Maintenance

It's been nearly a week with no posts! Three job interviews and a hectic week...

Next up is another story, genre undetermined.

Crying in Public: WHY

Since my east coast visit, my blogging has been more sporadic, mostly because of my frantic job search. Employers, if you’re out there, GIVE ME A JOB. Yesterday I spent the better half of the day trying to “put a face to the resume” at one of the University job’s I applied to. It didn’t go well: without an appointment, I was treated like a security risk. Live and learn!

On vacation, I began reading Dan Ariely’s book The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. An Israeli behavioral economist and professor at Duke, much of what Ariely talks about touches on the issues I studied in organizational theory as part of my Economics major. Most importantly, both behavioral economics and organizational theory dismiss the assumption of traditional economics that all people behave rationally.

Ariely is a burn victim—as a youth, an accidental magnesium flare inflicted third degree burns on over 70 percent of his body. In one of his passages, he described an experience that bore a striking resemblance to one of my own:

“During one session at a conference in Florida, three colleagues and I were going to present our recent work on adaptation, the process through which people become accustomed to new circumstances…I had carried out some studies in this area, but instead of talking about my research findings, I planned to give a fifteen-minute talk about my personal experience in adapting to my physical injuries and present some of the lessons I had learned. I practiced this talk a few times, so I knew what I was going to say. Aside from the fact that the topic was more personal than usual in an academic presentation, I did not feel that the talk was that much different form others I have given over the years. As it turned out, the plan did not match the reality in the slightest.

I started the lecture very calmly by describing my talk’s objective, but, to my horror, the moment I started describing my experience in the hospital, I teared up. Then I found myself unable to speak. Avoiding eye contact with the audience, I tried to compose myself as I walked from one side of the room to the other for a minute or so. I tried again but I could not talk. After some more pacing and another attempt to talk, I was still unable to talk without crying.

I was clear to me that the presence of the audience had amplified my emotional memory. So I decided to switch to an impersonal discussion of my research. That approach worked fine, and I finished my presentation. But it left me with a very strong impression about my own inability to predict the effects of my own emotions, when combined with stress, on my ability to perform.”

In a freewrite piece called The Night My House Burned Down (spoiler alert: it’s a downer), I wrote about the shock of getting extremely emotional after reading a story about the house fire:

“The first time that I lost control of my emotions when talking about the fire was not until two years afterwards, when I chose to read a short story I’d written aloud in class. I had woken up early to write it, behind on my schoolwork as always, and decided to write about walking through my house after the fire. I thought I was being clever: what teacher would give anyone less than an A when they’re talking about their house burning down? One of my friends told me that for the essay section of the SAT, he’d written a [made-up] story about his mom getting cancer and credited his high score to the sympathy of the readers. This was my strategy-- manipulating my teacher into giving me a grade that I didn’t feel I deserved. I felt so confident as I began to read in class, proud of the inevitable regard my classmates would hold me in after learning I’d gone through such a poignant event. Imagine my surprise as my voice began to falter half-way through the reading and my hands shook uncontrollably as I put down the paper. Never mind the absolute stupor and embarrassment at my reaction to my professor saying tentatively, “This was obviously upsetting for you...” I began to respond, “Well, it’s obviously shocking when you see your house burning down...” and absolutely collapsed, losing control and crying hysterically, almost hyperventilating before excusing myself and weeping in the bathroom for the remainder of the class. I had accidentally gone too deep, not thinking when I sleepily wrote lines like, “some of the pictures were still on the wall, water-logged and distorted by crusading hoses, but some lay shattered on the floor, choosing to go down with the ship”. I had tapped my emotional reserves which pooled unseen and undisturbed in my subconscious.”

I chalked it up to “going too deep”, but Ariely’s passage gave me a strange comfort, normalizing the experience: the audience (my classmates) had amplified my emotional memory. At the same time, the act of talking about—announcing, even—these emotionally poignant moments is like exposing them to the air—breathing life into them and forcing us to realize just how devastating these events were.

I’ll end this post with Ariely’s thoughts on blogging and the reasons behind it. In a passage called “Blogging for Treats” he writes:

“Now think about blogging. The number of blog out there is astounding, and it seems that almost everyone has a blog or is thinking about starting one. Why are blogs so popular? Not only is it because so many people have the desire to write; after all, people wrote before blogs were invented. It is also because blog have two features that distinguish them from other forms of writing. First, they provide the hope or the illusion that someone will read one’s writing. After all, the moment a blogger presses the “publish” button, the blog can be consumed by anybody in the world, and with so many people connected, somebody, or at least a few people, should stumble upon the blog. Indeed, the “number of views” statistic is a highly motivating feature in the blogosphere because it lets the blogger known exactly how many people have at least seen the posting. Blogs also provide readers with the ability to leave their reactions and comments—gratifying for both the blogger, who now has a verifiable audience, and the reader-cum-writer (editor's note: I LOVE COMMENTS). Most blogs have very low readership—perhaps only the blogger’s mother or best friend reads them—but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions to blog."

Thoughts on Business...

Last summer, I met a newly graduated Celebrant. The mother of my friend B, she told me all about the Celebrant Foundation and Institute and I was struck—celebrancy seemed an ideal option for me. Celebrants are non-religious “ceremony officiants”—we study the history of rituals and their place in our lives to facilitate us in ceremony building. Doing events like weddings, funerals, divorce ceremonies, and downsizing ceremonies, the celebrant works closely with the participants in order to build a significant and personalized ceremony for the occasion.


I decided to “major” in funerals. Some might call it morbid, but I was drawn to the rituals surrounding death much more than weddings and child namings. Attending online classes from October to April, I’ve finally received my celebrant certification and am ready to start. The business sense of celebrancy is difficult—you’re essentially starting your own enterprise.


After putting a lot of thought into it, I decided to do animal funerals instead of human funerals. I came to this conclusion after realizing that I—and thus the general public—would prefer to have an older (i.e. more experienced) person officiating a loved one’s funeral, among other things. Further, I think Los Angeles is the perfect place to start a doggie funeral home.


At this point, it’s about building a website and contacting people—is it too dark to talk to doggie day care places? Dog walkers? Veterinarians? I’ll end with the poem I gave to my friend C after the death of a loved furry one—it resonates with me as a dog owner and serves to inspire my fatalistic entrepreneurial spirit.


Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge.
There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together.
There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor; those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.
The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent; His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.

You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together....

Colonial Life and Bridey Murphy Reborn

Just returned from a blissful east coast vacation full of family, friends and the humidity I miss so much out here in the desert. We ended our days in Newport, RI—one of the original colonies boasting the oldest Independence Day parade. Sitting in the library now—absorbing knowledge via osmosis?—I have two sandy shells in my purse and a copy of Hypnosis Quarterly, Vol. XXII No. 4 from 1979.

A steal at $.50, the tagline of Hypnosis Quarterly reads “The Illustrated Journal of Hypnotism in All its Phases”. This issue looks at the “Bridey Murphy farce” from the fifties, specifically “dissecting [it]…employing logic and the facts of hypnosis and psychology as the instruments of dismemberment.” This is the wikied story:

“In 1952, Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein put housewife Virginia Tighe of Pueblo, Colorado in a trance that sparked off startling revelations about Tighe's alleged past life as a 19th-century Irishwoman and her rebirth in the United States 59 years later. Bernstein used a technique called hypnotic regression, during which the subject is gradually taken back to childhood. He then attempted to take Virginia one step further, before birth, and suddenly was astonished to find he was listening to Bridey Murphy.

Her tale began in 1806 when Bridey was eight years old and living in a house in Cork. She was the daughter of Duncan Murphy, a barrister, and his wife Kathleen. At the age of 17 she married lawyer Sean Brian McCarthy and moved to Belfast. Bridey told of a fall that caused her death and of watching her own funeral, describing her tombstone and the state of being in life after death. It was, she recalled, a feeling of neither pain nor happiness. Somehow, she was reborn in America, although Bridey was not clear how this event happened. Virginia Tighe herself was born in the Midwest in 1923, had never been to Ireland, and did not speak with even the slightest hint of an Irish accent.”

This case was particularly offensive to the Hypnosis Quarterly editors, who take issue with “the basic problem involved”, which they call “the desire of people to know about death”: “The tragedy of the Bridey Murphy farce is that it gives hope based on ignorance, wishful thinking and misinformation rather than knowledge and fact”.

Other articles in Hypnosis go on to list the inaccuracies of the Bridey story. Printed on the front of magazine is the dedication to “the Advancement of Ethical Hypnosis”, and the feel of the publication is very academic—these are doctors wanting to divorce hypnosis from the unprofessional associations of reincarnation and the afterlife. While I understood their motivations, as I flipped through the magazine on the rocky beaches of Rhode Island, I couldn’t help but disapprove of their desire to shut it all down.

Perhaps it was a lingering colonial spirit, but I like the idea of a remaining corner of mystery in the world, especially in these oil-seeped recession days. My romanticized (read: disease and hunger free) version of colonial life on the island, when everything was new and the universe seemed endless, is as irresistible as the urge to believe a mid-western woman spontaneously connected with the Irish ghost of her previous life.

PostScript

Now that the story has ended, I wanted to follow up with some of my thoughts on the story and “the process”. Basically, what’s up here is a first draft. There are a few kinks I want to work out namely:


• Developing Lennie’s character more


• Figuring out a more realistic way for Dexir to be distributed (for example, it would need to go through the FDA and whomever else before they would just mass distribute) and describe how that would happen. I would probably need to do a little research for this.


• Describing the nature of the beast in more detail—I wanted the “afflicted” to be indistinguishable during the day (I think this is scarier); more scenes showing how this plays out


• Clarify what exactly happened to Lennie: unbeknownst to the reader until Lennie’s demise, the “afflicted” not only seem normal during the day but retain daytime memories after nightfall. Michael had ingested some Dexir before meeting Lennie, but it hadn’t taken effect until the third day. Presumably, he went to go find something (food, supplies, etc.) and went too far, choosing somewhere else to rest for the night. Then, he reanimated but was not mindless—he remembered that Lennie was around and probably returned to the barn to kill her. Not finding her there, he went to her house.


• Give Lennie a nicer death, or at least close the story with a nice memory of hers—the one I was considering was of her riding on the Coney Island Cyclone on a teenage first date


It’s a work in progress!

The End of Lennie

Three days later, Lennie was back at her house. Her stay with Michael had been relatively uneventful. The first night, they’d slept in separate rooms with the doors locked, paying tribute to the mantra that swept through the country in its death throws: “total isolation in a secure setting”. The next night, they drank half of the Jack Daniels handle Michael had taken from McCrary’s and ended up passing out in the living room.

A good fifteen years younger, Michael was passably handsome and good company—at this point, Lennie had mused, even a Labrador retriever would have been good company—but neither of them had felt up to the task of any sort of sexual entanglement. Lennie had always found that frenzied post-apocalyptic fucking ridiculous—the Medieval orgies behind gated walls while the bubonic plague raged outside; the silver screen strangers desperately smashing their bodies together while zombies broke down the front door. For her, sex was about focus and all she saw when she closed her eyes was Milo’s missing cheek.

Even so, in one boozy moment, Lennie looked fondly at Michael and wondered if anything might happen between them. She must have fallen asleep shortly after. When she woke up the next morning, mouth dry and head throbbing, Michael was gone. She had called out for him and waited until the sun had arched more than halfway across the sky before leaving the barn and heading home. Still slightly dazed, she tried not to consider where Michael had gone—for all she knew, he was out running errands and would stumble back in moments before the sunset, with some delicacy like fresh fruit in tow. She couldn’t risk finding out if something worse had happened.

Pulling her bike up to the house, Lennie surveyed the property, which looked undisturbed. She reached the back door and found it still locked, and in one panicked moment thought she’d left the key. Fortunately, after a few moments of fishing, she found it and sunk it into the lock—the shadows were already beginning to fall. She re-boarded up the door and went up to her room, shut the door and lay down in bed.

Suddenly, she was dreaming again. She was whizzing through town on her bike, waving to people as she passed. Everything was back to normal—she saw Norm Callaway mowing his lawn and, passing the playground, all of the swings were in use. The sounds of the living! She’d forgotten the music, the lifetime of background noise she’d taken for granted.

A faint banging noise, like a nail gun, grew louder as she approached the source. She turned the corner and saw Tracy Horton, Michael’s mother, fussing over something, bringing her fist down on something again and again. She got closer and was about to call out to her before seeing that the fist was covered in blood. Tracy had someone’s head on her lap, and she was punching their face repeatedly. The limp body moved only with the force of each impact.

Lennie opened her eyes but the banging didn’t stop. She rushed to her bedroom door only to have it fly open in her face: Michael burst into the room towards her. He had something in his hand but Lennie shut her eyes before she could see what it was. She prayed it would be fast and luckily, for her, the first blow to her head knocked her unconscious, saving her from the terror that lay ahead.

Ok, ok, there will be one more after this...

Occasionally, Lennie would hear someone walking outside her house. In those moments, she would freeze completely, holding her breath and not making a sound. She tried never to draw attention to her home—she’d been living off canned goods for a while now, so there was no need for fires, and, it being September, it was still warm. Last time this year, the leaf peepers started to show up in droves, booking all the rooms at Rosy Inn Bed and Breakfast. Lennie remembered one year when she nearly hit one of them with her car: camera glued to his face, the peeper was completely unaware of his brush with death, looking up only after Lennie honked to remind him that he was standing in the middle of the street. She’d been impatient that day but, looking up at the maple hanging overhead, with leaves of crimson and pumpkin pie, she’d understood. What she would give to see that peeper now! What she would give to see a face not warped by terror or fury.


Over the past few weeks, a knot had begun twisting in Lennie’s stomach: food was running low. Her pantry shelves slowly emptied, despite her efforts to conserve every tiny pea at the bottom of the can, each tiny morsel. She would have to venture out soon, probably to McCrary’s, assuming it hadn’t been completely plundered already. If she cut through the Adams’ back yard, it was only about a mile from her house. Taking her car was out of the question—the roads were choked with abandoned cars and other apocalyptic detritus—so she would have to go on foot, or risk taking her bike on the road. She decided to take the bike: if anything happened, she’d be able to get away faster. Plus, she’d be able to bring back more food in her bike basket, as opposed to just in her backpack.


Lennie had always been a biker. A former advertising executive and native New Yorker, she’d sought out Croydon, New Hampshire for its tiny population (724) and seclusion. Roughly the same time “Meat Me” was taking place, Lennie sat in her living room with a class of champagne: she’d successfully escaped the city for one year. She’d plowed (helmet on, head down) through Manhattan streets and enjoyed the constant battle between taxis, horse-drawn carriages, and those detestable rickshaw offspring that took up the bike lane. She called them the SUVs of the bicycling community—tourist limbs spilling out from all sides, they were usually manned by cocky young men who ignored you when you rang your bell to pass.


Though she missed her two-wheeling street combat, nothing compared to the long bike rides she took in Croydon. Sometimes going 20 or 30 miles, biking on those empty, flat streets that first autumn was like a slow sip of cool water—it breathed air into Lennie, made her feel alive. She would fly past the changing trees so quickly they looked like they were burning, the colors so vibrant against the clear blue sky.


Lennie closed her eyes, inhaling her stale bedroom air. Mentally, she traced her route and made a list of the essentials. Finally, she forced herself to stand and walk downstairs. Her bike was in the foyer, with her helmet. She breathed deeply again before heading through the kitchen to the back door, where, after peeking out through the cracks to ensure no one was around, she began removing the boards. Her stomach turned as each one came down. Obviously, she would lock the door, but if anyone knew she was in there, they would come for her regardless. She also considered the fact that, if anyone chased her home, the time it took to unlock the door might cost her life.


Wearing leggings and a tight black shirt, she hopped on her bike and began to weave through the streets towards McCrary’s. She tried to keep her eyes on the road while looking for any movement. Although the symptoms only manifested during the night, her former life had collapsed and the world was in chaos—people, afflicted or not, couldn’t be counted on not to act like animals. Halfway there, Lennie had to walk her bike through the intersection of Main and North Street: there was a four-car pileup. As the fall breeze blew through a shattered windshield, a rotting arm slumped out of the front passenger seat. Lennie’s heart stopped before she realized that the puppetry of the draft was behind its animation.


Finally, McCrary’s came into view, and Lennie was almost surprised not to see little Milo, missing cheek and all. She walked her bike into the store and leaned it against the front wall. She needed to check if she was alone. The thick silence of the store should have fortified her confidence, but instead it spooked her further. The scene was too familiar to her nightmare. The McCrary’s of her dreams was much better organized, however, with way more options. Lennie smirked at her dark joke, feeling a little more comfortable. She took her backpack off and went to the canned foods aisle.


Lennie was loading the last can of ancient SPAM into her backpack when she heard someone enter the store. She froze.
“Hello?” a young man’s voice echoed through the empty store. “I know you’re here. I saw you come in.” Lennie crouched petrified. The intruder walked further into the store, and she heard his footsteps first before his face came into view, “Lennie Hammerstien!” exclaimed Michael Horton. Suddenly, he suspended his excitement and said, “You’re not one of them, are you?”
Lennie swallowed, “Are you?”
Smiling reassuringly, he said, “I’ve been hiding out across the street,” Michael continued walking closer and Lennie tensed, her fingers tightening around some canned corn. He stopped his advance, held his hands up and said, “I’ve been vegan since college.” Lennie smiled and then started to cry.


“We have to go! We have to get out of here,” she said, glancing to the sky and quietly noting the advancing dusk. She wanted to invite him over, to talk to someone, have another body in the house, but she was afraid. She remembered the locked door, the vulnerability.


“Come stay with me tonight. It’s so close—” he paused, searching for words, “and it’s safe! I promise.” Lennie grabbed her bike and they scuttled across the street, Michael’s arms full of another load of cans.


Deep down, Lennie knew it was a bad idea, but she couldn’t turn away company after so much time alone. After seeing Michael, she couldn’t bear the thought of another silent night, her terrified thoughts rousing her from sleep over and over again. He hadn’t been a friend, but, in such s small town, people just know each other. Because she was new, everyone knew Lennie. She’d known Michael’s mother, Tracy, relatively well. She didn’t dare ask about her.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Ok, so I said this would be the last one, but things are playing out a little differently than I thought they would, so there will be one more. After that, no disembodied arms, murder or meat discussion for a bit...