Taking it easy, hardcore

I'm taking my relaxation seriously. Today I started with an hour-long qi gong class, three hours of yoga, and then an hour of acupuncture which stretched into 90 minutes when I fell asleep on the table and the therapist didn't have the heart to wake me. I was snoring, he said. Well. Thanks, acupuncturist. I needed it.

My brain is tangling with the complex but pleasant puzzle of how to stay perfectly nourished and perfectly relaxed over the next six months, whilst travelling in Asia and Europe. I'm not actually going anywhere I haven't been before, unless you count a new city or two in countries I already know pretty well, so I have it pretty much mapped out in my mind. I'm always a pretty relaxed traveller, so really it's my normal routine with a lot more first-class tickets and massages thrown in. It's a write-off . . . and anyways, this is probably my last chance to travel first-class for awhile . . . soon I'll have children, which means I'll be poor. That's how it works, right? Anyways, when you book this far ahead, the price difference between coach class and business class is about 20 bucks.

Today's yoga class was a scream. I was really out of place there, like by asking what simple exercises I could do on a series of eight long-haul flights over the next month while everybody else had questions about the utility of homeopathy and raspberry leaf tea, but that was fine. Everybody else was white but had names like Indra. What was interesting in that context was that at the conversation bit toward the end, when people started sharing their snuff flicks birthing stories, was even these absolute hippie types had no problem reaching straight for the pain killers and C-sections as soon as they started feeling it was necessary.  Nobody had managed shit without nitrous, which was encouraging.

I guess I've been inculcated with the idea that I really have to do everything naturally or else I'm somehow a failure as a woman, and I've had to come to deal with the fact that there's a fairly high chance for me in particular that things are not going to happen naturally in the least, if I want Ren and I to live, anyways. That's made me sad, or testy, or something, but the more fucking horror stories birthing stories I hear, the more it's coming home to me that childbirth really has been to women what war has been to men in martial societies - something that just happens, and back in the day you couldn't go into it confidently expecting to survive, unless you were a bloody fool.

But Ren and I happen to be happening now, when childbirth just isn't as awful as it used to be for people of our income bracket and nationality, just as war isn't as awful as it used to be for all those guys flying around other people's countries and dropping bombs on them without getting too close. But I'll probably still make a good and thriving baby, and you won't find too many aerial campaigns that have made a good and thriving war. So. I guess my point is, if I have one, that thank fuck things are as they are.