my stress load can be equated to the load per unit area or the force (F) applied per cross-sectional area (A) perpendicular to the force as shown in the equation below:

 

Now, the best part of this whole thing is I just probably sounded really smart here and I have to thank Engineersedge.com for their insight for the formula above. I could honestly try to figure it all out, but the left side of my brain, the analytic side, has a very hard time with math and physics. I'm a right-brained person overall and if I think about it at length, it gets complicated and I'd probably short circuit. I try not to think about it.  Darned analytics. Now I'm thinking about it. 

So back to yoga. 

It's something not-so-new I'm working on. I'm seriously trying to decompress and work on some kind of Zen state I really want to achieve. I seriously doubt I will achieve that calm that surpasses my understanding; however, if I can reach a point where I can focus on the breath and the body and shut the world out for however long, I will have achieved something. Eh?

Now... back to downward dog... Which to tell you my mental state always makes me think, "Bad dog, good dog," while I'm waiting to exhale... I gotta work on that. 

A Rose By Any Other Name...

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
Jim Morrison 

A rose by any other name may still smell as sweet, but we call it a rose.

We spell it "r-o-s-e."

This leads me to one of my biggest pet peeves that really shouldn't be, but is.

Names.

Recently in the news, not that she is newsworthy, but that aside, Kim Kardashian and her spousal unit decided to name their unsuspecting child "North." Seriously? That poor child is going to grow up with all sorts of complexes as it is and you have just laden it with the mother of them all - a crappy name.

One might think that I would be appalled because Frank Zappa named his kids Moon Unit or Dweezil. Not really. One would expect something like that from the outrageously creative Zappa. Jane or Harry would have been totally out of character for him.  But naming a child "North West" opens the doors to many, many years of childhood jokes that no amount of money can buy your way out of. (Let's just start with "The Wicked Witch of the North West" and work our way from there...)

But North isn't the only baby name that I find incredibly bad.  "Cricket" makes my top ten list as well as Rainbow Aurora, Blue Ivy, Kal-El Cage (Superman jokes anyone?), Pilot Inspektor Riesgraf Lee, Moxie Crimefighter Jillette (That's Penn Jillette's son. I swear I hope he becomes a cop.) There's also kids named, Sailor and Seven and Daisy Boo.  One I find strangely cute, Apple - Gwen Paltrow's daughter, and I hesitate putting it on the list. There are others of course, but North is pretty freakin' horrible. 

But beyond that phenomena, is the "creative spelling" of names that drives me "Banzai Bat Crap Crazy." I deal with a lot of people on a daily basis and the older I get, the weirder names and spellings have become. I don't know why parents have to do this. Is it because they think it's "cute", "creative" or "original?" Is it because they want to be different? I don't rightly know.  Poor "Maddisyn" (actual spelling of a kid's name I saw in a local yearbook) hasn't got a prayer of ANYONE ever spelling her name correctly ... EVER. And take it from me, I have a fairly "normal" if not quite so common name and few people have a clue how to spell correctly, if at all. 

There is a scene in the book by Billie Letts, "Where the Heart Is" which was also made into a movie. (Excellent by the way...) There is discussion about the main character, Novalee, naming her child. She's given the advice to name her child a good, sturdy name - a name that means something.  

I stand by that philosophy and I'm sure plenty of people will be ticked when they read this. When you name a child, their name SHOULD stand for something. It should hold it's ground and be the pillar for that child. A name like "North" doesn't do that. It's shaky and opens the child to ridicule which is unnecessary. I'm not saying you have to go all 1950's names, but really, at the end of the day, why do we want to set our kids up for misery?