The Wisdom of the Rooms

So apparently I didn’t get the memo, but there was an Ultimate Fighting Championship in the McLean Condo last night, so please forgive if my thoughts are a wee discombobulated this morning. And I’m still kind of reeling over the death of Heath Ledger, star of one of my all-time favorite movies, Brokeback Mountain. I just can’t believe it.

It occurred to me that it has been all baby-baby-baby-pregs-baby-sick-baby-pregs-baby-sick-kosher dills on this blog all the time, and I realized I have not updated you on my career and the massive shiftage thereof.

I had to quit doing massage, people. I had been thinking about quitting and doing something else for awhile since it was really bothering me that there was not a lot of brain activity on the job. Don’t get me wrong – I am not saying people who do it are dummies. They are doing a huge, selfless service to humankind, especially the ones who do it well, and a nice pregnancy massage recently saved my ass when I was really hurting from carrying around the McLean Condo and these giant bazooms.

But once you have been through massage school, the job itself is all intuitive -- feeling where someone hurts, a lot of quiet, then changing the sheets and doing it again. About the time I was having these feelings, I started to get a lot of, shall we say, hygienically-challenged individuals on my table. People who would come in for a massage, covered in sweat, straight from a full workout at the gym next door. People with active outbreaks of infectious skin diseases. People who had never heard of the concept of washing one’s feet after a day of flip-flop wearing. Now, aside from the fact that a pregnant person has an overdeveloped sense of smell, visions of staph infections and contracting God-knows-what from these people while in a state of compromised immunity started to tear at my psyche continually. It’s bad enough feeling like a sitting duck for every random cold and flu cootie out on the playground, but the stress of not knowing what I was exposing myself and my baby to became too much, and I had to quit.

So what’s a pregnant person to do with nearly four months of working ability left before squeezing out the wee bairn? I started looking at part time job listings and came across this man who wrote this book and needed some help with the marketing of this book and the editing of his next one. I started reading the book last night for research purposes, and OMG you guys, I was so blown away.

How is it that no one thought of this idea before? He has taken years of quotes and wisdom learned in 12-step meetings, and put them into a book. But the beauty of it is, you don’t need to be involved in a 12-step program to appreciate the profound nature of what is contained in the pages. Anyone struggling with ANY kind of addiction, or anyone who loves someone who is, needs this book. Anyone who has ever repeatedly banged their head against the wall and fallen into the same patterns in life over and over needs this book. Anyone who refuses to define God in limited, dogma-laden terms and seeks a relationship with God on their own spiritual path, needs this book. Anyone who needs to be reminded of universal truths told from a highly personal perspective needs this book.

Have you ever heard someone speak or read something in a book and felt like what you were hearing/reading was meant just for you? Like that person was speaking directly to you? That’s what every page of this book so far was like for me. I can’t wait to read the rest of it and explore the thought-provoking questions asked with each section. And no matter what happens with getting the job or not, I am grateful I came across the information in this book, and simply had to share it with you.

I’ll keep you posted.

Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent

This is going to be a book review. No, shut up, this is not a book review blog, but as most of you know by now, this blog is about everything and nothing, and I loved this book so very much that I simply had to say something about it.

Norah Vincent is a woman with balls.

Wait, that sounds really loaded, but in this case, it’s true on a number of levels.

Norah Vincent is a woman who lived as a man for a year and a half. She hired a makeup artist to teach her how to apply a five o’clock shadow every day. She trained with a voice coach to sound like a dude. She bound up her boobies. She wore a crew cut. She joined a men’s bowling league. She lived in a monastery. She joined a men’s movement group. All of the usual titillating details you would expect a cross-gender adventure to have are, of course, present in the book. And I love me some titillating. Even just the word is so fun to say, right? Go ahead, say it with me: Titillating. Uh-huh-huh-huh. Doesn’t it make you feel like Beavis and Butthead? But I digress. None of the people she was around as “Ned” ever knew she was a woman unless and until she told them. And you find yourself getting nervous for her and her charade. It’s hard to root for a hero who is being so deceitful, but you want her to find out what she finds out.

Anyhoo, titillating details aside, what I took away from the book was so much more profound and thought-provoking. Mars and Venus? Eh, whatevs. Norah’s observations of men when there are no women around, and the way she articulates them to the reader, left me gasping for air at times. I would have to set the book down, look away, and really absorb the magnitude of “Oh my God!!! I get it now!” that I kept feeling as I was reading. Anyone who is in a relationship with a man, or works with men, or is a parent to a little man-in-training, and even men themselves, will gain to understand volumes about the current male condition and sociology that no psycho-babble book could ever teach you. I was riveted. And I think you will be, too.

Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent