Palyne

A reader-friend pointed out that I hadn’t posted on Red Cairo for so long people were going to think I’d keeled over. I have six blogs for different topics and I can’t keep up with one let alone six, so… that’s the way it goes. But I feel sadly remiss at not posting because this one, Red Cairo, is my most personal blog, where I talk about my dreams and weird experiences and psychic sessions and so on. You know, all the stuff that would make readers elsewhere run screaming into the night.

I’ve often felt I survived well in the world mostly because my weirdness was well hidden. I “pass”, as people with issues such as deafness and autism call it; when you function well enough “like other people” that conveniently, they mistakenly assume you are one of them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d been talking on the phone to LD, and she was supposed to be sleeping beside me, having negotiated her way into a night in mama’s bed, but really she was just faking it, listening to my conversation. The minute I hung up and prepared to sleep, my eyes closing as I thankfully began to relax, she popped up from her pillow all bright and chipper, insisting I tell her everything about whatever I’d been talking about.

The more I assured her that archetype meditations were a little bit subtle, complex, and probably better for adults as a result, the more steely her resolve became that I had to explain it to her. In detail. Right now. Or else. “Or else” I wouldn’t get any sleep was obviously the first reality, so I decided to explain it to her as best I could, since in theory, about 60 seconds of this was likely to put her in a moderate theta snore anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

In mid-2005 I had a long talk with my Ex. It had been 5 years since I’d made him move out, which means all the way back to Canada, for a long list of unusually good reasons. We hadn’t been more than roommates since Jan 1997 anyway. He wanted to come back (as a roommate-only) and this time ‘for real’ apply for citizenship (finally). No matter that I had no desire to put up with him again, I knew that my kid having her dad locally vs. in another country had to be the priority.

Suddenly inspired, as he likes to cook and garden, I told him that one of the requirements of our agreement, would be that he would cook. Lowcarb, so that I could be healthier without taking all the time myself since I worked, and semi-lowcarb (at the least, “real food”) for the kid, who was beginning to get just a little chubby. Given my weight, of course, I was worried for her, and wanted to stop that in its tracks. She was about 4′9-4′10 then, and about 110 lbs.

Like most things that you know are bad ideas, those wrong things that you are doing for the right reasons, it didn’t work out anything like I planned.

He still “couldn’t get around to” applying for citizenship, turned my entire house into such an ebay warehouse there was no room for a kitchen table or even more than a sideways-path through the living room, all while not providing a dime of his income for rent, food, bills, the kid, etc. After previously having ruined me with an IRS situation I will probably never afford to resolve as long as I live, he promptly settled into the same routine again. But…

Worse, in the end, was the food issue. He had no actual interest in making LC food, so most the time I didn’t eat. When he would make something, it was only if it was easy enough to involve LC bread, but since I’m gluten intolerant, then I’d have asthma/allergies, worse apnea problems, lower oxygen level, etc. (Not that he cared, of course!) When I got inspired to do it myself in frustration, he’d promptly make garlic bread or something he knew was my biggest weakness, or the kitchen (now ‘his’) would be so gross I’d just walk away again with no appetite. So I gradually gained weight, from 414 to 467 over 12 months, which I had to lose (fortunately I lost all that and more from Sep-Dec 06).

When it came to the kid, he had even less concern than I had previously, I guess. She ate dominantly fast food and mac&cheese and spaghetti and so on. After 18 months, the kid had gained well over 50 lbs (weighing 165 at 4′11), serious cellulite, the inability to get into anything sold in walmart that is wearable without fashion suicide, could barely get in the biggest karate gi, and now had a nightmare of taunting and humiliation at school. Since the other problems with him were just as present as ever, that was it, and I gave up and made him leave before he ruined my life twice.

That left the kid’s eating habits back in my court.

***

So then I wanted to put her on lowcarb, but nearly everybody made it clear to me that my eating plan was ‘extreme’ and that this would be totally inappropriate for a child. Sure, I could avoid McDonald’s, but “whole grains!” were “necessary”, and apples and bananas and plums and corn and so on, “How could fruit and veggies be unhealthy?”

The leading critic was my stepmother, who thinks the ADA advice is the law. (Her family, under this advice, has died off eyes by feet by heart attacks by cancer for the last 20 years, but this has not changed her views.) We had actual arguments about pasta.

The consensus seemed to be that my denying my kid mac&cheese was some kind of child abuse, because “all things in moderation” was the answer to life, and “pasta is not harmful, and kids love it!”. The fact that I didn’t want her eating potatoes was treated with an attitude as if I’d said that I was sacrificing her to an alien god. I mean it was crazy how simply avoiding high-carbs, not eating a potato, was seen as such a major thing.

Then age 10, she was a carb addict already, begging constantly for bread-pasta-sugar products, to the degree that she didn’t WANT to eat anything else, and would NOT eat anything else if anything with carbs/sugar was an option. It was hard even for me to stay on lowcarb when my house was filled with carby crap I love too of course, and she was constantly begging for fast food or sweets etc.

So about 8 months later, which is around October of ‘07, she was 5′0 and 160. She’d grown at least an inch in the previous 8 months and yet was around the same on the scale, so at least she wasn’t gaining MORE weight. But she had reached the point where her karate gi just wouldn’t work, and left the one exercise I was overpaying for her to have, and she had almost no clothes for school since finding stuff to fit her was so difficult in our small town.

She would sometimes spend a couple hours at night just pouring out her grief and misery about being fat, and not being able to wear cute clothes, and how people at school treated her, and more. I wasn’t fat in school (though I felt I was), so I didn’t have the peer results of that, but her obvious suffering just made me grieve inside for my baby that obviously I was not “protecting” the way I felt a mom should.

Around November 2006, I finally snapped. That was when she could no longer go to karate for lack of fitting a gi. I felt like somehow that was the last straw, “Her certain doom”.

And I put her on MY lowcarb plan. I decided everybody else could stuff their opinions. She was 11, 5′0, and weighed 164, that was about 6 weeks ago.

I did make a couple exceptions for her: once or twice a week I give her a little corn & peas nuked with some butter as a treat (those are more carby than I can eat, but I let her). I let her have as much fibrous veggies (the ones I make for both of us, broccoli, asparagus, cauli, peppers, onion, and more for her than me, baby carrots) and berries as she wants. I don’t worry about counting her carbs or calories — I simply make a point that nothing she eats is anything but lowcarb.

This meant that I started cooking a LOT more — 2-4x a day — so that she would always have “real food” and not be eating stuff from a can or frozen box or fast food, because mom was busy. This was a really big shift in my own time allotment to be honest, and if I hadn’t been on lowcarb, I wouldn’t have been healthy enough to have the energy/strength to do it. It has meant a substantial shift in my “available time” in a day. But since I started having her help me, it also meant that she and I spent a little more time together.

She used to tell me that she was constantly hungry. That even after she ate she was hungry. That she seemed to have “no off button” and that she would eat until she was sick if she had her way. She certainly did want to nosh 24/7 it seemed. So the rule I had was that I didn’t want her to be hungry on lowcarb, EVER, and I would try to make sure there was always something she could eat.

To my surprise, she started quickly asking for more meat. I mean, the girl ate meat like it was going out of style, and hasn’t stopped. I thought she would beg for more of whatever had the most carbs, but no. She became a protein fiend. I was a little nervous about this for awhile. I wondered if maybe she was overeating and I should put limits on it. But as I had recently read the Gary Taubes book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and noted all the research with animals (and some humans), I decided if she was craving protein, it was probably that her body actually NEEDED protein.

In the end, I adopted this strategy: I make her wait 30 minutes after our meal. If she still wants more food, I will make her more. That’s just to make sure she isn’t inhaling dinner and it hasn’t yet hit the tummy. She still continues to eat a lot of protein. Not too much for her size, just vastly more than she ever had. She used to only want carbs. The shift has been astounding.

And in just over a month, she went from not fitting in a size 17 jeans, to fitting easily in size 15, and I don’t think it’ll be that long before she’s in a 14.

She has noticed repeatedly and with great delight how much her stomach is smaller, her upper arms are thinner, the extra fat around her neck/chin has disappeared, her thighs, butt and calves are smaller — even her feet are smaller and no longer “puff out on top” in slipper-style flats.

For the first time in a long time, she now has at least enough clothing to not feel mortified at school. She now can put on clothes and look in the mirror and not cry. She actually “feels cool” and proud of how she looks.

Here’s the interesting thing: She weighed 162 the other day — only 2 lbs less than when we began. And yet, she’s lost 2-3 pants sizes, and obvious fat everywhere!

Now my sneaking suspicion is that her body was chronically protein deprived, and used all this meat she’s been eating like crazy to build up her lean body mass again, so all the fat she has lost, balanced against muscle rebuilt, comes out to about equal.

Her energy level is much higher. Her attitude and affection are 200% better. Thank god — the whiny lazy angry girl seems to have greatly changed. Getting her to do chores is vastly easier. Those are side-effects I didn’t expect! They rock!

And here’s the real kicker: she no longer begs for carbs and sugar. She no longer pleads for Taco Bell because she’s so hungry and it’s fast and cooking would take awhile. She is so EXCITED by the idea that eating this way has helped her lose bodyfat, that with rare exceptions, she doesn’t WANT to eat carbs. There have been times when I was willing to slide on something, and she said, “No!”

She has become a huge supporter in my lowcarb journey — instead of a problem. She is the one now that encourages me to go to the walking park with her. And given the amount of meat she eats, and how much she loves veggies, it’s been super helpful in improving even the way I do lowcarb eating, re-focusing me on those elements.

She’s so beautiful. And now, she is so much happier. As well as healthier. And she looks better, honestly, though there is still more extra fat to lose, I trust now that it will come off. She is going back to karate and will be more easily able to do it as well, I am sure. Her legs look longer, and she is just so much happier across the board, that it is clear that her misery at school and with herself because of her weight was affecting her a good deal.

I just wanted to report that. I know that I’ve had a lot of insecurity as a mother about “what is proper to feed the kid”. Isn’t it weird that most of our culture will not blink about living at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and people will argue a kid’s “need” to have pasta, yet if you tell them you’re making the kid eat mostly meat, dairy, fibrous veggies and berries, they act like it’s some bizarre diet-cult that you’re inflicting on them?!

***

As for me, I am down to 370 now. No big deal really, since health is now my priority before fat loss — low carb is about health-sanity for me, not a diet — but everything helps as far as my energy level and comfort goes. Since I began at over 500# (and a size 8x on the bottom–tip: they don’t make clothes for that size…), that’s fairly significant.

My 6x pants, one brand is falling off me, the other brand fits ok but loosely. Today I splurged and ordered 6x and 5x ‘cargo pants’ from Junonia — which will be the first ‘real’ pants (not stretchy soft things) that I’ve worn since… since… 1991 or so. (And of course, I could wear nothing but homemade skirts for years and years.) I can wear the 5x shirts my parents have bought me for the last few years at Christmas, so that was nice, that I instantly have several new things to wear.

I can do walking I couldn’t before, I can fit in seats at the city theatre now, where musicals and ballet and stuff happen (finally, I can take my kid to those!), and on the whole I just feel a lot better.

I have shifted every meal to either protein powder + cream + flax seeds (for me only, and sometimes frozen berries in there), or to MEAT primarily, usually with veggies. We eat a whole lot of simple hamburger patties, pork cutlets, or chicken breasts, with and without sauces or cheeses or dressings, and usually with stir-fried veggies.

We were still able to make super yummy holiday treats (peanut butter cookies, almond joys), and now and then when we want something sweet, I’ll make some kind of bowl muffin (egg, cream cheese, flax seed, flavor extracts, sweetzfree, and sometimes cocoa)… or LC cheesecake. Not often, but on occasion when she is feeling like she wants something sweet.

She’s happy, I’m happy, we’re both losing fat and gaining energy, and life is going well. 2008 will be great! I feel sure of it. :-)

This is long and boring and not that interesting so if you’re busy, wander on. ;-)

About a year and a half ago, my Senior PM team at work was broken up by a major corporate/multi-company restructuring. Our semi-executive boss got ‘laid off’ and promptly rehired as a consultant making even more but for a different company name yet in the same general group of people, go figure. One of my coworkers went to a different part of the company to manage the tech he’d been the “main” one working on, one left, two went to a different division, and since I was the “main” one working on a semi-new product line we’d been developing that had sold so well it was becoming a company standard, I got moved with the product line into the production department, so it could be standardized.

For those of you who aren’t business freaks, what this means is that one day I was doing a job that required brains and creativity and some tech knowledge, and that had a lot of flexibility for things regularly changing, and the next day somehow the allegedly same job was a “widget” job, where a standardized product with known parameters is made the same way over and over again, and I “managed” the vendors that were the lowest bidder and the editorial people who haven’t yet run screaming from the position of providing you content for it. I do my best to make the role one of “facilitator” and not “red tape”, as I’m anti-bureaucracy in a big way, but the fact is, solely by accident and just-the-way-things-go, it was a demotion.

I also lost a good chunk of pay with it, because they weren’t willing to keep my contractor status, and instead insisted I become an employee, and a ‘project manager’ role in ‘production’ pays less than a ’senior project and product manager’ role working on what we called ‘the A-team’ under the senior VP. The fact that part of the salary was based not on the job but on my college (which is minimal) and “the economy at my location” (in the poorest county of the poorest state in the nation, last I heard!) did not help.

Suffice to say I was kinda pissed off about this turn of events.

But I work from home in nowhere, Oklahoma, where the only local jobs are Wal*mart, fast food and a few doctor’s offices. Being unemployed in this area nearly makes me hyperventilate just thinking about it. And because I am FAT, something with more deeply ingrained cultural prejudice than being a black lesbian satanist with blue hair would probably invoke, walking into another job is not really that easy. I’ve always gone from one job to another based on contacts I already knew, and usually took jobs because someone literally asked me to (often pleaded with me to), not because I was applying for the position. I no longer fit in the cute little Vanderbilt suits and pumps I used to wear, which is not only a disaster for my fashion life, but a real problem for first-impressions and new jobs. So I was forced to be terribly grateful for the job I had, no matter that it was now something I was over-qualified to do over 20 years ago, and that greatly ignored a whole spectrum of talent/skill benefits I can offer employers.

Hard as it was to imagine, the situation was even worse, though. One of the managers that my team (especially my boss) had really kind of avoided and rolled our eyes about, became MY BOSS.

That’s right. GAH. And frankly, it was just as I feared. Her ’style’ (I say to be polite) meant I did the same work three times on at least a dozen occasions early on, and usually when I had the least time. I constantly had the urge to suggest training or explain (read: lecture) to her about some basic, only to remember that she was MY boss not the other way around.

I’ve been in management pretty much all my adult life, usually working directly for a CEO, or a Sr. VP at least, often without a title off and on as a troubleshooter/PM, in between sliding into various mgmt roles usually to set up a new dept., arrange training, or solve some problem. Suddenly, I was… I can hardly say it…

A NUMBER.

I was one of a bazillion employees of a company that recently sold for just under 8 BILLION dollars. I worked for someone half my age (a situation I’d always been in, in reverse–usually I was the young one without a degree managing people twice my age with MBAs, so I understood her position), and she didn’t know much about me, didn’t want to know, and greatly preferred people working at her location not from across the country.

I would do work, and then do it again and yet again when it turned out she hadn’t provided enough info up front–as if it were some secret need to know kind of thing–in such a way that it sponsored “mindless obedience” instead of any independent thought, because ‘thinking’ when someone is withholding context is likely to be more harm than help. Then I would do work, and then do it again and yet again when it turned out the report I spent 14 hours working on, based on her original I had to radically update with my info per her own request, I’d send it to her, after which she’d send HER original–not my revised version–to someone else, then send THEIR revisions to me to ‘update’ with my info ’cause gosh, guess we need to integrate these… this happened repeatedly. I wanted to scream. I wanted to stick pins in a little PJs-Boss-Voodoo-Doll.

Then there was communication. Mostly email. I would ask a question and get no response. I would ask it again and get a response that didn’t even address my question. I’d ask it again, to clarify, and get a response that basically just restated what was obvious I already knew based on the question in the first place. She was incapable of hearing what I *said*; she was so “inferred” a communicator, that if you said, “Boss, the sky is blue,” she would hear any number of things she “thinks that you must MEAN by that”–never what you actually SAID.

This is not that uncommon. In hypnosis and NLP one of the studies relates to the communications format that people engage in. Normally I’m a little better at dealing with this in people, but that is based greatly on physical intuition; you have to know a little about them in order to know how to say ABC when you “want them to infer” XYZ based on that. I had barely been exposed to her, and she was too busy and stressed out even to talk to me hardly at all, until I finally kind of made a big deal about how we NEEDED to communicate. (My job at a distance depends on it.) Even still, we have weekly meetings, which she actually manages to make once a month.

Early on, I really was irked about this. I didn’t dislike her — it’s work, it isn’t personal — but I was really irked about the entire situation, including her role in it all.

I consider loyalty to my boss one of my primary job duties. I’ve always worked for people where there was a great deal of mutual respect, and a great deal of what has always motivated me is personal recognition from someone I respect–in short, the reason I’m drawn to “power behind the throne” roles in most areas of my life, is because I’m motivated by the personal relationship. This just didn’t exist for me anymore.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I got to experience the cultural prejudice that the media and liberal college has indoctrinated into the entire country: a whole team of coworkers who were so convinced that anybody not in a coastal state or metro city was a hick-moron that they regularly made jokes about it in meetings. Which I would counter with a voice dripping frost, the best I can do from this distance. If we were that prejudiced against people for being a certain race or religion, they’d be sued into the ground. But it’s perfectly ok to say or imply that anybody who isn’t a liberal or who lives in the midwest is a blithering idiot “just because”. The enormity of this stupidity is just ridiculous. In a San Francisco-area company, the bias was everywhere. I’m a California girl. I could excuse myself. But it’s the moral of it already. Prejudice is gross no matter what it’s about.

***

I was no longer a daily leader in some kind of entrepreneurial enterprise, dedicated to my company’s vision and the support of my boss and coworkers and employees and vendors/ contractors. Now I was just a distant number in a huge conglomerate, buried by bureaucracy and unfamiliarity and at the mercy of coworkers who knew nothing of me and a boss who didn’t even care.

My job is my survival instinct. I get more psychic about my job situation when there is any threat to it, than any other area of my life. To the point of completely freaking out people I work with. It’s my combat zone, I guess.

***

Early on, just at the peak of my early despair about all this, I had a fairly intense dream.

In the dream, my boss and I were great friends. The dream bounced between two time frames. One was some years in the future, when we were very close. The other was a psychic thing in the present.

I found myself at her house, which somehow was a martial arts dojo. We set ourselves up to see who was going to win this little competition. I was clearly winning. She regrouped and we went at it again. This time it was a little more equal, but she was still losing. She stepped back, and a man I knew was her husband came up to us. He put his hands on her from behind, and talked to her softly, and “focused and grounded her.” And then she was a tough opponent. I could see how she was definitely ‘grounded’ and her focus improved by him, and finally she had become an equal.

And then we shifted back to some indefinite point in the future, when I understood that we had become wonderfully good friends, one of the few women friends I’d ever had that I got genuinely close to.

Turns out her husband is a martial arts sensei. So maybe some of that wasn’t entirely imagination!

But wait, talk about coincidence. She herself has a black belt — in the not super common form of karate (Gojo Ryu) that just happens to be the only kind available in my locale, thanks to a local expert, and is the one my daughter is actively studying. She trained with the son of its founder. Small world, or what?

***

I decided to trust my intuition. If my dreams say that she and I are super compatible, that we will be close in the future, and that if she focuses herself she is an equal opponent, then I will go with that, afford her whatever respect I can based on her position and this dream-based hope, and trust that things will improve.

She has grown on me.

I don’t have to do things quite as repetitively now. And thanks to insisting on communicating regularly, by IM if nothing else, we now know each other a little better. We met briefly earlier this year, though I barely saw her. Now I am more likely to say something about it, or even (mildly) complain.

But for about a year and a half, since all that shift happened, I’ve been different at work. Depressed. Totally lacking ambition. I just did my job and logged out. Didn’t do any more than I had to. From a person who voluntarily worked over 100 hrs/wk for about 20 years, simply because I am always so driven by creative ideas, proactive behavior and troubleshooting inclinations, this is a pretty big deal. It was like a different person. “Who wants to volunteer?” she would ask our team. I would silently take one step back. I didn’t care. I’m a fucking number. Any moron with half a clue could do this job. ‘Why should I care’.

***

Several days ago, something inside me shifted. I have no idea what. I just woke up and suddenly, I was the person I’ve always been about work. I looked forward to getting to it, because I had so many things I knew needed to be done and I wanted to accomplish. I looked at our documentation. PATHETIC! I started greatly improving the shared web area we use for that. I looked at that web area. PATHETIC! I started adding handy links and things like that to it. I looked at the documentation for my product line. Which, by the way, I was supposed to do a better job on eons ago and didn’t give a damn enough to really work hard on. Astounded by how I could not have cared, I’ve spent a few days working like 8am to 2am, with just a couple breaks of about 2 hours each, including making that much-needed documentation, training manuals for editorial, and more. By this weekend, hopefully, I will be fully “caught up” for the first time in probably 18 months, and will actually FEEL glad for my job, interested in my job, and “on the ball.”

I don’t know why. I’m pretty damn happy that some part of me finally returned home, though.

I imagine my boss is too, LOL.

Meanwhile, the last two weeks — and maybe this is it, frankly, damn, until I wrote that I had not considered this.

I’m one of those people whom stress actually holds together. I excel in situations that destroy other people, probably because most of my childhood was training for it. Calm, easy, no-stress jobs, even temp gigs I had when not in a regular position, make me profoundly depressed. I thrive on challenge and demand.

Well the last two weeks have been the most demanding since all that job shift happened.

For example, before that shift happened, at our national sales meeting, I slept one hour a night for eight nights straight, working frantically on a million problems and products that were emergency situations. The last three sales meetings, I literally had no work for about a week before until about a week after. Whole days without a single email. I was no longer solving problems. I’m in production now. I just shuffle widgets through a pre-defined path over and over. Until the last couple weeks, when my coworker with whom I share disciplines/projects is out on vacation (getting married) so I’m doing both our work, and the new term brought more problems than ever, and somehow our customers and sales forgot tech support existed and keep showing up in OUR inboxes begging for help on stuff, and so I’ve been busier than… well, busier than I have been since the days when I felt like I had a real job.

Maybe that’s what finally woke me up again.

***

So the other day I dreamed. I dreamed that I was hanging out with my boss. She was really stressed out about a lot of stuff, much of which I had not heard about. I was consoling her and telling her she needed to be kinder to herself. I pointed out the many aspects of her life that were obviously very challenging. Some of which are impossible outside the dream world–such as that I was her roommate LOL! (Maybe that was a translation. ;-)) In my dream, there was a japanese shoji lamp, tall, but broken off short, empty and without light. (In my house, I have one that has no light, but is not otherwise broken.) I interpret that as hers though, for some reason. The fact that she had this broken light seemed significant. But I stuck with her until I felt she had her strength back, and was grounded, and ready to face the day again.

When I woke up I thought, well, I feel closer to her again suddenly. Like we are a team. Like some of the ‘loyalty-to-boss’ that is always engrained in me, has come out a bit. I felt the ‘psychic counseling and kinship’ was probably true on some level.

So will we be buddies someday? I don’t know. We get along fine by phone, but I don’t really understand her from a distance. Maybe not even from up close.

She has an intriguing face. She looks a little bit like that man who played on the show “The Pretender.” I’m not sure what nationality that is. Something from one of the former Russian provinces I’m guessing. She has an 11 year old girl, just like I do — and twin boys, about 5 or so.

I guess we’ll see.

***

Geez. That reminds me. I had some dream this morning that my daughter had absorbed a twin in the womb. In the dream there was some consequence of this; I could feel teeth growing out of her lower torso, can’t remember if it was front or back, but I ‘understood’ that this was somehow related to some problem she was having. Weird!

Speaking of karate and the kid, by the way. For the 18 months her dad lived here, she picked up his interesting ‘habit’. I am working during the period when I have to take her to it, as my biz is on pacific time and we’re 2 hours ahead. I have to take off work to do it and work a little after (my lunch hour+ is getting her from school and errands. So technically I’m working-or-something from 8am until 8pm most days.) The habit goes like this:

Mom reminds that karate is coming in a few hours. Reminds again that it’s a couple hours. And then an hour. And then half an hour please get ready NOW. And then 15 minutes. And then either mom goes to grab purse and run out the door — and kid is not REMOTELY ready, often hasn’t even begun dressing, or is pretending to be asleep –or, mom is totally busy with work details, and nobody says anything at all about the time they KNOW we are supposed to leave, and mom finishes some business thing in time to realize it’s 20 minutes after leaving-time, nobody said a word conveniently, so either we miss it again, or I use gas and time plus disrespect the dojo by being late, all for 10 minutes of workout… so we don’t go.

After nearly two years of this, last week I freaked out. Had an official Hissy Fit. I didn’t want to do some punishment that made her associate something bad with karate. So instead I said she was supposed to be responsible enough to go, and it is only two nights a week, and I had even let her choose the night. But. If she blows it and doesn’t get ready on time, then she will do karate every single night that week, as “practice” for the discipline she must be lacking. If she wants to do karate LESS, she needs to be BETTER about doing it at all. This is a funny true corollary to adult life actually. I figured, worst-case, she’d be really good at karate!

She has now gone for nearly two solid weeks.

Today she brought up the subject of going every night. I thought she was going to plead for a break. Instead she said,

“If I go every night for the next two weeks as well, will you consider putting me in private lessons one night a week and the regular class the other night a week?”

She says she is serious about wanting to get better. More time in it, apparently just focused her more on it.

I’ve probably created a monster. ;-)

Rykah got a pair of Calvin Klein deep wine (red) glasses. She can now actually see half the world she could not before. She loves them. And she looks adorable in them, truth be told. Thank the gods that somewhere between her father and my genetics, she got a blend that is nothing like either of us.

Last night she came into my room and sat on my legs facing me and said very seriously to me, “Mom, I’m going to tell you something about me that you don’t know.” Sure this was going to be some major revelation, I was appropriately serious. “What is it, honey?” I ask in my best you-can-tell-me-anything voice.

“My favorite candy flavors are blue rasberry and sour apple,” she says with great sincerity. I pause. “Wow,” I say, while searching for what to actually SAY. “Cool. I’ll keep that in mind.” Then she wandered off to do something else. You realize that when she decides to tell me something of monumental import, she will probably mention it, in passing, while running out the door to play someday.

Off and on for — well, her whole life — I have always tried to make psi seem like a normal, no-brainer, no-big-deal kind of thing. We live many lives, we ’sit in on’ other identities when we dream, we leave our bodies when we sleep and sometimes when awake, when people die it’s only their body that dies of course, dreaming things that happen is pretty common, deja vu is our memory of future-awareness, and being deliberately psychic like in remote viewing is just another normal thing, it just takes more work to get the hang of for some people… like mom.

The other day, enthused after overhearing me talking to my tasker about a kind of data I’ve gotten a couple times that I think is cool (a graphic icon that is representative of the primary form+dynamic of the target), she decided SHE wanted to do RV. “Naw, it’ll bore you, it’s more an adult thing,” I told her offhandedly, which was sure to make her insist she absolutely had to do it right this moment and nothing I could ever say or do would change that.

She wanted to start with my envelope target pool. I didn’t think that was such a great idea. It was a pool of nearly 1000 that I made back in 2000, there are probably at least 700 left. The pool has literally everything including some pretty grim and grisly tasks here and there — but not that many statistically, compared to the whole pool. She was upset I wouldn’t just let her grab one and try and I didn’t want it to be a drama so I said ok, fine, they may not be appropriate but we’ll try a few.

She wrote down person or people, a few colors. The target was a gorilla. She wrinkled her nose in disgust–it took one session to make even my ten year old detest animal targets, something most of us had to do a lot of before we took that view!–and then she tried another.

blue. puffy. water. a few other things. The target is a heavily blue photo of a giant air balloon taking off over a lake and mountains. So she tried another.

A train. A… tunnel or something like that. Some other data. The target is a train, or part of one, and the destroyed stationhouse nearby (war pic). I suggested she stop but she wanted to do more. So she tried another.

She thinks it’s a plane crash. A lot of blood. She sees at the other end of inside a plane a tall man, black top to bottom in black-bandages, with a long shape in his right hand, like a crutch. I think to myself, this seems like her archetype for death (with me it’d likely be a skeleton with a rifle; with some, a black hooded figure with a scythe). There are people all over she says. She thinks something bad happened there. The target is the definitely losing trench of a civil war battle. With an environment rather similar to what you might get in a plane actually: looking down a row, a fairly contained shape with high sides, toward the other end, and bodies all over the place mostly to each side. “OK, no more target pool!” I say, breathing a sigh of relief that she does not seem upset about this (her taste for violence and gore even in media is tougher than mine for sure), and I tell her she has to use the dojo from now on.

So she registers as ‘Rinnie’ in the dojo, and does a session. I tell her not to make it public unless she feels it is worth looking at, as otherwise it mostly just dilutes the list of what people wade through and then sessions that could really get useful input are more likely to get missed. She’s delighted that she gets a couple colors right at least, and posts it, and is more delighted that she gets some comments on it. “Valentines,” is what my buddy Eric once called RV Galleries “comments” on a session, and I agree, they feel like that. ;-) So she does another.

She gets a few points close enough and she posts that. She gets a few more comments and she’s delighted. That seemed to pretty much exhaust her interest in the subject, so whether or not we will see her after this, who’s to say. I have no interest in pushing or frankly even encouraging her to psi, given how it messes with the stability of pretty much everybody on some level eventually. She’ll choose it on her own or she won’t. No matter to me really.

Which reminds me that when I began in RV I was the product evangelist, but now I am completely UNevangelistic about the topic. (My web work is based on providing options for people already interested, more than recruiting new folks.) In fact I recall that many years ago, I argued fiercely with a couple friends who felt that probably only about 1/2 of 1% of the population was all that appropriate for it. Now I think that number might be a little high. “There is nothing like working HARD for a living to make a man a conservative,” is a political saying; it sort of applies to RV too I think. I get less willing to assume on people — or on any part of the process — by the day.

Sometimes she tells me that I know nothing of her life or perspective, that I can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be her. I try not to giggle over that, because I’m sure she is right, but that usually only comes up in moments of angst, like why I won’t let her wear makeup to school for 5th grade, even though most the kids in her class do. The generations — and their bodies — get older when younger, by the year.

But it’s another day in suburbia. School pictures came out, progress reports came out, and they both went well for her in my opinion. Someday she’ll look back on this and I wonder what she will think, of her mom who spent her whole waking life outside work and kid on RV for a dozen years before the kid decided to try it, and probably for a dozen more years at least after.

She got glasses so she can see the world around her, finally… and she got a dojo login so she can see, well, the world that is not around her, too. Maybe by the time she is 21 she’ll be doing ‘deep mind probes’ (…that term makes me laugh out loud) the way most of us sing in the shower.

Last night was ‘mommy-baby date night’ with my ten year old daughter, which means she got to snuggle up and fall asleep in my bed. This morning when we woke up, she said she’d had a dream and I asked her to tell it to me. I find her dreams fascinating for some reason. I think someday if I write these down, she will be intrigued by them when she is older. Anyway, so when she was done telling me I wrote it down and read it to her to make sure I had it right. I thought someone else might find “a ten year old girl’s dream” a sort of novel interest, haha. You can see the esoteric and archetypal elements in it of course… she is clearly my daughter. ;-)

[Her dream]

I was walking on my porch, and then when I stepped off it I found myself in another world.

There was a stone chair, and next to it, three statues.

I went toward the chair and one of the statues, its stone broke and an old man that looked like the statue came out of it. He reminded me a little of “The Rider” in the Lord of the Rings movie.

I went behind the chair and found a doorway and went into some inner area.

I heard all these ‘things’ coming through the doorway and I hid. They turned out to be robots.

There was this tiny woman there and she and I fought. I won and so all her robots left.

I went back out and the second statue broke open and another old man was revealed.

He sat in the chair, and the other one said why are you in my chair, but then they laughed, they were both kings, but they were close friends.

I went back home to my house and went into my room but I saw this spider come down on a thread and I ran into it.

It fell on the floor and was huge and I was so scared, and I took off running out of the house and ran and ran.

I found myself in a place where the two kings were there on horseback. They had a woman like a young princess with them.

This other man on a black horse who looked a lot like one of the kings and was ‘almost’ a king but not quite, he was a black magician who also used a sword, he snuck up behind them all and killed the princess.

And then there was all these thin gauzy curtain things like in that video, all over [mom's input: "veils"].

One of the kings then had flowers in his hand like he had loved her and he said to her, “who did this to you?”

And even though she was dead she lifted her head and said something I can’t really remember. [mom: 'try'.] It was like, “Bahmitrix.” [she spelled this]

I thought that part was funny like it was a movie and even though she was dead she was talking and then dead again.

Then the black magician started talking to me and we talked and talked and somehow I came to be affectionate about him even though he was evil.

And he came home with me into my world, and he gave me a list of things I should do so I could become an evil magician like he was.

One thing I did was like a weird game where you had to capture things in a bag or net or something. I was about halfway through the list when – wait I think this is where I saw the spider. Anyway – when I wondered, “why would I want to be evil?”

And I realized that he wanted to be a king and he wanted me to become an evil magician so I could eliminate the other kings for him.

I went back out to the stone chair to tell the kings that this man was planning and coming for them.

And then I woke up.

[end of her dream]

While taking picture of the cats, Lu took a pic of Rykah as well. It was kinda blurry and slouching and I thought it wouldn’t work, but I stylized it somewhat in photoshop — only with a ’smart sharpen’ to the extreme, which took her lipgloss (a present she got from a gift exchange in school today for Christmas), something red behind her, and the various colors of her mixed dark blonde hair, and made it kind of neat artsy looking, haloes and shadows and all. I think I’ll add a tiny version of this to the nav bar.

By the way, Ry has her own website at http://www.rykah.com but so far there is only one page up on it. :-)