I am not a morning person. Have I said that before? It’s an important fact of my life. 11am is really too early. I prefer to sleep until noon or 1 because I don’t usually go to bed until 4am but these days I’m usually up at 11. I like being awake at night; it is quiet and no one bothers me which means I can get a lot of work done. And this schedule works for me—normally. My classes don’t start till 2pm. But sometimes I have to do things with the rest of the world and then it’s a problem. Last Saturday I had to attend an all-day leadership training at my church that began at 9am. First of all, scheduling anything at 9am on a Saturday is flat out rude. Honestly. Second, scheduling something all day on a Saturday is also rude. Saturday is everyone’s I-don’t-have-to-do-shit-today day and that is sacred and should not be tampered with. But I digress.
Since I don’t have a car and am dependent on the T and my own two feet for transportation, getting to my church takes over an hour. Which means if I need to be there by 9, I need to leave at 7:45, which means I have to get up at 7:30. (Yes. Fifteen minutes is enough time for me to put clothes on and brush my teeth. It’s not rocket science.) But as I might have mentioned before, any hour before 9am is really more like a hypothesis than a fact and I have serious trouble recognizing it as a legitimate reality. So when Saturday came around and my phone started playing a lively Romanian pop song at 7:30am, as I myself had programmed it to do, I was extremely upset and confused. I don’t understand why this is happening. What day is it? What time is it? I rolled over and clumsily checked the time on my phone. JESUS! It’s 7:30?! What’s happening today?! Am I getting married? Knighted? Did I win a fracking Nobel Prize? Why in god’s name would I get up this early? Oh . . . leadership training. God, who wants to be a leader? Snooze. Snore. Knowing myself as well as I do, I had actually set three alarms. Unfortunately, I outsmarted my attempts to outsmart myself by simply turning off the other alarms.
Listen. I cannot be held responsible for anything I do under the influence of sleep deprivation. The farther away from 11am it gets the less rational and the more delirious I will be. 7:30 is no man or woman’s land—it’s an equal opportunity wilderness. 7:30 is Cinco-de-Mayo-drunk-can’t-remember-my-name-or-how-many-shots-this-is land. 7:30 is accidently-took-those-doses-of-codine-too-close-together-slipping-into-a-coma land. Okay? Luckily, I’m extremely self-aware so I outsmarted my outsmarting my outsmarting myself by asking my roommate to call me and wake me up before she left for her breakfast date. She actually called me twice, God bless her. She called at 8:30 and I told her in a sleep-drunken slur that I was going late and hung up. She called me again at 9:15. At that point, I was at least cognizant enough to know I really needed to get up and get going. So I got up and stumbled around the apartment for a few minutes . . . got dressed . . . I think I ate a donut but I really can’t remember. I decided to call a taxi because that would only take twenty minutes as opposed to an hour and a half and I was already late. So around 9:40 I stumbled down the steps of my apartment and drearily crawled into a cab and muttered—“270 Bridge Avenue.” I had to repeat it three times before he understood me. God! It takes so much energy to talk in the morning.
I sat in the back staring into space and clearing the lingering morning phlegm out of my throat. Several minutes passed before I realized the driver was talking to me.
“Huh?” I inquired, rubbing sleep out of my eyes. He was in the middle of a sentence.
“. . . every day. You don’t need no doctor.”
“What?” He repeated himself and said something about a doctor and cold water but I was having trouble focusing and I missed it again. “Sorry . . . what’s that?”
“I hear you cough. I tell you—you take cold shower everyday, you say adios to doctor. You never get sick.” It might have been the suggestion that cold showers could ward off illness indefinitely or the sound of “adios” being pronounced with a thick Russian accent but something told me I needed to be fully awake for this. I snap to pretty quick when I sense something weird or funny is about to happen. So my middle-aged Russian taxi driver with bizarre medical advice was way better than a pot of coffee.
“So you take a cold shower every day?”
“Yes. Cold shower every day. I never get sick.”
“That’s crazy maybe I should try it.”
He went on to explain to me how he came to know about this preemptive home remedy. When he was a boy in Russia he overheard a man asking his friend’s father why he never got sick. The friend's father told the man that he took a cold shower every day and that was why he never got sick. So this man went home and took a cold shower. “Next day,” my driver paused for dramatic effect, “he go to hospital.” What?! Uh . . . you’re losin’ me Sasha.
“He went to the hospital?”
“Yes. Because he don’t go gradual.” Obviously. “You got to go gradual or you get sick. First day: hot. Next day: less warm. Then next day: little less warm. Then: cool. Then, you go cold. You don’t need no doctor. But you got to go gradual.”
“Ah. I see. Makes sense.” About that time there was a young man in a light jacket and scarf walking near the cab and Sasha decided to make an example of him.
“You see that man?” I nodded. “He need more clothes. I don’t need. I have just this jacket all winter,” he pointed to the thin jacket he was wearing. “I don’t get cold you know you take cold shower every day it don’t matter you go outside with no shirt you okay. You don’t get sick.”
“That’s pretty amazing.” I had stopped trying to hide my grin just as Sasha spotted another young man with no shirt jogging near our cab. He was probably twenty-something and as buff as an Abercrombie model.
“You see that guy?”
“Yeah.” Oh, I’m trakin’ Sasha.
“I run like that guy. No. I run better than that guy. I run like horse. I forty-five. You know my doctor say I have body of twenty-five year old. I run like horse.”
“Oh, really?” THIS IS AWESOME!
“Yeah. You take cold shower. You take hot shower. Then: three to five minutes in the cold water. Every day. You don’t get sick.”
“Oh, so you take a hot shower first and then switch?”
“Yes. But you got to go gradual . . .”
“Right.”
“ . . . or you go to hospital.”
“Got it.” The best thing about my cabbie comrade was that I didn’t even have to egg him on. Completely unbidden he proceeded to layout some pretty complex arguments in defense of the daily cold shower.
“You know people get sick when the weather change and the temperature change because the pressure and they body get sick. You change temperature every day you don’t get bothered.” I thought that was convincing enough but he wasn’t done. “You know it’s like the metal. It’s like the sword. In the ancient times, when they make the sword, it go in the really hot and then in the really cold and it make the metal you know you can’t break it.” Smelting? “Your body is a sword.” I should smelt myself? “You take cold shower every day you body get strong.” Yes, he’s saying I should smelt my body. Okay. I’ll take that under advisement.
“I see. That’s true.” He was already making his next point.
“You know in the world of your body the bacteria they get comfortable. They happy. They grow. And you in hot shower all the time they happy in the world of your body. But you change temperature. You go cold. They don’t like they got to go. You take cold shower they can’t live in the world of your body. They got to go. They don’t like it.” Damn your impeccable logic, Sasha!
“Huh. I never thought of that.”
“You know—genius thing so simple.” I almost died. He pointed out the window, “You see the wheels on the car. You know before they don’t have wheel. They try to push square thing. It don’t go. It don’t move easy. Then. They push round thing. It go easy. They got the wheel. Genius thing so simple.” That’s probably exactly how it happened.
Sadly by that time our ride was coming to an end. I paid him and promised to try taking a cold shower every day to keep myself healthy through the winter.
“You got to go gradual.”
“Right. Gradual. Thanks!”
I laughed so hard later with my friends when I told them about my educational taxi ride—complete with a pretty convincing Russian accent. A few days later my roommate was chopping onions in the kitchen and complaining because they made her cry.
“Here!” I said. “You have to put the onion root on your head. If you do that you won’t cry.” She looked at me like I was insane. “No, it’s true. I used to cry all the time when I cut onions but I learned this trick from an old Mexican woman. It works I swear to God. I do it all the time and I never cry anymore. And! It works for everyone I know who’s tried it.” This is all actually true by the way. You should try it. I know. I was a skeptic too. So is everyone until they do it. It will change your whole relationship with onions. I swear. Anyway, my roommate looks at me and says in her best Russian accent—
“Yeah. You take cold shower every day you don't need no doctor.”
Make sure to wear elastic around your head to ward off headaches, too.
ReplyDeleteThat's dumb. And we know that because you tried. But seriously, have you tried putting an onion root on your head before chopping? It works.
ReplyDelete