« May 2008 | Main | July 2008 »
I love my herb garden. Seriously love it. Because it turns everyday fare into magic. Just take a look at this grilled cheese sandwich:
I take a pair of scissors out to the herb garden, snip off some basil, some oregano, add fresh tomato slices from my CSA box, feta cheese (although I used raw cheddar in this one), put it all on a couple of slices of millet bread, and grill the sandwich in an olive oil/butter mix.
Dang skippy yum, right?
Got that feeling again. That feeling where I get that if I don't leave my apartment and go be amongst other people in a social setting that I just may burst, like a pinata beat into explosion by the steely eye of The Hoon who says: woman, at some point you really do need to be around other humans. And so I went.
It took me an hour to find a place whose energy didn't thrust me backwards when I peeked my head in the door. But finally I found one. Downtown, in the heart of the action, but not many people, the bar empty.
The bartender was one of those boys so beautiful it hurts to look at him, glacier blue eyes, tanned and healthy and muscley and twenty one years of age. He pretty much ignored me for a while, but then said something, and then I said something and he said something about having been at work since 11 that morning and I laughed and said: ahhhh, you're doing a double, and he said: ahhhh, you've worked in restaurants. And then we got to chatting.
I asked if he was a student. He said that mostly he was confused. That he was from up north, but had followed a girl down south and she'd left him, and now didn't know what to do with himself. He asked me what I did and I told him: writer and spiritual practitioner, and when he asked what that meant, I explained as practically as I could the whole psychic thing.
Over the next hour, we chatted a bit more, back and forth, as he ran about doing bar stuff, and I ate a very garlicky and very delicious spicy steak thing with some sort of salsa and cumin potatoes. Then a couple of guys showed up, and I said hi, and they said hi, but the energy at the bar totally changed. Bad juju made itself known and so I paid my check and waved adios. Please come back and hang out, the bartender said as I left. I smiled and headed out into the humid southern nite air.
It was ten p.m. What I wanted to do was go into that biker bar I pass by every day, the one that always seemed to have a hundred motorcycles parked in the lot. But as I drove through, I just didn't feel comfortable. Then I drove by the other bar I always wonder about, the one with the awesome name of "Slick and Red's Bar", but after driving through the parking lot, I left that one too without going in.
And so I came home. Climbed into bed with The Hoon and rubbed his belly. Then squeezed Jacinta until she fled from my grippy love. And here I sit. Polishing off the last of a bottle of chianti. Getting ready to head off to bed, wearing a souvenir from my sis's trip to Nebraska and which I took a pic of me in, for Will and Kim and crew, the lovely contingent from the outskirts of Omaha:
I've slowed down on it a bit, but for a while there, I was sending a dozen or so cover letters and CVs a week. Each one taking about anywhere from 15-45 minutes each to hone for each particular job or company or to fill out their specialized applications. And for all that work, for all that research and fine tuning and selling, I received one single reply. In response to somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred inquiries, the only fruit was one lone preliminary phone interview for a job, which I figured out two minutes in, that I was seriously never going to be in the running for.
Then, last week, I received an email. An invitation to an open house for a clinical research assessment firm that's opening a new division in the area. I sat with it and sat with it. Did I really want a job within the pharmaceutical industry? I really didn't. Really didn't. But as it's the only nibble I've received in quite a while, I curled my hair, put on the Corporate Uniform, you know the one, and appropriate girl shoes, took off a couple of hours early from doing holistic sessions, and went down to their new offices.
I pulled up in my gold 1994 Saturn, the headliner held up with regular applications from a glue stick, the inside a mess from my lack of care after trips to the farmer's market, the beach, ice tea consumption with straw wrappers roaming around, rocks and feathers picked up on various hikes stashed in the ashtray. I parked alongside a BMW, a Mercedes, a Lexus. Took the elevator to the 3rd floor, each step along the way encouraged on by company greeters, much like The Mart of Wal, but in pricier garb.
The elevator opened to a spread of cheese, fruit, and champagne. I looked around. No one was drinking the champagne. Everyone had bottles of water instead. Several people approached me, pointed the way to sign in, list my name and contact info, state what sort of job I was interested in. As I walked out of the room, I overheard conversations, "Yale or Duke?", "employed by the . . . IRB", " . . . graduate degree in . . . bio-product development . . . pharmacotherapeutics". I was stopped outside the door by a guy who said, "I'm one of the managers and I've been instructed to . . . show you magic!" And he did. He had the little foam balls that appeared and disappeared, the deck of cards, the rainbow of scarves.
Between the cleanse last week and the bounceback sugar eating this week, my eczema has been furious. Before I got out of my car, I applied just the right amount of moisturizer so that my hands weren't too rough but also not too sticky. Close examination would reveal the angry rash, the raised weals, the mangled cuticles, but I've gotten pretty good at the art of hiding my hands. I hadn't planned for the magic act however.
The manager-magician had me holding foam balls, choosing cards, holding scarves up for others to see. I had walked into the room feeling surrendered, and out of that, confident that I would just be myself, be on a fact finding mission, just talk with people. But now, my rashy self all up on display, I felt my confidence drain away, and I got that I was seriously out of place.
It isn't that wealthier folks don't get rashy of course, but that money hides so much of the "imperfections" of living. The cortisone shots, and allergy meds, and gosh knows what else as I'm so out of the loop with that sort of thing. And of course the teeth fixes, the veneers and whitenings and gum plumpings and pinkenings. And the clothes of course, and the style to wear them, and the makeup, the hair cuts and the haircare products, the jewelry, the watches, the shoes. Then there were the schools attended, the companies worked for, the specific languaging known only to those in the world of clinical trials.
And so after 15 minutes of magic, I could take no more, and handed the foam balls to the woman next to me, said, "your turn", and fled in the direction of the fruit. But I didn't eat any. It looked too bright, too colorful, like it had been photoshopped, and it made me nervous. I looked at the champagne, but knowing my propensity to loud-mouthing when I drink even one glass, I opted for a bottle of water.
And then stood there, utterly ignored, for about ten minutes, watching everyone else absorbed in conversation, some folks scanning CVs, others talking about their CVs. Then a woman found herself standing by herself, a badge dangling from her shirt that marked her as an employee. She glanced around the room, saw me standing alone, looked me up and down, and sighed. But she lifted the corners of her mouth, and walked over to me, her hand extended.
We talked for about fifteen minutes, and in truth, I simply refused to let her go. I had a lot of questions, and I got that this was probably my only chance to get them answered, even if my questionee wasn't particularly thrilled. I learned that the health care field, like everything else these days, is chopped into slivers of specialties, each one with it's own educational background requirements, graduate degrees, credentialing. Did you know that there are degrees now for clinical research? There are.
I learned that my degree, my Master of Public Health, really didn't mean much, unless I chose to move to Raleigh and go into "state-sponsored health programs" she said. She said this with a bit of a sneer, the words accentuated as if speaking of spoiled dairy.
She told me all sorts of things. How to career path into a job in the industry. The courses I would need to take, how I'd have to start out as an assistant, "move backwards in order to move forwards" she called it. "There are MBAs in this room" she said, "and it's a similar situation for them." When I asked the pay range for assistants she reluctantly, apologetically said, "high 40s, low 50s, but advancement is quick, no more than a year or so, then you move into the 60s". I didn't tell her that one year, about seven years ago, I made 36K, the most I've ever made. Instead I just nodded.
And when it seemed as if she was going to finally explode from the pressure of having to talk to me, dole out answers like a reluctant vending machine, I thanked her warmly and said I was going to leave. She looked so relieved and sincerely smiled. Then I asked for her email address, and giggled internally as she gave it to me, knowing I'd never email her, but enjoying the fact that I was torturing her in the way that misfits torture their torturers when given the opportunity.
As I waited for the elevator, I got to chatting with one of the "greeters". She was very warm, friendly, and the only non-caucasian face I'd seen in the place. I look for that now. I used to not, when I lived up north, where people just mingled, but now I do it as a matter of fascination, still stunned by how segregated the south is. I ended up sitting down and talking with her for a bit, found out she was a manager too, just taking a break from the main room. I asked for her experiences with the company, details on her career path, the industry. She said that I could research things on my own, as opposed to taking classes, but I'd need to be able to talk the talk, and then she rattled off lists of acronyms, protocols, regulatory buzzwords. That with my background I could get a job with them if I were willing to start as an assistant, but that I might have to apply several times, but to be persistent, and to work hard. She was very sweet, very generous with her energy, talked about how much she loved her job, the company, had been with them for 16 years. But when I looked more deeply into her eyes I saw the metallic sheen of mood drugs, and underneath that, profound sadness. I thanked her, sent empath energy into her, then got into the elevator, got into my car, and drove away.
When I got home, I puttered around the apartment, slowly getting out of the Uniform, doing things to help deal with the intense headache and residual backache I found myself with - poured a glass of wine, took a therapeutic dose of advil. I thought about my financial woes, my questionings about whether I could work in the industry that tortured animals like The Hoon on a daily basis, that killed humans on a regular basis from hiding the true nature and scope of side effects, going back again and again to the fact that I need income and soon and lots of it, my recent realization that going back to school and incurring student loan debt had in fact turned me into a kind of modern indentured servant, that the modern world now owned me in a way it never had before.
I went into the bathroom to take off my jewelry, the big hunk of jade I wear wrapped with leather cord, the dangling earrings from a San Francisco artist, the Native American turquoise bracelet. I looked in the mirror. And this is what I saw:
And I laughed and laughed and laughed. Because somehow, it just made it all complete. Was the perfect flourish to the afternoon. Because in that moment, all of the thoughts stopped except for one: how ridiculous I looked. Followed by how glad I was that I looked so ridiculous. Because I am in fact ridiculous. For all of my talents and skills and depth and whatnot, I am not and never will be one of the polished, one of the streamlined, one of those people who knows how to and willingly secrets their snags, their eruptions away behind xanax and zoloft, prozac and effexor, zyprexa and paxil and cortisone and botox and restylane.
I am in fact one of the splayed, one of the messy ones, one of the folks who continues to choose swamp navigation as a way of life, and who takes pictures of artifacts found, and then displays them on the interwebs. One of those people who refuses to acquiesce ownership of their life, their clothing choices, their manner of speech, their time. One of those fringe dwellers who refuses to give into the bait and switch, the scam, that is the majority of our culture. And one of those people who pays dearly for it.
And I'm okay with it. Yesterday, as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, laughing, and now today, in this moment, I'm fine with it all. I will continue to shoot for greatness, in the things that I feel inspired around- my writing, my revealing, my dogged search for that thing that has both resonance and consonance as Truth or Yes or Holy F*ck That's Funny.
I'll come up with something to make more money at, more will be revealed. And in the meantime, I can let go of more afternoons like yesterday's, no matter what they bring, though I sure am glad I went. I needed the laugh . . .
I have always been a fan of the barter. I just love it. To me, it feels like getting wonderful things for free, things that I ordinarily wouldn't either choose or be able to afford. When I was in school, I bartered a lot for massage, yoga classes, hair cuts. And I've done quite a bit the past year here in NC as well, especially at the holistic center where I work where I've had several folks barter their handcrafted jewelry for classes and sessions, brought fresh vegetables from their garden, and of course, psychic readings. I rarely turn people down that want to barter, and it certainly has made for some interesting experiences and items: a box of rocks collected from a hiking trip; a half dozen plants; a bag of food from the dollar store.
A couple of weeks ago, I did by far the strangest barter I've ever done. The woman who used to own the holistic center, who recently sold it to someone else so that she could focus on her own holistic practice, has been asking me for a while about the shamanic work I do. She'd told me a little about the work she does, most of it focused around this setup that involves a laptop and special software and connectors that fit to feet, hands, and forehead. It seemed outrageously silly to me and I did my best to keep a straight face as she told me how it cures everything from lupus to cancer to digestive disturbance to crankiness. I asked some basic questions: What does it measure? How does it measure it? How does it make it's corrections? None of which she could answer.
But over the months, she's said several times how she wants to do a barter, was curious about shamanics, and I genuinely like her, so I finally agreed to barter with her, and we set up appointment times for both of us. I went first, went to her home office, sat in the chair and she hooked me up:
Yes, I felt like as big of a goof as I look. And as she was hooking me up, I asked those three basic questions again of how, what, and treatment method. This time, she had me call the company. The woman that answered was very friendly until I asked my questions. Then she proceeded to get incredibly vague. It was like listening to a politician. She answered all sorts of questions, but never the ones I asked. So I just kept repeating the same three questions over and over and over. Of course, she got incredibly irritated with me, which for some reason made me laugh, so that the more irritated she got, the harder I laughed, until she finally just began putting me on hold for longer and longer periods of time. I hung up, shrugged, and let my barter commence.
It was hilarious. And for two solid hours I laughed and laughed and laughed. I was asked all sorts of questions around "corrections" such as "it's picking up high levels of stress, would you like the stress removed?", "it's picked up the presence of liver toxicity, would you like it to detox it?", "it's detected a past life where you were passive and chose to be a victim, would you like that cleared so that it no longer impacts your present life?" "your thyroid is underactive, would it like it to be brought back to optimum levels?" Two hours of this. Hundreds of questions like this. All to which I replied, "why, yes, yes I would".
The woman took it all very seriously, much as any "scientist" would as they ran their tests, their labs, their protocols. And she was amused by my amusement. And we did a lot of laughing together. And then I went home, and felt kind of nauseous for the rest of the day (she said this was a "healing crisis") and then . . . . . . . . . . . . nothing. If change occurred, it occurred so subtly as to be unrecognizable.
But really, it was fun. It was a hilarious way to spend a couple of hours, like medicinal fantasizing. I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for it. And when she came for a shamanic healing session from me? Well, she said didn't get anything out of it either.
Hilarious . . .
Recent Comments