Comfort Words

I walk into Shannon's studio, after having e-mailed her and checked her schedule, "Hey, you're Shannon, right? I'm Mona- I sent you an e-mail, but I though I would come by.."

And the corners of her mouth pull down as she grieves, "We're closing!".

"I'm so sorry," I say. We talk about it for a little bit, brainstorm ideas for a dance space/studio she could rent. Then she says, I'm exhausted. I've been teaching since 7 AM- can I comp you a class for tomorrow?
Sure, I say.

I head over to the 9 PM and catch Tamara's Baptiste-style hot vinyasa at 38th st. Afterwards, we chat, and she asks me some question to which I might have given a slightly snippy answers- snippy, not snappy, so not mean, just brief. Intuitively, "I don't want to talk about how things are because I am unemployed and I feel desperate and rejected and I think that's negative/ a complaint, I wouldn't want to meet you that way". So I snip.

Tamara must be awful clever because she picks up on, and so we talk about finding yoga work in the city.

And it's hard, she says. It's really, really hard, and it takes a long time, but it will happen. She went through me step by step her own experience and I couldn't be more grateful. It is so nice to actually hear the nitty gritty reality of fuck, having to look for work in the city. In the midst of a recession like this one, it's amazing how much 'looking for work' is a topic that people rarely talk about. How amazing is that?