SPA DAY & SOBA NOODLES
Getting quiet in Japantown
I spent the morning wrapped in gold foil letting seaweed sink into my skin.
While I lay there I thought about the exercise about getting over an unhealthy attachment I learned from Instagram. It involves first picturing the person in front of you giving you all the things you want from them and then feeling what that feels like to get those things. Then you imagine them leaving and notice all the feelings you have when they leave. I was surprised how easily it is to materialize heartbreak. Finally you summon a caring presence and you comfort the part of you that’s having those feelings of abandonment. It took me about two minutes to go through the exercise in my mind and it totally worked. When I revisited the person in my mind they had lost their power to bring about that good feeling completely. It was not the case a few hours later when I tried again. Different feelings came up like longing and shame. Those were harder to be present with.
I know I’m not the only one who has been feeling lonely. New research suggests that small everyday interactions are just as or possibly more important to well-being as long term ones. In the dressing room a woman who was struggling with the spa’s Dyson hair dryer asked me if I knew how to turn it on. We pushed a few switches and then I clicked the reset button on the outlet which seems to always require pushing in my bathroom at home. It worked. She thanked me and we exchanged our love for the hairdryer and how we often debate with ourselves whether it would be worth it to buy it.
“Is it $200 or $300?” she asked.
“I think it is more,” I said.
“Oh no that’s too expensive,” she replied. “I’ll just keep going over to my daughter’s house and use hers.”
I told her I wasn’t sure I needed it because actually I like my hair curly and she told me about how sleeping in curlers means she wakes up with curls and even though it’s hard to sleep that way she’s gotten used to it. I asked whether she wanted to use the attachment that makes the hair smooth (she didn’t) and realized I’d never tried the diffuser. A little Ikea tray of products by the mirrors were filled with Aveda products including hair serums, creams, gels—some specifically for curls. I got busy with all of them.
I was introduced to the wonders of a dressing room by my friend Jen who would take me to the gym with her guest pass and spend at least ¼ of the time just showering and doing her hair and putting on lotion. Being with other women getting ready is such an otherwise unfamiliar ritual. I remember being with my friend at her wedding and loving the energy of the room where she got on her gown. The bachelorette party is something that I (and she) avoided at all costs but I loved this process of preparing yourself and the bride in a dedicated space.
I want to live in that space you made for me: I said to that unhealthy attachment, in my mind and I pictured it like a womb from which I would be reborn.
I left the spa with a handful of face masks to use between appointments. Across the street was the Kabuki Hotel which has a really special lobby with exposed beams and I ducked in there for some free coffee. Outside there was a celebration of Japan town (50 years) that was getting started. People dressed in dragon pants and regular tops were getting ready to pull the large frame of the multi-person puppet over their heads for the parade. I’ve been longing for quiet (always) but these days honoring my need for it more and more. I am a reluctant introvert who also loves people.
I have my eye on a bar for tonight after O’s bedtime: a place that’s talked about as being so small you have to press yourselves against others to make a space for yourself. Ever since I became a mom I made some time for myself to be in public by myself. I once said to that unhealthy attachment that I loved to go to a bar by myself and people watch and this is something they did not understand. The practice has fallen completely off my list. Even two years postpartum I hadn’t lost the part of me that liked to both look at others and be looked at myself. Eight years in that part has turned into a mere sliver, a crescent moon that is ever waning.
I did not get to eat at the soba noodle place because I was SURPRISE! not the only one that saw the hole in the wall new otherwise unpublished handmade soba noodle spot on Instagram. I drove by wondering what it was I was after over there anyway.
When I worked in Torrance I ate homemade soba noodles and tempura noodles at least once a week. The small shop was next to the soft serve place all of which was in a small residential neighborhood near to the ocean. I had gotten the position by asking a poet on LinkedIn how he managed to get a job at an ad agency and then keep it. He got fired shortly after I started. For a while I was happy there, filling out the columns of competitive audits of websites that sold cars, staying far away from meetings, buying myself new clothes, staying late in the office that was as beautiful as it was oversized for what the company needed. Everything in a container whether it be right sized or not. Just being housed somewhere, of filling something in, of coming and going in a predictable manner, of being mostly unknown– those things had made sense to me then. They never could do the job now.