Unticipation.

I'm sure anyone who moves to another country has moments of "I HATE THIS EFFING PLACE I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT!!!" That was pretty much my afternoon.
A very very nice and magnanimous friend of Edmund's from work found out that I had been looking for a place to take yoga classes, and invited me to go with her to bikram yoga at her regular studio, appropriately named Bikram Yoga. Bikram yoga is a type of yoga you practice in a heated room, so apparently you're sweating your bollocks off (that's an Edmund expression. Don't Google it.) and hopefully getting some benefit out of it. I've never tried bikram before and I'm a little apprehensive; I have only practiced yoga in sweet air-conditioned rooms with old women, kindergarten teachers, and pansies. I'm picturing this bikram place as a semi-military operation taught by a former All-Ireland dodgeball (or possibly softball) coach, where the practitioners all ate celery sticks dipped in protein for lunch and if you're lily-livered enough to ask for a mat to put on the floor, which is made of sauna rocks, you'll get a roll of toilet paper and a kick in the arse. And if you need water I suggest you lick your own sweat, you big fat baby. Pantywaist. Namby-pamby. Big girl's blouse.

So I spent the whole day looking forward to having somewhere to go and preparing for the rigorous workout ahead. I freshened my yoga pants in the dryer with a sheet of Bounce, drank a glass of water every fifteen minutes, stretched, and Google mapped the studio six or seven times until...it was time. I felt like Rocky. With my little gym bag and water bottle, driving MYSELF across a town that, when mapped, looks less like a grid and more like a plate of spaghetti. YESSS. I left an hour early to give myself time to find it, park, sign in, and get in the zone. I would be like an Indian guru. Better--PUNCTUAL.

But alas. Getting there reminded me of that Mitch Hedburg joke about making a "complicated payment" rather than an "easy payment": "The mailman will get shot to death, the envelope will not seal, and the stamp will be in the wrong denomination. Good luck, fucker." In this case, Dublin happened. None of the streets were labeled, what Google Maps showed to be a long continuous road dead ended into a wall twice, and when I got to the complex where the studio was, I couldn't get in the gate. So the thing I had been awaiting eagerly all day didn't happen.

I'll admit it: I drove home in tears. It takes a while to get used to new things. I am, at 27, an old dog. I already resist change and eat All-Bran and glare at teenagers. I know I came here at the perfect time in my life, that this move happened exactly as if was meant to in God's grand scheme, but standing outside a gate with a water bottle in your hand, knowing you belong IN THERE and you just can't figure out how to do it is an incredibly frustrating end to a long day of anticipation.

I will say, though, that when you have gotten to the point where the sight of a street sign is a real treat, then there's not much you want for in life, is there?