Chinatown, My Chinatown

I'm back after a lovely weekend playing hostess to my dear AF (henceforth to be known as Ruth, her given name), traipsing around Chinatown and the East Village with her buying a lot of cheap crap I don't really need, but was too cute to resist. The piece de resistance was a $3 figurine of two Chinese people having sex, procured in a little tchotchke shop on Mulberry Street. Why? 'Cause. In my defense, I picked one of the more discreet ones--a man and a woman having conventional intercourse sitting up. If you look at it quickly, it probably wouldn't register that they're fucking, but once you do a double take, it's pretty clear what they're up to. I may have to go back and buy some of the more Too Hot For TV ones because, dude, they're figurines of people having sex! Anyway, the copulators are now residing on my night table, next to the Feng Shui kitties I picked up the last time Ruth was in town. They haven't yet complained.

While Ruth attended a two-day workshop with a world-famous acupuncturist (apparently, he's world-famous among acupuncturists, and no one else), I went to a yoga for weight loss workshop with a fellow named Brandt Bhanu Passalacqua at Integral Yoga on Sunday afternoon. Bhanu, as he's known in the yoga world, lost a hundred pounds in a year practicing a very gentle form of hatha yoga and modifying his diet to gradually include wholesome, organic foods (and eventually, no meat, but he doesn't soapbox). Awesome is not too strong a word here. Basically, everything we know to be true about weight loss is wrong. Carbs are not "bad," and you are not going to guarantee a safe, permanent weight loss by putting yourself through boot camp, unless that's your thing, because the number one cause of weight gain is stress. So, what do you do? Breathe a lot! Do gentle hatha poses without straining! Eat good, wholesome food six times a day! Buy his book! (Of course I did. Do you think I'm going to pass up a chance to lose weight without depriving myself?) The workshop ended with Bhanu passing out some of the yummiest dark chocolate I've ever tasted. We took deep breaths while we were eating it, which essentially forced us to savor what was in our mouths. Oh, what a relief to know I can still lose weight and give my poor creaky knees a break. (Christ, I probably sound like a fucking "Cathy" comic, don't I?)

I met up with Ruth after our respective workshops ended, and followed her around while she sought out the perfect jade roller for her face (it's an acupressure thing). Then we had to go into a few Chinese pharmacies. Then tchotchke shops. Then another Chinese pharmacy, and then the store where I bought the Chinese-people-fucking figurine and Ruth perused a box of three-for-a-dollar jade medallions for, like, a half hour. As exact and perfect opposites (Ruth is an Aries; I'm a Libra), this is one area that causes some friction between us. I go into a store, and if I don't see something I like for a reasonable price, I leave. Ruth browses and browses and browses and frankly, I don't know how she can stand for that long. But for some reason, the same behavior that would drive me into a spitting rage with a whole host of other people makes me like Ruth all the more. Not that I don't whine and roll my eyes at her and step out about fifty times for a cigarette when she's looking for the perfect aquatic woodcut for her office. We have our schtick, but it works well.

The evening concluded with the two of us watching the vomitatory "The Girls Next Door" on E!, a show I would not watch by myself unless I were being paid a substantial fee, but watching the TV-deprived Ruth watching Hef's girls cavort around and generally behave like thirty-year-old adolescents was all the entertainment I needed.

I'm now trying to get Ruth to go to India with me, but she's pretty much under contract to go to China at some point, and she can't afford to do both. Oh well, we have five years. Hey, didn't Stalin say something about that...?

Speaking of, if you're in Chinatown, pick me up a Chairman Mao watch. I'd get one myself but 1)broke and 2)birthday in less than a month. Thanks!