2013: An Ecstatic Year with the Exuberant Bodhisattva

January: I start a new job as a French Assistant at a Montessori School. I tell tiny children to push in their chairs, go to the bathroom and wash their hands in French. Some of them stare at me with huge eyes and nod their heads in bewilderment. The rest of them cry all day. When I lie down at night, I hear their screams. I wake up at 4:10 a.m. so that I can cram in two hours of Ashtanga yoga before my one-hour commute and 9-hour day with these newfound darlings.

February: To prevent the horrible skin that comes with sleep withdrawal, I begin to rub coconut oil into my face and body before showering at night. All night I scratch myself unknowingly. My boss asks if I have a cat and if that cat is digging holes up my forearms. My face becomes horrid and blotchy and the Boatman suggests that I might be allergic to coconut oil. School closes several times due to snow and I find this to be delightful.

Also, I am permanently infected with tiny people germs. My chronic symptoms range from a sore throat, repeated sneezing, endless snot, nausea, headache, loss of appetite, and a decisive sense of mediocrity which permeates through all the cells of my body.

March:  I develop adamant views regarding potty training. I decide that all the world’s problems stem from the fact that children are allowed to shit their pants up until the traumatic age of two when they are suddenly given the responsibility of eliminating their waste at appropriate times in appropriate places. I am prepared to devote my life to this, but the Boatman points out that this would require that I make my own child which is a terrifying idea.

April: I start sleeping in until 4:30, but the cumulative lack of sleep has already led to my clinical insanity.  I cry constantly. The ecstasy of snow days is over. The people on the bus smell like stale crushed mildewed garlic. During my break one day, I meditate outside in the playground and the police come by, suspicious. In another blog, I post The Little Savage and the Hermit, the epistolary novel I wrote with my ex-boyfriend, with the hope that it will be an enormous success and deliver me from my miserable existence.  (I take this down before it has a chance to go viral. In 2014, or 2015. I can’t remember.)

May: The clinical insanity continues. I leave the house in a tearful frenzy and fall asleep crying about the birthday parties I didn’t get invited to when I was twelve. My body resurrects its previously latent weird neurological twitches.  At unpredictable intervals, my shoulders shrug involuntarily and my esophagus contracts as through I am going to puke. Sometimes I gasp out of nowhere, like I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car and a tractor trailer was driving straight towards me.

I put my menstrual blood online in a blogpost that despite its extensive preparation, does not go viral.

On May 29, exactly three years since I broke my arm in 2010, my knee swells up on the way to work. I figure I should probably ease up on my 4:30 a.m. ritual of aggressive cranking.



The Blood



 June: I get a good physiotherapist for my knee and start all the way over with Ashtanga. This allows me to get significantly more sleep. I become less obnoxious almost immediately. I read Choose Yourself by James Altucher and my oxtocin levels increase almost immediately.



Me reading Choose Yourself and radiating Oxytocin

Me reading Choose Yourself and radiating Oxytocin

July:  I go to two appointments with an expensive psychologist and then fire him. My bosses only make me work for one week at summer camp. After that I go on E.I. and head east for three and a half weeks. While on E.I., I apply for a bunch of jobs at car dealerships, referring them to this excellent blogpost about 3 ways to make the world a better place. Nobody gets back to me

August: In Ontario and Montreal, I ruminate over what the fuck I should do with my life. There is a Part One and Part Two. I figure that if I want to try and make money writing, I’m going to have to branch out and write about something other than myself. Regardless, I continue to write excessively about myself. I submit a couple of posts to Elephant Journal, who has a new program to pay writers, and am rejected three times.

After almost a month away, I miss the Boatman and the Big Black Dog immensely. I am reminded of how much I love them, and that I kind of like being home in Halifax.



Me and the Boatman. Nothing like true love.



Our Darling Big Black Dog Friend

September: I start a new contract at the Montessori School, giving myself the option of fucking off to India if necessary. But when I get there, I realize that I’m happy to see everyone again. And then my bosses offer me something magical. A seven-hour day. Every afternoon at 3:30, as I head for the bus, the children run to the fence and call out, “Good-bye, Erica.” They’re cuter this year, even the ones who cry all the time.

In much sadder news, Eliot, the Big Black Dog suddenly got old over the summer. One by one, his legs go out on him. We make the heartbreaking decision to put him down on September 27, 2013. His last few weeks and his last moments are some of the saddest memories I have. I miss him every day and still kind of expect him to greet me when I get home and come eat the corn chips I drop on the floor.



Eliot gazes at the sea at dusk. His Obituary

October: I become obsessed with death, and enter somewhat of a creative drought. Over Thanksgiving, I lose my voice in Cape Breton. Perhaps this is symbolic. I turn twenty-eight. I miss Eliot.

November: I go to Halifax BookCamp and meet some obscure and compelling literary people. Also, I learn about Dinosaur Porn. I do not write a novel in 30 days.  I consider writing some catchy, bestselling erotica, but don’t get very far on it.



Dino-porn, an interesting discovery



December: One Friday, I take the school’s compost home from work on the bus. I envision a beautiful chakra Christmas card production, and it is a moderate success.  For three weeks, the children practice four songs for the Christmas concert. The teachers end up singing by themselves. At a fancy dinner at the Bicycle Thief, I ask the Boatman’s father if I can attend his hip surgery. The answer turns out to be no.

The End.

Happy New Year, Love the Exuberant Bodhisattva

@mypelvicfloor

Facebook Adventures
I Let Go, by Erica J. Schmidt

What the fuck should I do with my life? (Part One)

27 years + 1 human gestational period plus a couple of days ago, I was born. An enormous baby. 10 pounds and a couple of ounces. They cut me out of my tiny mother's tiny tummy. My feet were pointed towards her vagina. It's not the normal way people are supposed to be born. For years, I was terrified of going upside down.

Now I call out to my mother during sex.

My mother seems to get tinier every time I see her. She is 5 ft 3 and seems half the size of me. I am consistently baffled that I ever made it out of her vagina. Then I remember that I didn’t make it out. She got cut open. I tower over her, and feel twice as wide as she is, despite everyone's assurance that I am not an enormous person. Has my mother always been so tiny? Is she shrinking?

The children I work with, they call out for their mothers when they're sad or when they're scared. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. "I need Mommy," one of them says.

One day, a new child arrived. He called out for both of his parents at once. "Mommy-Daddy-Mommy-Daddy." It was all one word. All day, he called out one big long never-ending word." All the other kids started to call for both of their parents at a time too.

"Mommy-Daddy-Mommy-Daddy..."

During sex, I started saying it too.

"Mommy-Daddy-Mommy-Daddy."

Probably the Boatman is a saint.

The first time I mentioned my mother during sex, he was licking my vagina. Usually this feels very good. The Boatman adores licking pussy. He learned how from an early girlfriend who found out she was a lesbian. I think that learning from a lesbian is a good strategy. Also, the Boatman played the saxophone during middle school.
Anyways, he was down there, and it felt pretty good, but I could feel the tears coming. Tears happened all the time. This time was different though, because the tears came with an embarrassing thought.

I miss my Mom.

The Boatman says that during sex I can yell and scream and cry and say whatever I want.

Once I asked my mother if she'd ever had an orgasm. I shouldn't have asked her, but I was having trouble in that regard, and I was curious. Was it genetic? Had she experienced an Orgasm?

"Oh yah," she replied. "But it wasn't very good."

I think that's a really clear answer.

Every time I visit my mother, my sex life is destroyed for weeks afterwards.

Last spring I went to Ontario for five or six days. The Boatman and I loved and missed each other. All the stories in our heads made our love feel so beautiful and perfect. When the visit was over, the Boatman picked me up at the Halifax airport. He picked me up at the airport at 11 o’clock at night. We were back in the freshness and the air and the inspiration. Back in the love.

The first night we were too tired for sex. That was one of our excuses. The other excuse was that I could still feel my mother there with me. My tiny cut open mother.

On the next night, I had trouble concentrating. I couldn’t feel anything, as though my vagina was turned off, or dead. “Relax,” I said to myself. “Just relax. See what happens.”

The Boatman started fucking me a little harder. He was on top.

“Mommy, Mommy,” I called out a couple times. He kept fucking.

“She hates me,” I said suddenly. My words were loud and clear and decisive.

The Boatman stopped and looked at me. “You okay, babe?”

“Yes.” He kept going.

“I hate her,” I said a little later. 

The next day we fucked on the couch. Same thing with not being able to feel anything or concentrate. We tried a couple different positions. The Boatman came and afterwards I put my crotch on his thigh and humped him.

“She’s dead,” I said, a couple minutes into it. We both laughed. There was nothing left to worry about.

We kept fucking almost every day.  I started feeling my vagina again. It started to feel different. My whole vagina started changing, expanding. Then one evening, I was humping the Boatman's leg and Mommy came back.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” I called out. I paused and looked right at the Boatman who had his arms wrapped around me.

“She's orange,” I said.

The Boatman laughed.

I am lucky he likes to have sex with me even though I say weird things.

I say some things during sex, and some things during sleep.

A couple weeks ago, the Boatman lay next to me in bed. I had already been sleeping for over an hour. I rolled over, my eyes closed.

“Mommy-daddy-mommy-daddy,” I murmured. “It is hard for Mommy to be born. Very hard.”

The Boatman laughed and spooned me.

Now my mother and I are visiting again and nobody has had sex for a very long time.

It is too hard.

Very hard.

The End.

There was a picture of my tiny mother, and tiny sister, and me.

Nobody was orange, or dead. But I decided to take it out.

This post was inspired by/adapted from a section in Volume Two of The Little Savage and the Hermit. Volume One used to be online but then I took it down. The Hermit used to be alive, but now he's dead.

Pondicherry, January, 2016

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Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

What the fuck should I do with my life? Part Two
Not Separate From All That Is
Cardboard Box