Time warp

Last night, I went to the '70s, or a version of it in which everyone speaks Serbian.

There was a workshop in my office last night at 6. I didn't know it was going to happen until 5pm when someone told me. I decided to attend, even though I had no idea of the topic. The leader is a woman that I like.

The whole thing felt like a second-wave feminist consciousness raising. The kind of things I've only read about because they seem so hokey to our modern western sensibilities. We started by going around the circle to introduce ourselves and say if there is any part of our body that we could love more. The leader was very deliberate in pointing out that 'loving more' is not the same as 'wanting it to look better' & challenged everyone who said things like "I wish I had a smaller stomach" with "but do you love your stomach now?"

That accomplished, we moved on to talking about emotions. We were given a worksheet on which we had to plot our level of happiness, joy, friendship love, humor, etc. The second half of the worksheet asked us about the source of emotions - do we make ourselves happy or depend on others?, etc. We then formed pairs and discussed what we wrote. I ended up talking about Nirvana and Pearl Jam (which is much preferrable to the SuperSonics as a response when I say I'm from Seattle).

The moral of that exercise: we cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we react. (I learned how to say 'free will' in Serbian.)

We concluded the workshop by listening to people talk about bad experiences from their childhood. I couldn't figure out the message from that activity.

My main lesson of the evening is that I shouldn't drink hot wine before sitting in a hot room listening to people speak a language I only partially understand. I nearly fell asleep - which would have been horrible. I'm sure everyone noticed my struggle to keep my eyes open as they discussed the traumatic childhoods - classy.