The other night I came home to a noise emanating from either inside of our apartment walls or the apartment above us. It sounded like the middle part of a Venn diagram showing the overlap of rusty pipes, angry ghosts/bees/ghost-bees, and oversized appliances. If our apartment was a face, the alcove where the washer and dryer sit would be the mouth, and last night it would have been screaming.
This was an especially unwelcome development because it was paired with the semi-regular, fully terrible chemical smell that sometimes comes up from the nail salon below us. They moved in in January and opened in February, and before they had their full ventilation system working my room was uninhabitable unless I kept the window open at all times. Now the toxic stench only makes its appearance (what is the word when it’s not actually appearing, but scent-ing? I know! It makes its a-scent to the second floor) every few weeks, but lately I’ve been waking up with a headache that returns in the evenings.
And the best thing for a headache, of course, is industrial-strength wailing within your walls.
I thought of this today in yoga because, somewhat unexpectedly, the teacher started to play the didgeridoo while we were in sivasana, and the sound was very similar, albeit more pleasant.
I once tried to learn circular breathing at the music camp where I worked. In the end, I was able to complete one circular breath at a time, and then had to stop. That is, I could do more than someone who couldn’t do it at all, but not enough to really claim I could circular breathe. It was like being able to juggle…but only with two objects. Kind of like the real thing, but not really crossing the threshold.
