A reader pointedly asked if I wasn’t being a bit too harsh on the women who attended the Grammys (last entry) and asked me what I would be wearing if I were ever invited to attend the ceremony.
Well, as I have been blessed with the musical aptitude of, say, a sea slug, the chances of my ever being invited to the Grammys are in the "slim to none" category, and I hadn’t given it much thought. I’ll admit that he/she had a point. On the other hand, I do know that even if I had a body that others thought deserved a public flash, I still wouldn’t dress the way a lot of the women did. I’ll admit I referred to them as "whores" because they dressed like whores. Am I accusing them of actual prostitution? No, probably not.
I’d use the male attendees as an example: the vast majority of them appeared on camera looking quite suave, sophisticated, attractive and stylish, and managed to do it without exposing themselves in public. The women would have done well to pay attention to what the men were doing, that’s all I’m saying. The men looked cool, a lot of the women looked like trailer park tramps who never learned how to dress themselves properly.
Take one Sunday this month, for instance: a bright, cheerful, pleasant sunny day. I decided to treat myself to breakfast. Toodled off cheerfully at about 9:30 in the morning. My big mistake: I completely forgot which Sunday it was. By the time I found somewhere to eat where the lines of preening, narcissistic women were LESS than two hours long, I was beside myself, and in a ravenous rage from hunger. I actually returned home at 1:15 pm from an attempt at a 9:30 a.m. breakfast. Yes, I made the fatal mistake of venturing out of doors on [insert orchestral notes reflecting the onset of doom and disaster] … MOTHER’S DAY. After two hours of driving all over the Andovers, Tewksbury, Middleton and god knows where else, looking for somewhere to eat, I ended up at the Lawrence Denny’s. Big mistake … Lawrence, Massachusetts being Ground Zero of "THE PLACE WHERE FEMALES CAN’T DRESS THEMSELVES PROPERLY".
In fact, the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts would probably do the entire world a favor if it were to hold mandatory "Dress Code" instructions for the female residents – since apparently, none of them have even the limited intelligence to understand the concept, given the clothes (if you can call their non-existent covering "clothes") they slithered into to pay homage to themselves. Most of their choices were so disgusting I lost my appetite.
Miles of visible cottage cheese cellulite, dimpled 2 inches thick, crammed into spandex like pork sausage, fat thighs rubbing together so hard they squeaked. More toothless mothers with their sagging breasts hanging out of tank tops. After this vision, another "mother" waddled in wearing the world’s shortest skirt sans underwear, with the underside of her sagging bare rump visible when she bent over, so I guarantee you she left a host of crabs all over the seats in the Lawrence Denny’s. (This was a 50-year old woman, so trust me, half the restaurant turned away to loudly retch when she waddled in). Why Denny’s didn’t enforce even a minimal dress code and order her to leave I have no idea.
Happy Mother’s Day, Lawrence, Massachusetts. You'll be pleased to know you have something in common with the Grammy's. Both stuffed with nauseatingly under-dressed women who need to be far more covered up than they are. I'm still shuddering.
But to continue: finally! After 4 months of misery, a doctor figured out what was wrong, and while it’s too unladylike to discuss in a public journal, I will say that he fixed the problem I was having – and that was darn near killing me - and I’m now back at work.
By "a doctor" I do NOT mean a distinguished member of the Mass General Hospital Medical Staff, who nearly sent me off for surgery which I apparently didn’t need - I mean a surprisingly quick-witted nobody associated with Haverhill and Lawrence hospitals, neither of which rank high with the U.S. News & World Report best hospital rankings, or even in my own personal opinion, for that matter.
He did one test and that was it. I’ll need another test in 6 months to make sure nothing has reappeared where it shouldn’t, but finally, I feel somewhat semi-normal again. Primary Care Physician read the test results and said, "You’re lucky he caught this when he did, or I’d be treating you for cancer." Gee. Thanks again, Mass General …
My future soul mate wll be delighted to learn that all of the potential tooth/teeth problems I could have had after we met are being rectified BEFORE his arrival. No sooner had the post surgical digestive issues been somewhat cleared up than the teeth on the right side of my head started throbbing painfully. Of COURSE they did. Sky Sadist forfend I should have one moment's comfort and peace to devote to the "Search for My Soulmate" project.
Turns out I'd been grinding my teeth so hard during the night that I actually cracked one of them. Emergency root canal. $500 crown and crown lengthening procedure (apparently I have a small mouth which is news to anyone who knows me, since all of them told me I had a big mouth). In the middle of that nightmare, I lost my debit card - AGAIN. My sense of balance was still not good, and I wiped out on the sidewalk - HARD - three times. Cat started projectile vomiting, but I had to put off trips to the car repair shop and to the vet to pay for this ridiculously expensive tooth procedure, not covered by Delta Dental, so what exactly are they good for? I can clean my own teeth, thank you. I needed their help with the major stuff. Love to know what the annual salary of the Delta Dental CEO is. I'll bet it's astronomical, the money they steal from people.
My e-mail account was compromised and all of my friends and acqaintances dropped me notes asking if I was SURE I wanted them to visit the "Old and Ugly Skanky Women Dressed like Catholic Schoogirls" website. (Uh -- no, to anyone who asks - I do not). Caused me so much aggravation I started an "Instant Death Penalty to Hackers" petition - and I wasn't kidding. I ended up on the IP blacklist.
But on a brighter note, it’s Spring, and the best food you want to finally hold down permanently is beginning to arrive: asparagus spears, watermelon, fresh tomatoes … there will soon be fresh produce stands between here and Ipswich and Rowley to buy fresh vegetables right out of the ground and fresh fruit right out of the trees and bushes … any day now the county fairs will start popping up again in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine … after which the fall harvest vegetables are available … ahhh, corn-on-the-cob …
I personally think we ought to toss Columbus Day out the nearest window and replace it with "The Great Corn Festival", where we all get down on our hands and knees and thank the natives for this heavenly vegetable which originated in Central/South America somewhere as "maize" and developed into one of the most perfect foods in the world. We can make cornhusk dolls to stick pins into … and get three weeks off of work to simply consume vast amounts of corn-on-the-cob! Teach children to sing the "Corn Maiden" song, which I learned in camp one year and still remember, although (trust me!) no one wants me to sing aloud.
The "kneesocks of fire" have diminished slightly to "nerdy kneesocks of fire" (those kneesocks that slide down a girl’s legs until they’ve said farewell to her knee and are now halfway down her calf). I still can't feel my feet, although every once in a while a lightning bolt hits my toes and I squint and moan and hope the intense screaming pain goes away before I start crying in public and it usually does. So here’s hoping that as my spine continues to fuse, the pain in my legs and feet will start to fade away again.
I will admit that when you’ve been out on medical leave having a messed up spine fused and flat on your back (or puking your lungs out) for close to 6 months, the first weeks back are exhausting. Finally I decided to set myself a goal:
Plan A: to be able to walk from the "T" to the Brighton Music Hall on July 12th, and then back again in time to make the final commuter rail train home. Right now I can only walk maybe 100 yards before feeling weak, cranky and whiny. Now why, you ask, would I want to walk from the "T" station to the Brighton Music Hall?
A month or so ago, I discovered that the composers of my recently discovered all-time favorite lullaby were performing in the Brighton Musical Hall. It wasn’t until the tickets had been ordered that I thought to look up the Hall on a map to see where it actually was, and immediately said, "Uh-oh." Visions of Plan B: me splatting out on the pavement and crawling pitifully down a Boston street whimpering, "A wheelchair, a wheelchair, my kingdom for a wheelchair…" danced in my head. Would I make it? Would I collapse? Will I make it to witness a live performance of my all-time favorite lullaby by the classically trained, musicians who composed it?
Okay, I lied. Only one of them was classically trained (Interlochen) - I don't know about the others.
Few bands are worth crawling down a Boston pavement for, and if I can't get my walking stamina up, neither will this one. Not to mention that I'd suddenly had the bright idea to look up one of their live concerts on You-Tube. I had originally perceived tham as fairly laid back musicians. On You-Tube I suddenly heard a heck of a lot of wild screaming. Nothing goes through your head faster and more painfully than a woman screaming like an air raid siren. True, the band is made up mostly of professional actors (all locatable on the Internet Movie Database): Jerad Anderson, Ben Johnson, Ben Graupner, Jackson Rathbone and "Uncle Larry". While it's possible all of the girlish screaming originates from a profound love of movies in general (pause for everyone to raise their eyebrows sardonically), I'm suspecting they may be a victim of the "Twihard" groupies syndrome: Rathbone plays Jasper on the series. He also played Sokka on "The Last Airbender", but I can't see Airbender fams screaming their lungs out.
Which brings us back to the favorite laid back "lullaby" (started out as freebie downloadable from their website and is now one of their most requested songs) - so catchy that you can whistle the tune under your breath the next time your boss or your neighbor - or just about anyone - ticks you off and feel much better almost immediately.
In case you were wondering, this is the band "100 Monkeys", videotaped here by someone who appears to only have the hots for two out of five band members. Ben Graupner is on the left doing his Joker impression, including the scariest smile on the planet and that’s Jackson Rathbone on the right. And then, when your idiot boss suddenly has a PMS attack and starts acting like a demented harrigan, you can quietly whistle this tune under your breath and feel better immediately. And as for crawling down the street to the Music Hall, while I enjoy their music, all of that screaming may keep me away, no matter how my legs feel.
But back to Jackson Rathbone and my search for a soulmate. No, please don't get any silly ideas. I use him as an example of how easily one can confuse the physical attractiveness of a potential soulmate with the personality and thoughts of someone who's just plain wrong for you, and you'll see why. Besides, he's just shy of thirty, but looks much – oh very much – younger, and in fact, rumor has it he recently did a pilot for a TV series where he supposedly plays a high school student, and could probably pass for one – shades of Johnny Depp in his early TV days methinks - which is why I said I only wanted someone who didn't think like him. Anything more than that and I’d be sliding so deeply into cougar territory I’d need a slab of raw meat and a leash.
Or I'd be Hilary Swank, who interrupted one of his MTV interviews to suck on his neck.
Now, I have no problem with Jackson Rathbone as eye candy. Au contraire. Guy is sexy as the day is long, but the problem is, he’d kill me in less than a week, as evidenced by this interview he had with someone named "Gabrielle":
Gabrielle: What are qualities do you look for in women?
Jackson: I look for a woman with a sincere smile and a love of the arts. I love being able to go out on crazy dates, like breaking into zoos after hours, so a woman who has a sense of adventure... but I also love a calm night of jamming on a beach at midnight with a bonfire, whiskey, and friends... so a woman who can hang in any situation and not get too clingy if I'm playing some music and spending time with my friends and family.
Um ... breaking into zoos after hours? This is one man who definitely needs to be sat down in front of a television and shown the old SNL skit where practically the entire male cast threw themselves into a polar bear den and were last seen spouting geysers of blood all over each other and the audience. Yeah – as clutzy as I am and he thinks the two of us breaking into a zoo after hours (read: pitch dark) when I’m half-blind in the darkness is a good idea? Hmm.
Another idea he had in another interview was taking his date out for a lobster dinner, so I’m guessing I’m not BREAKING into the zoo; I’m being chased into the zoo by a hot-water crazed lobster, waving large pincers at me, taking large chunks out of my ankles, and THEN I take the header into the polar bear den and die a gruesome and bloody death.
And we won’t even speculate on my combining whiskey with a large and dangerous bonfire.
So, future soul mate ... take note of this charming man and go the opposite direction with your "first date plans". No zoos after dark, no bonfire-whiskey combinations, no being chased by enraged lobsters. And bring with you a schedule of "Corn Festivals" we can visit, and you're all set.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Day #16 Following the Instructions on Manifesting Your Soul Mate
While I guzzled a few gallons of water to flush the barium out of my system, I spent yet another Valentine’s Day reading the encouraging comment after the last SSD entry from a fellow perpetually klutzy reader from New York City (yay! New York City!! I’m officially homesick!) who, like me, manages to trip over pencils. He or she recommended burning the scraps of negative thoughts about love in a big metal mixing bowl, which I do happen to have. I first needed to do a few loads of dishes to clear out the kitchen sink area, lest the anticipated towering inferno get out of hand. Not to mention that I first needed to scribble my negative thoughts about love onto little scraps of paper.
Meanwhile, I decided to start re-reading The Divine Matrix (Gregg Braden), and then The Gnostic Gospels (Elaine Pagels), primarily because both of them had broached the subject of the “Mind of the Universe”, but from different angles. Kathryn Alice approaches it from a specific, “Put your call for a soul mate into the Universal Web and you will generate one.” Braden and Pagels approached it from a broader and more historical perspective, which I found more useful.
Something Kathryn Alice had never taken into account: for some people, the very act of focused meditation is a near impossibility. For me, it’s something like a mental block. As soon as I so much as hear the word “meditation”, I start yawning uncontrollably. I remember trying to utter the chants “ohm” and “namo guan shi yin pusa” a few times, and couldn’t even get those out without yawning hopelessly. I can see that I need to address this yawning issue before almost anything else. In fact, I started yawning by merely typing the word, “meditation”!
It is this Divine Matrix that I personally think of when I hear the word “creationism”, and is the primary reason why I don’t have a problem with it. If Americans would include the teachings of the Gnostic gospels, of Sufism, Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American creation stories, the Rig Veda, Max Planck, quantum physics (to name only a few) in a “creationism” curricula, I could live with it. But most Americans are so narrow-minded their idea of “creationism” is exclusively the judeo-christian Genesis myth and nothing else, so these same people would start screaming “heresy!” and jump up and down squealing like oinkers at anything beyond their own limited viewpoint, which is a pity, because if they weren’t so limited, their kids might actually learn something worthwhile.
But in the past year I couldn’t help but notice the vast chasm between what I was hoping for, and what was actually happening in my life. In other words, I had been hoping (and was still hoping) for something positive and good, and what I was drowning in was a vat of perpetual and seriously bad luck, spectacularly unpleasant injuries and illnesses, and one disaster after another. Family members and friends who were close to me knew exactly what I meant when I would talk about “being cursed” – they were all at the point where they tended to agree with me, and gave me good luck charms as gifts. They also knew where the bad luck had originated.
Long before the bus accident, I’d been the victim of an evil, mentally unstable con-artist thief and her two well-trained con-artist daughters, a chronic liar and (believe it or not) an employee of the Bank of New York, who had stolen my identity and my credit cards, put loans fraudulently in my name, had driven my credit into the toilet and was now trying unsuccessfully to steal all my possessions and the only home I’d ever owned in my own home state (New York), while leaving me in exile in Massachusetts. That disaster was now in the hands of expensive lawyers and I hadn’t paid much attention to the case for a while. But she seemed to be the origin of the “curse” which seemed to be following me around.
On the other hand, I found the “think positive” crowd to be seriously annoying, as though I were somehow subconsciously to blame both for both the Bank of New York con artist thief and for the jeep driver who, racing to a funeral, decided to broadside a bus – thus setting a year of pain and suffering into motion. How had I caused all of that to happen?
Truth be told, I wasn’t all that impressed with Gregg Braden, author of the first book, mainly because (I know, I know, everyone says this, but in my case, I’m not kidding), I had pretty much experienced the same epiphanies he had (i.e., connecting quantum physics experiments in my lifetime I had read about with the “you create your own reality” beliefs that dated back to our pre-human pond scum days); and just hadn’t written a book about it; I also hadn’t invented a probably fake native American “shaman” to verify it, the way he had.
The only Native American “shaman” I knew was a Lenape/Delaware out of New Jersey named Mike who took a shine to me and offered to take me up to a secluded cave in the Catskills where he promised to initiate me into some top secret Native American rituals. Right.
“Yeah?” I had responded to the offer, “I have an even better idea. Why don’t you go on up to the cave and wait there for me? I’ll be up shortly.”
People have this desperate need to believe that everyone who has some Native American blood in them are automatically spiritually adept, and even superior … sorry, I know better – and actually, so do they. Don’t get me wrong: I still love Mike to this day, but know that he’d be the first to scam a paleface if he thought he could get away with it – and if he’s reading this, trust me, he’s nodding enthusiastically and grinning from ear to ear. Let’s face it, most of us whites are such dolts, we’re easy to buffalo, so to speak.
However, the advantage to the book was that Braden had referenced scientific tests in his end notes that you could look up on your own without trusting someone else to hand feed it to you, i.e., the Quantum Teleportation experiments of 1993 and 1997, and experiments conducted at the University of Geneva that proved. “Once something is joined, it was always connected, whether it remains physically linked or not.” The implications this has for the “stardust” people (which is to say, us) in the aftermath of the original Big Bang is pretty startling. You could also read all of the other silly scientists who argue vehemently against everything that doesn’t fit into their world-view, whether they have proof of what they’re arguing for/against or not. Braden even referenced Elaine Pagels on her “Mind of the Universe” which came out of the Gnostic “Great Announcement” – and hoping that some of those “Great Announcement” fragments had found their way into the Gnostic Bible, I ordered one.
Then I sat and watched – with no small amount of disgust and distaste – a few minutes of the Grammy’s before admitting that, once again, the American music establishment was still operating without anything resembling musical taste. Skanky, shrill bimbo pop and rap still dominated the red carpet; I had yet to see anyone who was actually talented. Mostly I just watched a parade of indistinguishable whores all looking and sounding alike, before I gave up, vascillated between “Pirates of the Caribbean” and Peter Facinelli’s Hallmark movie and listened to Helen Forrest sing, “That Soldier of Mine”, I have no idea why. Well, except for the fact that Helen Forrest was actually musically talented and listenable; things like Rihanna, on the other hand, seemed only capable of wriggling down the red carpet in something that looked like cellophane – Landon Donovan may have tweeted loudly about her “booty”, but she was actually nauseating to look at, and I had to change the channel.
And now - off to set fire to tiny pieces of paper in a metallic mixing bowl.
Originally published: Feb. 15th, 2011 at 10:42 AM
When I'm Older
I'm fifteen, I'm screamingagain, cult-immersed, provocative,
easy, weepy, this is before
fountains froze mid geyser-rumble,
rivers' white-waters glaciated, shattered like bells.
I'm sixteen, I'm in love
again, self-absorbed, glossed paper gods on walls
pre-fabricated virility, this is before
I cut my hair for Mondays and looked away,
before the time of stale requiems, dirges.
I'm seventeen, I'm alive
again, scary-sweet bewitched,
music vibrates something secret and deep
poised on an apex, breathless,
I don't yet know how far down it can go.
I'm eighteen, I believe in rightness
again, self-reverential and compelled,
limitless and in love with my own skin
In my dreams, animal-men glide like rivers,
every song is an anthem and a bower.
I have power.
He sings now, and I know I knew that once.
He sings now, and probes
again in soft-silent dark recesses for
aching, forgotten sensations, trapped in stone walls,
He sings now, and I remember it all.
I remember it all.
Published University of Michigan Portfolio, 2005
Originally published: Feb. 12th, 2011 at 12:09 AM
easy, weepy, this is before
fountains froze mid geyser-rumble,
rivers' white-waters glaciated, shattered like bells.
I'm sixteen, I'm in love
again, self-absorbed, glossed paper gods on walls
pre-fabricated virility, this is before
I cut my hair for Mondays and looked away,
before the time of stale requiems, dirges.
I'm seventeen, I'm alive
again, scary-sweet bewitched,
music vibrates something secret and deep
poised on an apex, breathless,
I don't yet know how far down it can go.
I'm eighteen, I believe in rightness
again, self-reverential and compelled,
limitless and in love with my own skin
In my dreams, animal-men glide like rivers,
every song is an anthem and a bower.
I have power.
He sings now, and I know I knew that once.
He sings now, and probes
again in soft-silent dark recesses for
aching, forgotten sensations, trapped in stone walls,
He sings now, and I remember it all.
I remember it all.
Published University of Michigan Portfolio, 2005
Originally published: Feb. 12th, 2011 at 12:09 AM
Day #15 Following the Instructions on Manifesting Your Soul Mate
Initially, I was about to idly comment on the odd juxtaposition of creating an elegantly draped afternoon formal tea table that would have even impressed Queen Victoria herself, to the tune of Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Incense and Peppermints. Then I thought, “Well, I dunno – it sorta fits”. All I needed was the granny glasses and I would have slid neatly into at least one of those two generations – the Victorians or the 60’s era flower children. I’m daintily drinking a top of the line loose English Earl Grey tea (right out of Harrod’s, so it’s either top of the line or seriously overpriced) out of a rose-chintz bone china tea cup that belonged to my grandmother. I don’t know what it is about the sound of a bone china tea cup being replaced in its saucer (*clink*) that makes me feel ladylike and dainty, but there you have it. Nothing to nibble on during this afternoon formal tea – I’m still a little queasy – but the tea is heavenly.
Obvious next requirement for Soul Mate: willing to overlook love of his life acting like a screwball anglophile every once in a while. Just as long as someone physically prevents me from lifting my pinkie in the air as I’m drinking, I’m happy.
The good news is that the primary care physician actually came through and got me an appointment with a gastroenterologist at 2:45 that afternoon. Much better than waiting around for February 17th, which is the appointment Mass General Hospital scheduled with one of their gastroenterologists. Waiting for the hour of departure to roll around, I watched cd’s of Season 2 of Deep Space Nine. It’s been so long since I saw the original (and I used to tune into the show religiously I loved it so much) that it seems new again.
At the time I absolutely adored the character of Quark and the gifted actor behind all those sharp teeth: Armin Shimerman (or, Principal Snyder to all you Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans). This time sound I got to appreciate Philip Anglim’s low key sex appeal and Louise Fletcher’s unapologetic evil. Naturally, right as I was preparing to leave, I checked the mail and found that what I thought was Season 3 of The Tudors had just arrived from Barnes & Noble, and there wasn’t enough time to watch any of it before I left. Love that show -- Henry VIII only belatedly wishes he looked like Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Or maybe he did – who knows?
The good news? The tests that Mass General had done had made it to the gastroenterologist before I arrived. The bad news? He couldn’t figure out what was wrong, either.
Came home with so many more appointments my head was spinning – an upper GI and an appointment with an endocrinologist in two days time; more invasive procedures further down the road, which required me to be unconscious. They’d sucked more blood out of my veins again because apparently, the trillion and a half tests Mass General had run on the steady supply of blood I gave them every morning weren’t enough.
Came home to more vicious assaults by the Sky Sadist. It wasn’t Season 3 of The Tudors in the box, it was Season 2, which I hadn’t ordered and which I’d already seen. My debit card (which I had just had to replace a week or two earlier) went missing again. I finally found it tucked inside of my Daytimer appointment book – and into which (I assure you) I had NOT tucked it. How it went from a wallet slot into the Daytimer is something only the Sky Sadist can tell you, because the evil cackling I had to listen to while I ripped my handbag apart looking for it was unmistakable. I’d already cancelled the debit card for the second time in as many weeks, and had to get myself a new one from the local bank branch the following morning, causing no end of headaches. Bill Gates decided to do one of his Windows “updates” and shut down my computer without asking me first, ignoring his own computer settings, and losing me whatever I had open at the time. I spilled hot tea all over my brand new unblemished Daytimer pages and the Selected Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The heating ducts went on the fritz again, which would require me to call maintenance – AGAIN. After discussing the invasive procedure with the doctor, he sent all the paperwork to Haverhill instead of Lawrence, so everything was on hold again, while they faxed the paperwork back to Lawrence from Haverhill. And all of the lights in my car had blinked on while driving home from the gastroenterologist (“SERVICE! ENGINE! REPAIR ME RIGHT THIS MINUTE OR DIE!!”), and I was now without a debit card to pay the auto repair guys. All the while struggling not to throw up, for reasons no one could tell me.
What I actually needed was a gypsy or a voodoo priestess to lift the never-ending Sky Sadist curse, but just try to find either one of those in North Andover, headquarters of the Soccer Mom’s Associative Ring of Massachusetts. (SMARM). Official SMARM Vehicle: SUV. Members known for being so insufferably narcissistic and lazy that not a single one of them was capable of moving a shopping cart 5 feet into a designated area, preferring to leave them for other motorists to run into. Also known for running down pedestrians in crosswalks without blinking. Point is: no self-respecting gypsy or voodoo priestess would be caught anywhere near SMARM territory for fear of being fatally infected.
But back to the business at hand: my next step was the nearly impossible task of “dissolving all negative thoughts and letting in hope.”
Okay. (Said with fervent anticipation): I hope for someone who looks like Fabio, I hope for someone who looks like Fabio, I hope for someone who looks like Fabio.”
No, not THAT Fabio. Fabio Armiliato in “Francesca di Rimini” at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma.
Ok, fine. I knew hope wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to generate, when I was back in Lawrence Hospital, sitting in a dark hallway in the Radiology Department, awaiting upper GI tests that would require me to drink cups of barium, which I loathed. Lawrence General Hospital is back to its habitual level of incompetence by failing to provide accurate directions to either the doctor or me (i.e., no, I was not supposed to go directly to Radiology, I was supposed to go to Admitting, on another floor entirely. As a result of that bungle, I’m now running a ½ hour late and have another appointment at 10:00 a.m., which there is a good chance I won’t make. Thanks again, Lawrence.)
Just as I was when this project began a year ago, I was surrounded by more elderly sick people and sitting in the darkened hallway so long I fully expected to catch some other vile disease I didn’t have when I walked in, before they even got around to fixing the unknown disease I did have.
I was also back to starving. The medical profession really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the people they hand out “nothing by mouth” orders to. My stomach is empty and hurting. I’m beginning to think it would be seriously cool if I barfed all over them.
Oh, right. “Dissolve negative thoughts and let in hope” isn’t really building up a head of steam, is it? Actually, the book is more concerned with my eradicating negative thoughts I had about love. Some of her examples:
“I don’t want to be disappointed again. Don’t expect too much.”
“I’ve been so badly hurt I don’t believe in love anymore.”
“There are no good men left.”
“Everyone gets love except me – I’m left out.”
As for my own examples, I could immediately add one of my own without too much thought:
“I keep expecting the scary man in the black suit to show up.”
The idea was to write all of my own personal negative thoughts about love in my beautiful leather journal with my sensual fountain pen and then replace each negative thought with a positive affirmation like, “My past love life has no bearing on my future!” – except I’m not sure you could consider the scary man in the black suit to be a “past love life” – he was more like a “recurring nightmare”.
The final step was to copy all the negative beliefs onto small pieces of paper and burn each one.
Wait. Kathryn Alice wants me to set fire to small pieces of paper? In my apartment?? Me? The accident prone me? Me with my flammable perfume on (see entry on Magical Moon) that could set me off like a human torch? Does the spell still take if you burn small pieces of paper in your stainless steel kitchen sink? Does that leave scorch marks I’ll have to answer for later? Will it set off the fire alarm and being the entire fire department running over here with sirens blaring? And will I have to explain what I was doing, setting small pieces of paper on fire? And wouldn’t THAT be humiliating!
Ahhh, the endless possibilities in this scenario … some of them painful, some of them expensive and none of them good. How about if I just drown the pieces of paper? Or put them in my blender with some water, make paper mache out of them, make homemade paper, and use the screened result to send a note to the North Andover Fire Department: “I decided not to set these on fire. You owe me, big-time. Send large check and some really handsome, single firemen to the following address, which is still intact as I did NOT set fire to a lot of small pieces of paper as instructed, and screwed up my own soul mate search. You’re welcome. ”
Anticipating the worst, I scribbled down a few negative thoughts about love:
- Who could ever love me while I have a stomach full of barium? (Of course, I thought of this question while I was actually drinking the barium and had an attractive white barium ring around my mouth. So sophisticated! So classy! I just know I was cute as a button wearing a mouth barium ring!)
- What happens when two people fall in love and then grow apart? What’s the point of falling in love in the first place?
- Is love even possible after the age of 25?
- Don’t people get set in their ways? I know I did. Do.
- Don’t most men prefer blonde Reese Witherspoon sorts of characters, who act really dumb and flounce around giggling? I’m sure I don’t giggle. Well, that’s a lie. I did giggle once, and was so shocked at myself when I did it, I swore I would never do it again.
- Will Hosni Mubarak’s resignation impact my love life? (Okay, that question occurred to me while I was watching CNN‘s coverage of his resignation at the second appointment. And yes, Lawrence’s bungling had made me about 20 minutes late, so I was able to cool my heels in Pentucket’s waiting room, watching CNN for quite some time). Feel free to scream, ‘ONLY IF YOUR SOUL MATE IS AN EGYPTIAN!” – I already answered that one myself.
- Will the plates in my spine ruin my sex life? (And no, I’m not EVEN going to ask the neurologist that question – anyone with titanium plates screwed into their spine feel free to weigh in on that).
- Will I meet him at the Real McCoy Restaurant in Middleton? (Apparently not, but this was a great restaurant. You should try it sometime, future soul mate).
Originally published: Feb. 11th, 2011 at 4:20 PM
Susannah's View of Henry James
Feb. 10th, 2011 at 8:44 AM
(Or "James Strikes Again")
I came to teach sophistry,
an ancient novel in my pocket,
scooped from a used book bin for a dime,
looking for a summary.
Asked Susannah, who worshipped the Sophists from the first row,
did you know
Henry James burnt his own balls?
He became such a celebrated fool for it, followed by
whispers in salons and nods of intense knowing.
He danced around his own core, things not to be mentioned
he waffled, he wavered, it seemed intentional, a device to obscure hurt
I think he crossed out everything he really meant to say,
hiding his secrets in unsent letters,
I think he was a liar,
mused Susannah.
Gnarled with denied hunger,
unrecognizable, even to himself.
so we all celebrate our own grotesqueries
softened and slumped over time, like tombstone shoulders,
A pedophile and horrified at himself, in your book,
Quint the devil on his shoulder, Miles his greatest torment
All loathed parts of him are dead by story end, and rightly so,
concluded Susannah.
So as not to be revealed a monster
I tossed the work aside, and it sprouted wings and
flew out of the classroom window,
an ancient arrow, shot from a broken bow,
where it pierced an optimistic novelist, budding and ripe,
composing prose as he passed by the window,
in the balls.
Published University of Michigan Portfolio, 2005
(Or "James Strikes Again")
I came to teach sophistry,
an ancient novel in my pocket,
scooped from a used book bin for a dime,
looking for a summary.
Asked Susannah, who worshipped the Sophists from the first row,
did you know
Henry James burnt his own balls?
He became such a celebrated fool for it, followed by
whispers in salons and nods of intense knowing.
He danced around his own core, things not to be mentioned
he waffled, he wavered, it seemed intentional, a device to obscure hurt
I think he crossed out everything he really meant to say,
hiding his secrets in unsent letters,
I think he was a liar,
mused Susannah.
Gnarled with denied hunger,
unrecognizable, even to himself.
so we all celebrate our own grotesqueries
softened and slumped over time, like tombstone shoulders,
A pedophile and horrified at himself, in your book,
Quint the devil on his shoulder, Miles his greatest torment
All loathed parts of him are dead by story end, and rightly so,
concluded Susannah.
So as not to be revealed a monster
I tossed the work aside, and it sprouted wings and
flew out of the classroom window,
an ancient arrow, shot from a broken bow,
where it pierced an optimistic novelist, budding and ripe,
composing prose as he passed by the window,
in the balls.
Published University of Michigan Portfolio, 2005
Two Swords
Feb. 7th, 2011 at 12:49 PM
Two Swords
Crooked in the arm of a deep-throated drumming ferry,
cradled in the chorus of Hudson's water world,
we rock ourselves, a choir of ghostly faces,
in the world between
cities of the fallen and
cities of the forgotten,
we are in the gulls' world.
We weigh dust and blood-stricken faces
battered satchels, torn suits
a mother, caressing a shard of embittered glass, against
the shriek of gulls circling above us, their voices
knives jarring our silence while
the river rocks and soothes,
glistening and sharp at its edges.
We are between
these swords, these scimitars,
we are between
one shore and another,
lulled by whispers of other warm autumn
worlds into a past we know
where nothing has changed and the world is as it was,
and if we rock ourselves to sleep,
two smoky spires rising at our backs
will vanish in the sunshine.
Copyright 2001. Published University of Michigan Portfolio, submitted 2005
Two Swords
Crooked in the arm of a deep-throated drumming ferry,
cradled in the chorus of Hudson's water world,
we rock ourselves, a choir of ghostly faces,
in the world between
cities of the fallen and
cities of the forgotten,
we are in the gulls' world.
We weigh dust and blood-stricken faces
battered satchels, torn suits
a mother, caressing a shard of embittered glass, against
the shriek of gulls circling above us, their voices
knives jarring our silence while
the river rocks and soothes,
glistening and sharp at its edges.
We are between
these swords, these scimitars,
we are between
one shore and another,
lulled by whispers of other warm autumn
worlds into a past we know
where nothing has changed and the world is as it was,
and if we rock ourselves to sleep,
two smoky spires rising at our backs
will vanish in the sunshine.
Copyright 2001. Published University of Michigan Portfolio, submitted 2005
Day #14 Following the Instructions on Manifesting Your Soul Mate
Feb. 7th, 2011 at 10:04 AM
Day #14??? You know, your days are moving along awfully slowly.
True. Well, I’m counting days in Redwood Tree time.
As Sophia Petrillo (“see ‘Golden Girls’ if you’ve missed the cultural reference) would say, “Picture it: Cambridge, April, 2010: we’re just sitting on a bus, picking up passengers at a bus stop, when all of a sudden - *BOOM*!! Broad-sided by a jeep. True, it’s not like a jeep is going to flatten a full-size bus, no matter how fast it’s going – and it didn’t. But my seatmate and I got thrown forward, faces first, into the seats directly in front of us. Which might not have been so bad, either, except that the two of us were talking to each other when it happened, so both of our heads were turned.
First Appallingly Bad Mis-Diagnosis: Lawrence General Hospital Emergency Room (Lawrence, Mass.) who, without doing a single x-ray, or even a physical examination, announced, “It’s just a hyper-extended neck ligament and whiplash; you’ll feel fine in a day or two.”
They lied.
The pain in my spine accelerated at an alarming pace until I was unable to stand, was down on all fours and crawling. Wednesday June 9th I was sent back to the Lawrence General Hospital emergency room, who no doubt envisioned lawsuits over the initial misdiagnosis now tripped over themselves ordering X-rays, cat scans, an MRI of my back, ultrasounds … whatever other tests they could think of. NEW diagnosis: two bones completely out of alignment in my spine: upper near neck and lower at base of spine. Gee. NOW they get it right … thanks for the two months of needless agony, Lawrence.
So next I was sent to a neurologist -- a rude collection of sadists who could have given Steve Martin’s dentist a run for his money (“see ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ if you’ve missed the cultural reference), the New England Neurological Associates, and to see a physical therapist at the Northeast Rehabilitation Health Network. The therapist was able to fix the misaligned bone in my neck, so the severe 2 month long headache was finally gone; but the lower back was still causing enormous pain and I was now having back spasms. The Physical Therapist gave up and returned me to the neurologist recommending pain management. The neurologist ordered two more tests: an MRI of the lower spine and EMG/NCT Test (Neurological damage assessment). I began to use a cane because I was unable to walk without it. By this time it was mid-year – June and July of 2010.
The EMG/NCT Test (Neurological damage assessment) was performed on September 10th. Basically, it is a legal form of tasering: they shock you so severely that the neurological damage is determined by how loudly you scream in agony.
His evaluation: extensive (or maybe it was severe?) neurological damage and compression of the nerve exiting my lower spine. What, they couldn’t have figured that out without tasering me??? He could not make a recommendation; he had to receive a recommendation from his buddy, the Pain Specialist. This was beginning to smell like a fraud to me, but fine. A specialist unable to make a diagnosis without his buddy (another specialist) telling him what to do? Why are we paying him a small fortune if he can’t use his own brain?? Okay-dokey.
This was the recommendation: to prove that they didn’t rush into back surgery, they were required by law to recommend a steroid shot in the spine, even though everyone (including me) knew for a fact that it wouldn’t work (how’s a steroid shot in the spine going to cause a bone to shove itself back into alignment in the spine?), and then, as an absolute last resort: back surgery. Both required my brother Jim to fly up from Virginia to collect the mortal remains if something went wrong. Jim, being the best brother in the United States, dutifully flew north.
The steroid shot in the spine was so painful that I actually cursed the doctor out in Italian during the process – something to the effect of “Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smaritta … and an evil doctor stood at the crossroads with his long needle, on his way to well deserved hellish damnation for being the demon he is.” (See ‘Dante’s Inferno’, Book #1 if you’ve missed the cultural reference) – fortunately, he was an English-speaking-only idiot in addition to being a sadist, and so missed the reference to Dante’s Inferno. Jim (see brother, previous paragraph) was thoroughly entertained by my reciting Dante’s Inferno at the needle-waving “specialist”, proving that a construction supervisor was often vastly intellectually superior to needle waving “specialists” from the New England Neurological Associates who went to med school.
As expected, it did absolutely nothing for the back pain, except possibly make it worse – and now it was late in the month of September and we were looking at Lower Lumbar Spinal Fusion surgery.
Off to Lowell General Hospital. Jim wheeled me in the front door for the pre-surgical testing, only to discover that Lowell Hospital had lost me in their computer records. I nearly had a stroke on top of everything else. Took them a while, but they finally found me.
Another retarded stunt Lowell General Hospital pulled was announcing (while I was in the pre-surgical prep room being calmed down by my brother) that they needed a certain set of x-rays which we had at home. Mind, they had said nothing about bringing those photos with me, or I would certainly have done so. No, they tell me this an hour prior to surgery.
Instead of staying with me and keeping me calm, Jim now has to jump in the car and speed back to North Andover at top speed, pick up the x-rays and drive back again. It’s still dark this early in the morning and rainy. I’m now terrified for his safety as well as my own, going into surgery. When he gets back, the doctor informs us that he could have easily accessed the x-rays online. The surgical prep nurses at Lowell General have no idea how close they came to getting strangled that morning.
That evening, I found myself with 4 titanium screws and 2 titanium plates in my spine. My hair, once long enough I could sit on it, had snarled so badly during the operation that it now only hung to my shoulders in a knotted hair ball. (Within a week or two of being released, I had them chop it all off). Standing up wasn’t much of an issue; it was rolling over and pushing myself up to a seated position so that I could STAND up that was the problem. At one point, in the middle of the night, my lower leg was suddenly seized up in a violent leg cramp. I couldn’t roll myself over to sit up and stretch the muscle out and had no choice but to lay there and scream for help. Fun.
If that weren’t bad enough, the Sky Sadist thought it would be enormously entertaining if He made me violently sneeze with stitches in my back – gave Him the chance to cackle maniacally while I screamed in agony. I was sent home from the hospital only to ensure two sudden and violent bouts of vomiting, both of which sent me back to the emergency room in Lawrence … again, they just stood around looking bewildered and confused, which makes you wonder: WHY BOTHER HAVING A HOSPITAL AT ALL IF THEY’RE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY USELESS???
The week-long vomiting episodes put me through another unexpected medical crisis: withdrawal. Because I couldn’t hold them down, I went off all medication, all pain killers, all Nicorette gum crutches, a withdrawal that left me trembling and twitching in addition to vomiting. The only advantage to being forced into medication withdrawal is that I learned something a bit surprising: the medication I had been on had prevented me from dreaming. Once I was off all the medication, I started dreaming again. Not surprisingly, Lawrence General Hospital had no clue what prompted the vomiting, even though I was in their clutches at least three more times within a month or so. I doubt Jim signed on for puke pan emptying, so you gotta give him credit for forbearance.
The Advantage to Jim’s Visit
While I recovered, Jim disassembled the daybed in the living room, got the maintenance men to clean out the dryer vents, called up a local “Handyman” service to have them move all the standing bins of things to storage and getting COMCAST to re-wire my computer into the back bedroom.
The span of time between vomiting episodes was very brief. I was getting hungrier and hungrier, while being unable to hold down solid food. Being unable to hold down any pain killers sent me into the stage I recorded as “The Knee Socks of Pain Days”, because of the burning pain that lit up my legs from my knees down to my feet.
I was also developing cravings I couldn’t explain, considering I wasn’t holding down any food. One day I developed an inexplicable craving for a baked potato.
“These knee socks of pain days”, I observed in my journal, “are symbolized by Rhydian Roberts singing, “I won’t let you walk this road alone”, even though he most certainly is, since I‘m dying slowly of “Knee socks of pain” disease and all I want in life before I die is a microwaved baked potato, and here it is, 11:30 p.m., and where is he, while I walk that road alone? NOT hovering nearby, solicitously handing me a microwaved baked potato, that’s for sure.” HE LIED!!!! (Sorry, Rhydian, but you have to admit, you did …)
The vomiting episodes continued even after I went back to work; at one point becoming so violent that I had to be whisked out of the office in an ambulance and sent off to Massachusetts General Hospital for a week. There I was, puking all over them all day, and they couldn’t figure out why, and they’re supposed to be one of the top hospitals in Massachusetts!
I was back to starving from sheer hunger, although they only gave me one bag of whatever it is they give you when you’re starving to death. Then they would schedule tests for the next morning that demanded you take nothing by mouth after midnight the previous night. The people who performed those tests could care less if you’re starving to death – they sometimes wouldn’t come for you until 10 or 11:00 in the morning. And THEN, as breakfast rolled around the floor for everyone else except me, the nurses proceeded to torture me.
Roommate #2 at MGH was a woman who was apparently admitted due to projectile pooping. Every five minutes, I’d hear a burst of machine gun fire emanating from her ass, followed by the inevitable stink. Nurses would run in all aflutter and change all her bedding (sending the stink further up and down the entire floor as they did it), and then they’d proceed to cram more breakfast food into the woman who would be shooting it back out at the walls 30 seconds later. All of this in front of another woman (me) who was slowly starving to death because she couldn’t hold anything down and they weren’t even feeding her intravenously.
A squealing Nurse Nancy to the Poop Chute: “Oh, your breakfast is here! A toasty English muffin! How many pats of butter do you want on it?? How many packets of sugar on your oatmeal? And a big, juicy orange! Here, let me peel it for you!”
Three days in a row, I came close to strangling some of the mindless nurses at Mass General. To kill time, I designed a board game, dedicated to Roommate #1, who was a Jehovah’s Witness and proselytized unwitting victims from Barbados from 7 in the morning until 11:00 at night, sometimes on two cell phones at once. I called the board game, “Stupid Simpering Silly Sows and their Cell Phones”. It had cards much like “Monopoly”, some of which read, “You are babbling idiotically on your cell phone and discover that your husband has turned into a cobweb-draped skeleton due to your lack of attention. You are remanded to the Torture Chamber for 23 turns. He is made King of England.”, or, another, “You are babbling idiotically on your cell phone and rear-end an SUV with a “baby-on-board” sticker. Both of you are arrested for being dangerously annoying and fined $10,000.”
First they told me their guesses, “Maybe you’re allergic to your medication”; then they told me, “Maybe it’s gallstones”, and then I demanded to be sent home in sheer disgust, only to start vomiting again, as soon as I was discharged. They finally pulled me out of work again.
Lest you think I had trouble only with hospitals during this disaster, you haven’t met my primary care physician. Right in the middle of this, she decided to abandon her previous medical group (The Pentucket Medical Group) and join a newly created one, the Merrimack Medical Group. The only problem was that she left the Pentucket Medical Group before the Merrimack offices were up and running. They had no phone, no offices, no office hours. And I’m puking my guts out, and have been hauled out of work again. And I have no doctor.
Laying in bed at home, I had to learn to stay still – any amount of jostling, and I felt nauseous, although I will say that other activities have been doing well. Cesare arrived and looks gorgeous on the wall; the Nymphs and Satyr also arrived and look equally gorgeous … I found a Venetian print and had that mounted on the wall as well.
Making Space: Wind Chimes
Wind chimes are supposed to attract good energy to you, I didn’t know why. Perfectly tuned wind chimes, and the emphasis is on “perfectly tuned”, can counteract the negativity of unnatural sounds, such as traffic noise - skate boards - fighting cats etc. Well tuned chimes can help create a positive energy flow.
I have no idea what a “perfectly tuned wind chime” means … I couldn’t hold a note even if it leapt into my hand and staple-gunned itself to my palm … and personally, on windy days I find outdoor wind chimes to be annoying after a while, especially if they never shut up, in-tune or not. Not that I’d know the difference. So I had the wind chimes, but since it was now winter I couldn’t open the windows to determine if they were “perfectly tuned” or not.
I read books, I watched “The Tudors”, I slurped on Pedialyte freezer pops, possibly the only thing in the United States that actually did what it advertised it was going to do – got my electrolytes back on track. I watched the riots in Cairo. I listened, horrified, to news broadcasts that had statistics to prove that a whopping 13% of secondary school biology teachers not only taught but advocated creationism in the schools.
Now, before a gaggle of hysterical so-called Christian women start jumping up and down, snorting and squealing like a pen of over-fattened pigs, I ought to point out here that I really have nothing against creationism per se. I’m just not so insipidly stupid that I can’t tell the difference between science and religion. You want your spawn to learn about creationism? Fine! Send the brat to Sunday School, you idiotic cow, and stop ruining what little is left of the public school system, now such an appalling purveyor of misinformation, Christian parents are single-handedly responsible for none of their children being able to get scientific jobs (read: jobs that actually pay more than the minimum wage) in the United States.
In disgust, I decided to change my religion to an undying worship of Terminus, the God of Boundaries. Major holiday: February 23rd: Name of major holiday: Terminalia. Holiday credo which must appear on the holiday cards I expect my friends and relations to send me on February 23rd: “Concedo nulli”. Translation: “I yield to nobody”. Each year I preach a sermon to the masses: ‘STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!!”
Happy Terminalia.
Day #14??? You know, your days are moving along awfully slowly.
True. Well, I’m counting days in Redwood Tree time.
As Sophia Petrillo (“see ‘Golden Girls’ if you’ve missed the cultural reference) would say, “Picture it: Cambridge, April, 2010: we’re just sitting on a bus, picking up passengers at a bus stop, when all of a sudden - *BOOM*!! Broad-sided by a jeep. True, it’s not like a jeep is going to flatten a full-size bus, no matter how fast it’s going – and it didn’t. But my seatmate and I got thrown forward, faces first, into the seats directly in front of us. Which might not have been so bad, either, except that the two of us were talking to each other when it happened, so both of our heads were turned.
First Appallingly Bad Mis-Diagnosis: Lawrence General Hospital Emergency Room (Lawrence, Mass.) who, without doing a single x-ray, or even a physical examination, announced, “It’s just a hyper-extended neck ligament and whiplash; you’ll feel fine in a day or two.”
They lied.
The pain in my spine accelerated at an alarming pace until I was unable to stand, was down on all fours and crawling. Wednesday June 9th I was sent back to the Lawrence General Hospital emergency room, who no doubt envisioned lawsuits over the initial misdiagnosis now tripped over themselves ordering X-rays, cat scans, an MRI of my back, ultrasounds … whatever other tests they could think of. NEW diagnosis: two bones completely out of alignment in my spine: upper near neck and lower at base of spine. Gee. NOW they get it right … thanks for the two months of needless agony, Lawrence.
So next I was sent to a neurologist -- a rude collection of sadists who could have given Steve Martin’s dentist a run for his money (“see ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ if you’ve missed the cultural reference), the New England Neurological Associates, and to see a physical therapist at the Northeast Rehabilitation Health Network. The therapist was able to fix the misaligned bone in my neck, so the severe 2 month long headache was finally gone; but the lower back was still causing enormous pain and I was now having back spasms. The Physical Therapist gave up and returned me to the neurologist recommending pain management. The neurologist ordered two more tests: an MRI of the lower spine and EMG/NCT Test (Neurological damage assessment). I began to use a cane because I was unable to walk without it. By this time it was mid-year – June and July of 2010.
The EMG/NCT Test (Neurological damage assessment) was performed on September 10th. Basically, it is a legal form of tasering: they shock you so severely that the neurological damage is determined by how loudly you scream in agony.
His evaluation: extensive (or maybe it was severe?) neurological damage and compression of the nerve exiting my lower spine. What, they couldn’t have figured that out without tasering me??? He could not make a recommendation; he had to receive a recommendation from his buddy, the Pain Specialist. This was beginning to smell like a fraud to me, but fine. A specialist unable to make a diagnosis without his buddy (another specialist) telling him what to do? Why are we paying him a small fortune if he can’t use his own brain?? Okay-dokey.
This was the recommendation: to prove that they didn’t rush into back surgery, they were required by law to recommend a steroid shot in the spine, even though everyone (including me) knew for a fact that it wouldn’t work (how’s a steroid shot in the spine going to cause a bone to shove itself back into alignment in the spine?), and then, as an absolute last resort: back surgery. Both required my brother Jim to fly up from Virginia to collect the mortal remains if something went wrong. Jim, being the best brother in the United States, dutifully flew north.
The steroid shot in the spine was so painful that I actually cursed the doctor out in Italian during the process – something to the effect of “Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smaritta … and an evil doctor stood at the crossroads with his long needle, on his way to well deserved hellish damnation for being the demon he is.” (See ‘Dante’s Inferno’, Book #1 if you’ve missed the cultural reference) – fortunately, he was an English-speaking-only idiot in addition to being a sadist, and so missed the reference to Dante’s Inferno. Jim (see brother, previous paragraph) was thoroughly entertained by my reciting Dante’s Inferno at the needle-waving “specialist”, proving that a construction supervisor was often vastly intellectually superior to needle waving “specialists” from the New England Neurological Associates who went to med school.
As expected, it did absolutely nothing for the back pain, except possibly make it worse – and now it was late in the month of September and we were looking at Lower Lumbar Spinal Fusion surgery.
Off to Lowell General Hospital. Jim wheeled me in the front door for the pre-surgical testing, only to discover that Lowell Hospital had lost me in their computer records. I nearly had a stroke on top of everything else. Took them a while, but they finally found me.
Another retarded stunt Lowell General Hospital pulled was announcing (while I was in the pre-surgical prep room being calmed down by my brother) that they needed a certain set of x-rays which we had at home. Mind, they had said nothing about bringing those photos with me, or I would certainly have done so. No, they tell me this an hour prior to surgery.
Instead of staying with me and keeping me calm, Jim now has to jump in the car and speed back to North Andover at top speed, pick up the x-rays and drive back again. It’s still dark this early in the morning and rainy. I’m now terrified for his safety as well as my own, going into surgery. When he gets back, the doctor informs us that he could have easily accessed the x-rays online. The surgical prep nurses at Lowell General have no idea how close they came to getting strangled that morning.
That evening, I found myself with 4 titanium screws and 2 titanium plates in my spine. My hair, once long enough I could sit on it, had snarled so badly during the operation that it now only hung to my shoulders in a knotted hair ball. (Within a week or two of being released, I had them chop it all off). Standing up wasn’t much of an issue; it was rolling over and pushing myself up to a seated position so that I could STAND up that was the problem. At one point, in the middle of the night, my lower leg was suddenly seized up in a violent leg cramp. I couldn’t roll myself over to sit up and stretch the muscle out and had no choice but to lay there and scream for help. Fun.
If that weren’t bad enough, the Sky Sadist thought it would be enormously entertaining if He made me violently sneeze with stitches in my back – gave Him the chance to cackle maniacally while I screamed in agony. I was sent home from the hospital only to ensure two sudden and violent bouts of vomiting, both of which sent me back to the emergency room in Lawrence … again, they just stood around looking bewildered and confused, which makes you wonder: WHY BOTHER HAVING A HOSPITAL AT ALL IF THEY’RE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY USELESS???
The week-long vomiting episodes put me through another unexpected medical crisis: withdrawal. Because I couldn’t hold them down, I went off all medication, all pain killers, all Nicorette gum crutches, a withdrawal that left me trembling and twitching in addition to vomiting. The only advantage to being forced into medication withdrawal is that I learned something a bit surprising: the medication I had been on had prevented me from dreaming. Once I was off all the medication, I started dreaming again. Not surprisingly, Lawrence General Hospital had no clue what prompted the vomiting, even though I was in their clutches at least three more times within a month or so. I doubt Jim signed on for puke pan emptying, so you gotta give him credit for forbearance.
The Advantage to Jim’s Visit
While I recovered, Jim disassembled the daybed in the living room, got the maintenance men to clean out the dryer vents, called up a local “Handyman” service to have them move all the standing bins of things to storage and getting COMCAST to re-wire my computer into the back bedroom.
The span of time between vomiting episodes was very brief. I was getting hungrier and hungrier, while being unable to hold down solid food. Being unable to hold down any pain killers sent me into the stage I recorded as “The Knee Socks of Pain Days”, because of the burning pain that lit up my legs from my knees down to my feet.
I was also developing cravings I couldn’t explain, considering I wasn’t holding down any food. One day I developed an inexplicable craving for a baked potato.
“These knee socks of pain days”, I observed in my journal, “are symbolized by Rhydian Roberts singing, “I won’t let you walk this road alone”, even though he most certainly is, since I‘m dying slowly of “Knee socks of pain” disease and all I want in life before I die is a microwaved baked potato, and here it is, 11:30 p.m., and where is he, while I walk that road alone? NOT hovering nearby, solicitously handing me a microwaved baked potato, that’s for sure.” HE LIED!!!! (Sorry, Rhydian, but you have to admit, you did …)
The vomiting episodes continued even after I went back to work; at one point becoming so violent that I had to be whisked out of the office in an ambulance and sent off to Massachusetts General Hospital for a week. There I was, puking all over them all day, and they couldn’t figure out why, and they’re supposed to be one of the top hospitals in Massachusetts!
I was back to starving from sheer hunger, although they only gave me one bag of whatever it is they give you when you’re starving to death. Then they would schedule tests for the next morning that demanded you take nothing by mouth after midnight the previous night. The people who performed those tests could care less if you’re starving to death – they sometimes wouldn’t come for you until 10 or 11:00 in the morning. And THEN, as breakfast rolled around the floor for everyone else except me, the nurses proceeded to torture me.
Roommate #2 at MGH was a woman who was apparently admitted due to projectile pooping. Every five minutes, I’d hear a burst of machine gun fire emanating from her ass, followed by the inevitable stink. Nurses would run in all aflutter and change all her bedding (sending the stink further up and down the entire floor as they did it), and then they’d proceed to cram more breakfast food into the woman who would be shooting it back out at the walls 30 seconds later. All of this in front of another woman (me) who was slowly starving to death because she couldn’t hold anything down and they weren’t even feeding her intravenously.
A squealing Nurse Nancy to the Poop Chute: “Oh, your breakfast is here! A toasty English muffin! How many pats of butter do you want on it?? How many packets of sugar on your oatmeal? And a big, juicy orange! Here, let me peel it for you!”
Three days in a row, I came close to strangling some of the mindless nurses at Mass General. To kill time, I designed a board game, dedicated to Roommate #1, who was a Jehovah’s Witness and proselytized unwitting victims from Barbados from 7 in the morning until 11:00 at night, sometimes on two cell phones at once. I called the board game, “Stupid Simpering Silly Sows and their Cell Phones”. It had cards much like “Monopoly”, some of which read, “You are babbling idiotically on your cell phone and discover that your husband has turned into a cobweb-draped skeleton due to your lack of attention. You are remanded to the Torture Chamber for 23 turns. He is made King of England.”, or, another, “You are babbling idiotically on your cell phone and rear-end an SUV with a “baby-on-board” sticker. Both of you are arrested for being dangerously annoying and fined $10,000.”
First they told me their guesses, “Maybe you’re allergic to your medication”; then they told me, “Maybe it’s gallstones”, and then I demanded to be sent home in sheer disgust, only to start vomiting again, as soon as I was discharged. They finally pulled me out of work again.
Lest you think I had trouble only with hospitals during this disaster, you haven’t met my primary care physician. Right in the middle of this, she decided to abandon her previous medical group (The Pentucket Medical Group) and join a newly created one, the Merrimack Medical Group. The only problem was that she left the Pentucket Medical Group before the Merrimack offices were up and running. They had no phone, no offices, no office hours. And I’m puking my guts out, and have been hauled out of work again. And I have no doctor.
Laying in bed at home, I had to learn to stay still – any amount of jostling, and I felt nauseous, although I will say that other activities have been doing well. Cesare arrived and looks gorgeous on the wall; the Nymphs and Satyr also arrived and look equally gorgeous … I found a Venetian print and had that mounted on the wall as well.
Making Space: Wind Chimes
Wind chimes are supposed to attract good energy to you, I didn’t know why. Perfectly tuned wind chimes, and the emphasis is on “perfectly tuned”, can counteract the negativity of unnatural sounds, such as traffic noise - skate boards - fighting cats etc. Well tuned chimes can help create a positive energy flow.
I have no idea what a “perfectly tuned wind chime” means … I couldn’t hold a note even if it leapt into my hand and staple-gunned itself to my palm … and personally, on windy days I find outdoor wind chimes to be annoying after a while, especially if they never shut up, in-tune or not. Not that I’d know the difference. So I had the wind chimes, but since it was now winter I couldn’t open the windows to determine if they were “perfectly tuned” or not.
I read books, I watched “The Tudors”, I slurped on Pedialyte freezer pops, possibly the only thing in the United States that actually did what it advertised it was going to do – got my electrolytes back on track. I watched the riots in Cairo. I listened, horrified, to news broadcasts that had statistics to prove that a whopping 13% of secondary school biology teachers not only taught but advocated creationism in the schools.
Now, before a gaggle of hysterical so-called Christian women start jumping up and down, snorting and squealing like a pen of over-fattened pigs, I ought to point out here that I really have nothing against creationism per se. I’m just not so insipidly stupid that I can’t tell the difference between science and religion. You want your spawn to learn about creationism? Fine! Send the brat to Sunday School, you idiotic cow, and stop ruining what little is left of the public school system, now such an appalling purveyor of misinformation, Christian parents are single-handedly responsible for none of their children being able to get scientific jobs (read: jobs that actually pay more than the minimum wage) in the United States.
In disgust, I decided to change my religion to an undying worship of Terminus, the God of Boundaries. Major holiday: February 23rd: Name of major holiday: Terminalia. Holiday credo which must appear on the holiday cards I expect my friends and relations to send me on February 23rd: “Concedo nulli”. Translation: “I yield to nobody”. Each year I preach a sermon to the masses: ‘STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!!”
Happy Terminalia.
Pause While We Suffer Through American Patriots' Day
Apr. 21st, 2010 at 4:29 AM
From Wikipedia: "Patriots' Day (sometimes incorrectly punctuated Patriot's Day or Patriots' Day) is a civic holiday commemorating the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. It is observed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and State of Maine (once part of Massachusetts), and is a public school observance day in Wisconsin. Observances and re-enactments of these first battles of the American Revolution occur annually at Lexington Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, (around 6am) and The Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts (around 9am). In the morning, a mounted reenactor with State Police escort retraces Paul Revere's ride, calling out warnings the whole way. In recent years, however, Patriots' Day has been observed on the third Monday of every April, thereby providing the residents with a three-day holiday weekend."
I'd never even heard of Patriots' Day until recently, the day where, in reality, Massachusetts slyly extracts money from people's pockets with their sticky fingers to pay for the State Police to escort some looney-tune on a horse yelling ... what? "The British are coming the British are coming"? Oooh. There's some hot breaking scary news for you.
I'm thinking that if anyone yells "The British are coming!" at me, accompanied by the Massachusetts State Police, I'd probably say, "Oh, good! At least they're not as likely to shoot citizens as you are," (which is both true and probably the main reason the Brits lost the war) and then start looking up the road for Paul McCartney, but that's just me and a result of my brief but memorable encounters with the emotionally unstable North Andover police, who are just as liable to shoot you as to give you directions. The point is: only in Massachusetts would they elect to spend your tax money on a goofy reenactment that no one in the country gives a crap about, instead of something more useful like, oh I don't know ... putting up STREET SIGNS or fixing POTHOLES. You know, things that help to ensure residents don't die violent auto-related deaths on the state roadways.
But then, this is the same Massachusetts which has so far enriched everyone's lives by saddling them with taxes no other state imposes, forcing them to share geographical space with the seriously ugly high school skanks of South Hadley who tortured an Irish immigrant into suicide with their bullying, non-stop rain, non-existant summers, the stupid Red Sox sending low-flying jets over Cambridge and scaring the crap out of 9/11 survivors who don't need to have any more low-flying jets roaring overhead during their lifetimes and of course ... the Boston Marathon and Patriots' Day. Such a dumb idea that even volcanos in Iceland blew up in protest, thankfully preventing at least some of the expected influx of annoying people in running shoes from making it into Logan Airport.
But more to the point ... what always cracks me up about these misty-eyed celebrants spouting nonsense about "patriotism" are the very same people who, transported back to 1775, you would find busily humping the leg of the status-quo with religious fervor. Which is to say, they'd be sucking up to the British, calling Paul Revere a "hippie hooligan", what with his ponytail and granny glasses and all, and then calling the authorities to indignantly complain about his yelling at them from the road in the middle of the night. Trust me. The very same people.
So, that morning I was maneuvering my across the Boston version of the Indianapolis 500 Speedway - and by this I mean the entry road to the underground parking garage at North Station. Cars turn into the complex, gun their engines and try to run over as many commuters as they can, as they race for the down ramp to the parking garage at top speed. I'd actually made it past that gauntlet alive when I realized there were no Cambridge busses sitting there, waiting to be boarded. While this in itself isn't unusual - the noticeable absence or lateness of busses is standard fare for Boston public transportation - I also noticed that there wasn't any line of people staring morosely at the heavens or glaring at their watches and that was unusual. Only when I asked someone about it was I reminded of "Patriots' Day". I moaned. This meant that instead of the typical six to ten minute bus ride, I was now forced to wander the maze of the MBTA subway system. Back across the speedway and into North Station. Then to the Orange Line. Then to the Red Line. Then through the Marriott food court. Then another traffic gauntlet on Main Street. A 30 minute detour at least. Just so that some "American Patriots" could take a three-day weekend and feel unduly "patriotic" about themselves.
Which was bad enough. Ahhh, but at the end of the day I had to do the same thing in reverse. The only problem was: the infamous Patriots' Day Boston Marathon crowd was now dispersing. Boston - in its usual state of utter cluelessness and lack of foresight - thought letting loose the "Marathon People" into the mass of commuters battling their way home after a day's work was just a wicked swell idea. I thought it was rather sickening, myself.
You've never seen so many wrinkled knobby knees bow-leggedly hobbling down subway platforms, been confronted with so many unpleasantly-shaped people with saggy, cellulite enhanced butts crammed into skin tight bicycle shorts, or the stench of so many people after a 26-mile run for whom "deodorant" is another word for "*Duh* - what?" You've never heard so many mothers deciding that this was the perfect moment to bark everyone's shins with baby strollers, by shoving them into packed subway cars, or shrill women on cell phones braying like donkeys all at the same time, all shrieking variations on the same sad narcissistic theme,
"I saw you Mahvin! Didn't you see me wave at you? Didn't you SEE me, Mahvin? I sweah, I waved at you Mahvin! I was at mile 10 and a half, Mahvin! Didn't you see me wave at you? How could you not see me waving at you, Mahvin?"
I'm sure I wasn't the only commuter who wanted to grab the phone out of her hand and yell, "Just say you SAW the bitch, Marvin!" into it. Anything to shut her up.
You've never seen so many ludicrous pasty-white Boston snobs (Mother, Father and the Two Mini-Me's named Ashley and Frederick, III) all huddled in horror in the corner of a Red Line subway car, terrified that someone might actually brush up against them, all dressed in matching pressed pastel blue running suits and spotless shoes, all of their faux blue-blooded noses stuck up in the air at identical angles - yeah, like THEY had run anywhere except to Nordstroms for the silly outfits that made them more ridiculous than all the other clowns combined.
After being crammed into two subways and North Station with the "Marathon People", all I wanted to do was get home and shower the stench off of me. Woke up the next morning and enjoyed the irony: the winners of the "American Patriots' Day" running race, stage-set in the State of Massachusetts and designed to annoy the crap out of anyone who didn't get the day off of work? From Kenya and Ethiopa.
Couldn't think of a more appropriate ending to "Lazy American Patriots' Day".
From Wikipedia: "Patriots' Day (sometimes incorrectly punctuated Patriot's Day or Patriots' Day) is a civic holiday commemorating the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. It is observed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and State of Maine (once part of Massachusetts), and is a public school observance day in Wisconsin. Observances and re-enactments of these first battles of the American Revolution occur annually at Lexington Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, (around 6am) and The Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts (around 9am). In the morning, a mounted reenactor with State Police escort retraces Paul Revere's ride, calling out warnings the whole way. In recent years, however, Patriots' Day has been observed on the third Monday of every April, thereby providing the residents with a three-day holiday weekend."
I'd never even heard of Patriots' Day until recently, the day where, in reality, Massachusetts slyly extracts money from people's pockets with their sticky fingers to pay for the State Police to escort some looney-tune on a horse yelling ... what? "The British are coming the British are coming"? Oooh. There's some hot breaking scary news for you.
I'm thinking that if anyone yells "The British are coming!" at me, accompanied by the Massachusetts State Police, I'd probably say, "Oh, good! At least they're not as likely to shoot citizens as you are," (which is both true and probably the main reason the Brits lost the war) and then start looking up the road for Paul McCartney, but that's just me and a result of my brief but memorable encounters with the emotionally unstable North Andover police, who are just as liable to shoot you as to give you directions. The point is: only in Massachusetts would they elect to spend your tax money on a goofy reenactment that no one in the country gives a crap about, instead of something more useful like, oh I don't know ... putting up STREET SIGNS or fixing POTHOLES. You know, things that help to ensure residents don't die violent auto-related deaths on the state roadways.
But then, this is the same Massachusetts which has so far enriched everyone's lives by saddling them with taxes no other state imposes, forcing them to share geographical space with the seriously ugly high school skanks of South Hadley who tortured an Irish immigrant into suicide with their bullying, non-stop rain, non-existant summers, the stupid Red Sox sending low-flying jets over Cambridge and scaring the crap out of 9/11 survivors who don't need to have any more low-flying jets roaring overhead during their lifetimes and of course ... the Boston Marathon and Patriots' Day. Such a dumb idea that even volcanos in Iceland blew up in protest, thankfully preventing at least some of the expected influx of annoying people in running shoes from making it into Logan Airport.
But more to the point ... what always cracks me up about these misty-eyed celebrants spouting nonsense about "patriotism" are the very same people who, transported back to 1775, you would find busily humping the leg of the status-quo with religious fervor. Which is to say, they'd be sucking up to the British, calling Paul Revere a "hippie hooligan", what with his ponytail and granny glasses and all, and then calling the authorities to indignantly complain about his yelling at them from the road in the middle of the night. Trust me. The very same people.
So, that morning I was maneuvering my across the Boston version of the Indianapolis 500 Speedway - and by this I mean the entry road to the underground parking garage at North Station. Cars turn into the complex, gun their engines and try to run over as many commuters as they can, as they race for the down ramp to the parking garage at top speed. I'd actually made it past that gauntlet alive when I realized there were no Cambridge busses sitting there, waiting to be boarded. While this in itself isn't unusual - the noticeable absence or lateness of busses is standard fare for Boston public transportation - I also noticed that there wasn't any line of people staring morosely at the heavens or glaring at their watches and that was unusual. Only when I asked someone about it was I reminded of "Patriots' Day". I moaned. This meant that instead of the typical six to ten minute bus ride, I was now forced to wander the maze of the MBTA subway system. Back across the speedway and into North Station. Then to the Orange Line. Then to the Red Line. Then through the Marriott food court. Then another traffic gauntlet on Main Street. A 30 minute detour at least. Just so that some "American Patriots" could take a three-day weekend and feel unduly "patriotic" about themselves.
Which was bad enough. Ahhh, but at the end of the day I had to do the same thing in reverse. The only problem was: the infamous Patriots' Day Boston Marathon crowd was now dispersing. Boston - in its usual state of utter cluelessness and lack of foresight - thought letting loose the "Marathon People" into the mass of commuters battling their way home after a day's work was just a wicked swell idea. I thought it was rather sickening, myself.
You've never seen so many wrinkled knobby knees bow-leggedly hobbling down subway platforms, been confronted with so many unpleasantly-shaped people with saggy, cellulite enhanced butts crammed into skin tight bicycle shorts, or the stench of so many people after a 26-mile run for whom "deodorant" is another word for "*Duh* - what?" You've never heard so many mothers deciding that this was the perfect moment to bark everyone's shins with baby strollers, by shoving them into packed subway cars, or shrill women on cell phones braying like donkeys all at the same time, all shrieking variations on the same sad narcissistic theme,
"I saw you Mahvin! Didn't you see me wave at you? Didn't you SEE me, Mahvin? I sweah, I waved at you Mahvin! I was at mile 10 and a half, Mahvin! Didn't you see me wave at you? How could you not see me waving at you, Mahvin?"
I'm sure I wasn't the only commuter who wanted to grab the phone out of her hand and yell, "Just say you SAW the bitch, Marvin!" into it. Anything to shut her up.
You've never seen so many ludicrous pasty-white Boston snobs (Mother, Father and the Two Mini-Me's named Ashley and Frederick, III) all huddled in horror in the corner of a Red Line subway car, terrified that someone might actually brush up against them, all dressed in matching pressed pastel blue running suits and spotless shoes, all of their faux blue-blooded noses stuck up in the air at identical angles - yeah, like THEY had run anywhere except to Nordstroms for the silly outfits that made them more ridiculous than all the other clowns combined.
After being crammed into two subways and North Station with the "Marathon People", all I wanted to do was get home and shower the stench off of me. Woke up the next morning and enjoyed the irony: the winners of the "American Patriots' Day" running race, stage-set in the State of Massachusetts and designed to annoy the crap out of anyone who didn't get the day off of work? From Kenya and Ethiopa.
Couldn't think of a more appropriate ending to "Lazy American Patriots' Day".
SSD#13: Jimi Mistry, Ice Bullets, Borgias and Beds
Apr. 19th, 2010 at 2:57 AM
Day #13 Following the Instructions on Manifesting Your Soul Mate
Good News: The Long-Awaited Bed And Ongoing Space Shift
The new mattress and accoutrements arrived. Better news: the computer is now out of the bedroom and in the new computer room, and the nice man from Comcast did the entire move in about 15 minutes.
It appears that my soon-to-be-arriving soul mate is wisely delaying his appearance until he’s certain he won’t be walking to a den of chaos, and I can’t say I blame him. To ameliorate the appearance of progress, I’ll first report on the famous “Bob-o-Pedic”.
Pros: it is comfortable. based on the reviews of other people, I had expected it to be as hard as a rock until it had the time to “breathe” after being unpacked. But it had arrived by truck and hadn’t needed to be vacuum packed for shipping. When I had all the bedding on it and laid down, I thought, “this is nice!” before passing out and sleeping, undisturbed, for two hours. So thumbs up on the sleeping comfort. And for the first time in five years, my back didn’t hurt when I woke up! A not-so-fond good riddance to the flimsy, sagging, single mattress (which was only supposed to last four months) that I was trapped on for five years thanks to the Evil Ex-Relative, who stole my good bed for herself. The thing darn nearly crippled me.
And this is the bed and two nightstands I put together. This is not my bedroom -- I only wish I had a view like that outside my French doors … although it would probably be more likely if I had any French doors.
Bob-o-Pedic Cons: Thumbs down on the smell, though. It did have a pretty obnoxious chemical smell at first, which dissipated in about a week’s time. The bedding masked some of it, and it obviously didn’t prevent me from falling instantly asleep on it. It didn’t seem to deter the family felines, either – on the first day, Peanut also passed out cold under a new comforter on top of the bed, snoring loudly.
After struggling for another day assembling the two nightstands, I washed walls and dug through my tool chest again, hunting for the new picture hangers. A few weeks earlier, as I had nothing on my walls whatsoever, I had in fact splashed back to Ace for picture hangers on the fourth day of a bad 4-day nor’easter or whatever that deluge was that basically turned North Andover into The Island of North Andover, because so many creeks had flooded their banks and spilled over onto the exit roads. By the time I returned to my car, the rain had turned to ice pellets about the size of small peas, but they were still quite hard enough when being shot at me from the sky, thank you very much.
I think I’ve only experienced being outside in a strong hailstorm only once before, and I’d been in Manhattan at the time, able to duck into tall buildings in a single bound and watch other people shrieking as they were pelted with ice. This time it was me, caught outside in an open parking lot with nowhere to go and yelling “Ouch! Oooof! Owww!!! What the …?!?” Spent the next day with all these bright little red marks on my arms and face, looking like I’d been attacked by a frenzied boyfriend with a penchant for inflicting oddly shaped hickeys. I should have only been so lucky. Nope. Just getting shot with ice ball bullets.
Screwing Finials and The Great Styrofoam War: How the Chinese Plan to Take Over the World
Anyway, two nice guys from Bob’s assembled the furniture for me, leaving me only the table lamps to assemble. Easy enough were it not for the styrofoam packaging which had begun to disintegrate on its trip from its original home in China (of course), styrofoam being the only known man-made substance on earth designed to defy the laws of gravity. It occurred to me that THIS, and not war, is China’s plan for bringing down the United States. While we’re all distractedly picking pesky gravity-defying bits of clinging styrofoam off ourselves, they’ll just walk in and take over and we won’t even notice.
When I’d first looked at the photo of the lamps, I’d thought they had a simple, unremarkable silver metallic base. Turns out they’re actually in the shape of antique Grecian urns, painted to look, as they say in the biz, “distressed”.
Sure. I often entertain guests so dumb they walk in the door and exclaim, “Wow! You took expensive antique Grecian urns that belong in a museum and had them made into lamps! How clever of you!” I draw the line at having friends that dumb and would immediately ask them to leave and never return.
But I have to say, in assembling the lamps I came across two of the strangest assembly instruction lines I’d ever read:
1. PLACE HARP ONTO SADDLE. Place harp … onto saddle. Hmmm. The visual images that instantly arose from that one line cannot be put into words. Well, they can, but not in THIS journal.
2. PUT SHADE ONTO HARP AND SCREW FINIAL. After that first line, I was no longer sure where the Chinese were going with these instructions. Possibly, rather than initiating The Great Styrofoam War, they meant to walk in and calmly take over while we were choking over their odd assembly instructions.
How to Put a Bag Over The Head of Your Beloved … TV
Some Feng Shui people also tell you not to have exposed electronics, such as computers or television sets, in the bedroom. This is bad news for people who actually are in the habit of falling asleep while the TV is on. Nothing puts me to sleep faster than most of the mindlessly numbing programming Comcast throws at me every night, guaranteed to ensure that viewers in the rest of the world see Americans as nothing but violent criminals and stupid, shrewish women with the personal hygiene of dumpster-diving alley cats.
On the other hand, other practitioners tell you differently: if you need to sacrifice your own comfort in order to Feng Shui a living space, it’s not productive use of Feng Shui. Leave the TV there and enjoy it, is their advice. Quick executive decision: let’s go with that one!! I compromised by searching for a TV armoire. The TV would be in the bedroom, but behind closed doors. Big mistake.
The armoire, from a San Francisco company called Mercantila, first took the money and did nothing with it. Consequently, I next found myself battling a Customer Disservice Department straight out of the bowels of Hades, who first disconnected me several times, then nearly bit my head off for wanting to know where the furniture was, and then handed me a fake tracking number. I finally cancelled the order, demanded a refund and registered a complaint against them with the Better Business Bureau of San Francisco. Two days after the cancellation, they of course disregarded those instructions and shipped it anyway. Gee, if there’s one thing most customers just love, it’s being completely ignored.
Solution: Drink Myself Sideways and Watch the Wonderful Jimi Mistry in A Funny Disaster Flick
So while waiting for the armoire to meander across the entire United States on a pack mule, I drank myself into a fine buzz with a few more glasses of Garnacha de Fuego while watching “2012”. Even tipsy, it was one of the silliest movies I ever saw, although it had two bright spots amidst the plethora of plagiarized plots, ridiculously excessive CGI (not to mention completely inaccurate Mayan cultural history and ignorance of basic high school level aerodynamics): Woody Harrelson was a delightful hoot as a crazed conspiracy theorist who happened to get one (final) conspiracy right, and the perpetually under-utilized and multi-talented Jimi Mistry (really enjoy his “Lost in …” mix series on Sound Cloud) was the scientist who set the plot in motion. It wasn’t that Jimi had a great role; just that I was glad to see him again, even if they did have him spouting dialog in yet another faux Indian accent - when he was born and raised in Great Britain and speaks a better Queen’s English than I do. (I, on the other hand, speak a New York English which is a far cry from anything intelligible, except to another New Yorker.) I don’t know how he stands it.
Also started reading The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, the choice of which was NOT as a result of Hugo Chavez handing President Obama a Spanish copy as a gift, but was a B&N recommendation for having read Hiram Bingham’s Lost City of the Incas. I would encounter all of the press coverage of the gift later. My favorite review? The Wall Street Journal’s laughingly self-serving review of a book which excoriates capitalism, calling it “THE IDIOT’S BIBLE!” – the term derived from the commentary of three South American journalists, known for a political affiliation which I’m guessing could be loosely defined as “NOT LEFTIST”. The WSJ didn’t dispute any of his statistics or argue any of his historical facts, however – just called everyone who read the book an idiot. Wow. There’s an intelligent book review for you. Well, what else could you expect from the Wall Street Journal?
My second favorite cache of political commentary came from all those fine folks who equated Obama graciously accepting the gift as a sign that he was in fact a secret communist. The fact that he was handed a Spanish version of the book and told Chavez he hadn’t read it before deterred them not an whit. Apparently, the mere fact that he was polite and gracious – as opposed to punching Chavez in the nose and kicking him up and down a flight of stairs in full view of an international battery of television cameras – was indisputable proof that he was a secret communist in their minds. Ahhh, the pitiable lack of logic and common sense in the American people’s – and the Wall Street Journal’s - thought processes is just sad, sometimes.
In any event, at least so far, Galeano hasn’t written anything startling and new that hasn’t already been an accepted part of the South American historical curricula for decades now … although he probably wrote it in a more poetic and passionate fashion than other authors of drier textbooks … did no one in this country actually stay awake through their American history courses? True, I haven’t finished the book yet – maybe he turns insane in the last 100 pages or something. Although I suspect that some people enjoy screaming like hysterical banshees and advocating book burning just for the fun of it.
Grouchy Brits And Speaking of Romanticizing the Bedroom …
Even though we weren’t, I have to salute the Art & Frame Source on Osgood Street, North Andover: one of the few businesses in the Andovers run by people with working brains, above average customer service and a great sense of humor. Not only was the woman willing to see if she could track down a print of Nicolas Poussin’s 1627, “Nymph with Satyrs” from the National Gallery of London for me (the same painting you’re looking at on this journal page), she also peered at just the small thumbnail j-peg of it and announced, “She’s not sleeping, she’s in ecstasy!” - I yelled “THANK YOU!” at the top of my lungs and scared her half to death. But when she read the National Gallery of London’s puritanical description of the work and burst out laughing at it too – I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. Made my whole day. Turned out she was able to locate it, has it on order and we’ll mat and frame it when it arrives in a few weeks. Can’t imagine a more romantic print for the bedroom. No wonder the British are so grouchy, if they look at that painting and think of sleeping. They obviously have no fun at all.
So while we waited for nymphs and satyrs, the awesome Caesar Borgia swept dramatically across the country … in another box. I’d finally decided that he’d be gracing the wall behind the computer instead of Underdog, along with my pitiful collection of “certificates of achievement”. Difficult choice, but Caesar was definitely more pleasurable – albeit somewhat distracting - to look at while sitting at my computer (sorry, Underdog).
When I raised him up on the wall, he definitely looked striking up there. Didn’t even have to measure the wall – there was already a nail hole up there I hadn’t seen before I could use as a reference. And I especially liked the fact that his gaze was turned towards the wealth corner – as though he on one side of the room was lending his intensity of purpose and strong will to the other side. Which was fine by me.
Day #13 Following the Instructions on Manifesting Your Soul Mate
Good News: The Long-Awaited Bed And Ongoing Space Shift
The new mattress and accoutrements arrived. Better news: the computer is now out of the bedroom and in the new computer room, and the nice man from Comcast did the entire move in about 15 minutes.
It appears that my soon-to-be-arriving soul mate is wisely delaying his appearance until he’s certain he won’t be walking to a den of chaos, and I can’t say I blame him. To ameliorate the appearance of progress, I’ll first report on the famous “Bob-o-Pedic”.
Pros: it is comfortable. based on the reviews of other people, I had expected it to be as hard as a rock until it had the time to “breathe” after being unpacked. But it had arrived by truck and hadn’t needed to be vacuum packed for shipping. When I had all the bedding on it and laid down, I thought, “this is nice!” before passing out and sleeping, undisturbed, for two hours. So thumbs up on the sleeping comfort. And for the first time in five years, my back didn’t hurt when I woke up! A not-so-fond good riddance to the flimsy, sagging, single mattress (which was only supposed to last four months) that I was trapped on for five years thanks to the Evil Ex-Relative, who stole my good bed for herself. The thing darn nearly crippled me.
And this is the bed and two nightstands I put together. This is not my bedroom -- I only wish I had a view like that outside my French doors … although it would probably be more likely if I had any French doors.
Bob-o-Pedic Cons: Thumbs down on the smell, though. It did have a pretty obnoxious chemical smell at first, which dissipated in about a week’s time. The bedding masked some of it, and it obviously didn’t prevent me from falling instantly asleep on it. It didn’t seem to deter the family felines, either – on the first day, Peanut also passed out cold under a new comforter on top of the bed, snoring loudly.
After struggling for another day assembling the two nightstands, I washed walls and dug through my tool chest again, hunting for the new picture hangers. A few weeks earlier, as I had nothing on my walls whatsoever, I had in fact splashed back to Ace for picture hangers on the fourth day of a bad 4-day nor’easter or whatever that deluge was that basically turned North Andover into The Island of North Andover, because so many creeks had flooded their banks and spilled over onto the exit roads. By the time I returned to my car, the rain had turned to ice pellets about the size of small peas, but they were still quite hard enough when being shot at me from the sky, thank you very much.
I think I’ve only experienced being outside in a strong hailstorm only once before, and I’d been in Manhattan at the time, able to duck into tall buildings in a single bound and watch other people shrieking as they were pelted with ice. This time it was me, caught outside in an open parking lot with nowhere to go and yelling “Ouch! Oooof! Owww!!! What the …?!?” Spent the next day with all these bright little red marks on my arms and face, looking like I’d been attacked by a frenzied boyfriend with a penchant for inflicting oddly shaped hickeys. I should have only been so lucky. Nope. Just getting shot with ice ball bullets.
Screwing Finials and The Great Styrofoam War: How the Chinese Plan to Take Over the World
Anyway, two nice guys from Bob’s assembled the furniture for me, leaving me only the table lamps to assemble. Easy enough were it not for the styrofoam packaging which had begun to disintegrate on its trip from its original home in China (of course), styrofoam being the only known man-made substance on earth designed to defy the laws of gravity. It occurred to me that THIS, and not war, is China’s plan for bringing down the United States. While we’re all distractedly picking pesky gravity-defying bits of clinging styrofoam off ourselves, they’ll just walk in and take over and we won’t even notice.
When I’d first looked at the photo of the lamps, I’d thought they had a simple, unremarkable silver metallic base. Turns out they’re actually in the shape of antique Grecian urns, painted to look, as they say in the biz, “distressed”.
Sure. I often entertain guests so dumb they walk in the door and exclaim, “Wow! You took expensive antique Grecian urns that belong in a museum and had them made into lamps! How clever of you!” I draw the line at having friends that dumb and would immediately ask them to leave and never return.
But I have to say, in assembling the lamps I came across two of the strangest assembly instruction lines I’d ever read:
1. PLACE HARP ONTO SADDLE. Place harp … onto saddle. Hmmm. The visual images that instantly arose from that one line cannot be put into words. Well, they can, but not in THIS journal.
2. PUT SHADE ONTO HARP AND SCREW FINIAL. After that first line, I was no longer sure where the Chinese were going with these instructions. Possibly, rather than initiating The Great Styrofoam War, they meant to walk in and calmly take over while we were choking over their odd assembly instructions.
How to Put a Bag Over The Head of Your Beloved … TV
Some Feng Shui people also tell you not to have exposed electronics, such as computers or television sets, in the bedroom. This is bad news for people who actually are in the habit of falling asleep while the TV is on. Nothing puts me to sleep faster than most of the mindlessly numbing programming Comcast throws at me every night, guaranteed to ensure that viewers in the rest of the world see Americans as nothing but violent criminals and stupid, shrewish women with the personal hygiene of dumpster-diving alley cats.
On the other hand, other practitioners tell you differently: if you need to sacrifice your own comfort in order to Feng Shui a living space, it’s not productive use of Feng Shui. Leave the TV there and enjoy it, is their advice. Quick executive decision: let’s go with that one!! I compromised by searching for a TV armoire. The TV would be in the bedroom, but behind closed doors. Big mistake.
The armoire, from a San Francisco company called Mercantila, first took the money and did nothing with it. Consequently, I next found myself battling a Customer Disservice Department straight out of the bowels of Hades, who first disconnected me several times, then nearly bit my head off for wanting to know where the furniture was, and then handed me a fake tracking number. I finally cancelled the order, demanded a refund and registered a complaint against them with the Better Business Bureau of San Francisco. Two days after the cancellation, they of course disregarded those instructions and shipped it anyway. Gee, if there’s one thing most customers just love, it’s being completely ignored.
Solution: Drink Myself Sideways and Watch the Wonderful Jimi Mistry in A Funny Disaster Flick
So while waiting for the armoire to meander across the entire United States on a pack mule, I drank myself into a fine buzz with a few more glasses of Garnacha de Fuego while watching “2012”. Even tipsy, it was one of the silliest movies I ever saw, although it had two bright spots amidst the plethora of plagiarized plots, ridiculously excessive CGI (not to mention completely inaccurate Mayan cultural history and ignorance of basic high school level aerodynamics): Woody Harrelson was a delightful hoot as a crazed conspiracy theorist who happened to get one (final) conspiracy right, and the perpetually under-utilized and multi-talented Jimi Mistry (really enjoy his “Lost in …” mix series on Sound Cloud) was the scientist who set the plot in motion. It wasn’t that Jimi had a great role; just that I was glad to see him again, even if they did have him spouting dialog in yet another faux Indian accent - when he was born and raised in Great Britain and speaks a better Queen’s English than I do. (I, on the other hand, speak a New York English which is a far cry from anything intelligible, except to another New Yorker.) I don’t know how he stands it.
Also started reading The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, the choice of which was NOT as a result of Hugo Chavez handing President Obama a Spanish copy as a gift, but was a B&N recommendation for having read Hiram Bingham’s Lost City of the Incas. I would encounter all of the press coverage of the gift later. My favorite review? The Wall Street Journal’s laughingly self-serving review of a book which excoriates capitalism, calling it “THE IDIOT’S BIBLE!” – the term derived from the commentary of three South American journalists, known for a political affiliation which I’m guessing could be loosely defined as “NOT LEFTIST”. The WSJ didn’t dispute any of his statistics or argue any of his historical facts, however – just called everyone who read the book an idiot. Wow. There’s an intelligent book review for you. Well, what else could you expect from the Wall Street Journal?
My second favorite cache of political commentary came from all those fine folks who equated Obama graciously accepting the gift as a sign that he was in fact a secret communist. The fact that he was handed a Spanish version of the book and told Chavez he hadn’t read it before deterred them not an whit. Apparently, the mere fact that he was polite and gracious – as opposed to punching Chavez in the nose and kicking him up and down a flight of stairs in full view of an international battery of television cameras – was indisputable proof that he was a secret communist in their minds. Ahhh, the pitiable lack of logic and common sense in the American people’s – and the Wall Street Journal’s - thought processes is just sad, sometimes.
In any event, at least so far, Galeano hasn’t written anything startling and new that hasn’t already been an accepted part of the South American historical curricula for decades now … although he probably wrote it in a more poetic and passionate fashion than other authors of drier textbooks … did no one in this country actually stay awake through their American history courses? True, I haven’t finished the book yet – maybe he turns insane in the last 100 pages or something. Although I suspect that some people enjoy screaming like hysterical banshees and advocating book burning just for the fun of it.
Grouchy Brits And Speaking of Romanticizing the Bedroom …
Even though we weren’t, I have to salute the Art & Frame Source on Osgood Street, North Andover: one of the few businesses in the Andovers run by people with working brains, above average customer service and a great sense of humor. Not only was the woman willing to see if she could track down a print of Nicolas Poussin’s 1627, “Nymph with Satyrs” from the National Gallery of London for me (the same painting you’re looking at on this journal page), she also peered at just the small thumbnail j-peg of it and announced, “She’s not sleeping, she’s in ecstasy!” - I yelled “THANK YOU!” at the top of my lungs and scared her half to death. But when she read the National Gallery of London’s puritanical description of the work and burst out laughing at it too – I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. Made my whole day. Turned out she was able to locate it, has it on order and we’ll mat and frame it when it arrives in a few weeks. Can’t imagine a more romantic print for the bedroom. No wonder the British are so grouchy, if they look at that painting and think of sleeping. They obviously have no fun at all.
So while we waited for nymphs and satyrs, the awesome Caesar Borgia swept dramatically across the country … in another box. I’d finally decided that he’d be gracing the wall behind the computer instead of Underdog, along with my pitiful collection of “certificates of achievement”. Difficult choice, but Caesar was definitely more pleasurable – albeit somewhat distracting - to look at while sitting at my computer (sorry, Underdog).
When I raised him up on the wall, he definitely looked striking up there. Didn’t even have to measure the wall – there was already a nail hole up there I hadn’t seen before I could use as a reference. And I especially liked the fact that his gaze was turned towards the wealth corner – as though he on one side of the room was lending his intensity of purpose and strong will to the other side. Which was fine by me.
SSD#12: Woman vs. Bed and Mallard Ducks in Three Languages
Mar. 20th, 2010 at 2:17 AM
Day #12 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate"
Making Space: In - and Out
I was not only supposed to be imagining the Soul Mate as already there, according to the book, I was also supposed to be making space for him. I evidently expected the soon-to-be-arriving Soul Mate to charge in the door, race to the fridge, chow down, belch contentedly and then amble off to the bathroom with an hour’s reading material without even saying hello, because the first spring cleaning tasks I put some elbow grease into was a thorough cleaning of the bathroom and then the refrigerator.
Not that either one of them were in particularly bad shape – they weren’t – I just went the extra mile of bleach and ammonia cleaning I don’t normally do every week – and then sprayed the bathroom with a lovely, über-feminine floral air freshener so his eyes wouldn’t immediately start watering – not from joy at finding me at last, but from the ammonia fumes. Am I thoughtful or what?? We can discuss the questionable behavioral expectations I had for him later.
Making Space: Pinked
In Feng Shui terms, the “relationships, love, marriage” section of the apartment is supposed to be reflective of the fire element and decorated with reds, pinks and whites – definitely not my favorite color scheme. Too much pink always reminds of those annoying women who carry around little yipping dogs in wicker baskets, slather on their make-up with a trowel, paint on their arched eyebrows, bat their fake eyelashes at everybody and talk in little-girl voices and think they’re irresistible.
Reds I can deal with and whites I can deal with – but pink? I don’t know. What DO men think about pink bedrooms? I've never actually done a survey, but my educated guess would be that pink was not their favorite color scheme, either. (Or, if it happened to be some guy’s favorite color scheme, I’m not at all sure he’d be at all interested in ME, let’s put it that way).
Also, it’s supposed to contain the elements that reflect such relationships: no pictures of people or items in isolation, nothing depressing or scary – only two’s and couples; items that represent love and commitment. Feng Shui practitioners sometimes recommend a pair of mallard ducks for this area. Now, I have nothing against mallard ducks. I know mallard ducks are supposed to mate for life, but I still don’t spy a pair of mallard ducks and think, “How romantic! Love! Marriage!”
What To Do When You See A Mallard Duck
Actually, I see a pair of mallard ducks and immediately (if you’ll excuse the expression) duck and cover. Reason? I used to live in a region of the lower Catskills populated with stupid and illiterate hunters who would just as often shoot themselves and each other (and me) while aiming for a mallard duck as anything else that moved. I have nothing against the NRA in particular, but I still can’t figure out why they think it goes against the constitution to take a really stupid man who can’t read a simple “Hunting Prohibited” sign in a residential area, put a gun in his hand and then set him loose on the population. Lord, but we’re an idiotic country sometimes. You have to prove you can read road signs to drive, but not prove you can read “Hunting Prohibited” signs in order to be handed a gun?
But I digress.
A bedroom, to bring to mind love and romance, should also probably have a bed in it. And that was something of a problem. I didn’t have a bed. Well, I do have a bed, but it’s presently in another state, still being held hostage in the lower Catskills,. (See “Felonious and Evil Ex-Relative”, previous entry). For the last five years I’ve had to make do with a cheap, squeaky daybed that was only supposed to tide me over for four months in college and was now so worn out my back was killing me. Even my doctor had suggested I consider buying a new bed when I complained of sciatic nerve pain so severe I had trouble standing up straight in the mornings.
I could hardly welcome a Soul Mate into my life with a romantic life confined to a single, squeaky day bed and me hobbling around in the mornings like an 80-year old. After weeks of comparison shopping and scrimping I found a platform bed I could afford, and ordered it. I was told it would arrive in six to eight weeks.
The Doorbell Rings!
I was told wrong. It arrived in three days. Definitely had to have set some sort of land speed record for beds.
And I was SO not ready for it. I was very peacefully sorting through books in the “New Bedroom”, deciding which ones to keep and which ones to send to the storage room when the doorbell rang at 8:00 in the morning. It was so heavy the FedEx guy couldn’t even lift it onto his dollie, and had to push it along the carpeted hallway most of the way. I’m sure my neighbors couldn’t imagine a more charming way to be awakened in the morning than by the sound of grunting, groaning, heaving and ho’ing in the hallway. (And feel free to keep your comments and giggling to yourself, please). I knew that if the Fed Ex guy couldn’t lift it, there was no way I was going to lift it. To heck with the patient wait for him to materialize, I needed my Soul Mate – and his muscles - RIGHT NOW, or I was going to welcome him into my life by handing him a pocket wrench and telling him to start cracking.
Alas, the doorbell didn’t ring twice. The lazy sot … er, I mean, my beloved soul mate … was so not going to show right now. Wise man. It looked like I was going to have to do this myself. And surely you have some idea already of my accident-prone tendencies. When I looked at the huge and heavy bed components and threw phrases like “do or die” around, I was being more literal than most people. My cats know me pretty well, too, and wisely slunk out of the way, preferring to warily watch the proceedings from safe distances. Wise animals, cats.
Assembly in Three Languages
One thing I really love about assembly instructions is the way that it never says, “Two people recommended” on the website you order the bed from, but it does say it on the instructions when you’re standing all alone in your living room. In three languages, no less: “2 PEOPLE! 2 PERSONNES! 2 PERSONAS!” To which I snorted, “Merci! Gracias! AND THANKS FOR TELLING ME THAT NOW!” I had an immovable bed, no way to lift it, nowhere to put it, no way to put it together and no firm mattress to put on it.
But – there was nothing else I could do but tackle the problem alone. I started at 8:30 in the morning, first by walking in circles around it, eyeballing the pile of components. Then by dragging the components piece by piece from the living room into the bedroom. Then by opening the directions and trying to match up pieces with illustrations I needed a magnifying glass to see. Then I dug out my toolbox again, looking for my new screwdrivers. Then I put some uplifting music on the speakers. Then I started putting this huge bed together. Since I didn’t have the second person, I decided to use the wall and other pieces of furniture to brace it against when I needed to hold it steady.
It worked. I know, I couldn't believe it, either! I finished at 4:00 in the afternoon without injuring myself once, if you don’t count the bruise in my palm from screwing bolts into it manually … voila! Every body part I had now ached, but I had a big empty platform laying in the middle of the bedroom. Of course I spent the rest of the day forgetting it was there, and barking my shins on it regularly.
Mattresses take less time to arrive, so I had assumed I could wait for it; and hadn’t even ordered one. Thinking I could probably now use one sooner rather than later, I dialed up Bob’s Discount Furniture for a Bob-o-Pedic and made one happy salesman’s day – he didn’t even have to do a sales pitch. In the meanwhile, I supposed I could lay the single mattress down on the platform, to at least give my aching back some support and finally dismantle the squeaky daybed. And good riddance to it. But in my world, dismantling things could be just as dangerous as assembling things … and I don’t have the best record in dismantling things without injury. It could wait at least a day.
Meanwhile ... now to assemble the matching nightstands.
Day #12 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate"
Making Space: In - and Out
I was not only supposed to be imagining the Soul Mate as already there, according to the book, I was also supposed to be making space for him. I evidently expected the soon-to-be-arriving Soul Mate to charge in the door, race to the fridge, chow down, belch contentedly and then amble off to the bathroom with an hour’s reading material without even saying hello, because the first spring cleaning tasks I put some elbow grease into was a thorough cleaning of the bathroom and then the refrigerator.
Not that either one of them were in particularly bad shape – they weren’t – I just went the extra mile of bleach and ammonia cleaning I don’t normally do every week – and then sprayed the bathroom with a lovely, über-feminine floral air freshener so his eyes wouldn’t immediately start watering – not from joy at finding me at last, but from the ammonia fumes. Am I thoughtful or what?? We can discuss the questionable behavioral expectations I had for him later.
Making Space: Pinked
In Feng Shui terms, the “relationships, love, marriage” section of the apartment is supposed to be reflective of the fire element and decorated with reds, pinks and whites – definitely not my favorite color scheme. Too much pink always reminds of those annoying women who carry around little yipping dogs in wicker baskets, slather on their make-up with a trowel, paint on their arched eyebrows, bat their fake eyelashes at everybody and talk in little-girl voices and think they’re irresistible.
Reds I can deal with and whites I can deal with – but pink? I don’t know. What DO men think about pink bedrooms? I've never actually done a survey, but my educated guess would be that pink was not their favorite color scheme, either. (Or, if it happened to be some guy’s favorite color scheme, I’m not at all sure he’d be at all interested in ME, let’s put it that way).
Also, it’s supposed to contain the elements that reflect such relationships: no pictures of people or items in isolation, nothing depressing or scary – only two’s and couples; items that represent love and commitment. Feng Shui practitioners sometimes recommend a pair of mallard ducks for this area. Now, I have nothing against mallard ducks. I know mallard ducks are supposed to mate for life, but I still don’t spy a pair of mallard ducks and think, “How romantic! Love! Marriage!”
What To Do When You See A Mallard Duck
Actually, I see a pair of mallard ducks and immediately (if you’ll excuse the expression) duck and cover. Reason? I used to live in a region of the lower Catskills populated with stupid and illiterate hunters who would just as often shoot themselves and each other (and me) while aiming for a mallard duck as anything else that moved. I have nothing against the NRA in particular, but I still can’t figure out why they think it goes against the constitution to take a really stupid man who can’t read a simple “Hunting Prohibited” sign in a residential area, put a gun in his hand and then set him loose on the population. Lord, but we’re an idiotic country sometimes. You have to prove you can read road signs to drive, but not prove you can read “Hunting Prohibited” signs in order to be handed a gun?
But I digress.
A bedroom, to bring to mind love and romance, should also probably have a bed in it. And that was something of a problem. I didn’t have a bed. Well, I do have a bed, but it’s presently in another state, still being held hostage in the lower Catskills,. (See “Felonious and Evil Ex-Relative”, previous entry). For the last five years I’ve had to make do with a cheap, squeaky daybed that was only supposed to tide me over for four months in college and was now so worn out my back was killing me. Even my doctor had suggested I consider buying a new bed when I complained of sciatic nerve pain so severe I had trouble standing up straight in the mornings.
I could hardly welcome a Soul Mate into my life with a romantic life confined to a single, squeaky day bed and me hobbling around in the mornings like an 80-year old. After weeks of comparison shopping and scrimping I found a platform bed I could afford, and ordered it. I was told it would arrive in six to eight weeks.
The Doorbell Rings!
I was told wrong. It arrived in three days. Definitely had to have set some sort of land speed record for beds.
And I was SO not ready for it. I was very peacefully sorting through books in the “New Bedroom”, deciding which ones to keep and which ones to send to the storage room when the doorbell rang at 8:00 in the morning. It was so heavy the FedEx guy couldn’t even lift it onto his dollie, and had to push it along the carpeted hallway most of the way. I’m sure my neighbors couldn’t imagine a more charming way to be awakened in the morning than by the sound of grunting, groaning, heaving and ho’ing in the hallway. (And feel free to keep your comments and giggling to yourself, please). I knew that if the Fed Ex guy couldn’t lift it, there was no way I was going to lift it. To heck with the patient wait for him to materialize, I needed my Soul Mate – and his muscles - RIGHT NOW, or I was going to welcome him into my life by handing him a pocket wrench and telling him to start cracking.
Alas, the doorbell didn’t ring twice. The lazy sot … er, I mean, my beloved soul mate … was so not going to show right now. Wise man. It looked like I was going to have to do this myself. And surely you have some idea already of my accident-prone tendencies. When I looked at the huge and heavy bed components and threw phrases like “do or die” around, I was being more literal than most people. My cats know me pretty well, too, and wisely slunk out of the way, preferring to warily watch the proceedings from safe distances. Wise animals, cats.
Assembly in Three Languages
One thing I really love about assembly instructions is the way that it never says, “Two people recommended” on the website you order the bed from, but it does say it on the instructions when you’re standing all alone in your living room. In three languages, no less: “2 PEOPLE! 2 PERSONNES! 2 PERSONAS!” To which I snorted, “Merci! Gracias! AND THANKS FOR TELLING ME THAT NOW!” I had an immovable bed, no way to lift it, nowhere to put it, no way to put it together and no firm mattress to put on it.
But – there was nothing else I could do but tackle the problem alone. I started at 8:30 in the morning, first by walking in circles around it, eyeballing the pile of components. Then by dragging the components piece by piece from the living room into the bedroom. Then by opening the directions and trying to match up pieces with illustrations I needed a magnifying glass to see. Then I dug out my toolbox again, looking for my new screwdrivers. Then I put some uplifting music on the speakers. Then I started putting this huge bed together. Since I didn’t have the second person, I decided to use the wall and other pieces of furniture to brace it against when I needed to hold it steady.
It worked. I know, I couldn't believe it, either! I finished at 4:00 in the afternoon without injuring myself once, if you don’t count the bruise in my palm from screwing bolts into it manually … voila! Every body part I had now ached, but I had a big empty platform laying in the middle of the bedroom. Of course I spent the rest of the day forgetting it was there, and barking my shins on it regularly.
Mattresses take less time to arrive, so I had assumed I could wait for it; and hadn’t even ordered one. Thinking I could probably now use one sooner rather than later, I dialed up Bob’s Discount Furniture for a Bob-o-Pedic and made one happy salesman’s day – he didn’t even have to do a sales pitch. In the meanwhile, I supposed I could lay the single mattress down on the platform, to at least give my aching back some support and finally dismantle the squeaky daybed. And good riddance to it. But in my world, dismantling things could be just as dangerous as assembling things … and I don’t have the best record in dismantling things without injury. It could wait at least a day.
Meanwhile ... now to assemble the matching nightstands.
SSD11: Cheesy Cards, the Price of Love, Pity for Canada and Why I’m a Condescending Party-Pooper
Mar. 14th, 2010 at 11:44 AM
Day Number 11 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
Happy Valentine’s Day Whoever You Are! (only a month late)
One of the items on the “To Do” list – as part of the “Imagine that what you want has already happened” approach to manifesting soul mates – was to buy him a Valentine’s Day card for Valentine’s Day last February, as though he were already here to hand the card to. This year was the first time I’ve perused Valentine’s Day cards, since (CONFESSION TIME!) I’ve always thought it was a stupid holiday. Not because I thought love itself was stupid, but because it seemed like such a pro-Corporate day. Why put money in the pockets of the executives of the Hallmark Corporation for the sole purpose of celebrating something and expressing something you should be celebrating and expressing every day? Oh, I know, I’m just such a condescending, party-pooping twit, aren’t I?
So, this past February I forced myself to swallow my holier-than-thou attitude (not as easy as it sounds on paper, believe me) and look at Valentine’s Day cards. Worse, the cost of a simple card had skyrocketed. It wasn’t that long ago they cost less than dollar each – but then, it had been a while since I bought one. I would find myself somewhat moved by a sentiment only to turn the card over, look at the price and gawp in surprise. Was my Soul Mate worth my spending anywhere from $3 to $4 to say something I should be saying every day? Or would he say, “Why did you waste all that money on this, you silly woman??”
I know, I know, depriving corporate America of their monstrous bonus checks is probably un-American. Oh well. Stick me in the encyclopedia under “Benedict Arnold”, then. I still saw no reason why I should buy some Hallmark executive and his dimwitted trophy wife with her oversized silicone rack dual memberships in their local country club for nothing more than handing me cheesy pre-printed poems that sounded like they were written by a “Team Edward” Twilight preteen in the hormone-fueled throes of her first passion for a bewildered Rob Pattinson. (Besides, I much preferred Peter Facinelli, who cracks me up with his entertaining tales of RV road trips with his wife and daughters.).
But I digress.
I finally decided that if my Soul Mate were touched by the gesture, it would be nice, but it would also be nice if he hinted that the money would have been better spent on something useful – like a yacht the two of us could use to sail off into the sunset, so to speak. Really. I would agree with him wholeheartedly, so either way I’d be alright with the reaction. Maybe we could eventually incorporate it into our wedding vows: “I promise not to waste our hard-earned money buying you redundant and unnecessary Valentine’s Day cards!” I’m sure people have written weirder wedding vows than that.
But I’d promised not to question any step in this process, so there I was, reading Valentine’s Day cards at the store and feeling rather self-conscious. Some of them were so incredibly sappy I just couldn’t consider them and hold on to my self respect and eroding sense of dignity … many were just too over-the-top, with their hearts and flowers and tweeting bluebirds of happiness. Some sounded like really bad lyrics to a cheesy pop song. Some were a little too irreverent. Others were downright crude. The process took a while. Finally, I was left with a couple of pitiful choices:
“I’m so glad I found you. You and I are connected in a way that goes beyond romance, beyond friendship, beyond what we’ve ever had before. We’re soul mates. I can’t explain it. I just feel it. Happy Valentine’s Day”.
Lord Byron it wasn’t, but for this touchy-feely sentiment, Hallmark executives wanted $3.99 in the USA and $5.49 in Canada. I could have purchased a Byron paperback book of love sonnets for not much more than that and been more emotionally satisfied.
But I did notice the much higher Canadian prices. Poor Canada! Every time you grumble about spending money on your “valentine”, keep in mind: at least you’re not Canadian! (Unless of course, you are Canadian, in which case … we’d send you a ‘Gee, so sorry you got screwed by Hallmark!’ sympathy card, except most of us can’t afford them.) Love is so much more expensive in Canada. Makes you want to apologize for and retract the South Park movie anthem, “Blame Canada”, doesn’t it? No wonder Canada produced the depraved Terrence and Philip in the South Park Universe: if it’s so much more expensive to express love via Hallmark cards in Canada, Terrence and Philip were probably deprived of love from an early age. No wonder they were so warped. Forget blaming Canada! BLAME HALLMARK!
So that was one choice. Another sad and long-winded possibility.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I just want you to know that. I can’t stop feeling thankful for your sweetness and your gentle ways. I can’t imagine not being with you today, and tomorrow and every tomorrow beyond that. I love you more than I can tell you. I want to spend my life trying to be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Summary: the last line was all they needed for this card; the rest of it was, “Blah blah blah”. He’d think I was a typical babbling woman who couldn’t stop mindlessly chattering if I handed him this. But for this verbally superfluous sentiment, they wanted a whopping $5.99 in the USA and $7.99 in Canada. Do they pay the writers of these cards by the word, or something?
Sorry, I digress again.
I’d forgotten all about buying the card - I’ll leave it up to your imagination to guess which one I eventually settled for. I’d probably blocked it from memory shortly after buying it - I hadn’t even written a personal note in it, the way I was supposed to. Something like, “Sorry I couldn’t find anything less girly than this, but here ‘ya go! I had to sell my heirloom jewelry to afford it, but …(<--- that was a lie. I don’t have any heirloom jewelry. I have a horrible skin allergy to metals, so anyone who would have thought of giving me any heirloom jewelry immediately thought better of it, primarily because they loved me and didn’t want me to break out in unsightly welts and swell up like a balloon. Love you, Mom! Nice way to start a relationship though, huh? Lie through my teeth about heirloom jewelry!) …” - until I was doing my Feng Shui room switching and ran across it in my move. As soon as I saw it, I decided that the perfect place to write the “wedding vow” was on this card!
So a Valentine with the vow, “I promise not to spend our future hard-earned money buying you redundant and unnecessary Valentine’s Day cards!” is now firmly glued to my “Treasure Map”.
Gee, I sure hope he has a sense of humor.
Day Number 11 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
Happy Valentine’s Day Whoever You Are! (only a month late)
One of the items on the “To Do” list – as part of the “Imagine that what you want has already happened” approach to manifesting soul mates – was to buy him a Valentine’s Day card for Valentine’s Day last February, as though he were already here to hand the card to. This year was the first time I’ve perused Valentine’s Day cards, since (CONFESSION TIME!) I’ve always thought it was a stupid holiday. Not because I thought love itself was stupid, but because it seemed like such a pro-Corporate day. Why put money in the pockets of the executives of the Hallmark Corporation for the sole purpose of celebrating something and expressing something you should be celebrating and expressing every day? Oh, I know, I’m just such a condescending, party-pooping twit, aren’t I?
So, this past February I forced myself to swallow my holier-than-thou attitude (not as easy as it sounds on paper, believe me) and look at Valentine’s Day cards. Worse, the cost of a simple card had skyrocketed. It wasn’t that long ago they cost less than dollar each – but then, it had been a while since I bought one. I would find myself somewhat moved by a sentiment only to turn the card over, look at the price and gawp in surprise. Was my Soul Mate worth my spending anywhere from $3 to $4 to say something I should be saying every day? Or would he say, “Why did you waste all that money on this, you silly woman??”
I know, I know, depriving corporate America of their monstrous bonus checks is probably un-American. Oh well. Stick me in the encyclopedia under “Benedict Arnold”, then. I still saw no reason why I should buy some Hallmark executive and his dimwitted trophy wife with her oversized silicone rack dual memberships in their local country club for nothing more than handing me cheesy pre-printed poems that sounded like they were written by a “Team Edward” Twilight preteen in the hormone-fueled throes of her first passion for a bewildered Rob Pattinson. (Besides, I much preferred Peter Facinelli, who cracks me up with his entertaining tales of RV road trips with his wife and daughters.).
But I digress.
I finally decided that if my Soul Mate were touched by the gesture, it would be nice, but it would also be nice if he hinted that the money would have been better spent on something useful – like a yacht the two of us could use to sail off into the sunset, so to speak. Really. I would agree with him wholeheartedly, so either way I’d be alright with the reaction. Maybe we could eventually incorporate it into our wedding vows: “I promise not to waste our hard-earned money buying you redundant and unnecessary Valentine’s Day cards!” I’m sure people have written weirder wedding vows than that.
But I’d promised not to question any step in this process, so there I was, reading Valentine’s Day cards at the store and feeling rather self-conscious. Some of them were so incredibly sappy I just couldn’t consider them and hold on to my self respect and eroding sense of dignity … many were just too over-the-top, with their hearts and flowers and tweeting bluebirds of happiness. Some sounded like really bad lyrics to a cheesy pop song. Some were a little too irreverent. Others were downright crude. The process took a while. Finally, I was left with a couple of pitiful choices:
“I’m so glad I found you. You and I are connected in a way that goes beyond romance, beyond friendship, beyond what we’ve ever had before. We’re soul mates. I can’t explain it. I just feel it. Happy Valentine’s Day”.
Lord Byron it wasn’t, but for this touchy-feely sentiment, Hallmark executives wanted $3.99 in the USA and $5.49 in Canada. I could have purchased a Byron paperback book of love sonnets for not much more than that and been more emotionally satisfied.
But I did notice the much higher Canadian prices. Poor Canada! Every time you grumble about spending money on your “valentine”, keep in mind: at least you’re not Canadian! (Unless of course, you are Canadian, in which case … we’d send you a ‘Gee, so sorry you got screwed by Hallmark!’ sympathy card, except most of us can’t afford them.) Love is so much more expensive in Canada. Makes you want to apologize for and retract the South Park movie anthem, “Blame Canada”, doesn’t it? No wonder Canada produced the depraved Terrence and Philip in the South Park Universe: if it’s so much more expensive to express love via Hallmark cards in Canada, Terrence and Philip were probably deprived of love from an early age. No wonder they were so warped. Forget blaming Canada! BLAME HALLMARK!
So that was one choice. Another sad and long-winded possibility.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I just want you to know that. I can’t stop feeling thankful for your sweetness and your gentle ways. I can’t imagine not being with you today, and tomorrow and every tomorrow beyond that. I love you more than I can tell you. I want to spend my life trying to be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Summary: the last line was all they needed for this card; the rest of it was, “Blah blah blah”. He’d think I was a typical babbling woman who couldn’t stop mindlessly chattering if I handed him this. But for this verbally superfluous sentiment, they wanted a whopping $5.99 in the USA and $7.99 in Canada. Do they pay the writers of these cards by the word, or something?
Sorry, I digress again.
I’d forgotten all about buying the card - I’ll leave it up to your imagination to guess which one I eventually settled for. I’d probably blocked it from memory shortly after buying it - I hadn’t even written a personal note in it, the way I was supposed to. Something like, “Sorry I couldn’t find anything less girly than this, but here ‘ya go! I had to sell my heirloom jewelry to afford it, but …(<--- that was a lie. I don’t have any heirloom jewelry. I have a horrible skin allergy to metals, so anyone who would have thought of giving me any heirloom jewelry immediately thought better of it, primarily because they loved me and didn’t want me to break out in unsightly welts and swell up like a balloon. Love you, Mom! Nice way to start a relationship though, huh? Lie through my teeth about heirloom jewelry!) …” - until I was doing my Feng Shui room switching and ran across it in my move. As soon as I saw it, I decided that the perfect place to write the “wedding vow” was on this card!
So a Valentine with the vow, “I promise not to spend our future hard-earned money buying you redundant and unnecessary Valentine’s Day cards!” is now firmly glued to my “Treasure Map”.
Gee, I sure hope he has a sense of humor.
SSD#10: “PULL IT!”, Classical Crossover Gathering News And Other Accomplishments
Feb. 28th, 2010 at 5:28 PM
Day Number 10 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
First, I want to acknowledge a slightly irascible member of the reading public who dropped me a private note on the retractable tape measure and Ace Hardware packaging: “You see that little plastic sliding lock on the front?” Ah. Thank you. Apparently, the tape measure doesn’t have to retract without warning – I could have locked it! He also mentioned the Ace screwdriver packaging. I had described sawing away at the packaging with a box cutter. “JUST PULL IT!” he yelled.
Now, he could have meant a number of different things by that, some of which are better left to the public’s imagination, but I chose to take the high road and interpret it as helpful advice … and I did try it on the two smaller screwdrivers I had also purchased from Ace. It worked. No need to saw at the tabs which held it anchored to the packaging, no need to have a tourniquet handy for the inevitable moment when my hand slipped … I needed to just … uh … “pull it”. Hard. So, a big thank you to … “[Anonymous]”!! No really, that was his name. Either he’s very shy, or his parents have a really sick sense of humor and enjoyed watching him get beaten up all the way through his childhood. No wonder he spent all his time alone in his room, playing with his retractable tape measure and pulling on his screwdrivers, getting crankier by the minute.
Well, after thanking my (one) cranky fan, I spent the last week sustaining all manner of physical injuries Feng Shui’ing the apartment within an inch of its life. Note to Future Soul Mate: are you SURE you want to pursue this? Because you’re about to hook yourself up with the biggest klutz on three continents (I’m not sure about Australia, there may be someone there who gets run over by marauding kangaroos every time they walk out the front door. And the way “George of the Jungle” keeps swinging into trees, I’m not entire sure about Africa, either. Or was George of the Jungle from the South American Amazon?? Brendan Frazer out there anywhere?? Feel free to weigh in on that.)
All I did was move two four-drawer file cabinets and re-file the contents of at least three drawers, try to disassemble a dresser carcass, and in the process managed to sustain so many splinters, scrapes, stubbed toes, broken finger nails, bent fingers, pulled muscles and overall bruises that I spent more time anti-bacterializing and band-aiding myself than I did almost anything else. So I’m pretty sure I won the gold in the North American Household Accidental Self-Inflicted Injuries Olympics this week. No one ever told me Feng Shui’ing was so dangerous. But once I can find my camera in the chaos, I'll record the "before" and "after" photos for posterity.
Meanwhile ... the exciting breaking news of the day was that just about every voice I love listening to gathered in one place today to record a fund-raising single for Haiti relief - this would be a gathering of classical crossover artists. A lot of them were running around with their cell phones videoing snippets of things, but it looked like there was at least one serious cameraman in the background filming everything that moved. Can't wait for the video and the single - should be awesome!
Day Number 10 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
First, I want to acknowledge a slightly irascible member of the reading public who dropped me a private note on the retractable tape measure and Ace Hardware packaging: “You see that little plastic sliding lock on the front?” Ah. Thank you. Apparently, the tape measure doesn’t have to retract without warning – I could have locked it! He also mentioned the Ace screwdriver packaging. I had described sawing away at the packaging with a box cutter. “JUST PULL IT!” he yelled.
Now, he could have meant a number of different things by that, some of which are better left to the public’s imagination, but I chose to take the high road and interpret it as helpful advice … and I did try it on the two smaller screwdrivers I had also purchased from Ace. It worked. No need to saw at the tabs which held it anchored to the packaging, no need to have a tourniquet handy for the inevitable moment when my hand slipped … I needed to just … uh … “pull it”. Hard. So, a big thank you to … “[Anonymous]”!! No really, that was his name. Either he’s very shy, or his parents have a really sick sense of humor and enjoyed watching him get beaten up all the way through his childhood. No wonder he spent all his time alone in his room, playing with his retractable tape measure and pulling on his screwdrivers, getting crankier by the minute.
Well, after thanking my (one) cranky fan, I spent the last week sustaining all manner of physical injuries Feng Shui’ing the apartment within an inch of its life. Note to Future Soul Mate: are you SURE you want to pursue this? Because you’re about to hook yourself up with the biggest klutz on three continents (I’m not sure about Australia, there may be someone there who gets run over by marauding kangaroos every time they walk out the front door. And the way “George of the Jungle” keeps swinging into trees, I’m not entire sure about Africa, either. Or was George of the Jungle from the South American Amazon?? Brendan Frazer out there anywhere?? Feel free to weigh in on that.)
All I did was move two four-drawer file cabinets and re-file the contents of at least three drawers, try to disassemble a dresser carcass, and in the process managed to sustain so many splinters, scrapes, stubbed toes, broken finger nails, bent fingers, pulled muscles and overall bruises that I spent more time anti-bacterializing and band-aiding myself than I did almost anything else. So I’m pretty sure I won the gold in the North American Household Accidental Self-Inflicted Injuries Olympics this week. No one ever told me Feng Shui’ing was so dangerous. But once I can find my camera in the chaos, I'll record the "before" and "after" photos for posterity.
Meanwhile ... the exciting breaking news of the day was that just about every voice I love listening to gathered in one place today to record a fund-raising single for Haiti relief - this would be a gathering of classical crossover artists. A lot of them were running around with their cell phones videoing snippets of things, but it looked like there was at least one serious cameraman in the background filming everything that moved. Can't wait for the video and the single - should be awesome!
SSD#9: Dowsing Pendants, MTV, Women without a Subconscious and the Twitter Taliban
Feb. 19th, 2010 at 6:42 AM
Day Number 9 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
One of the benefits of the “Prepare for Your Soul Mate with Feng Shui” project - even if you can’t pronounce it properly - is the distracting de-cluttering that accompanies moving everything around: I found myself picking up things, one item at a time, looking at it, examining it, determining whether or not there is a real use for it, and then keeping or discarding it. Very useful periodic activity, regardless of why you’re doing it.
Which is how I picked up a small drawstring suede bag that I’d been carrying around since my days in Media Buying. It was handed out at one time by a network or syndicator as part of a promotion -- looking at the now faded embossed logo on the bag: looks like it might have been MTV. Cannot remember why they sent these things out, but it might have been some sort of witchy predictive promotional gimmick like: “Predict how popular this season will be!” or maybe “Predict how long it will take us to forget our entire raison d’etre and start airing crap so pitiful we get beaten in the ratings by VH-effen-1” … or something along those lines. So they enclosed an item in the bag which – at the time I received it – I thought was some sort of cheap ugly jewelry on a cord, but which I now recognize from my recent interaction with crystal lore as either a quartz point dowsing pendant or a good facsimile of one. I had no idea why I’d been carrying it around all these years.
I pulled it out, looked at it, said, “Coooool!! I’d forgotten I had this!” I immediately dropped everything I was doing to test it out.
Now, as I understand it, there is nothing “supernatural” about the process – the pendant moves in response to questions due to “tiny involuntary muscle movements” directed by your subconscious mind – or, more accurately, the unconscious mind. When you’re asking it a question, you’re not directing the question externally, but internally – pulling answers out of your unconscious, which (supposedly) is more knowledgeable than the rest of you … although the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how anyone came up with that theory that the unconscious mind is more intelligent or knowledgeable than the conscious mind, if no one can actually quantify what the “unconscious” knows or doesn’t know.
Maybe the unconscious was in fact the mental “dust bin” for useless pieces of information, false reasoning, insane ideas and bizarre discarded thoughts and un-processed experiences – which may be the reason dreams are so often weird. Maybe it was downright stupid. Who came up with the idea anyway? A thought for another day … when I can deal with all the Freudian and psychoanalytical babble on the subject.
However, I did promise myself at the start of this project that I wouldn’t question the instructions I was to follow – no matter how badly I wanted to – so I’ll keep going. I’m now going to test out the quartz dowsing pendant and ask about my Soul Mate. The control portion of the test: asking it a true\false question you already know the answer to – for example, giving it your name and asking if that information is correct - and watching the swinging motion of the pendant, to get a baseline reading on your own “tiny involuntary muscle movements”. Well, OK, that sounds easy enough. I give it my name and ask, “Is this correct?”
Nothing. Nada. Zip. Not even a twitch. I make another attempt by giving it a false name and asking if that was correct. More dead silence.
Maybe I’m holding it wrong. I try it several more times, holding it in different hands; holding the cord at various heights from the quartz. Nothing. Not even a slight sway I could trace to an errant breeze. Neither the string or the crystal moves even slightly. If anything, I’m starting to feel rather silly, envisioning my unconscious mind now as a separate entity, regarding me with an expression of irritated disgust, silently berating me for wasting its time with this nonsense.
“Maybe that’s not a real quartz crystal”, I think. Maybe MTV was so cheap they handed out cheap acrylic fashioned to look like quartz. I ignore the argument that natural quartz is probably far more plentiful and cheap than manufactured acrylic. The Rude Scientist in me now rears her head.
“That’s ridiculous! Stop being an idiot. What difference does THAT make?”, she wants to know. “If it’s your involuntary muscle movements causing this thing to move, you could stick a dead skunk on the end of that cord and it should still work.”
I have to admit: she’s right. Although extremely rude. And condescending. Someone needs to slap that woman silly. And about that dead skunk, may I say for the record, “Ewww.”
“Are you DEAF or something?” I finally snap at the contraption crossly, forgetting I’m actually speaking to myself and not to the stone at the end of the string. Either way, there is no response to that question, either. So apparently, I’m either hard of hearing at the unconscious level, or ignoring myself altogether, hard to say which. Bets are at 50/50.
But if the Rude Scientist is right, there is only one remaining possibility, and that must mean: … (there will be a startled pause while the inevitable logical deduction hits me.)
OMIGOD, I have no subconscious!
I don’t know what this means, but it can’t be good.
Seems there are those religious factions among us who have decided that the best solution for eliminating naysayers is to stalk them. After justifiably conking the Anti-Borgia faction of false-rumor-mongerers over their heads I’m now being stealthily “followed” by a member of the Twitter Taliban … this must be what the victims of Jack the Ripper felt like, sensing the depraved evil slithering down the dark alley behind them. “Get thee behind me … Twitterer!!” (Nah, you’re right, doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) Don’t these people have anything better to do, like writing large checks to Jimmy Swaggart, or something? Sheesh.
Day Number 9 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
One of the benefits of the “Prepare for Your Soul Mate with Feng Shui” project - even if you can’t pronounce it properly - is the distracting de-cluttering that accompanies moving everything around: I found myself picking up things, one item at a time, looking at it, examining it, determining whether or not there is a real use for it, and then keeping or discarding it. Very useful periodic activity, regardless of why you’re doing it.
Which is how I picked up a small drawstring suede bag that I’d been carrying around since my days in Media Buying. It was handed out at one time by a network or syndicator as part of a promotion -- looking at the now faded embossed logo on the bag: looks like it might have been MTV. Cannot remember why they sent these things out, but it might have been some sort of witchy predictive promotional gimmick like: “Predict how popular this season will be!” or maybe “Predict how long it will take us to forget our entire raison d’etre and start airing crap so pitiful we get beaten in the ratings by VH-effen-1” … or something along those lines. So they enclosed an item in the bag which – at the time I received it – I thought was some sort of cheap ugly jewelry on a cord, but which I now recognize from my recent interaction with crystal lore as either a quartz point dowsing pendant or a good facsimile of one. I had no idea why I’d been carrying it around all these years.
I pulled it out, looked at it, said, “Coooool!! I’d forgotten I had this!” I immediately dropped everything I was doing to test it out.
Now, as I understand it, there is nothing “supernatural” about the process – the pendant moves in response to questions due to “tiny involuntary muscle movements” directed by your subconscious mind – or, more accurately, the unconscious mind. When you’re asking it a question, you’re not directing the question externally, but internally – pulling answers out of your unconscious, which (supposedly) is more knowledgeable than the rest of you … although the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how anyone came up with that theory that the unconscious mind is more intelligent or knowledgeable than the conscious mind, if no one can actually quantify what the “unconscious” knows or doesn’t know.
Maybe the unconscious was in fact the mental “dust bin” for useless pieces of information, false reasoning, insane ideas and bizarre discarded thoughts and un-processed experiences – which may be the reason dreams are so often weird. Maybe it was downright stupid. Who came up with the idea anyway? A thought for another day … when I can deal with all the Freudian and psychoanalytical babble on the subject.
However, I did promise myself at the start of this project that I wouldn’t question the instructions I was to follow – no matter how badly I wanted to – so I’ll keep going. I’m now going to test out the quartz dowsing pendant and ask about my Soul Mate. The control portion of the test: asking it a true\false question you already know the answer to – for example, giving it your name and asking if that information is correct - and watching the swinging motion of the pendant, to get a baseline reading on your own “tiny involuntary muscle movements”. Well, OK, that sounds easy enough. I give it my name and ask, “Is this correct?”
Nothing. Nada. Zip. Not even a twitch. I make another attempt by giving it a false name and asking if that was correct. More dead silence.
Maybe I’m holding it wrong. I try it several more times, holding it in different hands; holding the cord at various heights from the quartz. Nothing. Not even a slight sway I could trace to an errant breeze. Neither the string or the crystal moves even slightly. If anything, I’m starting to feel rather silly, envisioning my unconscious mind now as a separate entity, regarding me with an expression of irritated disgust, silently berating me for wasting its time with this nonsense.
“Maybe that’s not a real quartz crystal”, I think. Maybe MTV was so cheap they handed out cheap acrylic fashioned to look like quartz. I ignore the argument that natural quartz is probably far more plentiful and cheap than manufactured acrylic. The Rude Scientist in me now rears her head.
“That’s ridiculous! Stop being an idiot. What difference does THAT make?”, she wants to know. “If it’s your involuntary muscle movements causing this thing to move, you could stick a dead skunk on the end of that cord and it should still work.”
I have to admit: she’s right. Although extremely rude. And condescending. Someone needs to slap that woman silly. And about that dead skunk, may I say for the record, “Ewww.”
“Are you DEAF or something?” I finally snap at the contraption crossly, forgetting I’m actually speaking to myself and not to the stone at the end of the string. Either way, there is no response to that question, either. So apparently, I’m either hard of hearing at the unconscious level, or ignoring myself altogether, hard to say which. Bets are at 50/50.
But if the Rude Scientist is right, there is only one remaining possibility, and that must mean: … (there will be a startled pause while the inevitable logical deduction hits me.)
OMIGOD, I have no subconscious!
I don’t know what this means, but it can’t be good.
Seems there are those religious factions among us who have decided that the best solution for eliminating naysayers is to stalk them. After justifiably conking the Anti-Borgia faction of false-rumor-mongerers over their heads I’m now being stealthily “followed” by a member of the Twitter Taliban … this must be what the victims of Jack the Ripper felt like, sensing the depraved evil slithering down the dark alley behind them. “Get thee behind me … Twitterer!!” (Nah, you’re right, doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) Don’t these people have anything better to do, like writing large checks to Jimmy Swaggart, or something? Sheesh.
SSD#8: Cesare Borgia, Greek Sophists, The Canteras Brothers, Blake ... and Underdog
Feb. 15th, 2010 at 5:20 AM
Day Number 8 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
So ... the big "switch your entire apartment around" project was now underway. I soon had cause to vaguely remember the basic set of rules someone once wisely dispensed regarding "Basic Tool Usage Safety Tips": i.e., if you find yourself getting frustrated and tired, put everything down, step away from the sharp tools, take a deep breath … and start drinking heavily." Okay, okay, maybe not that last part.
You'd think I was being asked to build the Winchester mansion from scratch - no, all I needed to do was break down a 6-foot tall bookcase I had actually put together once upon a time - and which was missing all of its shelves, still back in New York. However, it was a good bookcase; I figured it would be useful when I could get all the components in one place. In the meanwhile it was taking up space and needed to be brought back to board state and stored. Simple task, right? I put the thing together; I should be able to take it apart without too much difficulty. Right?
Right.
First I didn't have the proper flat head screwdriver; off to Ace Hardware. Back with the screwdriver; spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get the screwdriver out of Ace's anti-theft (and anti-customer too, apparently) packaging. Finally had to saw through the rubbery plastic tabs anchoring it to the package using a box cutter.
Could now turn the cam bolt locks with the screwdriver, but couldn't pull them out of their recessed holes. Had to crawl back into my closet and rummage through my tool box looking for needle nose pliers. Found them after another 30 minute search, and removed the cam bolt locks. Couldn't figure out how to remove the cam bolts themselves.
Now had to remove the nails out of the back of the bookcase, because I thought I could get to the cam bolts through the back side of the bookshelf shell. Hammer claws were too thick. Back to the needle nose pliers. They worked, but I bashed my elbow at least three times when a nail came loose without warning. I now realized I had to keep all the hardware I was removing in a marked container for the time when I had to put it back together. Spent another 30 minutes looking for a suitable container and a spare label to slap on it, for identification purposes.
It had now been two hours and the bookcase was still laying on its side on the floor, stubbornly stuck together, taunting me. I did some deep breathing and lit a lavender Yankee Candle in the vague hope that calming aromatherapy really DID work. Not quite as well as I'd hoped.
Finally went and poured myself some Spanish Viña Zaco into my new floral etched amber wine glasses, hand crafted for me by Javier and Efren Canteras of Mexico (I love that entire Novica family – really! They’re so nice!) and tossed on a soothing Blake cd. That idea worked so well, I was soon thoroughly buzzed and toasting both the talented Canteras brothers and the awesome Blake boys with tearful, sloppy reverence and pulling the case apart with abandon, using the new screwdriver as a lever. Done! (*hic*!)
The bookshelf corner was eventually doing to be the new computer corner, but I hadn’t called COMCAST yet about moving the cable. I probably should have done that first. I learned a few things:
(1) COMCAST doesn’t do wiring – for that, I had to hire a carpenter and an electrician. (“WHAT??? It’s a friggin’ apartment!”) THEN I had to pay Comcast $30 just to step foot into the apartment and decide what to do; THEN pay them for equipment and service which they would estimate once they were there, forcing me to make a decision while I’m standing there, gasping at the astronomical cost.
The second thing I learned was: (2) COMCAST had just unbundled my service the day before without bothering to tell me, doubling my monthly payment. We had gone through thirty minutes of bundle restructuring when the power blinked on and off, disconnecting the call.
The third thing I learned: (3) COMCAST won’t reconnect you to the person you were just speaking with – you have to start the call all over again, even if you’ve just spent thirty minutes you’ll never get back with the previous so-called “customer service” rep. I couldn’t go through it all again and hung up.
Yup, the ancient Chinese Feng Shui masters had never had an apartment wired for cable – nor they had been forced to deal with the monstrosities of human indignity known as the United States television cable conglomerates, created by the evil forces unknown to kill everyone off slowly using torture by stress and frustration, wearing down once-vibrant human beings into nubs of defeated protoplasm. Too much more of this, when my soul mate walked in the door he’d find me curled up into a fetal position, twitching and mumbling to myself.
This incident caused me to sober up somewhat, and now I took a good look at the wall that had previously been behind the now dismantled 6-foot tall bookcase shell.
“Ugh! Now I have to wash it!”
The corner, by the way, was right in the middle of the “Fame, Illumination and Reputation” portion of the Feng Shui bagua map and, according to the experts, should be decorated in reds and power symbols – regrettably, not the “cobwebs and dust bunnies look” I was apparently going for, in that corner. Come to think of it, why isn’t there a Feng Shui expert somewhere who insists: “Make sure this area is full of cobwebs and dust bunnies!”? If there were, I’d be all set.
Truthfully, I didn’t even know what “fame, illumination and reputation” really meant, in terms of my home and living space. I can’t think of three things I care less about at first glance – “fame” and “reputation” – and “illumination”? I’ll blink on and off like a firefly? I’m automatically inducted into the Illuminati? What?
Let’s check in with the experts, shall we?
“You should strengthen this area when you want to have a good reputation or improve on the one you already have. When you need to summon the courage to do something. When you want to be more respected by people or one specific person. When you want to become well known for something. When you want to get the credit you deserve. This is the spot that can make or break your perceived power. Remove any items that symbolize something you are not or something you don't want to be known for.”
Yeah, I probably don’t want to be known for my cobwebs and dust bunnies. Actually, I have thought so little about my ‘reputation’ I couldn’t even tell you what it was, or what people thought of me, because … well, because I couldn’t really care less what people thought of me. Maybe that’s not a good attitude to have, I don’t know.
Some of their ideas for “activating” this space:
red furniture
sunlight and green plants
photos of famous people you want to be like
letters, awards, certificates
newspaper articles that remind you of your aspirations
electric lights, such as small white Christmas tree strings or lamps that can be safely left on all the time (yeah, right. Apparently, the Feng Shui masters have also never paid an electric bill).
red candles
photos of people who can help you with your goals
red or hot pink rugs, furniture, flowers, cushions, curtains
Well, I had no red or hot pink furniture, cushions or curtains, nor did I anticipate buying any, but I had my diploma. And (now that I thought about it) also a Six Sigma Certification on a plaque. That summed up all of the “awards and certificates” I had on hand and those would have to do – everything else was in the hands of the aforementioned evil ex-relative.
But “photos of famous people I want to be like”? I could think of some famous people I thought were amusing … or talented … or attractive … but that didn’t mean I wanted to be like them … besides, how would I know what they were “like”? I only knew what they did for a living, or what they looked like after hours of air brushing and photo-shopping.
I’m not saying I want to be “LIKE” him – as again, I have no idea what he’s like – but I’ve always admired Viggo Mortensen who uses acting to fund his book publishing ventures; his compassion and love for animals; the fact that he's enormously intelligent … plus those incredible good looks and the ability to sing in Elven tongue! And really, how many men have THAT on their CVs? I wouldn’t mind sticking him on the wall, if it didn’t make me look like a 16-year old girl snipping things out of “Movie Star Magazine” and twittering away on my Barbie® trimline telephone. (Sorry, Viggo … but I just couldn’t bring myself to go there. I hope you understand). I also considered trying to look for a bust of one of the Greek Sophists, but you’d be surprised how few of those are actually around (how few busts of them are around, I mean; I know the Greek Sophists aren't around).
The reference to reputation, though, made me think of one of my favorite historical figures: Cesare Borgia. I wrote an extensive paper on him in college and came to the conclusion that, while he was certainly no saint, he was nowhere near the level of depravity and evil associated with him by the Catholic church and their followers. I thought It was a classic case of distracting people from the evil doings YOU’RE doing by overexaggerating the sins of the guy who just left. Cesare and his family were not so different from other papal examples of the time period – he just did what he did more quickly, thoroughly and efficiently than everyone else.
Charming, enormously intelligent, sensual and handsome, he had admirers from Leonardo da Vinci (who worked for him briefly) to Niccolo Machiavelli to many Italians living under the thumb of tyrants in Tuscany. He was loathed by many powerful families in the Italian peninsula, mostly because he was the only one who managed to break their tyrannical hold on their areas – and a lot of the horrid incidents associated with him seemed to have originated from members of these families, later thoroughly contradicted by historical record - but he was also loved by a lot of people for his fairness, justice and equanimity. He might also have been loathed because powerful men at the time watched their wives and daughters start breathing heavily whenever he passed through town. He was enormously popular with women.
Even today “Christians” perpetuate some of the most horrific – and already disproven – lies about the man … most of them already thoroughly vetted as existing solely in the imagination of his family’s rivals – who later gained the papacy themselves and were just as “unholy” in the role as the Borgias are accused of being. You’d think that if even the Catholic Church backed down from the bovine excrement they were spreading around for centuries, their idiot followers who bought that same fertilizer all these centuries would back down too, but apparently not.
Ironically, Cesare was so handsome he may have been used as the face of Christ in paintings made during the Renaissance – the irony was that the same judgmental Christians who even today use the Borgias as examples of the papacy gone horribly wrong probably have a painting of Cesare Borgia as Jesus hanging on their living room walls somewhere.
Now true, I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to cross the guy while he lived, but that’s true of a lot of powerful men from that time period, not just the Borgias. There’s a few Sforza and della Rovere papal relatives I wouldn’t have wanted to cross either. And I’m not saying I want to be LIKE Cesare Borgia, but he is my favorite example of someone with a largely undeserved excessively rotten reputation – so much so that the Catholic Church didn’t get around to saying “Ooops” and reburying his bones in Spanish consecrated ground until quite recently. He would probably be a good example of someone whose reputation has been somewhat – albeit slightly – redeemed, as time went by.
Hmmm. I respected the Greek sophists even though the Aristotelian and Platonic crowd treated them with derision. I respected Cesare Borgia even though Christians were spreading false rumors and calling him names. I now know which celebrity photo to put up on the wall!!
Day Number 8 Following the Instructions in "Manifesting Your Soul Mate":
So ... the big "switch your entire apartment around" project was now underway. I soon had cause to vaguely remember the basic set of rules someone once wisely dispensed regarding "Basic Tool Usage Safety Tips": i.e., if you find yourself getting frustrated and tired, put everything down, step away from the sharp tools, take a deep breath … and start drinking heavily." Okay, okay, maybe not that last part.
You'd think I was being asked to build the Winchester mansion from scratch - no, all I needed to do was break down a 6-foot tall bookcase I had actually put together once upon a time - and which was missing all of its shelves, still back in New York. However, it was a good bookcase; I figured it would be useful when I could get all the components in one place. In the meanwhile it was taking up space and needed to be brought back to board state and stored. Simple task, right? I put the thing together; I should be able to take it apart without too much difficulty. Right?
Right.
First I didn't have the proper flat head screwdriver; off to Ace Hardware. Back with the screwdriver; spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get the screwdriver out of Ace's anti-theft (and anti-customer too, apparently) packaging. Finally had to saw through the rubbery plastic tabs anchoring it to the package using a box cutter.
Could now turn the cam bolt locks with the screwdriver, but couldn't pull them out of their recessed holes. Had to crawl back into my closet and rummage through my tool box looking for needle nose pliers. Found them after another 30 minute search, and removed the cam bolt locks. Couldn't figure out how to remove the cam bolts themselves.
Now had to remove the nails out of the back of the bookcase, because I thought I could get to the cam bolts through the back side of the bookshelf shell. Hammer claws were too thick. Back to the needle nose pliers. They worked, but I bashed my elbow at least three times when a nail came loose without warning. I now realized I had to keep all the hardware I was removing in a marked container for the time when I had to put it back together. Spent another 30 minutes looking for a suitable container and a spare label to slap on it, for identification purposes.
It had now been two hours and the bookcase was still laying on its side on the floor, stubbornly stuck together, taunting me. I did some deep breathing and lit a lavender Yankee Candle in the vague hope that calming aromatherapy really DID work. Not quite as well as I'd hoped.
Finally went and poured myself some Spanish Viña Zaco into my new floral etched amber wine glasses, hand crafted for me by Javier and Efren Canteras of Mexico (I love that entire Novica family – really! They’re so nice!) and tossed on a soothing Blake cd. That idea worked so well, I was soon thoroughly buzzed and toasting both the talented Canteras brothers and the awesome Blake boys with tearful, sloppy reverence and pulling the case apart with abandon, using the new screwdriver as a lever. Done! (*hic*!)
The bookshelf corner was eventually doing to be the new computer corner, but I hadn’t called COMCAST yet about moving the cable. I probably should have done that first. I learned a few things:
(1) COMCAST doesn’t do wiring – for that, I had to hire a carpenter and an electrician. (“WHAT??? It’s a friggin’ apartment!”) THEN I had to pay Comcast $30 just to step foot into the apartment and decide what to do; THEN pay them for equipment and service which they would estimate once they were there, forcing me to make a decision while I’m standing there, gasping at the astronomical cost.
The second thing I learned was: (2) COMCAST had just unbundled my service the day before without bothering to tell me, doubling my monthly payment. We had gone through thirty minutes of bundle restructuring when the power blinked on and off, disconnecting the call.
The third thing I learned: (3) COMCAST won’t reconnect you to the person you were just speaking with – you have to start the call all over again, even if you’ve just spent thirty minutes you’ll never get back with the previous so-called “customer service” rep. I couldn’t go through it all again and hung up.
Yup, the ancient Chinese Feng Shui masters had never had an apartment wired for cable – nor they had been forced to deal with the monstrosities of human indignity known as the United States television cable conglomerates, created by the evil forces unknown to kill everyone off slowly using torture by stress and frustration, wearing down once-vibrant human beings into nubs of defeated protoplasm. Too much more of this, when my soul mate walked in the door he’d find me curled up into a fetal position, twitching and mumbling to myself.
This incident caused me to sober up somewhat, and now I took a good look at the wall that had previously been behind the now dismantled 6-foot tall bookcase shell.
“Ugh! Now I have to wash it!”
The corner, by the way, was right in the middle of the “Fame, Illumination and Reputation” portion of the Feng Shui bagua map and, according to the experts, should be decorated in reds and power symbols – regrettably, not the “cobwebs and dust bunnies look” I was apparently going for, in that corner. Come to think of it, why isn’t there a Feng Shui expert somewhere who insists: “Make sure this area is full of cobwebs and dust bunnies!”? If there were, I’d be all set.
Truthfully, I didn’t even know what “fame, illumination and reputation” really meant, in terms of my home and living space. I can’t think of three things I care less about at first glance – “fame” and “reputation” – and “illumination”? I’ll blink on and off like a firefly? I’m automatically inducted into the Illuminati? What?
Let’s check in with the experts, shall we?
“You should strengthen this area when you want to have a good reputation or improve on the one you already have. When you need to summon the courage to do something. When you want to be more respected by people or one specific person. When you want to become well known for something. When you want to get the credit you deserve. This is the spot that can make or break your perceived power. Remove any items that symbolize something you are not or something you don't want to be known for.”
Yeah, I probably don’t want to be known for my cobwebs and dust bunnies. Actually, I have thought so little about my ‘reputation’ I couldn’t even tell you what it was, or what people thought of me, because … well, because I couldn’t really care less what people thought of me. Maybe that’s not a good attitude to have, I don’t know.
Some of their ideas for “activating” this space:
red furniture
sunlight and green plants
photos of famous people you want to be like
letters, awards, certificates
newspaper articles that remind you of your aspirations
electric lights, such as small white Christmas tree strings or lamps that can be safely left on all the time (yeah, right. Apparently, the Feng Shui masters have also never paid an electric bill).
red candles
photos of people who can help you with your goals
red or hot pink rugs, furniture, flowers, cushions, curtains
Well, I had no red or hot pink furniture, cushions or curtains, nor did I anticipate buying any, but I had my diploma. And (now that I thought about it) also a Six Sigma Certification on a plaque. That summed up all of the “awards and certificates” I had on hand and those would have to do – everything else was in the hands of the aforementioned evil ex-relative.
But “photos of famous people I want to be like”? I could think of some famous people I thought were amusing … or talented … or attractive … but that didn’t mean I wanted to be like them … besides, how would I know what they were “like”? I only knew what they did for a living, or what they looked like after hours of air brushing and photo-shopping.
I’m not saying I want to be “LIKE” him – as again, I have no idea what he’s like – but I’ve always admired Viggo Mortensen who uses acting to fund his book publishing ventures; his compassion and love for animals; the fact that he's enormously intelligent … plus those incredible good looks and the ability to sing in Elven tongue! And really, how many men have THAT on their CVs? I wouldn’t mind sticking him on the wall, if it didn’t make me look like a 16-year old girl snipping things out of “Movie Star Magazine” and twittering away on my Barbie® trimline telephone. (Sorry, Viggo … but I just couldn’t bring myself to go there. I hope you understand). I also considered trying to look for a bust of one of the Greek Sophists, but you’d be surprised how few of those are actually around (how few busts of them are around, I mean; I know the Greek Sophists aren't around).
The reference to reputation, though, made me think of one of my favorite historical figures: Cesare Borgia. I wrote an extensive paper on him in college and came to the conclusion that, while he was certainly no saint, he was nowhere near the level of depravity and evil associated with him by the Catholic church and their followers. I thought It was a classic case of distracting people from the evil doings YOU’RE doing by overexaggerating the sins of the guy who just left. Cesare and his family were not so different from other papal examples of the time period – he just did what he did more quickly, thoroughly and efficiently than everyone else.
Charming, enormously intelligent, sensual and handsome, he had admirers from Leonardo da Vinci (who worked for him briefly) to Niccolo Machiavelli to many Italians living under the thumb of tyrants in Tuscany. He was loathed by many powerful families in the Italian peninsula, mostly because he was the only one who managed to break their tyrannical hold on their areas – and a lot of the horrid incidents associated with him seemed to have originated from members of these families, later thoroughly contradicted by historical record - but he was also loved by a lot of people for his fairness, justice and equanimity. He might also have been loathed because powerful men at the time watched their wives and daughters start breathing heavily whenever he passed through town. He was enormously popular with women.
Even today “Christians” perpetuate some of the most horrific – and already disproven – lies about the man … most of them already thoroughly vetted as existing solely in the imagination of his family’s rivals – who later gained the papacy themselves and were just as “unholy” in the role as the Borgias are accused of being. You’d think that if even the Catholic Church backed down from the bovine excrement they were spreading around for centuries, their idiot followers who bought that same fertilizer all these centuries would back down too, but apparently not.
Ironically, Cesare was so handsome he may have been used as the face of Christ in paintings made during the Renaissance – the irony was that the same judgmental Christians who even today use the Borgias as examples of the papacy gone horribly wrong probably have a painting of Cesare Borgia as Jesus hanging on their living room walls somewhere.
Now true, I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to cross the guy while he lived, but that’s true of a lot of powerful men from that time period, not just the Borgias. There’s a few Sforza and della Rovere papal relatives I wouldn’t have wanted to cross either. And I’m not saying I want to be LIKE Cesare Borgia, but he is my favorite example of someone with a largely undeserved excessively rotten reputation – so much so that the Catholic Church didn’t get around to saying “Ooops” and reburying his bones in Spanish consecrated ground until quite recently. He would probably be a good example of someone whose reputation has been somewhat – albeit slightly – redeemed, as time went by.
Hmmm. I respected the Greek sophists even though the Aristotelian and Platonic crowd treated them with derision. I respected Cesare Borgia even though Christians were spreading false rumors and calling him names. I now know which celebrity photo to put up on the wall!!
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