Saturday, June 19, 2010

...and All that Prophetic Jazz

This was my astrological horoscope for yesterday, June 18, 2010:

CANCER (June 21-July 22): You need to make some serious changes to satisfy both personal and professional associations. Reconstruct the way things have been in the past and you will realize what needs to be done to make the future better.
Now, I used to be the kind of person who read my horoscope religiously [smirk] every single day, sometimes twice a day from different sources just to make sure I was on track. As time went by, I sifted through all the chaff to find the truth and philosophy I liked and could relate to. I finally settled down to make my peace with the Universe and practice My Thing. It's surely not Your Thing, but that's okay - - at least with me.

This horoscope, however, was after-the-fact-prophetic. Earlier that morning I discovered my intuition was correct, dead-on in fact, that I was not going to get the job with my dearest friend, Toughy the attorney. The silence had been deafening from his end and I knew in my depths that the coup was complete, that decisions had been made behind his back and he would be the last to know.

What I cannot change about the past is my past. I cannot change the depression I suffered after my car accident; it wasn't my fault and it simply happened. But my medical history was an open book to the powers that be and I was determined to be unfit for duty for my dearest friend, to return to my former career in that firm, and set him right in his direst time of need. Some, like the Maine Labor Board, might consider that Harrisment of a sort, and in case you didn't know, it's highly illegal to ask a new hire to reveal any medical information about themselves.

However, if an entire medical history from a car accident case is:
  • already there for the picking and choosing of facts;
  • for the sole purpose of eliminating a candidate for employment because she's gone batshit; and
  • if said perusement can be denied by all culpable parties - -
  • well, you get the picture.

    [This is strictly my hyperbole, for the record, you cowards...just try me.]
I had gotten the news that I was never in the running for consideration on the drive to my mother's house to pick her up for her hearing aid appointment, and before I read the horoscope in the local newspaper. I was pretty teary-eyed about the whole thing but swallowed it whole in order to present a smiling face to my mother.

And, so here I am looking sort of dumbfounded at this finger-wagging horoscope in the hearing aid guy's office, waiting for my mom to get her adjustment. I'm trying to bend my already addled mind around this two sentence blurb. Should I not have even tried to recreate the past by going back to an old career? I'd had serious reservations about returning to law all along; I was only considering it for Toughy's sake. I was a jackass specialist as well as legal assistant and paralegal. Until Toughy came along, that's who I was hired to tend. And, working for lawyers is an art. You know the art that looks like the splatter a hefty Hereford could create after a large meal of corn and oats? That kind of art.

Today, I'm stuck in neutral; moving neither forward nor backward. Toughy and I are likely in the same mode. The Universe is forcing his hand to decide and make "some serious change" and "reconstruct" just like me.

I think I'll go for a long walk and try to find grace in all this confusion.









Monday, June 14, 2010

Baring the Blackened Sole

These blackened soles of mine have traversed many the highway and bi-way, rumbling past hitching seraphims with trembling thumbs only half-heartedly exposed beneath their cloaks. I've tread there and beyond, baby, and only sometimes and rarely am I reminded of my somewhat naive and vaguely sordid youth and past when I get a faceful of someone else's.

See, I believe the focus should be not so much the dirt we "get on our hands" as the history, mystery, and experience we receive as a gift from daring to go where "angels fear to tread." It is the only place we get perspective on other people's lives. Sometimes, we get a glimmer of truth about ourselves but usually not until much later.

All that I am began in 1964 and ended here today, so far. All the good, the bad and the really unsavory stuff I've done, I believe I've both benefited from and paid dearly for along the way. When I finally met my truest love, my loving husband, I felt that I had "evened the score" on my Karmic dance card. I'd hurt and been hurt and finally I was back at zero and had a clean slate to work from. I could feel the Cosmic Cast Iron Frying Pan in the Sky hovering above me, waiting to swat the back of my head if I screwed up this time but I was now older and wiser. I knew I had gotten to a place in my life where my future could be grand.

All the suffering, inflicted by others and purely self-inflicted had been working toward this moment in time. It had prepared me for the love of my life; this thing I'd been dodging and unprepared for was finally mine to have. I deserved it. And, here I am many years later, content with my truest love, my husband, my life settled down and peaceful.

In order to be completely honest, completely human and "there" for my Self and my dearest friends, it is imperative that I never again forget my blackened soles and the dangerous paths I tread with my quivering angel hovering a step behind and whispering "Don't!"

Thursday, June 10, 2010

You Gotta Know When to Hold 'Em, Know When to Fold 'Em...

How does one approach the job market nowadays? Can there be any room whatsoever for bargaining, negotiation, or "feeling one's oats," as it were?

The reason I ask this very broad question is I'm really struggling with specific facts about my Self, which make me feel proud and a little self-righteous, if you want the whole truth:

I'm nearly 46 and I have an excellent resume that clearly stands out in a crowd. I am well-spoken, mature (when the mood strikes), and make an excellent first impression. I am well organized, can work for any jackass on the market with ease and professionalism, and can learn any job quickly and easily. These are FACTS about me.

Okay, facts aside and despite all of these glorious things: I have been unable to find a job after applying for between 45 and 50 jobs since I quit my job in September 2009. I have applied for jobs ranging from "Unemployment Specialist Hearings Officer" (hey, they sent the referral TO ME) to cleaning lady at the hospital (now you know what that would entail, right?).

I cite my age above because I feel I'm beyond certain types of jobs like working at McDonalds in a paper hat or hustling plates at the local diner in orthopedic shoes and a threadworn blue and white poplin waitress get-up. I would rather clean up hospital ickies than do either of those jobs.

Hundreds, no thousands of college grads are pounding the pavements for real and in the computer ethers, debt-laden and possessing papers that should be getting them through doors that are shut fast against them. Those people with jobs aren't budging and the companies who are downsizing are not rehiring. They are simply making do with less workforce.

And, here I am thinking I should be able to negotiate because I'm valuable. WOW.

Even as I write this and see how crazy it all looks and sounds as I read aloud, I'm still convinced I should be able to negotiate something better for my Self - because I'm valuable and I know it. Pride goeth before the fall, eh? Well, shit even after I fall down I'll still be rolling around screaming, "...but I'm valuable!!"

Thursday, June 3, 2010

You Can't Cry Foul If You Aren't Playing The Game...

Of late I find my Self reminiscing back in time when I was about eleven. This was when I realized my parents were no longer sleeping together in the Biblical sense. Mom had "cut Dad off," as it were for reasons that still mystify me some thirty-five years later. I know this because it was pretty obvious that they'd drifted apart, plus Mom told me, quite confidentially in that icky mother-daughter way that results from mommies losing their grip on who they are and what role they actually perform in their children's lives. She pole-vaulted the line from Mother to unwelcome and untrustworthy confidante in one fell swoop. At age eleven, I became the adult in our relationship. My mother could no longer be trusted to act as an adult, take care of me properly, or be confided in.

Many years later when Dad finally sought out the affections of another woman, Mom flipped out. She was incensed that he could "cheat on her like that." I was older then with a sensibility that sympathized with Dad's loneliness and anger at Mom. "Cheat on you like what" I asked her? My very handsome father who had seven children with my mother wanted to be with a woman who found him attractive and wanted to have sex with him. It was just that simple. After A DECADE of denial, hostility, criticism, and inattention Dad finally decided to go find a woman who actually wanted to talk to him, to find him irrepressibly funny, and to walk down the street with him at dusk in complete silence listening to the peepers and watching the dancing fireflies. And to have sex - lots and lots of life- and soul-affirming sex. My darling husband says that "even a hundred year old man wants to have sex." I'm sure he's correct.

Mom screamed that I didn't understand and she was one hundred percent correct. I obviously wasn't an insane sociopath like she was. To this day, I will never understand how Mom or any other person can treat their spouse like a cuckhold for years, sometimes decades, and then be surprised and angry when their husband or wife finally breaks down and finds someone else to love them - mind, body and soul.

Mom called all the shots in the marriage. It was her way or no way. Black or white were your two choices. She even had the nerve to try to bring all of us kids over to her side of the issue, succeeding only with one kid in making Dad the bad guy. Most of us recognized that although Dad wasn't perfect, we knew what Mom had done was just wrong in a marriage, or on a basic human level. Mom would threaten Dad in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that his fighting her or his telling us the truth would result in a loss of his children.

How do I reconcile this now that I'm much older, married, and looking at life with experienced eyes? I see it the same exact way I did when I was a kid. Mom was wrong and there was no fixing that. Dad wasn't "right," but he ended up giving up an important part of his real life for his kids out of fear he would lose us. Mom had no right to cry foul for Dad's infidelity. She treated him with incredible hostility with zero explanation.

I recently forgot about this life experience I've just chronicled when I was dealing with a very dearest friend's life event. I was called upon to use my intellect, powers of reasoning and love for him. Instead of doing these very things, I reacted to the hysterical rantings of a sociopathic woman. See, I didn't know any of her backstory, like I knew my mother's or I would have...waited. I let my friend down in a big way by not trusting that that he was fulfilling that very important part of his life that had been denied him for a decade.