Mediums Rare

Heartfelt thanks for the lovely comments on my last post. Although Ernie's comment made me think this:

Ernie: "You are really funny, probably without trying."

Me:




I've had an up and down week. I had a couple of really productive days and thought hey! I can do this, I'm all good. Then I would sit down in a chair and fall asleep for three hours or feel like I was run over by a truck the day after being busy and think okay, maybe I'm a useless waste of skin after all and optimism is for chumps. Bloodwork and a doctor's appointment are on the docket, but I have a sense the diagnosis is going to be the usual - depression, anxiety, perimenopause and/or terminal lameness.

I worked in the school office for the first time at my Wednesday school. I did mainly attendance, which is sort of a repetitive, Zen exercise. I gave out late slips, which is always something I thought would be kind of fun - you plug in the name, a little slip zips out of the little machine! - and it is! It is kind of fun! It was also fun when one of my library students would come in and side-eye me suspiciously or say "HEY, what are you doing in HERE?" There's an office administrator in the office, and the v.p. and principal's offices are right off the main office, so it's also got a fun community vibe that I don't get in the library. I think it will be a nice way to get some extra hours in. Also, the librarian went home sick just as I was finishing off my office shift, so I hopped over to the library, like a regular multi-tool (instead of just a tool, which frequently feels like my default setting.) Then I raced home to take Lucy around the block in the twenty minutes I had before my haircut. I was on top of shit that day. I had to sleep for fourteen hours to recover, but whatever.

Eve came downstairs last night and said "well, I made a prediction that just came true, so I'm psychic now and I don't know what to do with all this responsibility. Do I use my powers for good?" which got me thinking about psychic moments. I'm sure I've had some that felt genuine, but at the moment all I could think of were fake ones. When I was at Youth Encounter - a bizarre, possibly slightly abusive thing our church and Catholic school did, where they crowded dozens of teenagers together in a school for the week-end, deprived us of sleep and subjected us to long religiously-themed lectures and gave us letters from our parents in an effort to, I don't know, get us to see God or maybe manifest telekinetic abilities or something - I was doodling on a paper during one of the lectures, and there was this guy named Dave beside me. Then a few people performed some musical numbers, and afterwards he said to me "okay, you have to explain this to me before my mind explodes", and he showed me that I had written Forever Young in a doodle before someone had played it on the piano. I think what happened was that I had heard the person rehearsing the song earlier, but for a few minutes I could have had Dave playing any lottery number I told him to.

When I first got a phone in my room, it was a touch tone that I eventually realized made a tiny, almost sub-audible chirp just before starting to ring, so I could always pick it up before it rang and make the person calling think I had precognition.

My friend Collette's mom used to believe in psychic abilities, and would make Collette do the ESP testing where you're supposed to guess what symbol is on the card. Collette could see the reflection of the card in her mom's glasses, and she guessed mostly right with the odd wrong just enough that her mom was convinced she was the next, uh... someone famous and psychic.

I don't know where I land on the notion of actual psychics. I tend to think that anyone that is in public claiming them is probably full of shit, but I could probably be convinced that some people have a heightened sensitivity to the world and other people that could manifest in ways that seemed psychic, although psychic is defined as "phenomena that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws", which makes me think of Dana Scully saying "nothing happens in contradiction to nature, Mulder. Only to what we know of it." So there. So there?

Feel free to share your own psychic experiences. I'm off to explore my suddenly recovered memories of Youth Encounter and possibly call my mom to ask what the hell she was thinking letting me go to one.