Late last night I got a random text from Marty, a CC lady, asking me to go to the spinning guild in Sacramento’s show tomorrow. I wasn’t planning on it, but okay, fine, I guess. So I was over there for about 20 minutes. Lovely colored work, I gotta say. Didn’t win the raffle prize I bid on, but oh well. But there wasn’t that much to do beyond look around and say hi to Marty, who said she isn’t in the mood to volunteer at the CC either and also can’t explain why.

Mostly I got annoyed by the gauntlet of older ladies at the door trying to encourage me to join their guild, and me saying that I can’t. Finally one of them clued in and was all, “Ohhhhh, you have to work for a living, don’t you?” (Yes, that’s a direct quote.) I said yes, because I am obviously not over 65 in looks like well, the rest of the guild. So we had an awkward conversation about how I can’t join a guild that has meetings on say, Tuesday afternoons. To which she said that well, if they have nighttime meetings, then it means the elderly can’t go to nighttime meetings. To which I pointed out that well, I guess you have to pick what clientele you’re going to serve, and clearly I am not your customer. I hear the same bitchery from Dawn and Loretta about the embroidery guild they are in (note: Loretta is retired enough to go to meetings on Wednesdays at 1 p.m., Dawn straight up uses vacation time to go), how they are concerned that they don’t have younger members. Well, if you have meetings during regular work days, what do you expect? Either you do nights, or weekends, or you only have members over 65 or stay at home moms or whoever the heck has free time during the day.

I went to the grocery store and then went to the yarn store. I had texted Scott earlier in the day to ask if he wanted the monologue books I dug up around the house (yes), so again, I left them with his mom. She was all, “oh, he’ll love these,” (well, one hopes, but I never read the men’s monologues so I hope they don’t all suck) and then we had an amusing conversation in which I complimented her on her shirt and she said, “Oh, thanks! My friend Eddie Bauer made it for me!” I like his family. I can’t help it. After that, I went to the yarn store and picked out gold yarn to make him the birthday present I have in mind. (We’ll see how it goes. It might be a bit tricksy.) I ended up telling the employee what I was making, but hopefully that won’t end up being revealed to him accidentally somehow since I don’t think(?) she knows I know him?

And after that I went to a workshop by Dr. Florie Wild. Slight disclaimers on this one: briefly met her before a few times since she gave a lunchtime lecture at work and I did a Whole Earth workshop with her (see below), she’s a friend/counselor or whatever of Laurel’s, as she told me today Laurel’s led workshops for her. I’m on the mailing list and she was having one last free workshop. Since I was feeling angsty at the time, I signed up.

Quotes from the workshop:

“Good stories can be like spells of possibility.”
“When you swallow truth, it’s toxic.”
“Discomfort is where the magic happens.”
“The magic happens in the stretch zone.”

After the introduction of how she got herself out of working for my giant org and a bad marriage and into a good relationship, and spending some time telling someone else in the workshop why you were there*, we talked about that voice in your head that tells you you are crap. “It’s a protector voice, but it’s misguided. Usually it sounds more reasonable.”

* I was amused that the lady I was partnered with also knit and mentioned that yarn shop, and I was all “just came from there!”

She had us write down what our giant cosmic voice of suck (my terminology) said on a sign and then walk around showing it to people (which led to much hugging). Mine was “YOU SUCK!!!!!”* with a lot of underlines underneath it. Other voices were similar, like “You’re not good enough” (I think that one was from multiple people) and other things along those lines. I have to say that when the voice is going off, you forget that others also have the same voice, which is saying similar but shitty things to everyone.

* Let’s face it, when there are two younger women auditioning for three younger women roles and you still don’t get in? What, folks, does that say about me?

Florie said that shifting it is a long term work, and you should do the following:
(a) get to know the voice
(b) dialogue with it
(c) you can’t totally kick it out, but you can give it a new job.

Then she started this whole “time machine” thing, in which you imagine that you’re five years in the future and have figured all of your shit out. This is when I started having deja vu, because turns out I have done this one before. Now, I was going through my year of Trump writer’s block in 2017 and didn’t write much about it in the yearly recap and I didn’t write anything fresh at the time, but in that workshop at Whole Earth I was partnered with a lovely lady who had a vision of breaking up with her boyfriend and moving to a farm. And I ... literally could not imagine anything in five years being different from how it was then. I was still in my job, nothing had changed, “future me” was all “I don’t exist, I don’t know anything.”

This was the point where I wanted to leave the workshop today, obviously.

So I wanted to ask her uh, what happens when you can’t picture ANYTHING, and I said this to my partner and she was all, well, it’s interesting we’re together because I have a similar issue. I was all “whew” to this. Florie said that she’d done that one a second time on someone recently who came up with nothing in the past but was able to come up with something later, so hey, it might work...

Without getting into major details about my partner since I think there was a “what happens in the room stays in the room” sorta policy, minus the “farm” bit (substitute in a new line of work), she had the same kind of experience of “I left the guy and now I’m happier” that the other lady I did it before with did.

I did, however, come out with some stuff this time: namely that Scott and I are together in the future and living in Winters and still doing theater stuff and projects and getting into shows. Unfortunately, I was all “I am still doing my hell job and it really isn’t any better than it is now, I just literally don’t see a way out of it.” Which is where I got hung up on last time since two years ago I didn’t have any kind of potential future in theater (since improv at the Comedy Spot didn’t want me) and there was literally nobody to like romantically either. At least I have some hope in those areas, even if I am not very good at theater and who the hell knows if Scott’s ever going to want to. (Not even God knows that one :p)

I can only assume that since God hasn’t opened any doors, windows, skylights, etc. to find me something else to do even during periods of time where I desperately goddamned needed it, that job is where God wants me to be. Or I’m blocked or blocking myself, presumably because I am hellbent insistent on having health insurance and a reasonable paycheck that someone else is paying for rather than starting my own business. Like seriously, unless this job leads me to blowing my own brains out*, I am clinging to it because there aren’t any other options. That is non-negotiable given my family history.

* No, I don’t own a gun, I’m afraid of knives, I can’t swallow pills... finish quoting from Dorothy Parker’s “Resume” here, but I don’t think I am actually going to do that.

And I really have no idea what else I would do for work since “journalism” and “quiet data entry in a corner” are no longer job options for me. I honestly don’t care what the hell I do any more as long as it doesn’t involve finances or customer service and isn’t focused on making me do stuff I am shit at, such as finances and customer service. Too bad literally every job seems to have both these days.

But really, this clarified something for me: (a) I have no hope of leaving the job even in fantasies, and (b) that’s because, among other reasons, I just literally don’t have any idea what else I would do that is reasonable. That’s a theme of late: find some third option because you hate all the ones that are on the table and thus you never actually do any of them. Florie called this a “crisis of imagination.”

Later, one lady quoted from some angel book or other (I suspect this was a Doreen Virtue one? Unclear which “purple book” this was) about faith. She said she’d always had huge issues with the word until she read this definition: “Faith is the unshakable knowing of the heart, when nothing makes sense to the mind.” Which sums up....well, a certain issue of mine lately here. I think frequently that’ll happen even if I don’t have any psychic instincts about it other than my own inner confidence that with the synchronicity* stuff going on, there’s something going on beyond the usual and that has to mean something. I certainly also doubt it, and my own sanity, a lot as well. But overall I’m at least 51% optimistic and that’s a lot for me (as compared to work, which is 0% there).

* Just in that workshop: I found another heart--in a shell she had there--another ring because I find ring shaped objects everywhere now--and one girl came in wearing a shirt saying “May your mercury be more Freddie and less retrograde,” which of course I sent a pic of to him after the workshop.

My partner in time travel said that “you were happy in your personal life, so your job didn’t matter.” Which, yeah, if I was happier in that, I think I’d at least be somewhat distracted from the suck.

I sadly can’t go on with doing Florie’s future programs, since I owe my shrink money, am low on savings, have car payments now, etc. but this was a good workshop and I hope it lingers on with me in the future.

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