hari om… so… we last left our heroine in bombay… (that sounds so strange to say–like we stashed our smack in an alley in india) she was just finishing a performance of her new comedy show “eat, pray, laugh” along with her comedian friend samson at the jewish community center. she–ok, i–was worried that the indian jews wouldn’t really enjoy or understand the racier bits of my indian travel tales… but it turns out that those were the parts they enjoy the most. i capture most of the show on my awesome canon elph camera, which i then leave in a rickshaw the next day, along with all the other photos i took in england of jasper and i. jasper is six weeks old and adorable.

letting go

i am sad for a couple of days about losing the photos. and the camera too. it served me well on my last trip to india. so now i am learning lesson number 8,341 on letting go. but like i’m actually getting it. i mourned the loss, and then i got that, hey, this shit is all temporary. and it’s a great addition to my losses. meaning, now i don’t have a laptop, a cell phone, or a camera to distract me from what’s right in front of my nose. nothing exists but here and now. and what i’m seeing in the here and now with my eyes is also marginal on the reality scale.

whispering woods

co-incidence of strange co-incidences, the method acting teacher i studied with for four years, who has never been to india, is in bombay the exact same week that i’m here. i visit him at the film school where he’s teaching and sit in on a couple of classes. the studio is called whispering woods, and it’s like the canyon in LA. lush, green, undeveloped. i even get to do a deathbed scene while a kind of famous (so i’m told) actor is in the class. talked with some of the other professors there and the head of the film school and might get to teach a class on standup the next time i’m in the hood.

anandashram

i remember sam and his sister alice dropping me off at the train station, but i don’t remember anything about the ride. all i know is that it was overnight and i arrived in khanangad as the sun was coming up. one of my kirtan heroes, krishna das, told me after a concert that there’s a place in india where they chant “om sri ram jai ram jai jai ram” continuously. an ashram called anandashram. so that’s where i’m going. i arrive and somehow i’m not in the guest book, but they let me stay anyway–give me a private room and everything. and it’s a very special time to be there because a saint from tamil nadu (a state in india) is visiting for several days named thuli baba. i’ve never heard of him until now, but it’s very exciting. after each meal, i have the opportunity to have satsang and prasad with his group of devotees. the skinniest, frailest, loudest cat i’ve ever seen curls up next to thuli baba every day. they tell me that the cat was a guru in the last life and is working out some heavy karma for the world by coming back as this cat and not eating.

sun and moon

friends of my friend haridas bring me to the ocean to see the sunset and the full moon rise on the opposite side of the earth. i climb the mountain behind the ashram and leave all my worries there hanging in a tree. letting go for the 8,342nd time. you know what they say… “8,342nd time’s a charm!” the next day (or the day before… who knows!) my german friend sandra and i are walking back from a beautiful little temple in a field and we pass the cows’ maternity ward. on the ground is a five-minute old calf being licked by its mother. they milk the mamma cow and i peer into the giant milk pail of colostrum saying, “whoa.” “you like?” the guy says. the next morning they knock on my door with some cake for me made from coconut milk, sugar, and this thick cow colostrum–let me tell you–i have never eaten anything more rich. plus, when i was trying to “om” it started coming out as “moo” that day.

i joke!

i’m getting daily two-hour massages from these two young women with medicinal hot oil. after five days, it actually gets to be kind of boring! they don’t speak much english, so i’m cracking them up with my mime humor for two hour straight. “cheery” means smile in malayalam. and “tamasha” means joke. (these words strangely come in handy later when i’m being harassed at the train station.) “ichally” means ticklish and “idally” is a kind of breakfast rice dumpling. and they kind of rhyme so i’m just saying “ichally, idally, ichally, idally…” there’s nothing funnier than jokes between people who don’t speak the same language. i’m joking with gestures about how the oil they’re using smells like cooking oil and that i’m afraid all this basting means they’re going to cook me for dinner… and on and on…… stuff that’s way funnier without words.

i know by ths time in my trip that i’ll be spending more time in india in this life. it calls.

i hope your day of giving thanks was full of grace. i have returned from my time in india and i’m back in the bay, so blessed in so many ways. have a gander at the next installment of my adventures below… more to come about Tiruvanamalai in my next note..

In the meantime, I invite you to join Suzette Hibble, Erin Brandt and I, for the next Creativity, Sexuality, and Spirituality Workshop! Please register for the December 10th workshop event with me if you’re interested–soon–it is filling up–only a few spots left!

Namaste,
Alicia

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10. Considering writing a blog. Write the dumb blog. It’ll only be sand-blasted into the internet forever. Your words will likely be at once un-losable and lost; probably no one will ever read them, but everyone will be able to forever.

9. Considering “becoming an expert” on something (thanks to the internet, I made my cat an expert on pet products, and she’s threatening to book more speaking engagements than me.)

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Of course there are a lot of great personality tests out there.. Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, EQ, etc.

The test I offer here, the GSD-Q is great because you only have to look at three simple diagrams and you can “type” yourself within a few seconds. The other great thing about the test is that whichever type you are, you can make an instant shift in every area just by adding a dose of the other two types.

Take a moment to clear your mind, breathe deeply, and sit comfortably. When you are ready, look at the next three images for about three seconds each.

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I take a redeye to Florida every January to visit my grandmother. In Judaism, you always pray to spend the next holiday in Jerusalem, but somewhere I think it was mis-translated to Fort Lauderdale. You spend your life working and saving to one day finally retire to the beach, and you spend the rest of your life sitting around watching Good Morning America in an air-conditioned box. Waiting around for the big air-conditioner in the sky.

I catch the flu two days before I leave, as is my religious custom. I arrive at 8 am, not having slept on the plane. I try all eighteen sleeping positions, and none yielded the fruit of sleep. I am exhausted to the point to pure acceptance. I don’t have the energy to be offended at the onslaught of impending abuse.

The truth about Fort Lauderdale is that it’s a wasteland of Wal-Marts and early-bird buffets, separated by strips of concrete, and sugar-coated with a white-sand coastline and tangerine waters. It’s as if Costco bought a swamp, installed A-C and invited everyone to could park their RV in the parking lot.

I finally figured out the difference between how it feels driving in a sea of SUV’s on the Florida Turnpike and a sea of SUV’s on the 405. Everything’s the same, but in California we’ve replaced Jewish guilt with white guilt and a healthy dose of pollution guilt.

Part of the genius of our family’s “abuse” is that it is invisible to the naked eye. I present her with my new 8″ x 10″ head shots. Since my last photos, I’ve lost 10 pounds, removed my lip ring, and no longer have bleached, spiked hair. Not fifteen minutes after I arrive, Ruth Dattner, who can see a crow perched on a lawn chair and Venus in the night sky, but even sitting 12 inches from a giant plasma TV, cannot identify George Clooney, Ruth Dattner says for the first of eleven times today, “I don’t like your hair in these photos.” “Grandma, I spent an hour getting my hair done for these photos. “Some hairdresser.” Ensuing are the eleven iterations, a la Mozart. “If you get a good haircut, you wouldn’t have to spend an hour making your hair look good, it’ll stay looking good. When was the last time you went to a hairdresser?” We both cut our own hair, but today, as she squawks that we’ve used two whole teabags for two cups of tea, she doesn’t care that I’m saving money or that I might actually like how my hair looks. “Your hair today looks…. blech.” I just spent six hours overnight on a plane. “It’s your haircut.” My cousin Antonio says “I think your hair looks nice.” In this one fell swoop, I’ve been usurped as the family peacemaker. Relieved of my duties. I’ve been defended. It’s a strange, woosy feeling. “Comb your hair before we go, will you? It looks terrible.” “I will comb my hair if you don’t mention it again all day.” “I can’t make any promises.” “Then I’m not combing my hair.” “Comb your hair.” “Only if you don’t mention it again.” “Ok.”

I give my father several copies of my new headshots as well, a gift I’m hoping will fill out my sparse attendance on the mantle next to the weddings and babies of my step-siblings. “What kind of lens did this guy use?” He’s looking at the nose he passed on to me. “I don’t know, some wide, some telephoto.” Did you not just hear Grandma capping on my hair, dude? “I think you do better with a 120 lens, shot from far away.” My own father wants me to have an optical nose job. If there is a third insult in the first fifteen minutes, I am possibly going to explode.

At the chinese buffet (incidentally called Chinese Buffet), we sup on round after round of fair to middling cuisine. It seems to me that food quality is often inversely proportional to food quantity. It is here, between the crab rangoon and the shrimp with lobster sauce that Grandma beings to unleash her mighty storytelling prowess. And when I say story, what I mean is judgement, for there is no middle or end to most of her long, descriptive “tales”. Some fat people sit down at the table next to us, and she says “(blah blah blah I missed the first part) we were watching this family eat and they each had a giant glass of milk, hash browns, eggs, bacon, pancakes {time out here–this is almost exactly what we just had for breakfast} and the thinnest one was two hundred pounds.” “And what happened?” I naively ask. “Nothing. They were eating a lot of food.” I wish I realized this when I was a kid; I could have been curled up with her around the fire and pleaded, “Grandma, tell me another judgment!” “Poor people steal, and so does George Bush. Don’t marry an Armenian.” (She told this judgment again two days later.)

After the buffet, Grandma’s poor ankles are swollen. We’re rubbing them at home, treating them with electrical devices. She’s feeling hopeless and asks “Do you have a passport, Alicia? You can’t get back in the country without one now. Even if you go on a cruise or if you go to Canada.” “Yeah, I have one.” Duh. “You have to have one to get back in the country. Promise me you’ll get your hair cut.” I had promised myself I would draw the boundary. No more abuse or I’m leaving. But it sounds so ludicrous… Who says “Tell me to get a haircut one more time, and I’m taking the next flight home?” “I promise I’ll get a haircut when I get home.” I have been wanting to get a really nice cut, but I’m growing my hair, and I don’t want to lose the inches after all this time. “And then send me a picture of it.” “Ok.” Oh, the fields of battle are bloody. My soldiers are bleeding chocolate. Tomorrow, I really swear that I am drawing the line.

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are you ready to put the power of synchronicity into getting shit done?

i’m going to suggest something radical. i want you to throw out your to-do list. i’m not kidding. take it now, and tear it word from word. every task you’re supposed to finish, everyone you’re supposed to call, the reminders for the thank you note to your boss for the raise, the birthday card for your neice, the electricity bill. everything. now put the pieces of paper in a bag along with your wrist watch, which represents your concept of time. ‘there’s never enough time,’ we say, ‘time is running out,’ we insist, ‘it’s later than you think!’ we cry.

now get a hammer. smash the watch and the paper. break it up real good. now put it in a top hat and set it aside. we’ll come back to it later, but first i’d like you to pick a card.

seriously, read on only if you’ve burned, shredded, or drowned your to-do list. and put it in a top hat.

that’s the card you want? don’t show it to me. have you memorized it? ok, put it back in the deck. no, face down. good.

now i want you to get a pen and a piece of paper. do it. seriously, do it. i want you to write down the three people you know personally who most inspire you. now write down your three favorite activities. now write three favorite times in your life.

and now write down the one thing they all have in common (e. g. the quality of ‘gentleness’). i want you to write the opposite of that one thing (e. g. ‘forcefulness’). and now, this is complicated, but i want you to write down the opposite of the opposite, without using the first word (let’s say, ‘allowing’). put that aside for now.

ok, have you ever experienced coincidence? have you heard talk of the same book several days in a row, and subsequently found a copy of it on the sidewalk? have you run into a friend in a distant city? randomly asked someone’s birthdate and found it was the same as your own?

write down the first coincidence that comes to mind. immediately and without thinking, write down what that coincidence signaled to you (e. g. ‘my best friend called me at the same moment i picked up the phone to call her. the phone didn’t even ring. from this i take that somehow we are connected in an unseeable way’).

now plug your answers into this equation: i am (allowing) that (we are all connected in an unseeable way). make it grammatically correct so i don’t look like a shlump. just jam it together. go ahead. i have a 5 o’clock show on a cruise ship.

now i want you to take this equation, and put it in the top hat. wave your hand and say, ‘there are no coincidences! there are no coincidences! there are no coincidences!’ now, take out your piece of paper really dramatically as if it’s your old smashed watch that’s been magically transformed into this new thing.

is this your card?

no?

no. it’s today’s to-do list.

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