00:11 - 13.03.08
Dreams
Before dealing with reality there was the dream. I was having a chat with the spirit of John Lennon. There was a guest book that had an embossed goldeny brown cover that one was supposed to sign. It was as though one wrote in water - something that seemed quite significant and symbolic. Hmmm, there is a quote about life being written on water, I think. That seemed to be the theme of the discussion. John was sitting under a beautiful tree - maybe an elm. Nearby was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; smiling and singing to himself as Yoko played some sort of stringed instrument. Very pretty sound, sort of like flowing water. There seemed to be a number of people involved in the discussion. It became quite animated, then heated, as disagreements started to mar the discourse. At some point, John said something about "the little people" not needing to be consulted or maybe the word "considered" was used. The discussion was about the future of the development of the social order on the planet by then, I think. At that point I was annoyed with his condescending attitude, since he came from equally humble beginnings to those he felt didn't need a say in the decisions. I wrote in his guest book that he should get over himself and start acting like a regular person. The Maharishi smiled and faded away just like the Cheshire Cat then - just the smile was left. I guess right now it is my nature to be cheeky and blunt about what I'm thinking, both in this dimension and in the dreamtime. John just looked startled, then he laughed and disappeared too. I think the idea of his had been to see if anyone would point out that he, as emperor, had no clothes. I think he liked being naked. AUM well back to reality.
When I arrived home on Friday, it was to find my youngest obviously frustrated. By law all employers are supposed to send out one's employment tax forms no later than the last day of February. My son is due for a refund and those funds are desperately needed to help us keep our heads above water financially. He had called his employer, who denied having copies of those forms, when in fact they must keep copies on file for a minimum of seven years. They said they had mailed out those forms two weeks ago. My son then called the tax office which confirmed that. The agent then told my son that despite having records of that company's other employees submitted and available on-line, there was no record of my son at all. If there had been, the tax representative could have forwarded a copy to my son from their database. When my son asked how long it might be before his material was submitted, the agent said that it might be June or July before it arrived, but that he could still take his last pay stub from 2007 and use it to go get his taxes done, so that he could get his refund. Being that it was Friday night by then, my son knew that he would have to wait until at least Monday to talk with his company's payroll department, since he wasn't convinced that any of the tax preparation companies would accept anything but the official form. They have to sign off that they've seen those documents, after all. His comment to me was that he was beginning to feel that there really was someone trying to cause us as much financial difficulty as possible. I had worked hard during that trip to the country Friday to get my paranoia under control. However, between not being able to get on the internet so we could file taxes by that route and no possibility of getting that reconnected any earlier than this week, I was feeling the same way. I felt that was especially so after one friend, who is a lawyer, commented that they believed that someone was blocking my ability to get a job on purpose when we had talked a couple of days earlier. Lawyers aren't usually given to speculative statements.
What it meant was that after an evening of stewing about and reading the Bible - which as you might have noticed is not a calming experience for me - I had reached meltdown by Saturday morning. I had promised to attend and be involved in the one friend's Women's Day event and had really been looking forward to hearing the keynote speaker's talk, since it is a woman for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration. However, I was also afraid that I would be such a negative influence because of my emotional state, that I called my friend to let her know I wouldn't be there. She seemed to realize how low my morale and mental state had gone and just asked if she could help. Made me feel even worse that I wouldn't be there to support the event. Instead I started back adding yoga into my exercise routine - with care - since that one haunch was still a bit tender from that one day when I misstepped off the train toward the bus. I kept seeing the Dalai Lama in my dreams last week you see. He was telling me that things would start to improve if I just made the effort to include at least some yoga. My mind chooses some pretty potent images to get my attention, doesn't it? At least they are all handsome men I see. I think I saw Sir Sean too, but he was wearing a Stewart kilt - one of my favourite tartans - not the saffron robe or John's choice of undress. I think maybe I should be depressed more often, hmmm? Don't see that kind of imagery when I'm happy. Anyway the images and the yoga did have a calming effect and I decided to spend the weekend working on clearing up the next layer of clutter and reading.
Right now my cupboards are really bare with only baking supplies - some quite ancient - left. I had made from-scratch nanaimo bars, because those were the freshest ingredients I had, to take to my friend's Women's Day function. Since that didn't happen, I decided that I would allow myself to indulge in comfort food as well while I read - John Grisham's book "Street Lawyer" - just to boost my mood, you see. I thought his fast moving plots would keep my mind diverted. However, the irony of having a decadent dessert instead of real food, while reading about the plight of homeless people was just too much to handle mentally - "let them eat cake". Guilt and fear both running through my mind as I contemplated another week of unemployment's effect on my finances. The one benefit is that every morsel of food going into my mouth now is looked at as simply fuel and I am noticing what really is essential - very little indeed. As I was reading - synchronously - I noticed a feature on the news about the food banks building more nutritious hampers for those who need them, with the help of local grocery stores and charitable organizations. That cheered me up quite a bit, partly because I am grateful I don't need that help and partly because I was glad to see that it was finally realized that giving homeless people nutritious food would help their health and also protect them from the obesity that begins when one only has access to simple carbohydrate and sugars for food - umm like that decadent dessert. But chocolate is a legume, right?
Decided that the novel was cutting too close to my own reality - the scene where the one lawyer has a hissy fit simply because the protagonist asked to look at the file that triggered his being taken as a hostage, reminded me of similar weird reactions in some of the downtown workplaces I have been, for example. Went back to the yoga and the Bible instead. Should have just stayed with the yoga, as you might have guessed if you read my posts from a couple of days ago. I haven't even gotten to the book of Job yet. Somehow I don't think that his angst is going to help me cope either, but at the same time that angst seems to be embedded in everything I encounter lately. I never could understand the logic of the divine's replies with respect to the storyline. I just assumed part of the text had gone missing at some point in time. How is it that a loving deity would allow evil to have it's way, beating down a righteous soul over and over and over again. Maybe I'm being forced to confront that angst to learn something from it, but I'm just not getting the message or the lesson. Slow learner I guess. Worse yet, I watched our national channel's feature "Life and Death in Kandahar" and cried through most of it. When the one padre, standing in front of an Afghani field hospital operating theatre, reflected that it was the "old men - the politicians - who created the wars" and that the young soldiers were the ones who were forced to pay the consequences for "those bad and uninformed decisions"; then we were back to those questions of Job once more.
Sunday my youngest managed to scrape enough money together so I could get my internet bill paid up to date, as well as buy a few groceries. On Monday morning, as soon as the provider's offices opened, I called to confirm the payment so as to have the service reinstated. By dinner time it was still not up and running and I was getting rather frustrated. I had planned to spend Sunday sending out resumes, you see, so I could continue my job search and also do all the online paperwork for my son's taxes and benefits. When we called the provider, they explained that there had been a major malicious hacker attack on their system that morning. Their system was still down. No internet for anyone. It was clear that the tech support people were being verbally assaulted by a lot of angry customers. Not their fault, so I just went back to reading and organizing the house. Read a feng shui book Sunday evening and decided that it couldn't hurt to try it out, you see. My son had spent some time on Monday tracking down someone in payroll at his workplace who finally acknowledged that, yes, they did have access to copies of his tax forms and that they would have them sent out by the company who had been commissioned to prepare them. Good news was that the form was in existence, but the bad news was that there would be another delay as the form was going to have to be mailed. Another risk of lost mail, and again the paranoia about someone blocking funds that we should have been able to use to pay bills. Sigh.
It's getting late and I have a lot of errands, hopefully, to do tomorrow so good night for now, Scheherezade will continue her tales of woe tomorrow.
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