Wearing a toga draped over a bikini, eating borscht

That’s the position I found myself in yesterday afternoon. Yesterday I did two of my favorite things: sweat in the bathhouse, eat Ethiopian food. I add these to a list I made back in September, which included and still includes the following:
1. dreaming
2. laughing
3. being surprised (along the whole +/- spectrum)
4. being naked with my boyfriend
5. shifting into alternate consciousness while writing

Because seven is an unfinished basement, I add these to make a solid top ten favorite things:
8. sorting & organizing (which sometimes include messing things up first)
9. exploring a new town
10. making mix tapes/CDs/etc. for people I care about.

Anyway, yesterday my boyfriend and I celebrated three eventful years together in Manhattan at the Russian and Turkish baths, after which we dined finely an Ethiopian restaurant new to both of us. The state of meditative calm induced by the bathhouse for me is unparalleled. If the bathhouse were closer to where I live I’d go once a week. Perhaps it’s good it isn’t; i.e. Grandma’s rolls stopped tasting so good when she started making them every week and not only at holidays. After a couple of hours of sweating we went upstairs for food. The vegetable soup was gone, so I ordered borscht. I’d never had borscht. When I lived in Iowa City I made beet soup, not borscht exactly, after reading Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume. Because nobody was interested in eating the magenta sludge, I ate it every day for a week, sometimes twice a day. My hands were magenta for two days after I had cut up the beets. What a great food. It stains magenta.

At the bathhouse I observed the following:
1. A young Asian fellow wearing a speedo which was colored pale blue and white blurring together like clouds in the sky.
2. Lots of crack, as in ass crack showing out the top of bikini bottoms and shorts.
3. A fellow perhaps a little younger than me who looked instantly familiar, though I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him before. We shared palpable recognition each time one of us walked into a space where the other one was. Many times he looked at me, and a few times at my boyfriend, with searching recognition. Conclusion: he is somebody I ought to know, or he is a heads-up for someone I will meet, or he is a reconfiguration of somebody I already know and his purpose is to remind me of something important about this person.
4. A guy I saw last time, who in the Russian room kindly poured a bucket of icy water on a bench so I could sit down without burning my ass cheeks.
5. The scent of eucalyptus that continues to call attention to itself in my nose today.

The bathhouse isn’t co-ed until 2pm on Sundays, just men earlier in the day. We arrived at 1:30. As we drove by I noticed that across the street from the bathhouse, on 10th Street between 1st Ave and Avenue A, was a little shop called Obscura, which I’d been to over a year ago—two years? This was before I knew anything about the bathhouse. I missed it when I went to the bathhouse for the first and only time previously. In case you didn’t catch my account of that first time, go here. Inside Obscura one will find skeletons, pre-20th century photos, heavy prosthetic limbs, old dolls, and the like. Cool place.

When we left the bathhouse we went to Ghenet, about a mile away, and tongue-fondled the ambrosiac vegetarian sampler for two along with a bottle of Cabernet Savignon. A good day it was. And then we slept like bears.

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In other news, orange-faced people wearing suits weird me out. I’m not talking about oompah-loompahs. There is one of these who occasionally strides up and down the hallway outside my office.