The Chronic Malcontent jumps a little

My sister has been challenging me since she first appeared on the scene as a rival to my position as the only girl in the family hierarchy. I was not quite two when she showed up, this blonde squalling red-faced thing, so I hadn't had a lot of time to consolidate my power. I've been struggling to keep up with her ever since. This week my sister challenged me to do the 7-minute exercise regimen she found on the internet. Well, she didn't come right out and say, hey, you fat slob, you should do this. She coyly remarked that she had tried it twice. That was all I needed to galvanize my shaky legs into action.

In this routine, you do 30 seconds of about 10 exercises—pushups, curlups, planks, jumping jacks, and some other stuff—all in seven minutes. First, jumping jacks to warm up. I managed 30 jumping jacks successfully without falling over or crashing into anything. The second exercise was the "wall sit," where you put your back against the wall and "sit" against it. I held it for about five seconds before my legs gave out and I ended up on the floor. After it took me 30 more seconds to get up, I realized I might not be ready for this particular exercise routine.

Exercise is not my favorite pastime. I'm not naturally thin. Food is my drug of choice. To my perplexity, my sister has always been slender and feminine. While I played softball and volleyball, she learned ballet and figure skating. As I got my hands and clothes dirty with paint, she studied painters and paintings and learned how to handle artifacts with fastidious care. I have photos of her wearing white cotton gloves while holding a framed painting of some saint or monk or duke. I was the dirty, mud-covered female in the family. She was the refined child—who (I'm gleeful to report) still cringes when I swear.

Our usual challenge involves writing. My sister is a prolific writer, although she might not agree. She just delivered her second book to her publisher, a year-long labor about something to do with medieval books. I helped her choose the cover design but I can't remember the title. Her audience is small—maybe a handful of libraries and world-class scholars. Not surprising, she will make little to no money for her efforts. But did I mention, published!?

My writing projects are all over the map. I need multiple pen names to encompass my diverse interests, few of which ever reach daylight. It's safer to keep them hidden in the dark.

Speaking of writing, I rarely blog anymore. I can't find my words. Interesting events happen, interesting people cross my path, but I don't write down the stories, and they fall away into the past. My memories are mostly dust. Yesterday's memories are already crumbling. As I wait for the next phase of my life to begin, my brain is processing my experience in a new way, the way an engine processes gasoline that has some water in it. That is to say, not well. Stuttering, stumbling, confused, apprehensive. Day by day, I resemble my mother, in thought and in appearance. Except I'm three times her size and still allowed to drive.

Recently I spent a few hours scanning some family photos and negatives. Pictures of relatives, far away in space and time. Lots of photos of my mother as a child, a teen, a young adult. She looked like a happy child, a contented teenager. She went on outings with her friends, to the beach, to the mountain. She went camping with her family, slept in a canvas tent, rode horses, caught fish. I suspect she would have been happier not to have been burdened with four children in six years. I have tried to compile a book of blogposts about her, but I was stymied when I got to the ending. I mean, I know what the ending will be but I'm not ready to write it.

Speaking of endings, Mom just received a clean bill of health from the nurse practitioner who comes out from the insurance company for an annual house call visit. For an 88-year-old smoker with moderate dementia, Mom is in great shape. Her heart is strong, her kidneys are pumping. She coughs like a demon but her lungs are clear. She could live a long time. At this rate, it is likely she will outlast me. Especially if I don't exercise once in a while. Guess I'd better get back to jumping jacks. Some action is better than no action.

The chronic malcontent is itching for a niche to scratch

I wish I were smarter. If I were smarter, I would no doubt be able to gather up all the loose ends of this entrepreneurial fiasco and bundle them into a cohesive strategy that will fill my bank account. If I were smarter, the path to success (which I define as money, lots and lots of money) would be as clear and bright as the Yellow Brick Road. People would stumble over themselves to help me trot like a frisky colt along my merry way. Or maybe I'd be more like a golden-haired maiden, strewing rose petals behind me. Whatever. It would all happen easily and effortlessly, followed by the miracle of happy and secure retirement.

Last night I went to the monthly meeting of a local SEO Meetup group. (I believe SEO stands for search engine optimization.) I've attended three months in a row, thinking I would meet a specific person (I'll call her Caroline), who was recommended to me by an SBDC counselor (I'll call her Saundra). Three times Caroline has indicated via RSVP that she would be attending the Meetup. Three times she's been absent. This week, I noticed that Saundra had RSVPed her intention to attend. Great, I thought! Saundra is the person who recommended I connect with Caroline. Wouldn't it be great if they were both there? Score! Well, no, not SCORE, I mean, SBDC!

Even as I walked out into the 90° heat to my car, I thought, what am I doing? Odds are neither one of these women will be there. Will I be okay with that? Am I still willing to burn gas to drive 45 minutes in heavy traffic to bumf--k Lake Oswego, sit and chat about a topic I know nothing about, and pay money to eat crappy Chinese food? Apparently so, because off I went.

There was a pretty good turnout this month, about 20 people all together, oddly mostly older men. Sure enough, neither Caroline nor Saundra were there. I was one of four women. Three of us were somewhat long in the tooth and broad in the beam. But there was a golden-haired maiden (I'll call her Tiffany. Or Heather. No, maybe Chelsea. Yeah, let's call her Chelsea.) Chelsea was a young goddess, with full lips, long sunkissed hair, and a Barbie-esque figure, that is to say, prominently jutting along all the right frontal planes.

We started with a round of introductions (in which I introduced myself as a market researcher with no knowledge of SEO, and the emcee—let's call him Daniel—said, “Oh, if you are a market researcher, you probably know a lot about SEO,” a comment I found perplexing, since I was telling the truth, I know virtually nothing about SEO. I have a hard time even remembering what SEO stands for. I keep confusing it with REO, as in REO Speedwagon, which I believe was a 1970s rock band. Maybe he was trying to be funny? People laughed. In my usual out-of-body fashion, I am always the last to get the joke. I still haven't got the joke.)

After the introductions, Chelsea and Daniel fielded questions from the group on various aspects of SEO. I had no questions, but I listened and took notes like a good student. When the show was over, I paid my bill and drove away into the setting sun.

The memorable moment, the takeaway, as they say, was when the older woman sitting next to me turned to me and said, “Who do you do market research for?”

“Marketers and small business owners,” I replied, my usual tentative answer.

“No, my dear. That is much too broad,” she said in a peremptory tone. “Small business owners is too big. You need to narrow it down.” Later I realized she was lying in wait for a teaching moment. Did I look so lost and unsure of myself? Still, I've been trying on niches in my mind, the way some people try on hairstyles and sandals, so what she said hit home.

“Uh, how about the visual art and design industries?” I offered.

“Okay!” She turned back to the woman across the table, her teaching moment complete, leaving me to ponder the significance of what just happened. I don't believe the universe delivers signs, but when the same message keeps cropping up in various places, it probably behooves one to take a closer look.

So, I've got an itch to find a niche. A methodology niche is not going to cut it, I've been told. Apparently I need an industry niche. Banking? Finance? Healthcare? Freaking SEO? Whatever industry I choose to focus should have two essential qualities, namely that the potential clients in the industry want me and can afford me. Other than that little detail, any old niche will do. Clearly, I don't know where I fit, as usual. If I were smarter, I would know this stuff.

Another new hat: Who am I now?

It's humbling to realize that even after 57 years walking around on the planet I have gained so little knowledge about my own preferences and working styles. A week ago, if you had asked me what kind of work I prefer, I would have said, “Well, thanks for asking! I like to work alone. I'm a control freak. I like to work in my pajamas.” And all that is true. Based on those preferences, I would have expected editing to be a perfect job for me. But after editing 200 pages of poorly written, convoluted scholarly tomes by wannabe academics, I learned that that is not the whole story, not by a long shot. I am an introvert, I am a control freak, I do like to work in stinky pajamas... and I'm a creator, not an editor. Beam me up, Scotty! I've had enough editing to choke a Klingon.

Editing someone else's mess of a dissertation is like trying to sweep kitty litter off a linoleum floor with a toothbrush. You have to find every... last... speck to get the job done right. And just when you think you've found every dinky stinky grain, you see a little dollop of poop caught in a corner. Poop like generating the list of references using a third-party non-APA-compliant software program. Poop like non-APA-compliant tables and figures. Poop like stringing five verbs in a row, all ending in -ing, in a sentence that takes up half a page. That kind of poop. A bigger broom won't do it.

Apparently, I'm a pretty good editor. I'm thorough, and I know my APA. (I ought to, after eight fricking years in graduate school.) My problem, though, is that I'm too slow. It takes me a long time to do a thorough editing job, especially when I have to create styles, reformat tables, and generate Tables of Contents, Tables of Tables, and Tables of Figures... wha—? (Tables of tables? I mean, Lists of Tables! Whatever!)

When you are getting paid a set amount per job, the more hours you spend, the less you make per hour. On the last job, the 150+ page dissertation (I know, what am I whining about? My massive wretched tome was 390 pages!), I calculated I earned about $16 per hour, when it was finally put to bed. That might sound good to you, but that's gross earnings. So, subtract federal, state, local, and self-employment taxes, and I netted a measly $10 per hour. And PayPal takes its cut, too.

So, time to find another hat. I keep finding out what I don't want to do. Year after year, job after job, I fall into the wrong jobs. That seems like a really painful, tedious way to discover one's calling, don't you think? How many possible occupations are there? A few hundred? Probably more like a few thousand. I don't have time to try them all in a colossally misguided process of job elimination.

Only one job lasted a significant amount of time. That was the teaching job at the career college, almost ten years. The job started out great, perfect fit, better than I'd ever had, certainly better than, oh say, driving a school bus, sewing bridesmaids dresses, or playing bingo with old folks in a nursing home. Or gardening, or waitressing, or secretarying, or chaufeurring, or admin coordinating... teaching was way better than all those occupations. And for a few years, despite the shenanigans of management, it continued to be a good fit. Until the marketing classes went to another campus, and I got assigned to teach keyboarding, term after term. By that time, the death rattle was echoing through the halls, and nobody was surprised when corporate pulled the plug last year. End of story. Old news.

On the bright side, it only took a week to realize that I'm not cut out to be an editor. No more spending years doing something I hate, resenting it, and plotting revenge. The downside, though, is that apparently in 57 years I haven't progressed an inch toward anything resembling self-awareness. It's easy to say, you can take the girl out of the art [world], but you can't take the artist out of the girl. (If I can still call myself a girl. I can, can't I? Clearly I am still about twelve.) That old platitude doesn't quite work in this case, but you get my drift, right? I make my own messes, I don't clean up other people's. I'm a creator, I'm a maker, I'm a writer, I'm an artist. You betcha. That and $5.50 will get you a frappuccino at Starbucks.

Tomorrow I'm off to yet another startup workshop (free!) to find my true calling. It's across the river in The Couve (Vancouver, WA), a green and magical land where you can pump your own gas, so maybe I'll find what I'm looking for there.

Best advice I've heard today: Go crazy!

As I sit staring at my computer, trying to dredge up something worth blogging about, I listen to Prince's manifesto Let's go Crazy, and think, hey, maybe that's good advice. Maybe it's a sign from god. You know how it is, when you can go in a million different directions, but you just don't know which ones will pay off, so you find yourself waiting for that special sign from the Universe. The song on the radio: You get what you give. The billboard: 127 million dollars! The horoscope: Watch out for family members trying to undermine your creative endeavors. A song from Prince is as good as any other sign out there, I think. I've tried everything else, and all I get is disapproving growls from my cat and a dwindling bank account. (I'm not sure which is worse.) Going crazy sounds like it might be fun.

My friend Zena the Warrior Princess, who is going on sabbatical for a few months, expressed her uncertainty about what activities to engage in during her time off. We talked on the phone today.

“I have a list of about 20 things to do while I'm gone,” she said. “How do I decide what to do first?”

“Write each activity on a little piece of paper,” I said, “fold it twice, and put it into a container. Shake it up and draw one out. Let the Universe decide.”

“That's brilliant!”

While we were talking, I realized that I had already done this. Years ago, I designed a “game” to help me choose among many alternatives. I called the game Divine Chance. I'm not wedded to the divine part, necessarily, but I do believe in chance, as in random stuff that makes us crazy. And, as my brain slowly remembered the game, I recalled that in my kitchen, high on a shelf behind the houseplants, is the colorful game board, a two-foot square piece of cardboard, which I segmented into something like 15 numbered sections. The sections are loosely painted in festive primaries and secondaries—red, blue, green, yellow, orange, outlined in black, all in acrylic, kind of like an opaque stained glass window.

And there is a container, too! An empty coffee can, still smelling like French Roast, pressed into service long ago as a receptacle for about 20 little folded slips of paper. My idea (at the time it seemed like fun) was to place the game board on the floor behind me, shake up the container, and then toss the slips of paper over my shoulder so that most of them land on the game board. Then my plan was to turn around, find the task that landed in section 1, and do it first, and so on down the line, according to the numbers on the game board. Thus would my destiny be created, through random chance.

Of course, it all depends on what you write on the slips of paper, doesn't it? Did I write impossible things, like... become an opera singer? Learn to fly? Travel the world in a yellow submarine? No, I did not. I opened up a few of the musty pieces of paper to reveal the mysterious tasks that at the time were important enough to me to ask for random intervention.

Cut my hair. (Really?) Fix my car. (Uh-oh) Get an MFA. (Whoa. That dusty dream is, like, 15 years old. I had forgotten about it.) In fact, most of the tasks were trivial, prosaic, and years out of date. No longer applicable to my middle-aged solitary self-employed existence. What would I put in the can now, I wonder? Take a nap. Write a book. Go crazy?

But the idea of the Divine Chance game is still funny. And it's no goofier than using Tarot, I-Ching, or tea leaves to try to chart a path through the unknown future. Now I believe that if I can't make a decision, it means I don't know who I am, at least temporarily. I also know that as long as I stay in action, the Universe can influence outcomes. I don't know how it works, I just know that it does. If I sit around waiting for the bus to come to my door, all I will see is the short bus coming to take me away, ha ha. Signs or no signs, the trick is to be a shark and keep moving. Even if everything seems random and it feels like insanity.

Marketing people talk really fast

Yesterday I got up before the sun and drove out I-84 to a marketing conference at Edgefield, a former county poorhouse, now a retro-chic hotel operated by a Northwest outfit called McMenamins. I was too tired to appreciate fully the hand-painted murals on the interior walls and doors of the venerable old building as I asked a worker, “Where is the ballroom?” I was directed to the second floor window-lined auditorium, which was configured with narrow tables, all facing forward, classroom style. Ah... familiar.

A long table was laid out along the side of the room, loaded with bagels and various breakfast spreads. I ignored it and stumbled to a chair near the back that wasn't right next to another person and parked my bag. I sank onto a barely padded seat, taking note of the massive mural on the wall of the ballroom... horses, was it? Locomotives?

“They've got us packed in like sardines,” I observed to the guy two chairs to my left. He was an older guy with a smattering of sandy hair laid on his bald head like a doily. He grimaced.

At that moment a 30-something long-haired fellow strode over to the table. “Anyone sitting here? Hi, I'm Sundown.” We shook hands. Sundown introduced himself to the guy on the end. They shook hands. The guy on the end leaned over toward me, holding out his hand. I automatically reached out my hand.

“Paul,” he said, and we shook, hard. I tried not to let my eyes pop out of my head. Ow. I got up to get some coffee. The others headed for the bagel table.

We snuggled back in. Another guy inserted himself in the chair to my right. He stayed for about 30 seconds, and then he was moving on. “I need more room,” he laughed, shaking hands all around. He took the chair with him. Awesome. I spread out, shifting my chair inch by inch to fill up his empty space. Whew. I stopped feeling like a sardine and started listening to the opening remarks.

Marketing people talk really fast. In my bleary-eyed state, keeping up was a challenge. I lagged abut 8.5 seconds behind each speaker, the entire day. Part of my problem was that I was torn between taking notes or watching the PowerPoint slides. Doing both requires bi-focals, which I currently choose not to use. So, reading glasses or distance glasses? I opted for distance so I could read the slides, but then the scribbles in my notebook were a hazy blur. Getting old is hell.

My shining moment came when the moderator asked the audience for some ideas of businesses for which we might have a hard time identifying an emotional component. Someone said “children's lunch subsidies.” I called out, “marketing research.” Members of the audience volunteered three more ideas, which were so bland I can't remember them now. Then we five volunteers were asked to leave our chairs and stand in different areas of the ballroom.

Resigned, I got up from my chair and walked toward the back of the room to take up a position by the untended bar. The other volunteers went to their respective corners.

“Go help these people figure out the emotional component of their dry, unemotional businesses,” shouted the moderator gaily. The audience erupted slowly out of their seats. I waited, half hoping no one would would be interested. One guy came hesitantly over to me.

“Marketing research?” he asked.

“Hi, I'm Carol. What do you do?”

“I'm John. I'm in real estate.”

“How nice.” I waited. When it looked like nothing further was forthcoming, I prodded him by saying, “What emotion do you think might be lurking in marketing research?”

Before he had a chance to say more than a few words, an older white-haired woman came trotting up.

“Fear!” she said confidently. Wow. Was I so obvious? I looked at her, frozen.

“Fear of the consequences of making the wrong decision,” she clarified. She stuffed a piece of bagel in her mouth.

Ah, she didn't mean me and my fear. She meant the fear the prospective client might be feeling, which would prompt them to hire me. To assuage or avoid their fear. Okay, I get it.

Another woman joined us, youngish, dark-haired. “I'm from So-and-So ColorPlace!” she said and proceeded to tell us about how her company has to change its name because a rapper has recently used the name in a nasty song. Wow. Now, that's something to be afraid of, that your company name will be inadvertently destroyed by a rapper. I couldn't compete, so I let her ramble on. Soon it was time to return to our seats, and I fell back into obscurity.

That was pretty much the high heart rate point of the day, except maybe for the moment when the last speaker stopped talking and the beer began flowing. I politely declined the beer ticket the assistant waved at me, still appalled that I had managed to imbibe three of the five deadly food groups at lunch: wheat, dairy, and sugar. (If you add caffeine in there, another whoops.) Beer would have put paid to my self-esteem crisis. At that point I was sure what would serve me best was bath and bed, so I gathered up my gear and headed for home.

Later, the phone rang during my oblivion, but I merely noted that it was not my mother and buried my head back in the pillow. Exit, stage right. I'm not sure why the day was so grueling. There were only 65 people there, not a massive crowd. Everyone was well behaved. Hardly anyone talked to me, so I didn't have to fend off energy vampires. My table mates were pleasant. Other than the fact that I was sleep deprived and I ate a crappy lunch, I have no excuse for feeling obliterated by the day.

Today, the day after, I've had some time to think about it. I think I've figured it out. It's marketing, that is what it is. I've got the marketing disease. It's the Don't sell, persuade! syndrome, in which we desperately seek the magical combination of words and images that will inspire/motivate/persuade a potential client to respond to our call to action: Pick up the phone! Click on this link! Give me your email! Please, please, pretty please! What can I give you, what would it take, to make you like me, to make you want me, to make you hire me? Tell me, tell me, tell me...

Plagued by monkey mind

As my friend in Minneapolis once said, “On a good day, my mind is trying to kill me.” She's speaking of her own mind, but the phrase seems to apply to me this week, too. How do I know? Because my brain is trying to convince me that I didn't actually earn a Ph.D. My brain is trying to tell me that the whole thing—the academic achievement I spent the last eight years of my life working toward—was a colossal... dream? mistake? fantasy? That it never really happened. Poof.

This is bordering on insanity, I know. How can I doubt my achievement? I have witnesses. If reality can be known and understood at all (debatable), I think (most) people I know would (mostly) be willing to accept as reality the fact that after all those years, I finally finished the damn doctorate.

It's not the first time my mind has played this trick on me. One time I got an A-plus on a paper. Within moments I had convinced myself that it wasn't true. It wasn't really an A-plus, my eyes are failing me. Or, it wasn't really me at all, it was someone else, probably that smart blonde girl in the second row, who earned that A-plus. Or, it was a silly grading error; after all, the TA is an imbecile; soon they will discover the truth: It wasn't me. I'm a fraud.

I think this mental condition is related to the Buddhist concept of monkey mind. Sadly, my particular brand of monkey mind leans more toward confusion, indecision, and lack of control, and less toward whimsy, which is too bad, because appreciating whimsy can be pleasurable. On the plus side, monkey mind comes with entertaining visuals: I picture a line of badly dressed flea-infested monkeys wearing tattered red fezzes, dancing on my shoulder and clashing little brass cymbals, right in my ear. Youch. If they weren't so darn noisy, they might actually be funny.

When the monkeys in my mind start dancing and clashing their cymbals, it means my brain is trying to rewrite history. What is my solution to monkey mind? Nap. My solution is to take a nap. Or a bath, or read a book, preferably while taking a bath. And not just any book, but something that takes me far, far away from monkey mind. My current remedy is the old standby, the Otherworld tetralogy by Tad Williams. Each paperback weighs a pound, a thousand pages of virtual reality immersion, and after a few chapters of traveling along the River of Blue Fire, I have no idea what reality is, virtual or otherwise. It's very helpful.

After spending three years working on a phenomenological study, you would think I would be comfortable with the subjective and tenuous nature of reality. Usually I am. The monkey mind is loudest when I fall into the trap of thinking I can ever truly understand or know anything. Hey, did you think that getting a Ph.D. means a person is suddenly smart? Har har, joke's on you. Maybe a little smarter, maybe not, but stubborn, for sure. I think we can agree on that.

If you can't make a decision, it means you don't know who you are

I once overheard someone say, “If you can't make a decision, it means you don't know who you are.” I chewed on that idea for several years while I floundered my way out of a disintegrating relationship. Should I stay or should I go? All those years invested, all that crap to box up and move... but no more companionable TV time together, no more sex...on the other hand, no more snarky comments, no more walking on eggshells, no more of that peculiarly profound loneliness you only get when you are in a relationship... weighing the pros and cons of uprooting the status quo in favor of embracing the unknown.

Breaking up is a big decision. I don't know how you make the big decisions, but I have to roll around in the muck for a long time before all of a sudden my perspective shifts, and I wake up. It's like someone turns on a light switch. One moment I'm in the dark, the next moment, things are bright and clear as day. All that remains at that point is logistics. My heart and mind leave long before my body walks out the door. By the time I carry the last box to the car, I've been gone for months. Each partner (I was always the one to leave) accused me of being cold and callous, of leaving with no advance warning. What can I say? The time for tears passed ages ago. It just took time for my body to catch up to the rest of me. Bye-bye.

I left my last relationship ten years ago, Independence Day weekend, 2003. My only regret is I waited so long. Decision making takes as long as it takes. You can't rush it. It's a process, it's organic, like mold growing on bread. Like yogurt, like beer. Like growing a garden. When you are in the middle of the process, it seems never-ending, a nail-scraping eye-gouging eternity of frustration. Why can't I decide! Clearly we aren't happy! But we used to have so much fun together... But now it sucks. Why can't I just leave? But how will I pay the rent on my own? Argh!

I have an acquaintance who telephones me regularly, presumably to witness her chronic indecision. She (I'll call her Kaylee) has elevated indecision to a high art. The simplest decisions—where should I eat? Should I go out with my friends or not?—are torn apart into microscopic moments that must be examined and discussed in excruciating detail. Kaylee does not enjoy this process. Frequently she weeps. Each decision has the weight of life or death behind it. The wrong decision really feels like a death sentence to her. Me, I'm like, just make a decision already, who cares? Either way you learn something. But she can't; she's paralyzed with fear.

Twice in the past year I've persuaded her to flip a coin to make a decision. The first time was a big decision. She was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to break up with her partner, a man who lived in her basement. (I know, really?) They hadn't had a real relationship in years, yet she was terrified to let him go. For months she told me she didn't love him, she wanted him gone, she just needed to gather courage to ask him to move out. Then she found out he had been seeing someone else. Finally, I thought. Now she'll be happy to see him go, but no! Suddenly her love for him revived. She declared her desire to marry him, to have his baby, to commit to him forever, because she loved him so much. Oh, why hadn't she seen it before, while she kept him relegated to the basement!? Oh, woe, alas, alackaday! She wept, she gnashed her teeth, she went without sleep and food.

I'll be the first to admit, love can make anyone nuts. Leaving a relationship is not for the faint of heart. It's advanced decision making, a 400 level course. It requires guts. So I let her wallow in her indecision on the boyfriend. I witnessed. Hey, it can happen to anyone. Love is a battlefield, right?

The second time we tossed a coin, though, she was trying to decide if she should drive to the coast for a vacation with her friends. The problem was, her cat was sick. Should she stay with the cat, or go on vacation? Hmmmm, a classic dilemma. Should she apply a Kantian approach? The good of the friends would surely outweigh the good of the measly cat. On the other hand, you could apply the Golden Rule: if you were a cat, what would you want? Walk a mile in my furry paws.

I always ask, when confronted with what appears to be two obvious options, are those my only choices? Like, when I go to a buffet, I scope out the whole thing, from lettuce to pudding, before I choose my entree. I like to know the whole picture. Kaylee sees only two options, and both are fraught with the danger of making a wrong decision. I suggested she let the universe decide. She flipped a coin, and it came up heads: go on vacation.

“Great,” I said. “The universe has spoken. Have a good trip.”

“No, I can't go, I can't leave Tippy!”

“Ok, then don't go, stay home.”

“But I really need a vacation!”

“Ok, so go on vacation.”

“But what if Tippy dies while I'm gone!”

“Tippy's a cat.”

“Tippy's like my child! If something happened while I was gone, I'd never be able to live with it.”

“Ok, so stay home with Tippy.”

“But my friends are going to be there!”

I did a lot of eye-rolling while she raved and wept in anguish. When we finally ended the call, I heaved a sigh of relief that I didn't have the disease of indecision. When I decide, I just go with it, whatever it is, if it seems right at the time, I just go with it. I let the universe take care of the outcome. I don't always make the right decision, but I always learn something. Isn't that one of the purposes of living? To learn? Maybe it means I finally know who I am. Or maybe it means I'm ok with not knowing.