Britical :: October

October 31, 2007

Search & Rescue (work in progress)

I am bloody cold and lying in the middle of the woods on a small island somewhere off Boston, Massachusetts. Under several layers of polypro, I have a bag of crushed pretzels taped to my ribcage, and my face is covered in blood. It is entirely possible I will die. Or so you’d think.

The pretzels are a clue. Because ‘though they might sound and feel to the touch like chest wall trauma they are in fact part of a simulation we’re doing that day for my Wilderness First Responder re-cert. Awesome. Still, the three days here are entirely more bearable than the original sleep deprived, exhausting eight or so I spent here a few years back. I feel more capable with plugging sucking chest wounds (can use a credit card, preferably the victim’s), body drags (heads up for snipers), and better at diagnosing everything from snake bites to high altitude cerebral edema, and whether it’s feasible to even bother starting CPR on someone during an avalanche rescue, and how, in fact, it might sometimes be less risky to stretcher someone out than call the helicopter for immediate evac. I am also less miserable sleeping in the cold barracks-like building, knowing now to steal seven or so thin, itchy blankets from other rooms while everyone was at lunch the first day, and hiding them in various places until nightfall. The days are long: up at 6am, hours in the classroom, use-your-wits drills outside, and the more tiring and lengthy “sims” (simulations) where half of us are rescuers, half victims. I rather hanker after the original, the notorious “night sim” – hours and hours of hopeless trekking through the dark looking for victims we suspected, after a while, and in our exhaustion and ensuing paranoia, might not even be there…

After the final exam it’s time to leave the island. I am overjoyed at passing. There have been weeks and weeks of cramming impossible amounts of information and now it’s All Over! We all grab our things and trudge down to the dock where the fishing boat-cum-ferry is waiting to take us back to the mainland – to real food and a better thread count. Most everyone goes inside or huddles on the lower deck, but a few of us, enamoured by the bright air and the waves or just mad, I suppose, with delight at leaving, go up top and stand happily in the freezing wind. One of our instructors, a fairly droll and cynical seeming fellow until now, bursts alarmingly into song while someone dances an Irish jig. The boat tips and bounces across the sullen waves, and the song – something inevitably endless about drinking Irishmen – takes us all the way into the harbour.

October 30, 2007

Miami - It’s Hallowe’en Every Day

Miami, FL

The widely held notion that Hallowe’en is a chance for the entire female population of New York City to dress like sluts (slut nurses, slut bunnies, slut sluts, etc.), is surely moot in Miami. In Miami, apparently, every day is Hallowe’en.

Even though I am here “off season”, the weather is just warm enough, the place is blissfully empty, and what wildlife can be observed looks, to my eyes, very much “in season” (as in ovulating mares). Looking in a shop window, even a female mannequin lounges supine front and centre, legs akimbo - and knickerless. Over lunch, I see little herds of women who resemble unconvincing yet ever so slightly restrained female impersonators in lots of Cavalli and weird plastic surgery. They perch at their tables looking as if they just discovered the word “vivacious” and have resolved to practice very hard. They twitter away and flutter their super-sized eyelashes at no one in particular. Probably a South American thing, I think generously. It isn’t quite as advertised here (legions of people who look like Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie models strolling hand in hand down Ocean Avenue), but all the more fascinating for that.

Not that I didn’t make some sort of When in Rome effort myself. But teetering gamely around Bal Harbor one afternoon on three and a half inch Manolo leopard mules and wearing a giant hat (I’m still not willing to take the sun, not even here, especially not here), I felt like I was playing dress up. Plus, it’s a lot of fucking work. And my goodness, it’s not even “the season” yet!

Of course, I had asked several friends what there was to do here apart from clubs and hotel pools and clubs and snarfing stuff up your nose at 4am, and most exchanges can be boiled down to the following:

Me: Guess what? I’m going down to Miami this weekend, is there anything to do besides clubs and hotel pools and stuff?

Friend: Uh, no…..what do you mean? Why are you going anyway?

Most of them rolled their eyes, tickled that I would ever go there, even if they like to. “Oooh, you’ll hate it, ha ha ha!”

They all rack their brains and they all come up with the same thing: “the design district”. Though one lovely friend thinks there is a botanical garden somewhere or other. But Lord knows the place is already stuffed to bursting with shiny palm trees, lizards, and some sort of dark green shrub that I saw outside a mall full of lovely pink flowers among which were nestled lots and lots of fat, fluffy, very contented looking little sparrows. I thought this was very cool – a sparrow bush! But no one seemed very impressed and they kept walking.

I will say I was surprised to see how long the pool was at the Delano: “Oooh, look!”, I squealed idiotly, “I could swim laps here!” My friend just said “Mmm…” and gave me an odd, inscrutable sidelong glance that I only understood when we’d strolled to the end of it and I realized the water is only an inch or two deep for almost half its length. What’s the point? Dismaying, unless you’re wanting to convert your sensible atheist friends by pretending to be Jesus.

Feeling bitter and misled, I went home to my friend’s apartment – a lovely penthouse, where what was to be done except open another bottle of champagne and scoff down yet more caviar for dinner (third night in a row we couldn’t be bothered to get the ready-made salads from Whole Foods out the fridge. Miami will do this to you, I guess.). We sat on the floor trying to figure out the cable TV system. This, I think then, is much more fun than than South Beach.

Below us the building is "off season" empty. The windows across the way do not blaze with light and parties; the harbour does not glister. It is dark. The hallways remind me, excitingly, of ‘The Shining’ - but even the twins are elsewhere. There is a spa and pool on the 5th floor which we don’t bother with after being accosted by an alarming man covered in hair who came galloping towards us, maybe just happy for some company: “Well, hello, ladies..!”.

In Miami you can frolic and shop – and then lay on the beach all afternoon until your skin resembles an Hermes bag. That’s expected, after all. And without wanting to damn with faint praise, I will say the clouds down here are very nice: dramatic, stormy, if promising much and not delivering, at least this weekend. I had been hoping for a big hurricane, some alligators, or maybe get to Disneyland – but the driver informs me it is four hours away. Four hours?? How can this be? Who knew the land of the hanging chads was so large. Clearly, I am in the wrong place. Then again I may be back in December, when the crowds return, when no doubt it will be clear that Disneyland has, in fact, come to me. As they say, it is what it is and I feel certain whatever it is, it’ll be highly entertaining.

October 9, 2007

Yoga Kills

NYC

Perhaps if I did more yoga I really would be able to kick myself in the ass for not buying the ‘Yoga Kills’ t-shirt I saw a few years ago.

Yesterday, I was reminded of yoga’s unparalleled ability to enrage as I glowered and scowled my way through an hour of pointless and pointlessly excruciating silly positions. The well-meaning inevitably perky instructor took us through the usual, bland (yes, bland yet unfathomably painful, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) series of downward dog, asana whatever… this and that ligament snapping idiocy.

I follow as best I can and ponder why it is that every few years, I will take a yoga class thinking that it will have morphed into something bearable. But like the therapists say, if the tree grew apples last year, it won’t grow oranges this year. Over at last, I heard someone saying, "Hey, this has really lengthened me and given me balance." I pointed out, with some asperity, that neither limbs nor muscles can be lengthened and that balance is specific to an activity. You only have to observe an equestrian trying to snowboard to see that one in action.

As usual, yoga left me in a filthy mood, and very far from blissful. I stomped off went about my wholly horrible day of being seatless on the subway while oversized people with blue and yellow kittens holding fishing rods painted on their billowing t-shirts lounged fatly, spilling onto all the seats and the six pharmacies I visited were out of stock of some mundane product I discovered later simply does not exist. And so on and so on.

But this evening, returning home at last, and having snagged a seat on the train, a little bright place in the day: a huge, black labrador plonked himself down onto the floor right next to me. Of course his owner, backing his way into the seat beside me, was blind, and, in the nature of some blind people, seemed slightly gruff; which is to say, too proud to accept too much help.

I knew not to pet a working dog, but the look on the animal’s face made it challenging. He had immediately rested his big head on his owner’s lap (if I was horrid, I’d say he was firing up to deliver a particularly skillful session of fellatio, but his expression was not calculating enough for that). The dog’s face was absolutely possessed by the most rapturous look of Go-to-Hell-and-Back reverence I have ever seen on the face of anyone anywhere - parent, child, rapturous sportsfan, or recently converted religious hysteric. It was mesmerizing.

I was only person on the train in a position to see the dog’s gaze. It made me sad his owner could not see it. But then it came to me, in the way these things sometimes do, as he spoke gently to the animal, that the feelings were entirely mutual: "Come on, turn round, you know what happens if you sit that way…" (Tail gets stepped on, I assume). The dog slowly manoeuvered himself to face away from the precious lap - and reluctantly so, or so I fancied.

Still, seeing the blissful expression on the dog’s face yesterday, there was one thing I just knew with absolute certainty: he did not practice yoga. There is, dear reader, a lesson in that.