Where is 154W?

Things are not always where you expect them to be. 

Tonight I lost my locker at the gym.

After yoga I returned to the locker room and went to the area where I thought my locker was – locker #8 as I recalled. However, my key tag read “154W” and I assumed I’d picked up someone else’s key from the yoga studio floor.  I thought “I know, I’ll just go over to 154W and wait for that person to show up with my key.” 

I walked around the locker room twice and found no locker marked “154W.” I returned to the yoga studio imagining a woman standing there looking down in a befuddled state at a key reading “8W” – I found no such thing.

I went to the front desk and had a woman who worked at the gym go and look for 154W.  She couldn’t find it…She fetched the master key and went to locker 8 and opened it.  That wasn’t my locker.  Right next to #8, sandwiched between 8 and 14 actually, was locker 154W!

This defies all sense of the order of things. Kind of like this “dog.”

This experience got me thinking about looking for things; we can look for something using rational thought and even a solid process in some instances and not find it.  It seems plausible that some things can be found only once we abandon those rational thoughts and processes. 

What I’m applying this to is dating.  I went full throttle into the online dating world.  I was on three sites and had a lot of single dates (you go on only one date and realize that person isn’t your cup of tea).  It made me learn a lot about myself, other people and dating in general.  It was like a crash course in dating.  I had a process, a spreadsheet, and a sense of adventure.  There was some good luck; I found a few good guys.

It was while I wasn’t looking that I came across someone organically (i.e. not through a website). It defied my sense of order but it’s been amazing. I would have never looked between locker number 8 and 14 to find number 154…

Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix for me was a melancholy room at the historic Hotel San Carlos where I camped out with a cold.  Well, that is what was going on with me when I wasn’t at the WTS Chapter Leadership training, which was being held in a different hotel about a half mile away.  That’s right, I got to commute via foot through the desolate, dusty streets of “downtown” Phoenix for two mornings. 

The first night in town I wandered fruitlessy through those empty streets in search of dinner and perhaps a beer.  While I didn’t really find anywhere good to eat I did see some Phoenix sights.  This is supposed to be an artistic interpretation of a desert flower on the ASU campus:

I also got to see the famous “Westward Ho” building.  An old hotel-turned senior housing or something.

This little guy was a treat to come across – seriously.  How often do you get to see a gecko on the sidewalk??

Of course, I took the light rail a bit. This is Phoenix’s relatively new light rail line:

On my last afternoon there I walked about a mile and a half from “downtown” and visited the Phoenix Art Museum.  This was my first solo visit to an art museum (or museum of any kind).  It’s different when it’s just you; it’s just your own thoughts and contemplation.  I was ok with that.  Here are some photos from my art museum experience.

There was a place on one floor with tall windows and big, black, leather chairs.  I sat for some time in those chairs observing the sunny Phoenix afternoon through the glass.

I think this was saved from an old hotel sign (the hotel was destroyed in some tragic catastrophe of some kind).

This is just a frog I really liked.

Me

Parting shot:

That was Phoenix for me.

slasher victim

I find it excessively difficult to come up with a Halloween costume.  Every year I want to do something clever, but that idea never seems to come to me.  It has only been in the past few years that I’ve dressed up.  So it’s a new topic to think about for me. 

This year I was saved by Emily.  Well, she saved me a few times this year, but also for halloween.  She had the idea to be an 80’s slasher victim and we did it together.  Brilliant idea – just the purchase of a good will prom dress and application of fake wounds and blood and you’re there!

Here’s us in costume being dead:

This is my self portrait with tiara:

See how good the wounds looked!

Now I should get thinking for next year…I could be a gorilla again.

MMMM

Last night I went to see Martha Marcy May Marlene at the Esquire theater, a place I haven’t been in some time.  It’s a disturbing story of a young woman (played by Olsen twins sister – Elizabeth Olsen) both during and after living with a cult.  The cult included elements of sex/sharing each other, initiation and cleansing, gender roles, and manipulation. The cult is, of course, led by a man - the scrawny but commanding Patrick (John Hawkes of Winter’s Bone).

I can’t stop thinking about it. 

The many women of the cult seem more like a harem for the group of men that live there.  The men are clearly more important in this micro-society.  The women make the men food, wait for the men to finish, clean up, and then eat dinner themselves.  They seem to serve the needs of the men let’s say. Patrick, the quiet bull of the herd, has his needs met most of all. 

The heroine – let’s use the Martha name – does get out of the cult and lands in the somewhat safe home of her sister and brother-in-law.  Even though the world of her sister is starkly contrasted with the cult, there is a blurred line between memory, reality, dream, and paranoia.  The movie jumps around in time and you don’t always know where you are or what’s really happening and neither does Martha. It was a little painful watching Martha struggle to decide which world is better, that of the structured and sexual cult or the clean, expansive, uncertainty of the real world of her sister’s home.

Watch it but make sure you are expecting to be unsettled.