Day 4: Hace dos días

What I saw:

1. 4 really cute students in the corner of the cafe before school starts
2. boy on steps cruising me 'cause we're wearing similar penguin hoodies
3. my whiteboard a mess with new vocabulary
4. 2 Elluminate screens while training a teacher
5. implant specialist putting xray film in my mouth
6. puddles of my sweat on each side of gym treadmill — interval training
7. cards on floor of Spanish class
8. full(ish) moon over London Eye, lit up blue
9. late night omelet in a frying pan
10. my new bf Andy Dwyer on P&R as I crash on sofa

7. Cards of the floor of Spanish class

Lupe has multi-colored sets of cards, all with sentences. She explains we have to put them in order. Each one has a sentence, and when the task is over we'll have a story. My partner and I get the yellow set. It will be a race.

Lupe asks if we want to work at our escritorios or en el suelo. Without answering, I'm out of my chair and on the nasty, industrial carpeted suelo. My classmates follow suit. I'm so exhausted from the intervals I did before class (speedwork kills) that I just want to lie down. Even if it's on a classroom floor that has years of shoe shit trampled into it.  It feels hard, coarse and just a little itchy.  It could in fact be the most inviting sleeping surface I've ever been prostrate upon. If I had a blanket, I'd be sound asleep, like a toddler in a pram being pushed down a crowded city street. I envy their ability to sleep anywhere; or perhaps just the fact their yummy mummies pump them full of Benadryl before going out on a shopping spree.

As best I can tell, the story is about a trip to a safari park and a woman feeds her apples to an elephant, who then gets his trunk stuck in her car window.  Drama ensues. Lucy and Ethel go to the safari park.

I don't recognize many of the words, but can suss out enough key phrases to figure out the order of the story. While my partner wastes time looking up words in the dictionary (it's a race, remember?) I drag the cards across the carpet into some semblance of order.  Classmates' whispers of English and Spanish translations breeze through the recycled air. Lupe walks above us, in sandals instead of her usual white go-go boots (she's fab), answering ¿como se dice? questions.

The cute Ibiza boy, who you may remember from a previous Spanish post, is on the floor next to me. He's working with his friend, my namesake, who's not only a member of the team, but could very well be a team captain.  Yup, Spanish class is pretty much a gay bar.

We finish ahead of the other teams. Lupe checks our answers, we made no mistakes, and I want to fall into a celebratory, ¿como se dice coma?.

Day 3: Hace dos días

What I saw:

1. towel draped over side of bathtub
2. people on line outside coffee truck
3. traffic on Old Street
4. new students, some very cute, registering in lobby
5. my class waiting for me in room 409
6. oooo backpack on floor of glass cube
7. my clothes hanging on door of shower room at gym
8. my iPod plugged into the gym's stereo
9. Upper Street full of post-work commuters
10. dinner dishes in the sink

8. My iPod at the Gym

I start my warm-up on the treadmill and trainer John asks me how I'm feeling. The speed reads 11 which is fast for a warm-up. I say I had a cranky weekend for no real reason and he pushes the speed button up to 12. The whir of the machine at my feet slap against the canvas.

He says music helps when he's like that. I say I've been looking for new tunes and a man in jeans and a dress shirt walks in front of the treadmill, heading to the physio office. John speeds up the pace and my stride follows suit.

"I want to hear a Bob playlist," he says, and when the warm-up is over he sends me for my iPod. "DJ Bob is in the house," he announces as he plugs it it.  I'm sure the red-shirted trainer boys have better things to listen to and won't like it.  My "long run" playlist.

"It's eclectic," I say, hoping the first song on shuffle won't be too homocentric.

We go to the chin up bar and a disco re-mix, keeping the homo in homocentric, comes on. A remix of Will Young's first song. Evergreen. It was a ballad when he won Pop Idol (or X Factor, or whatever it was called back then) with it. Trainer John is singing along, his hands just above my waist as he gives me an assist to finish the set.  He knows the words. N is coaching his client through a series of walking lunges. Better him than me.

We move to the bench for reverse pull ups. Super sets with press ups ('cause I'm in the UK, remember, and they're not push ups here). In between sets, W (who I had a a trainer affair with while John was on holiday), blows me a kiss while he checks his phone between clients. These are the gayest group of straight boys I've ever met. The banter and camaraderie always makes the hard work more enjoyable. They all seem to genuinely love their work. It creates an amazing energy. And fit lads flirting with you never hurts.  "I miss you," W silently says from across the room. John says 10 more seconds rest. Time to get back under the bar and pull.  Back days are hard for me.

Another set and N is now tapping his foot to Born To Run — not a re-mix,  told you it was eclectic — while he checks the form of his client's plank. 

It's strange to hear my music on the loud speakers. I never listen to this mix unless I'm running. What is usually just in my head is now the whole gym's soundtrack.

Fast forward to end of session. It was a tough but excellent work out. I get more than my money's worth here. I'm showered and changed and head to the stereo. John's with his next client, putting him through warm-up paces on the treadmill. "See you Thursday, Big Bob," he yells across the gym.

I turn down The Killers mid-song, and unplug the pod.

"Booooo," yells N.

W chimes in with another "Booo" and soon a half dozen red-shirted trainers (all who knew my name by the end of my 2nd session) are boooing me, and some of the clients as well.

"You've changed, Bob," N says. "You used to be such a nice guy.  And now you take away our music?"

"Did you want me to leave my phone here till Thursday?"  I pull the top CD off the stack next to the stereo. It's a compilation of Christmas songs. Random. I hold it up. "Shall I put on a little Christmas?"

W re-racks the kettleball he'd been making his client swing. "It can't be Christmas if you're leaving," he tells me and gives me a wink goodbye.

Day 2 - Hace dos días

What I saw

1. Text on phone about lunch
2. White jeans at Aubun Wills
3. oooo Brick Lane vegetable market
4. Cheap household junk at other BL stalls
5. Brunch table at Owl & Pussycat
6. ooo Rebekah making post-brunch at Nelson's
7. Getting lost during the run
8. Seeing John the masseur finshing up my run
9. Word with Friends notifications on iPhone
10. Laptop screen with documents I didn't finish this weekend

5. Brunch table at the Owl and the Pussycat

The boys didn't want to sit upstairs we ordered at the bar and tried to decide on a table. Most of the chairs are stools and don't have backs. We sit by the door, but they decide to move to a bigger table that has benches.  I opt for the more comfortable thrift-store chair at the head of the table, professing it has a better view instead of saying I wanted to sit comfortably. 

The back patio is empty. Service didn't start till noon, so the place is still quiet as the wall clock reads 12:10. And that's probably bar time. Better than the 10:30 start the boys asked for last night. Who has Sunday brunch at 10:30am?

A woman sits at the table next to us, drinking a Bloody Mary and reading a paper while waiting for her foodl.  Our table is big -- distressed wood and could easily sit six, so there's plenty of room. The manager, perhaps even cuter than he was last visit, has cranked up the sound and starts dancing to "Brown Sugar" despite having told me he's shattered from last night and starting a double. He assures me the vegetable roast (egplant -- sorry, it's aubergine in these parts --, carrots and sweet potato in strudel) will be amazing. When the food arrives, I will find he did not steer me wrong.

The speaker is directly above our table, which means brunch will be louder than I expected. It's never this loud upstairs.

The patio fills while we're eating, as does the pub. My iPhone goes off, telling me a bloke I know who moved back north has just checked in on F'book to a pub with the same name as the one we're in. A few minutes later, he walks by and looks surprised to see me.  I'm not the one who moved.

"It's trendier here than I remember," he says.

I joke "that's 'cuase I'm here" and he says that might have something to do with it.

Day 1 - hace dos días

Ha, you thought this would be Spanish-free, didn't you. ;-)

What I saw:

1. My clothes on the floor next to the bed.
2. A pile of papers and books on the coffee table.
3. Cream swirling into my coffee.
4. Larry lying on the sofa.
5. A stack of newspapers under his feet.
6. The cat lying on the back of the sofa, above Larry's head.
7. Cyclist in my way as I ran.
8. A bowl of crips at G's.
9. A table set for four.
10. A white black cab stopping to take us home.

#8: A Bowl of Crisps at G's

Potato chips, 'crisps' because I'm in England now, beckon to me. They sit on the end table in G's living room. I haven't been there since camping out last December after the fire at ours. J is on the sofa, next to Larry. G is in the kitchen, apologizing that dinner is going to be late. His iPod in in the Bose player on the bookshelf to my left.

I want the crisps, but they're not on my reducing plan. Neither is the red wine I'm drinking. We'll call this a cheat evening rather than a cheat day — and I did run seven miles today, faster than I had planned.

I have pistachios instead. They are delicious and I'm thankful they're not cashews, because I'd be downing them by the handful. Larry and J are talking about the insurance market (J's job) and I want more wine. The shell dish (brown ceramic, just like the two next to it that harbor nuts and crisps) is filling up while the pistachios slowly disappear inside my gut.

G moves my wine glass to a coaster, saying, "Sorry to be an old woman about that."

"Not at all, it's your house," I say, instead of telling him it's stemware and therefore won't leave a mark. You don't need coasters with wine glasses.

He changes the music to something I've never heard before, but would be happy to play on a rainy afternoon at home. Which, being England, never happens. An indy band that sounds like something you'd slit your wrists to. "Is it too dour?" G asks.

"No, I like suicide dinner music," I say.  The potato chips' siren call is too tempting and I start to slide down the slippery slope of having just the one. Mmm. Salt and crispy fat.  So much for the reducing plan.

Round 2 — What I'll (not) do

Well, my intention was "I'm going to do one new thing every day for the next 30 days."

Then I started thinking, while it might be an amazing task, I'm not sure how feasible it is, especially since I've already got a lot on my plate. So I'm going with Plan B (and I'll try to incorporate something new into my days, which will help out with said Plan B).

There's an exercise that I've done before from a book called Page by Page by Heather Sellers. In the book, she says if you do it ten days in a row, "your life will change." I've always* wanted to follow through with it. So here's what I'm gonna do for 30 days.

Page by Page, Exercise 13 (page 60)

• Number a page from 1-10
• Set a timer for 3 minutes
• Make a list of ten things you saw two days ago, starting from the morning and ending with the night. Keep your hand moving. If you get stuck, draw slow circles. You want to end up at exactly number ten at the end of three minutes. Don't write a novel at each item, just a few anchoring words to capture the image.
• Three minutes, one list.
• Look over your list. Let one item pick you, or if nothing leaps out, do number three. Number three is magic and it always works.
• Set the timer for ten minutes. 
• Write the item number and the words at the top of a fresh sheet.
• Some rules: You must keep your pencil moving. You must write slowly, all caps, skipping lines. Write in simple clear sentences. Don't try to be too fancy. Avoid adjectives and adverbs. Just write in nouns and verbs, very simply, very slowly. 
• For ten minutes. Write what you see. Write what you hear.

Apparently it's all about creating ritual. And forcing yourself to just write what you remember (and I reckon that after a few days I'll subconsciously be looking for new images/details to try to remember for two days later).   And, as busy as I know I'm going to be, if I can't find make 15 minutes a day to just sit down and do something for myself, then things be needing to change.

I'll type them up and share them, maybe not every day, but there will be thirty lists and thirty sets of observations.

What are you doing?

* Okay, you caught me. "Always" is a bit of an overstatement. I bought the book 4 or 5 years ago, and I've wanted to do it since then.