It’s the only appointment I need to go quickly, and it’s the only one that runs late.

The general practitioner runs — at most — fifteen minutes behind.  Last month, I was taken early for my mammogram.  I was out of the radiology department before my scheduled appointment time even began.

But the OB/GYN is always running a half hour behind.  An hour behind.  This week, two hours behind.

I sat down in the waiting room and noted, as always, that I am the only woman without a pregnant belly.  I am surrounded by women rubbing the soccer balls tenting their maternity shirts.  Five pregnant bellies, four bored men, and me.  And two toddlers climbing on and off the disappearing laps of the pregnant women.  A children’s show playing from an iPad.  A floor covered in dried Cheerios.  A television set playing medical infomercials near the ceiling: “Are you having trouble getting pregnant?  Are you over 35?  Talk to your doctor about your fertility.”

A half hour past when my appointment was set to begin, the nurse informed me that it would be another hour and a half.  Did I want to reschedule?

Reschedule?  So I could sit in the waiting room again with a new set of pregnant bellies and infomercials?  I had already been there for 45 minutes having shown up 15 minutes early for my appointment.  I asked them to get me in with anyone.  There are many doctors in the practice.  Surely someone could do my annual exam.

An hour later, they squeezed my appointment into a different doctor’s schedule.  They called me back.  She entered the room and spent three minutes servicing my internal organs.  She exited the room, and I cried while getting dressed.

I got to check the appointment off the list for another year.

Someone needs to create an gynecological practice for the infertile.  No obstetricians on staff — you’ll need to go elsewhere for pregnancies — and perhaps still with toddlers and Cheerios in the waiting room.  But a quiet practice where you will never have to listen to medical infomercials while you wait or sit in a sea of pregnant bellies.  Where the doctor will enter the room knowing that this is the appointment you dread more than the dentist, that you put off until last minute or even later.  She’ll walk in the room, let you know that she understands how hard it can be to be lying with your legs in the stirrups.  Maybe she’ll hand you a box of Kleenex.

You’ll never walk up to the desk to inquire why your appointment is running so late and be told that you need to be patient because the doctor needs to see all the pregnant women ahead of you.  The nurse won’t purse her lips while she says, “pregnant women” and give you a look that says, “how dare you insinuate that you should be taken at your appointment time when there are pregnant women here!”

I will give up my seat to pregnant women on the Metro.

I will give up my parking space.

I will let them go ahead of me in line at the grocery store, remembering how uncomfortable it can be to stand for long periods of time.

But I don’t think it’s asking too much to get to keep my appointment time.  Especially when I am wishing so hard every time I visit that office that it will go quickly and my doctor always runs so late.

Do you know what is fun?  Talking about books.  Do you know what could help me out tremendously?  Talking about mine.  (If you’ve ever wanted to give me a gift, this would be what I want.)

Lavender Luz is hosting a book tour for my newest book, Apart at the Seams (thank you!).  Sign up goes until August 1st, and the posts will go up September 4th.  See, lots of time to read the book and join along.  All you need to do right now is click over and fill out Lori’s online form to let her know you’re participating.

Pretty please?  With sprinkles on top?

If you can’t participate, but still want to do something, consider spreading word with a blog post, Goodreads review, Amazon review, or getting an enormous Arianna tattoo across your lower back.  Really, you won’t regret having her face plastered across your skin for eternity.  I am considering getting two of them — one for each knee cap.

On a serious note, an enormous thank you in advance to everyone who is helping spread word.

I am!  I am smart enough to get into a New York kindergarten.  Hello, Horace Mann: I’d like to introduce you to your newest kindergartener.  Me!  Me!  I’m going to kindy!

I scored 5 out of 5 on the kindergarten assessment.

Click the screenshot to take the quiz:

Will you be my kindergarten classmate?  I’m warning you ahead of time: I am a paste-eater.

Every morning, I spend a straight half hour with my thoughts. I’m aware that I’m supposed to be clearing my mind while I’m on the yoga mat. The nice woman on the screen* tells me to clear my mind; empty it. Just concentrate on my breathing. That is very hard to do. I am a thinky sort of person. I like thinking. Telling me to clear my mind is like telling me to eat non-vegetarian food. It’s not as if I can’t, per se. But I don’t eat animals so I would likely vomit if I tried to eat meat… or not think…

I would have a brain vomit.

I’ve stopped fighting my brain’s tendency to run through thoughts, and I’ve instead embraced my yoga time as a thinking time.  I know that makes me a bad yogi.  I mean, the whole point of yoga is to train your body so you can spend long periods of time meditating.  The fact that I can’t even clear my mind while I do yoga doesn’t bode well.

In the same way that I go through various physical poses during yoga, I alter between types of thinking based on where I am in the routine.  During the opening stretches, I’m usually thinking about my current life: things I must do, things worrying me, things that will happen that day.  It’s like a little warm-up routine for my brain.  I mean, yes, it stretches my mind a little to wrap itself around all my fears so early in the morning, but it’s a good stretch; that yummy sort of pain as the brain goes into a pose that feels completely familiar.

In the middle of the routine, when we’re doing things like “camel,” I’m thinking through whatever scene I’m writing in the moment.  I’m mentally playing around with characters and trying out bits of conversation.  And finally, when the routine switches to the stillness of gasp-inducing stretches such as “folded pigeon,” I move into daydreaming.  Which is like nightdreaming.  Except I’m awake.  Or I take someone else’s characters and act out a little piece of mental fan fiction.

So a half hour of thinkiness.

Josh told me about an article over the weekend that found that people would rather administer electrical shocks to themselves than sit alone with their thoughts.  One of the authors of the study is Daniel Gilbert who wrote Stumbling on Happiness.  i09 reported on the study, and I love this quote: “But what is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.”

Granted, I am doing something when I am thinking through yoga, but I also sit and do inverted meditation — that’s what I call when I sit still and instead of emptying my mind, I fill my mind — several times every day.  Like just sitting on the sofa and staring at the cushion and thinking.  I don’t think I’d opt for the shock.  I mean, I really don’t like shocks.  I really do like thinking.

Even when I’m thinking about things I don’t like to think about.

Because I don’t look at thinking as doing nothing.  I mean, thinking is thinking.  It’s something.  Nothingness would be real meditation: getting to a state of not thinking and not doing.  That would probably drive me mad.  But thinking; that’s productive.  Even unproductive thought (like circling the same fear for the third time) feels productive.

Do you mind being alone with your thoughts?  Would you always opt to do something rather than nothing?

* An unrelated side note: I love the Yoga Studio app even more now with the new update because I can upload my yoga music to play underneath the woman’s breathy voice. This app has changed my life.

Perhaps it’s because the signs belong to a religious institution, but I always think that G-d speaks to me via church signs since burning bushes release dangerous levels of carbon dioxide.  I assume G-d wasn’t thinking about the potential greenhouse gases that would be released into the atmosphere when he spoke to Moses, causing global warming.  But now he’s given it some thought and realized that church signs are much more environmentally-friendly way to communicate with individuals.

Anyway, I read church signs as I pass, and while the vast majority don’t seem applicable to my life, and they must be meant for someone else…

“Use sonscreen to prevent sinburn.”

…this one spoke to me.

It wasn’t really on the Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church.  It was on a church that I pass on the way to my parent’s house.  But that church is on an inconvenient curve in the road, and I wasn’t about to pull into the parking lot just to take a photo.  So I made that on a church sign generator.  Which, I know, feels like cheating.  But the point is the message.  Isn’t that a smart message?

“Tough times never last, but tough people do.”

As I drove I thought, “I could be a tough person.”  I mean, I’m not a particularly tough person now, but I could make a point to become one since it is true that — if personal history is correct — tough times don’t last.  I could keep that in mind and pace myself.  I could choose toughness.

I came home and recited it to Josh, who finished saying it aloud with me after the comma.

“Oh!” I said.  “You saw the same sign?”

“No, Melissa, that is just a familiar cliche.”

“I found it helpful.  It gave me a new perspective on life.”

I felt defensive about my church sign.

I decided to Google the saying and discovered it was a popular platitude, attributed to Robert H. Schuller.  Who was Robert H. Schuller, I wondered.  He was a televangelist who ran a program called the Hour of Power.

Oh.

My first thought was the lyrics to Frank Zappa’s “Bobby Brown Goes Down.”  Didn’t he say he could last an hour… power…  So then I needed to Google that song, which actually is a Tower of Power and not an Hour of Power.  (“I can take about an hour on the tower of power / As long as I get a little golden shower”)

And that reminded me of a harrowing drive I made between Milan and Venice in the backseat of a friend’s car as he drove over 100 mph, and I had to translate and explain an entire cassette of Frank Zappa songs for him. (“But, Melissa, what is a golden shower?”)  I was gritting my teeth, my entire body tense as his tiny car rattled over the highway, thinking, “dear G-d, dear G-d, let me get to Venice in one piece.”  And that didn’t last, you know.  That tough car ride had an end point when we arrived at a long-term parking lot so we could take a boat the rest of the way into the city.

See, I was tough.

Which brings me back full circle to the fact that sometimes you get the church sign you need.