I woke up with that just-missed-yoga dread, that i-need-coffee-but feeling, that should i shower or should i shouldn’t thing that keeps you in bed for an hour wondering if this is how depressed people feel and then you practice saying, I am miserable, i am miserable in your head and your wrist starts to hurt with your face on your cheek and you wonder if you’ll ever go to yoga again and you’ll look at the clock and want to die because you have just spent an hour in bed practicing saying, “I am miserable, I am miserable, I am miserable,” just to see if you were (you sort of were).

You are old enough to know that you should just get out of bed and go get coffee and read a book and then go for a walk and then write something and then you will better. Or there is always the lying in bed with a coffee headache chanting I am miserable I am miserable I am miserable. That is also sort of fun.

My roommate came out and said she was going to yoga in Brooklyn Heights and maybe I’d like to go. I said yes and then things turned around and I said I was going to drop off laundry, which is a new bourgeois thing I do now, the horror of walking two blocks with a mesh laundry bag is also a new thing that has not yet worn off. I walked past brunch restaurants with people eating brunch with people who loved them, none of whom were wearing yoga pants that were too tight on their ass nowadays. Maybe some of them were practicing chanting, I am miserable I am miserable I am miserable but when I walked by with my ugly blue mesh bag of laundry— a bag I tried to buy with a credit card at the dollar store, a bag I didn’t realize was only a dollar until the woman said, No, no, mami, and laughed at me— when I walked by with this bag that I paid for with quarters, I imagined, the way I always do, that every man who has had sex with me and never called me back was sitting at a table near the window with some woman he wants to marry and laughing because I am wearing ill-fitting yoga pants and he (the collective he) can see my underwear through the mesh in my ugly blue laundry bag.

I would like to imagine myself a very self-assured human being, self-possessed is my new favorite aspirational adjective of empowerment, but imagining all the people who have rejected me in one way or another  to be sitting in restaurant windows laughing at me— the prosecution rests, your honor. That’s what they’ll say at the trial of my personality. She has been known, your honor, to cross to the side of the street with fewer brunch-like establishments when carrying that curious blue mesh bag your honor.

My spine may actually be perforating at this very moment, in the interest of Satan and his ability to more quickly pick me out of a lineup— he wants to see all of my dirty underwear straight through my upper lumbar.

Anyway I got coffee and sat at a table with my phone, which was dying already, before noon, and Kelsey and I met at the bus stop and she had on the wrong leggings so she ran home and grabbed the right ones before the next bus even came— no small victories here, people— and the bus was packed and I moved over to let on an old, fat, handicapped woman who instead of using her own tactile abilities or her voice/brain/mouth, waved her hand wildly over the bus ticket hole spastically to signal the bus driver to stick her card in. He did and I had to move to make room for her and then he made a big show of OPENING AND CLOSING THE DOOR ON ME to get me to move. WHAT IS GOING ON I yelled but he kept cruelly slamming the door into me, smooshing me behind it honest to god literally hurting me and I was laughing and saying OW! and still he did. He must have gotten a lot of satisfaction out of that and I don’t blame him but damn!

So we went to this new yoga place and it was filled with hateful girls just like us, our age, all anxious as shit trying to get their mats in a good place. You try to tell a room full of 25 year old girls to move their mats closer to each other to make room and see what happens. They will make a face as if you just asked them if they liked the new Vampire Weekend album and then they will move their mats one millimeter and I will stand there holding my mat about to scream, just standing there over them waiting for someone to be a decent human being while they readjust their navajo blankets. These girls would sooner have you do yoga out in the hallway via Livestream than move their mats one inch closer to their neighbor.

So finally the teacher stepped in and everyone had to bregrudgingly move their mats more than the width of one human hair and so I got to put my mat front and center, half folded up to make room for the harmonium, which can we be candid for a minute? IS THE DUMBEST THING IN THE WORLD. I’m sorry Lindsay I am sure it is cool when you do it, or when I am not being hateful, but at that moment, when I was sitting right in front of it, chanting words in Sanskrit that had not yet been explained to me, it seemed like the funniest, most ridiculous thing that could be happening in the world. For those ofyou that don’t know, a harmonium is a baby piano with an accordion attached to it that is huge and kind of awesome and hilarious and they sit on the ground and you play it like Linus and also move the accordion part around, slither it around the ground like a very fat snake while you chant words you don’t explain to people and everyone sits with their eyes closed because either they are enlightened or they do not want to acknowledge the fact that a 25 year old white girl is playing a HARMONIUM.

Harmoniums aside, yoga was amazing and I was terrible at it, because instead of going to yoga lately I have been sitting in bed mourning my mesh laundry bag. Yoga is utterly the worst when you go back after slacking off because you twist around so much you can actually feel that there is MORE OF YOUR BODY than there was a few months ago. Like, oh, there is actually MORE SELF than there used to be. I EXIST MORE. And not in a good way. Although I cannot objectively comment on whether or not this is a Good Look, it is not a good feel, mostly because it is harder to bind your arms around your body when there is more body but not more arms. IT’S JUST SCIENCE PEOPLE, KEEP UP.

Anyway after yoga Kelsey and I walked around the neighborhood and I realize it was old bourgy because there was a Montessori School next to Book Court and I felt the pangs of wanting to be older instantly. I only feel this in Park Slope or standing in front of Book Court. Then we got tacos and beer and talked about college and my parents’ divorce and it felt wonderful to sit in the window drinking Corona Light in the middle of the day and not feel bad about it.

After this I went to my old neighborhood to get my hair dyed. This was very stressful, imagining a new group of people to be behind every window, still in yoga clothes and purple shoes.

Getting my hair dyed in one of the worst human experiences because I always hate staring at myself in the mirror with someone watching me. I am afraid my Looking in the Mirror Face will escape and I am afraid she will feel bad if I re-part my hair and she realizes she parted it on the wrong side. But I had to face these horrors and let her very tragically put my hair in tinfoil strand by strand (which is coincidentally the title of Annie Lamott’s next book) while I, the spoiled white bitch, read a book and did not say one word to her the entire time, except at the beginning when she stiltedly asked me if I lived in the neighborhood and said that I didn’t, that I had just moved from it. She nodded silently and said my neighborhood seemed nice and I said, WHat about you?” in that awkward, compulsory way and she said, “Yep. I live around here.” THAT SUCKS MY NEIGHBORHOOD’S BETTER is probably something i could have said but instead I said, Ah. yeah. Nice.” and then didn’t say another word until she asked me I wanted water (yes I did).

When it was all ready she led me to the sink-chair land and I quietly, obediently stared at the ceiling and she began to laugh with glee.

“It takes so long to do it and 30 seconds to take out.”

“Yeah. Ha.”

“I always laugh at that. I put in all the highlights so meticulously and it takes so long and then I just pull them out so recklessly. It’s wild, ya know?”

I tried to think of things I did in my life like that but decided not to follow that thought.  I was glad she addressed how long she spends putting the foil in. It had felt like the silent tragedy of the whole affair. I couldn’t relate. I thought maybe putting meetup kits together was a little bit like this, but not even. She put toner in my hair and it smelled like nail polish remover. I thought it must be very chemically similar to nail polish remover, which was disconcerting to say the least. She apologized that it was so cold and I kept my eyes closed, imagining a small stream of nail polish remover dripping into my right eye, blinding me for my vanity in some heavy-handed symbolic gesture. I wanted to say, it isn’t because it’s cold, woman, it’s because you are pouring the contents of an entire bottle of nail polish remover over my head and blinding me in the process.”

She cut my bangs even though I did not want a haircut because apparently no mere mortal can resist cutting another person’s bangs when given the opportunity. I am convinced that when hairdressers see my face they see no other option than to further destroy it, to put inches between my eyebrows and my hairline in an act of violence. I supposed this was my price to pay for having the face of a small, overweight child on the eve of her first communion.

I walked through my old neighborhood hiding from old boyfriends who were no doubt sitting in all of the windows laughing at my short bangs vindictively.

By the time I got home I realized I had forgotten my keys that morning and my phone was dead. I began to hatch out a plan, considered which restaurants were more likely to have an iphone charger, and walked to my apartment just in time for one of our neighbors to be coming in at the same time. I walked up and my roommate was still home and we had a glass of wine and showed each other our new scarves and smoked cigarettes and I went to pick up my laundry and was astounded to find that the Laundry Guy remembered which bag of laundry was mine. I saw it in all of its atrocity on the top shelf and could see at least three pairs of underwear all the way across the room. No wonder this old man remembered all of our various mesh duffel bags, he probably stuck his face in all of them, memorizing our period stains and varying degrees of body odor.

He handed me my bag and called me sweetheart, just like the yoga teacher had. Twice in one day felt funny.

“Oh!” he said. “We found two keys in the bag.” They were tied with a twisty-tie to the string that held the bag closed. My office keys. I walked with them home, still tied to the hideous white string. They looked neat and adorable, like a bow on a package. No one looked at me through the windows on the walk home, I’m quite sure of it. The problem with these keys, though, is that one is good and one is not. One works and one gets stuck in the office door at midnight for three hours and leaves you feeling alone and inept.

I will not be the one to stick them in a lock to see which is which. There are limits to the things I will do by myself.

I hope no one from work reads this because I am going to ask one of you to do it!!