I received an email today, a visit from 1978 Dublin: Ger O’Connell, my round-eyed Rathmines housemate, found me synchronistically through my blog. (I’d looked for her nine or ten years ago, and had no luck.)
Now we’re catching up through Skype. Small, wonderful World!
I’m not at all sure I’ll ever see my $50 Sprint rebate. Why? Well, to begin with, I just received an email acknowledging their receipt of my (kinda massive) paperwork, mailed for about $10, return receipt requested and all - to avoid never getting my $50 rebate. A lawyer helped me with it - really! (out of kindness…).
Sprint’s email began, “Dear - and then my legal name in all CAPITALS, like on an IRS document, and, as if that wasn’t a bit of a turn-off, my last name, Harrington, had become HARIBGTON. Good Luck, you’re probably saying by now!
If you’ve been thinking of getting a broadband device, you might want to wait until other companies start making equivalent products. (Or tune back in 8 - 14 more weeks - that’s what they say! - and I’ll let you know if it ever arrives!)
I cried last week in the doctor’s office. Really! I’d set myself up: Two and a half years of the same, consistent assumption, overriding the pain, overriding the stiffness, the relative immobility of that left joint. “Some day,” the crap in my head said, “I’ll get the big metal screw out of my ankle, and THEN…”
Well, Someday happened last week - remember back in the doctor’s office? - and what he told me had absolutely nothing to do with those assumptions I’d been making an ass out of myself with. He gave me a prescription for an ankle brace, personally fitted (though it seemed really far from a good thing, there in that back-to-reality moment.) He also suggested steroid shots, and that really did it. I had tears streaming down my cheeks, there in the office where many are told that they CAN be fitted for prosthetic LIMBS, and here I was, tearing up because I couldn’t have the magic-bullet surgery I’d been expecting!! Ah, non-attachment. Non-attachment… And not living for something to come at some future date!
The first time I heard Mariachi music, it seemed embarrassingly exuberant. (It just couldn’t have been more different than my upper-middle-class, WASPy, military upbringing. Mariachi is happy music, made by happy people; I simply couldn’t relate.)
I was surrounded by it today, at a repair shop in San Rafael, where I didn’t need an appointment, yet was attended to right away. I think of the average mechanic as being not exceptionally high in people skills, yet Luis and Ben (and later, his brother, Fernando) were exceptionally friendly and charming. And Mariachi music played the whole time I was there. I have a new perspective now on Mariachi. I’ll now associate it with a pleasant, trusting experience.
Perhaps Mariachi was the reason I left smiling, planning the next time I’d be in San Rafael.
Last Fall, I flew. I hadn’t flown since 9/11.
The removal of shoes was a first for me, as was being pulled aside for a small bit of organic dried tomato pesto, enough to spread on my rice cracker while I waited for the flight. Even when newly packaged, it was in no way a liquid, so I hadn’t thought it would be a problem. I showed the anxious agent how it would not slide when the little glass jar was tipped. He eventually let me keep it, carefully pointing out that there were explosives of just such a consistency.
The others in line, equally humiliated, were friendly. It was Seattle; no one thought such regulations were a good idea, and sharing the nonsense seemed to bond us.
Prior to 9/11 I didn’t own a laptop, which now made the wait more interesting (though taking my heavy laptop in and out of its case while also shoeless did not). I sat on a comfortable black seat and plugged myself in to the post-9/11 United States.
When I was small, my favorite color was baby blue, a “Beam me up, Scotty” color, way before Mr. Scot was ever written into existence. I did not want to be on the planet. Over the years, I embraced the various colors one by one, falling in love with this one, then that one. During this decades-long process, I never had one favorite color; I was still in the process of my healing.
Approximately eight or nine years ago, I realized that I once again had a favorite color: green. The baby blue, out-of-my-body color of my early childhood had deepened in tone and strength - - and had combined with yellow, the color of the solar plexus, or 3rd chakra, which to me is about owning personal power.
It had been a long (and, forgive me, colorful!) process.
It’s a whole new means of self-knowledge, and a playful one. Merely take a look at the colors you are drawn to, as well any colors you’re resistant to; it’s every bit as revealing as a Rorschach blot.
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