1:24 p.m. - 2003-04-01
Turn-ons: New Job Opportunities, New Hats. Turn-Offs: Cults, Bussing to Nevada.
I nearly sheared off my inner thigh muscles this week trying to work up to 120 seconds of weighted water-treading before arrogantly snapping; deciding that the Park Department's standards were impossible for the average teenager let alone a reluctant adult with an attitude, an ittermittent gym-fancy and a shameful seasonal dependence on speckled cadbury mini-eggs.

I called the pool, trying not to sound like a weird old lady, and asked "Hey....so...you know the lifeguard pre-test on April 1st?"

"Yeah." A breathy, spearmint-flavored, sixteen-year-old utterance.

"Is it...'surface dive, collect the brick and tread water for two minutes without using hands', or is there a missing comma, to whit: "surface dive, collect the brick, and tread water for two minutes, and so on."

"You return the brick to the side first."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?"

"Mm-hm."

"...'Cause, haha, there's some decidedly odd punctiation on the website, and it very much looks as though one has to tread water for two minutes with the ten-lb. brick! ....When I was last certified it was 60 seconds, not 120. And I thought 'no way', I don't remember it being that hard, but you know."

"...Website...?"

"Well, anyway. Haha... Hm. Thanks."

"No problem."

"...No brick test?"

"No."

*click*

In celebration of the sudden, greater likelihood of a second job by the middle of May, I went out and purchased an absurd red cowboy hat with a star on the front, a present to myself for the year's manic desert jaunt.

It is largely a gesture of faith.

I am back to square one as far as transport is concerned. Keelie, my former travel partner, has gone mad and decided to devote 6 days a week and all of her paycheck to becoming a yogi for a very interesting organization.

...And this is where it goes far afield.

It has been creeping up. Long periods without contact, talking of nothing but a particular discipline of yoga, and spending thousands of dollars on "healers' training." Now--getting up at 6 a.m. to hand out pamphlets, volunteering 6 days a week and talking about giving up her lifelong dream of marriage and children for a sexless life with a gaggle--a flock? a great clot?--of other masters, following orders from overseas. She talks of nothing else.

To quote a great man: "I am not making this up."

She came by on Sunday to give me a few of her personal possessions, and to generally look wacko.

...I am harsh, in my anxiety.

But I have spoken as kindly and honestly as I could, and made any salient points I had. I asked her to make a contingency plan for any change of heart 5 years hence. She seemed disturbed by the idea--as though she hadn't considered the very real idea of emotional crisis if her decisions depreciate, to entertain being blindsided by doubts, to be prepared to sort the wheat from the chaff and not die of shame in the effort.

Such things are called break-ups, and she could take a lesson from herself.

It doesn't matter if it's a man or if it's a cult.

I have said "cult" to her. And "culty." "Gee, that sounds culty!" (My anxiety drives me to new heights of Rude). I've asked her if they keep her awake, make her fast, cut her off from her relatives or friends.

And they don't, per se. They don't force her to do anything. They just make money from her unpaid labor.

She has realized that her mother and grandmother are "draining", however--which may be true. I found that revelation hilarious, however, in light of her hypocritical disregard of a year's emotional vampirism at my neck, most disgracefully used. I almost laughed aloud.

It's actually so uneasily upsetting that I don't like to write about it. This sort of crap is only supposed to happen in the movies.

But she's happy. And she's alive.

I'm really not sure she would be, without this.

I'm at sea, really.

But...my new red hat surely is jaunty.

I'd like to concentrate on the face-shading virtue of my rakish chapeau, actually. I'd like to dwell on some new material for a goodly while--for example, some distressed straw in size 7 7/8. I'm going to practice visualizing the pre-test tonight. I'm going to run off with a basket and collect the remaining bits of peace my brain held before Keelie splattered them all over the walls like a medulla-throwing monkey.

I'm off to form a cult around my new hat.

previous - next