SCREW 1,000 WORDS/DAY. I BLEW THAT. I HATE GOOGLE, YAHOO, MY HACKERS, MY SHRINK, BUT NOT YOU DEAR READER

It's all driving me to drink.  Not quite yet, fortunately.  I am sober two years some day this month I wrote down last year and lost.  I really don't want to drink.  I just don't want to go to any more drag-my-ass A.A. meetings.  I have opted out but may go tomorrow, later today, due to my AA cult indoctrination which instills in you the idea that if you are fucked up, and ladies and gents, I am fucked up, you need a goddamned sunshine blown up your butthole A.A. meeting even it is the epitome of dreary, chaired by some old self-rightenous geiser, (sp?) in love with the sound of his own voice and the topic is one of the boring traditions, like it was a few weeks ago when I walked out on "Our common unity comes first," or whatever the hell it is. 

Does that mean I can't reveal the high backsliding rate for A.A. members that everybody knows about and no one talks about.  Go read all about the Achilles heels, sick practices and undesirable thoughts that are drummed into your head by A.A. gestapos, in the Orange Papers:One Man's Analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous and Substance Misuse Recovery Programs, and Real Recovery.  Or go read similar vendetta, poison spewing jive about how A.A. is only in it for the money and in cahoots with 12th Step based Hospital and Outpatient Treatment Programs to make "millions off the backs" of alcoholics at Stinkin' Thinkin': Muckraking the 12-Step Industry.  They started out attacking the treatment industry, for whom I once was a whore, but ended up attacking A.A. with some far fetched and some rational blameworthy frenzied writing.

I was warned about wearing two hats and leaving a perfectly good career in magazine writing and editing to go back to school so I could prostitute for the 12-step recovery based hospital and outpatient treatment facilities. It doesn't matter how many books you read, letters after your name you earned or boring workshops you sat through, the first question of every single patient/client is "Who are you to tell me about Alcoholism/Addiction?  What makes you such an authority?" 

As soon as you share your personal story right on cue for so many dollars and cents per hour and prove you are one of them, you're exalted to a state where you almost can't do any wrong until you get to no dating or sex the first six months-to a year of sobriety.  You tell the same story over and over like a fortune teller at a carnival somebody put a buck in.  You feel you are selling out your sacred beliefs for an income, but, hey, everybody is doing it, and some clients say you helped them.

Dirty, dirty business.  I relapsed after 15 years clean and sober time, and in looking back I'm surprised it took a full ten years of counseling alcoholics/addicts to finally get me to pick up that first drink that led right to the worst hell imaginable just like everybody says it will.  Now, today, many years later, I have managed to put together two years without a drink, joint, cocaine, or any old pill or drug that I came across on public restroom floors or skeezers with a desire to get you down in the same hole "he's in." (Bob Dylan.)

I'll probably go to the morning meeting.  It's sort of like chasing the initial high of a drug. You want to get back that first rush of all that synchronicity making miracles happen every single day as long as you don't drink or get high. You want back that feeling of belonging with these people who think like you, act like you and have the same character defects as you.   All the meetings where I cried out of gratitude, genuine love for my fellow survivors, experienced life changing insights, and slowly grew up with the rest of the misfits out on the playgrounds of the church basements, school classrooms, and misc public buildings where A.A. meetings were held.  It was a sweet life.  I worked with others, newer people in the program, because my heart went out to them.  Their pain and lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem was stuff I knew inside out.  I didn't do it for a paycheck or what they might do for me. 

And I ended up thinking I was never as bad as "these people."  I didn't pimp my daughter for money for crack, wake up in crackhouses, or seriously endanger my health.  No, I was the dirty pedophile priest, getting drunk on communion wine and shooting smack, and seducing the youngest altar boys in my lair, the rectory.  One of my last, disturbing memories was one of the last nights I was still officially employed as a substance abuse counselor (C.S.A.C.) and got one of my slicker outpatients to come with me for a ride to try and cash a check of my soon to be ex's that I had performed forgery on with the help of  nail polish remover, I think it was.  Jewel and Dominick's were having none of that larceny, and we ended up just driving around all night into dawn hoping we'd run into somebody who'd give us some drugs for being the good people we were.  It felt definitely sleazy and filthy to expose the addict in me to a man who had once respected me, worked hard at his recovery program, and done a lot of the right things to stay clean and sober.

That's all I care to confess for tonight.  You're not supposed to break your anonymity at the level of the media or press, but who reads this? 

Today, I am happy just to be a mostly unemployed writer. I work as Chicago Alcohol and Recovery Examinder for Examiner.com for a little while longer.  I started in April, and have made $1.52 so far this year total. It is a content farm that employs writers who become slaves and stay on with half-baked promises of more money in the future.  I had hoped I might help at least one person, but you need readers for that.  I made $1.52 on reader clicks, so I guess it's safe to assume my readers are my sibs and friends to whom I proudly, and ridiculously, send copies of my articles.

BTW, does anybody besides me think Yahoo's new Beta e-mail is even more fucked up than the old e-mail that now I can't get back to?  If they show me my 2007 mail again, somebody is going to get hurt. 

Don't forget to donate.  The donate button is on the blog, and the e-mail address that goes with it is: missmarymac0040@sbcglobal.net.  I have to get away.  I have to go be a travel writer or join the Peace Corps or something. The prosaic, mundane and boring are closing in on me until I can't breathe.

Great New Stuff To Read From Digital Publications You May Not Know

I lost the photo credit.  Let's hope it was a "Share" Creative Commons.

I lost the photo credit.  Let's hope it was a "Share" Creative Commons.



Are you doing it?  Are you writing 1,000 words a day?  How about three morning pages every day?  Did you read that link from Julia Cameron.  I tell you it's all true and more. I can only sort out my life by writing my pages in my journal. Here's your exercise for today:


List every miracle you can think of that ever happened in your life in 15 minutes.  Count the small miracles of synchronicity too.  That person didn't just happen to be there when you most needed him or her.  That check didn't have to come in the mail that particular day.  Go ahead.  When the 15 minutes are up, review them and be grateful.  Now write for 15 minutes on the miracles you want to happen in your life now.


"You know that song with the line "I need a miracle everyday?"  That's how I feel most days just staying clean and sober, out of depression, not in a bipolar manic mode or having my heart ripped out of my chest by one of my loved ones; namely, my kids.


I borrowed that exercise from the free book whose link I gave you a couple of days ago, "How Much Joy Can You Stand?"  Give a copy to a friend who dreams or needs to dream.


I have decided to stay on at Examiner.com even though it pays squat.  Maybe I'm just supposed to reach out and help someone with an alcohol or addiction problem.  In that case, I'll work for $1.21/month.  It's so ridiculous.  They keep harping on how they'll give you $50 for every referral of a writer that they hire. Who would do that to a person they knew and probably liked, and maybe was a friend?  I wouldn't send the woman, Kathy, who comes over at 6 a.m. and late at night, it doesn't matter, pounding on my back door like there's a fire to beg cigarettes from me.  I really wouldn't, but she could stand to have a job; I do believe.


What did I learn today that I can share?  I wrote a rough draft for Align.com on the health benefits of mangoes.  They are high in beta carotene and other nutrients like vitamins C, E, potassium, magnesium, copper, iron, antioxidants galore, fiber, selenium, and I forget what else.  They help prevent cancer.  They help heat exhaustion and heat stroke.  They are good for diabetics.  They help with acid indigestion and digestion.  They have iron and are good for women in menopause or those who are pregnant.  They are sweet, succulent and sexy little orange-fleshed ovals from India, Mexico, Pakistan, Florida and Hawaii and other tropical places.

Try this, although it might defeat the health consciousness motive, it's wonderful. Take a fully ripe mango and cut it in half after removing the stone.  Fill that empty space with the best, richest vanilla ice cream you can buy or make, none of that cheap off-brand stuff.  Sit on your front porch or out on the deck with it on a spring or summer night and look at the stars. You will be transported.  No thanks necessary.  Enjoy!


Want to start fundraising for something?  I want to fundraise for myself.  I need a vacation, desperately. Go to www.kickstarters and they will help you solicit funds for individual projects that are not necessarily nonprofit.  You can choose a campaign time period,  and if you don't get pledges equaling the amount you said you were campaigning for within those 30-60 days, then they don't cash in the pledges and you missed your big chance.  They charge 5 percent of each pledge for administrative costs.  It sounds better than a bake sale to me. Or maybe just better than what I'm about to do, and I swore I'd never do it, but my time on Earth is limited.


If you want to donate to me so I can go on the trip I am going to win from a Rhoads Travel (formerly Elderhostel) scholarship,  and be able to travel to the destination of the funded trip and eat and buy a couple of postcards, just push that "Donate" button I installed today without shame and enter my e-mail account at missmarymac0040@sbcglobal.net.  I haven't been anywhere or gone anywhere except one state up for a wedding in years and years.  I thank you from the top of my head to the spreading out of my limitless soul with love and gratitude. It's only money.

I'd like to go to Canada, I think.  I've never been there.  I need to recharge my corroding batteries, revitalize my cells and blow out my stale thinking.  I'm in a rut.  I can't write and there's no inspiration flowing the way it should if I were pumping adrenaline, intuition and God's will for me as a beloved child. Abundance is everyone's.


Don't forget to support your local freecycle..   Give some free stuff you don't want or need away, and get some free stuff that you will enjoy for a while before you pass it on too.  Anti-materialism collecting has no associated guilt or debt.  You never know what that e-mail from your local freecycle will say is sitting under the stairs at a certain address.  It could be a box of puppies or it could be pirates' treasure.  I love imagining what will be next.

I also spent some time this morning reading one of my books on how to write grant proposals.  This one is titled "Grant Proposals Demystified."  I copied many of her extensive resources which I know i will use.  Here's one for a free newsletter for anyone who writes.  From what I saw of her writing tips, she makes a lot of sense in a succinct fashion.


Oh, and i read more of Jung's "Man and His Symbols," I think it's called.  I'm reading about what dreams are and what their symbols mean and where they come from.  He says forget about those meaning of your dreams books.  Every dreamer invents their own language for their dreams and must learn to decode it on their own, or, I guess with the help of a analyst or knows them well.  Here's something reassuring he wrote that i was glad to read after a night of dreaming about poor people with barely standing rickety shacks for homes nailing plywood on the exterior surfaces to hold it together.  I guess they thought they were remodeling.  I woke up feeling like I was one of the shacks and my "remodeling" efforts to change my life according to my dreams were useless and ludicrous.


Leave it to me to find the lowest self-esteem interpretation of my dreams.  Not so fast, Jung writes that dreams must speak in a different language with new symbols to get our attention because we no longer respond to ideas from our everyday life. We "have stripped them of their elemental energy," he says.  So something more is needed to effectively drive home a message to make us change our attitude and behavior.  That is what dream language does.  Its symbolism has so much psychic energy that we are forced to pay attention to it.


Except that he gives two tragic examples of patients of his whom he tried to warn based on their dream content.  They would not change their behavior and attitude and one ended up dying suddenly, just walking off in space while climbing rocks, and the other was beaten and raped in the woods she wouldn't give up walking through.


"How Much Joy Can You Stand" said, "The world awaits your vision.  So when will you find it in yourself to share?"  Free copy right here (pdf file).


Regardless of what your inner critic thinks, people do want to hear what you have to say, and to see what you have to show.  In the end it all comes down to love and sharing doesn't it?  Isn't that the real purpose of all of our lives?  Let's get in touch with those passions and let bliss guide us to what it is that we are supposed to share with the world.


My current dream is to do well at grant proposal writing and have a small home business doing it.  Then I want to apply for non-profit (501(c) 3 status and get a grant and start a nonprofit to help people with a problem I want to solve or at least put some intensive work into.


I read the most inspirational article in Inc.com.  Now I read it regularly and started collecting the back issues that were in my e-mail.  This article was giving examples of innovative social entrepreneurs who were out to change the world.  This one guy, Scott Harrison, a night club promoter in New York,  was 28, and all he did was get high, drink, chase women and have sex.  His life was void of positive contributions he realized while in Uruguay on vacation with friends.  "I thought there would never be enough girls, enough status or money or fame—there would never be enough alcohol or partying to make me happy," he said. He realized he was a "selfish scumbag," and knew it was time to do something.

At 30 he founded charity: water, which brings clean drinking water to developing nations. He set about doing things his way, which was to utilize Google Earth to track projects for donors.   All public money raised went directly to water projects. Operating costs for the charity were raised separately.

As of today, charity: water has funded 3,962 water projects, providing access to clean, safe drinking water for 1,794,983 people in 19 countries. It works in ways that are easy for people to see the difference they are making. About $20 provides one person access to safe drinking water. A typical well costs about $5,000 and can provide safe water for 250 people.  Here, I'm just copying the figures and facts now. You might as well read it yourself and be inspired.  There are similar stories that are also very inspirational.  It can be done if you have a dream and you're willing to work for it.


I promised you new reading material, and you shall have it. I found a list of top digital publications in Matador, one of my very favorite things to read for fun, to satisfy curiosity, to feed my beauty hunger, to feel motivated, to be inspired, to quell wanderlust and more.  This article lists the top 32 publications to writers at Matador.  I wasn't too impressed, but keep reading until you get to the list at the end with just hyperlinked titles.  Here are the good ones.  Check out Granta. costs $45.99/yr in the U.S. to subscribe and that's for only four issues which are published as books.

It features great writing, photos, memoirs, audio, video, and more.   It seems very literary.  They have a free newsletter, and here's me catching truffle crumbs from the wealthy again, they do publish some freebie articles and stories.  I am familiar with about half of the other magazines on the list.  It has always been my greedy literary dream to write a short story for the "Sun."  They pay extremely well.  The magazine doesn't carry ads, and is quite something culturally wonderful.  Check these out for your reading pleasures and submissions.

Time to go write my articles for the non-literary and peanuts.  Let me see how many words I have.  I hope you had fun and learned something.  I learn something new every day.  It's what keeps me going.  I saw the perfect job for me on Elance search of reports today.  Somebody wants 10 hours/week for one or two weeks of a researcher/writer to find out why 70 percent of smokers say they wish they could quit but don't try.  Why are these people still smoking.  The kick is that he's not so much interested in this knowledge, per se, as he is something that parallels it that might be harder to research.  Why does every computer user know they could lose everything on their computers at any given moment and yet still not bother to back up their data occasionally or even frequently?  This is what his inquiring mind wants to know, and what I'd love to research and come up with some answers.  Human behavior fascinates me.  It just kills me.  We are one crazy species.  Wish we intuitive messages as I go to bid on this project.


Words for today:

Words for today: 2,031.  (Did tomorrow's too, except that's cheating.  I'll be here tomorrow.)

CAN YOU TELL YOUR INNER WISDOM FROM OTHER VOICES?

Photo: Hoverfly, by David Short
Creative Commons Attribution License
Eristalix pertenax on Mexican orange-blossom.
Taken 5/20/2011 using Canon Digital IXUS 70.



"We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other,to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity." - Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"

Still at my 1,000 words a day, which is about all I'm writing lately, much to my dismay. I don't count journaling, which I do every day for hours--that's therapy.

I just can't seem to get it together to write articles for the two publications I freelance for, AlignLife.com and Examiner.com.  I have no readers at the Examiner yet, although I just started there recently.  I'm thinking I should have become Chicago's Bob Dylan Examiner (they really have one)  or the Ecstasy Examiner instead of Alcohol and Recovery.  Who wants to read about alcohol and recovery?  I try not to preach, but drinking people dont want to hear anything about their drinking habits.  I asked to be the Addictions Examiner, but I have to wait until I prove myself on just alcohol or something.

There's a really exciting new publication on addiction, alcoholism and recovery called The Fix.  You find articles on topics you won't find other places like this one on addiction and skin picking.  It's called trichotillomania and they say it's not as serious as cutting, but it's still in the mental illness or neurosis family of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).  Oh ick, you say.  There's reviews of swanky rehabs, ads for stuff I never knew existed like marijuana spray for pain, and serious articles about the top ten experts in the field of addictions. 

I finished my "Developing Intuition" book by Shakrit Gawain,  and I really do mean to keep at following my intuitive messages each and every day. She writes about all the people or voices we have in our heads.  I know I have Miss Perfectionist, Mrs. Gumblehortz, my inner critic who wears her hair in a bun with not one stray hair coming out of it.  Then there is Ms. Weatherhardy, the responsible one, who believes she is a human doing and not a human being.  There is Mary Melon, the vulnerable child who gets scared by the risks of taking a leap of faith and following intuitive wisdom without knowing where it goes.  And, of course, there is the rebel who doesn't want to even follow her own gut feelings like it's some kind of scam.  There's more too.  Figure out who yours are.  The inner critic and the perfectionist make my life a living hell if I don't tie them up and put duct tape on their mouths.

So far I haven't seen any big changes in my life. I still spent two hours researching and writing a book proposal project bid yesterday only to have the Linux Live Knoppix CD crash and the letter disappear, although I spent hours looking for it.  If I had intuitively known that was going to happen, I wouldn't have written the damn letter in the first place.  I guess turning a business book into a fable is not the job for me, although I sure thought it sounded like fun.

I am currently helping my brother edit his book for teens, "A Fairy Tale Life Is No Fable," by Michael Grady, and he has done a bang-up job incorporating fables in his book that he plans to publish on his website.  It definitely will be of interest to teens.  He is a CPA, retired, and a professional speaker, who used to travel the world doing the accounts for Dun & Bradstreet.  He knows about things teens will be helped to learn and that should hold their interest like how to give a good speech, investing, money management, learning to write well, staying healthy, taking responsibility for yourself, sex, drugs, and some rock 'n roll.  I made up the rock 'n roll.  It seemed to go with sex and drugs, at least it did in my generation.

Yeah, I saw some decent jobs at Elance.com, the agency I use to get my freelance gigs.  For a while there I felt like I had walked into the wrong place.  Suddenly articles were being priced at $2-$4 and shit like that by clients, where they had been going for up to $50+.  They seem to be running from being categorized as a content mill like Demand Studios, and now AOL Seed, and Bright Hub, and now there are jobs for $500-$1,000.  I was invited to bid on some "Course in Miracles" type articles and to bid a healthy amount.  I was also invited to bid on meditation articles for good money, but I felt like too much of a hypocrite since I haven't been able to make myself meditate any more recently.  My mind is like a wild monkey.  I just want to get going on making my dreams a reality and learn grant proposal writing so I can start my own business doing that, write my self-help book on adult AD/HD (ADD), and edit my brother's book.

Oh yeah, and I also want to learn website design so I can freelance at that as well.  About.com offers free courses in that as well as the other stuff you need with it like HTML, css, java, I think, and cascading sheets.  All of it might as well be in Latin for all I know, but I figure there are a lot of hotdogs that have taught themselves how to do it and I am a good learner, I hope.  I think it would be fun to have another creative outlet.

Today I went to the thrift store and bought a stack of dime magazines to get new pictures for my vision board I want to make.  I need to update one according to my current five-year plan of dreams.    I finally found a how to do it article that didn't suck with materialism and phoniness.  My idea of my future does not revolve around a built-in pool and owning three houses, and I'm not about to glue gleaming materialistic pictures of crap and call it my dreams.  Here's the article I was looking for.  I wanted something to help me do some creative visualization on my dreams and some affirmations work.  This article came from Oprah, where else.  Here is the dream board made by Martha Beck that they refer to:

Let me know how it goes, and how you felt as you were making it.

Is anyone joining me in the 1,000 words a day challenge?  Just a reminder:  It could be your daily discipline that will end up being the springboard for the e-book you always meant to write, or the novel, play, non-fiction book, memoir, or blog.  Get going.  I spent a lot of time at college studying creative writing.  I wanted to know what the secret was that would make me a good writer.  I finally heard it from one of my professors who simply wrote on the board:  "Writers Write."  That's the secret.  No one gets good at writing by trying to drink like they're one of the American writers in Paris during the 20's like Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  You don't become a great writer by talking about writing in bars, clubs and every chance you get to impress somebody.  Writers write because they must.  It's a drive.  If you are a writer and you don't write, you feel funky, even depressed.  Follow  writer Julia Cameron's advice from her book "The Artist's Way," and this website, and write  your morning pages when you wake up and aren't yet sure what's on your mind and in your heart.   It's so much cheaper than therapy.  I get more out of it than I do therapy too.

I journaled for a couple of hours today.  I did some journaling exercises from the Joy book I told you how to get for free yesterday.  I wrote lists.  I love lists.  I wrote ten things I love about my life, ten things that are unique about me, ten things I could fix or change in the world, and ten things I'd like to share.  Do those and you'll have your 1,000 word challenge met for the day, and it will be therapeutic.  I learned some things about myself and my soul's mission/life's purpose from doing these lists.

Time to go see how many words I've got here: 1,176.

See you tomorrow.

Maryellen/MsRefusenik

1000 WORD CHALLENGE HAS MANY NEW, BRILLIANT, BEAUTIFUL WORDS

I am not counting a missed day just because it is 1:15 a.m.  These are my normal operating hours.  I have been busy learning about dreams, the unconscious, the conscious, the selves, the intuition, how to tell when an intuitive guidance message is the real thing, and more.  Carl Jung also taught me the best new word I have learned since I read some articles on untranslatable words and bringing back obsolete words in Matador, one of my favorite publications.  In fact, they are such good articles, I will share them with you right now.   How about that--"20 awesomely untranslatable words from around the world," and in case you didn't bother to click, here's the first one to give you an idea of what you're missing:

1. Toska

Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of soul,a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”  

If you liked those, here's 20 more awesomely untranslatable words from around the world. 

We can always get back to what I learned tonight, but I do want to tell you my great new word.  If you already know this word like you know the words ignorant, unread, stupid, uninformed, forgive me.  I went to a state school.  This brilliant black opal of a word is:  MISONEISM.  I don't know how I struggled through this world this long without it, and you really do need to invent a word like it if it didn't exist.  It means a deep and unreasoning fear and hatred of the new, especially of new ideas; a deep and superstitious fear of novelty.  We are plagued with misoneism in this society.  It's a wonder the wheel was invented, and I never knew of this word before.  God bless Carl Jung for sharing yet another important finding.

You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to get those two links for you.  I am on a different operating system than when I started these 1,000 words.  Something is wrong with Linux's Wary Puppy Live CD.  I think it definitely has the mange and it might be rapid.  It keeps taking me to the backs of these closets where there is nothing, and dumping me there to figure out a way out.  The damn Sea Monkey can't stay open on a web page without getting a cramp that makes it suddenly close.  It's a nightmare I tell you.  And don't even get me started about my Windows XP with its dueling Internet Explorer and Google Chrome browsers that both pop up so they can try to take over, although I will say Chrome has more manners in this regard than I.E.  So I'm back home on Knoppix, but it's not the old Knoppix 6.2; this is 6.4 and it's flashy with it's fractal art on the landing page and it works, so far, like a well-oiled bicycle chain, something I rarely get to experience because I'm a lazy fuck.
Oh so much for computers and their headaches.  It started off being a great night.  I am reading this fantastic book I got from the library about keeping your dream alive and what you need to do to make it happen.  It's not a bunch of the usual doggerel--it's really mindfully written and it speaks to me.  I was wishing I didn't have to take it back to the library, when synchronicity stepped in and I found where I could download a free copy.  I'll give you a couple of quotes from it and you can decide if you would like a copy too. 

The author, Susanne Falter-Barns, hopes that people will use the book, "how much joy can you stand?" to start joy clubs where friends spur each other's dreams on and celebrate together when they happen.  The book, she says, are short essays meant to pick up any flagging enthusiasm.  And, I'll tell you, the book gets me dreaming like I'm 20 years old and just graduated from college, and have inherited a million bucks to do whatever i like.  She makes it all seem within grasp.  She helped me get in touch with my personal power that I am forever pretending not to have because what would people think if I became the mouse that roared and everything was not hunky dory.  I would have to roar and take my power and use it to take control of my life situation and make sure that it worked for me.  Because I am tired of being nice and waiting for the world to notice that I NEED A BREAK.  I am not going to get a hand up from somebody who takes pity on my poverty and various disorders and diseases that I use as excuses to not further myself to where I want to be.  I need to get up off my lazy, procrastinating butt and take charge.

One way I am doing this is by learning to trust my intuition.  I get good intuitive messages and I immediately rationalize them as worthless or just old tapes or any excuse not to pay attention to them.  From now on I am paying attention.  I am reading an excellent book on how to do it by Shakti Gawain ("Creative Visualization").  It's titled "Developing Intuition:  Practical Guidelines for Daily Life."  It is a super book and right on the mark.  I am right now on the chapter that talks about how to tell your inner wisdom intuitive messages from other voices and other selves.  Today I listed, at Shakti's suggestion, my fears that keep me from taking the risks of following my intuitive messages.

If I had followed my intuition recently and put my bike in the house when I saw somebody had unlocked it and moved it, I'd still have a bicycle.  Now I have divine inspiration, I believe, to write a book that has never been written.  If I don't listen to my gut feelings on this and let this opportunity pass me by, it will be a real shame.  I am going to breathe life into this dream and some other dreams I have about contributing to the world.

Which brings me back to sharing some of "how much joy" with you.  She says you need to stick to your dream and have a "fire in the belly."  Here, I'll let her tell you:  "The fire in your belly comes only when you're willing to work at your dream for no good reason.  You don't pursue the dream because you'll be famous someday, because the work is going to make you rich, or because it will make for better cocktail banter.  You design, teach, invent or serve because this is what you are meant to do.  Getting the fire in the belly means simply surrendering to the truth." (pp.20-21).

I have frequently written in this blog about finding your purpose in life, your soul's mission that you came here to fulfill.  This book is a how-to-do-it on that  It's not about establishing a platform or a brand or how to successfully market via e-mail, it's about how to make damn sure you get to do what you were born to do. 

We know what our talents are, unless we've really been stomped into the ground, and then we need help getting up and recognizing them.  Everybody has talents as great as the greatest artists, composers, scientists, and saints.  We just listened too well to critics who told us we were shy of the mark, even when they were our own parents we listened and believed that we weren't as good at something as we believed we were.  We lost so much joy in  being able to practice that gift in our lives.  Now it's time to claim it, rename it and make it yours for life.

Here's the exercise at the end of chapter, and I love these.  She titles them simply, "Try this," and I do them in my morning pages or journal.  Here's the "Try this," for this:

"You have three minutes.  Make a list of everything that you are truly passionate about.  Include anything you can think of, from eating imported chocolate to having great sex to fly-fishing on the Snake River.  Then think about what characterizes those experiences.  Do you go into a trance and lose track of time?  Does the experience leave you feeling like a better, stronger person?  How often do you let these passions into your life?  Are there any you need to pursue now?  Keep this list and return to it whenever you feel the need to stoke your fire."  (p.21)

There's really too much for me to type that is great about this book.  She is helping me put flesh on my dreams and I thank her.  If you want a free copy of this beautiful, inspiring book, go here. 

And I am going to go check and see if that's 1,000 words, because I have dreams to stoke and I need to be working at them, following my intuitive messages, of course. 

That is 1,735, and I am out of here.  I hope I gave you something you could use.

WANT TO COMMIT TO WRITING 1000 WORDS A DAY?

You can have one of these cool badges for your website too.  The truth is you don't even have to commit to 1,000 words if that's too much.  Badges also come in 250 and 500 word sizes.  The idea is to get writers writing, bloggers blogging, and freelance writers making some money.

I got the idea here.  I was reading a good article by a novelist with ADD who was writing about getting stuck due to his disorder and not getting the novel written.  He included a link to this site.  I seem to have temporarily lost the article, but if you have adult ADD, this is a great website for articles.  They offer more than the usual coping with low self-esteem, impulsivity and disorganization stuff you get sick of reading.  It's like the authors just want to rub it in again, "I'm organized and I was able to write this book.  You'll never be organized enough to finish that kind of demanding, multi-faceted task."  Or maybe it's just me being hypersensitive.

So I am so going to write a book about adult AD/HD (ADD), and I'm starting today and every day this week with 1,000 words a day.  The rules for the badge say you only have to write 1,000 words (or how ever many you choose) six days a week, but I'm going for seven of course.  I'm nothing if not ambitious except when I'm on the couch with my Chocolate Covered Mint Oreos (when I'm lucky enough to find the mint version), watching TV and feeling guilty because I didn't write that day but I was full of good intentions.

It's a secret what kind of book it will be exactly because nobody has done it yet and I want to be the first.  I am hoping to get enough written to send Hazelden, the big recovery publisher, a book proposal soon.  I would consider self-publishing it as an e-book but I am too broke to afford even that.  BTW, writers, have you seen the fantastic software Adobe will drop on you for a 30-day free trial?  Check them out.  The Dreamweavers and desktop publishing equipment cost $400-500+ and you can download one right now.  Watch out though.  Some of the final publications they produce can only be read on tablets.  You don't want to limit your e-book or what have you like that, do you?  And remember--you better have your manuscript ready to roll because you only get 30 days of the free trial, and then you either have to buy the software or say goodbye to it.

That was a brief, unsolicited, unpaid, commercial announcement.  I think it's really great of Adobe to do that.  If you're a student, look into selling at one of their educational stores too.  It's a good deal.

My 1,000 words a day will be about writing, writing books, self-help books in particular, AD/HD (ADD), addiction, alcoholism, and subtopics like coping with impulsivity, using your natural born creativity and not limiting it, learning to listen, money management, becoming addicted to AD/HD stimulant medication, which all the books say rarely happens, but I don't believe that for a second, and things along those lines.

They might also include novel writing since my second novel is currently in a state of unpleasant limbo with everybody in the book knowing what's happening and going to happen and no ending or resolution in sight.  I got bored with my novel and the characters, and in that very distracted ADD way decided I was moving on to new, more interesting projects like teaching myself grant writing.  I am currently working on that goal too.  In fact, some poor misguided individual on my Elance agency jobs list wants a grant writer who will work on contingency.  Freelance grant writers charge about $75/hr. so you tell me why one would take a job on contingency.  I am seriously considering bidding on it for the simple reason that I have been going pie-eyed reading about how to write a grant proposal, but I have never done anything except type them when I worked as an administrative assistant for the U of I - Chicago, Dept. of Education.  I have been planning to learn enough to go volunteer to work as some nonprofit grant writer's free intern just to learn the ropes, but writing a grant on contingency sounds equally beneficial.  The only problem is that he wants videos and video components, and it's hard, I believe, to find grants to individuals for businesses that aren't nonprofit.  But he may turn me down flat, so I'll worry about that later.

Sure, like I worried about what knowledge management was after I signed up, paid the tuition,  and bought the books for the first of many courses in what was to have been my M.S. in Knowledge Management.  My ADD had me really going off half cocked that time.  I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, but I was too impatient to get started to thoroughly research what exactly I wanted to study, and I'm no kid.  I was on about my fourth career change at the time, and actually was unemployed, so what better time to get into grad school, right?  My B.A. is in English, and not with anything practical like education courses.  No, I specialized in creative writing and literature the better to read Henry Miller and write two unpublished novels that may sit mouldering the rest of my life.  Who knows?

It turns out, as I learned two weeks into the most god-awful, boring class of my life, that KM, as they like to refer to it, is not a groovy sort of information management resources thing.  I was confusing an MLS and library sciences with capitalism, gross, and, P.U., business schemes to make more money.  Borrrrrriiing!  To top it off the professor had an accent and I couldn't even understand three-quarters of what he said.  He had written our textbook, so there was no use hoping for a reprieve from monotony from that corner. It was duller than a John Wayne retrospective showing of his war movies, and I opted to leave with my failing grade emblazoned on a transcript I will never claim.

How's that for impulsive?  I couldn't be bothered to find out what the hell I'd be studying for the next two years...  AD/HD can really make your life ridiculously impossible if you let it.

Let me see how many words I've written so far:  1,076.

Reminder, if you don't make your quota in a day, the badge rules say you aren't supposed to try to make them up the next day or that's cheating.

I made mine.  Now go start your novel, blog or e-mail to someone you haven't seen in a while.

WHAT WILL THEY DO TO US NEXT WITH THESE ATYPICAL ANTI-PSYCHOTIC DRUGS?

"Killing of the Nemean Lion," by Orin Zelest
Creative Commons Share License

Now they are willfully and purposefully killing seniors in nursing homes with anti-psychotics.  Everybody who has ever had the misfortune of being so much as introduced to Mr. Risperdal et al knows that this class of drugs is strongly not recommended for persons with dementia, or even those over a certain age.

Look at the news flash that I came across today.  I cannot tell you how sickened and appalled I am:

Audit Finds Widespread Use Of Antipsychotic Drugs In Nursing Homes

';

• Topics: Aging, Mental Health
• By Scott Hensley, NPR News
• May 11, 2011
• This story comes from NPR's health blog Shots.

• About 1 in 7 elderly residents of nursing homes receives a so-called atypical antipsychotic medicine, a federal audit finds, despite an increased risk of death when the medicines are used to manage dementia in older people.
• A review of medical records found that most of the atypical antipsychotics were being used outside the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the medicines to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
• Indeed, 88 percent of the Medicare claims for the drugs show they were prescribed for elderly people with dementia.
• "Despite the fact that it is potentially lethal to prescribe antipsychotics to patients with dementia, there's ample evidence that some drug companies aggressively marketed their products towards such populations, putting profits before safety," wrote Daniel Levinson, Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, whose office did the analysis.
• The top three drugs, based on the number of claims found in the 2007 audit, were:
• 1. Seroquel from Astra Zeneca
  2. Risperdal from Johnson & Johnson
  3. Zyprexa from Eli Lilly.
• To Levinson's point on marketing, nursing home pharmacy chain Omnicare agreed to pay the federal government $98 million in 2009 to settle charges it took kickbacks from J&J to boost sales of Risperdal.
• The OIG made some recommendations for improvement, such as better education and halting payments for unnecessary use of medicines.
• Despite the risks, the prescription of the medicines isn't likely to disappear. As psychiatrist Daniel Carlat told the New York Times, there aren't very many other good options. "Doctors want to maximize quality of life by treating the patient's agitation even if that means the patient will die a bit sooner," Carlat said.
• Indeed, as NPR's Joanne Silberner reported back in 2005 when warnings were raised about both the newer, atypical antipsychotics and their predecessors it treating the elderly, a doctor told her he would continue to use the medicines carefully and in low doses because they still carried benefits.

They just don't want to deal with the old people acting out because they are bored out of their minds, have no human company many of them and that includes the callous, bored medical and nursing staff, have to follow a constrained daily schedule that they had nothing to do with setting up and that probably doesn't make much sense to them, have no one to speak to about their fears and concerns, and so on.  So, like moms putting toddlers in front of soap operas or cartoons on the TV, or drunks dragging the kids they are in charge of into bars for the afternoon, or... no... wait... It's like none of these things.  None of these examples is the same as killing a person because you don't feel like dealing with him or her any longer.

There is an excellent blog that everyone should read if they have ever had the remotest interest in mental illness and mental health, and the courage and intelligence and guts it has taken one woman to survive the drug damage done by psychiatrists with their killer pills.   It's called Beyond Meds.  You can read much more that than the triumph of the will that let this brave woman survive years of withdrawal from psychiatric drugs like Risperdal (I'm on it), Lamictal and the Benzodiazephines. She does so much good by spreading her message of hope.  She is now collecting statements to present at the conference of the American Psychological or Psychiatric Association.  Forgive me, I forget which.  Everything on her website is both unbelievable and obviously true and chilling to the core.  These people practicing medicine are ruining others for life, sometimes just ending their lives like those in the above article.

I have been on the three drugs mentioned:  Seroquel, Risperdal and Zyprexa.  I have been a rebel all my life, refusing to conform to very little that didn't fit my personal values and beliefs.  I am 60 years-old now.  I have no doubt that should I ever end up in a nursing home, which is likely to hear my grown kids tell it, they will label my bipolar disorder a bunch of goofy things, assume I have dementia too, and feed me the very drugs that have been the bane and future nightmare of my existence.  Lamictal, a drug that the author of Beyond Meds unbelievably got off of, has an allergic reaction on some people that begins with a rash or a sore.  If it's bad, the reaction can prove to be fatal.  I had an open, gaping, hideous wound pop up out of nowhere during my first week on the drug.  I was hospitalized at the time and no one said a word or cautioned me.  Even the doctors could hardly stand to look at me because the sore was so ugly, but it was a clear sign I was having an allergic reaction to a newly prescribed drug and could die.

But then that's how mentally ill people are often treated.  The rules of decent behavior towards them don't seem to apply and aren't practiced by everyone, even doctors.  Go fill out Beyond Meds' form for the APA about your psychiatric experiences and read while you're there her letter to feminists and liberals, which I am both.  She is, I hate to say it, right on.  These supposedly open-minded subsets of larger groups are just as quick or quicker to label the mentally ill and treat them like non-thinking, monsters of attack as soon as they hear the diagnosis.  It must stop.  The stigma causes suffering in people long before they are diagnosed.  The stigma begins to destroy the mentally ill when they are first feeling something is wrong but wouldn't dare tell anybody about it, not even their family physician.  Like that ever does any good.  If you just want an anti-depressant or a tranquilizer and call it the end of the day and that's all she wrote, perhaps.

I have to go look to find out who is protesting these deaths and what is being done to stop them. This article makes it pretty clear it will continue to be business as usual in that particular nursing home, even if Medicare/Medicaid stops paying for the drugs used.  They'll find a way to siphon the money from M&M, and the killing of innocent people will go on as it has for years despite huge legal settlements brought against the drug companies.

Blast and Chicago's number one binge drinking rate on national survey

Blast and Chicago's number one binge drinking rate on national survey I sweat real blood and tears over this monster mother, but it's a serious problem in Chicago and elsewhere. Somehow the prevention people just haven't gotten across that the consequences that come with binge drinking aren't flukes that happen to someone else. They can happen to anyone who drinks more than a glass or two of beer or wine or spirits on any day of the week. Read it and make a decision. It will make you feel good about yourself.

The KNOPPIX software collection and all included programs that are
authored by Klaus Knopper, are subject to the terms and conditions
of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, as quoted herein.

Please note that this license does NOT automatically apply to
third-party programs included on this CD. Check
/usr/share/doc/*/copyright* and other supplied license files
of each software package carefully for more information.
==================================================================


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Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.

If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this
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The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate
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  Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program
  `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.

  , 1 April 1989
  Ty Coon, President of Vice

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs.  If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library.  If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General
Public License instead of this License.

It's the Summer of Love, Just Kidding, It's Google's Summer of Code

I swore I wouldn't learn code--not Java, not C+, not Perl, not Ruby on the Rails (but I like that name), and I still am sticking to my guns.  I also said you would not find me,
MsMonolinguinal Ignorant American (studied three years of high school Spanish and three years of college French and a crash course in German, all for naught)  translating Wiki docs.  But when I see logs showing 12 and 13-year-old kids translating from both Finnish and Russian on one project, I am ashamed. 

I swear I don't know how they do it at Wiki, but they make translating into and out of a language you don't know any better than your high school sweetheart's middle name at this point (and that was supposed to be such undying pure true love), seem like rolling out dough for biscuits.  Lay it down, roll it out, crease where necessary and you're ready to read Nabokov  in the original Russian.  It's some kind of alchemy.  Of course you've got helpers, and watchers, to make sure that some poor Croatian teenager doesn't get arrested for attempting to take Russian money out of Russia--A big no-no.  I  might have translated that you were expected to give money to every person who handles your luggage.

Today they (the Wiki nymphs  or elves or whatever they are who leave missives aplenty, but aren't seen or heard from to my knowledge.  They led me down some document about the big conference or foundation of the LXDE or some such, and I did some simple editing that was put in front of me that was probably just a test.

I am working on something to do with setting up the quicker, sharper desktop known as the LXDE, but I am dim on what's involved and exactly what the end product is.  I am bummed because I didn't know about this big Woodstock of codewriting until two weeks past the deadline for scholarship applications.  Not that I planned to learn to write code so I could go hang out with thousands or hundreds of  geeks. But the international meeting takes place in Paris this year.  I'd learn enough code to sign up to make a hamster or turtle gadget for a $5,000 internship, and an all-expenses paid trip to Paris.  I forgot to say that everybody gets a mentor to guide and direct them with their project.

GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2011

Here's the poop on the women's project for the summer.
I also found out that for part of this Summer of Code, they have decided to attract more women to make gadgets and work on documentation.  There is a $5,000 internship to be awarded to any female code writer or even plain writer/editor who wants to sign up for some of their complex and mysterious unfinished projects.   It's a two-page single-spaced list and I went over it carefully with the attitude that there must be something a spaced out clutz without a techno  cell in her brain pan can do, because I sure do need that money this summer.

Some fairy or maybe a gnome brought  me to sign in for Wikipedia late last night after I'd been up for a couple of days.  Right away they start in with the usual same old song that what I thought was my "global" login is worthless, never heard of my user names or e-mail addresses, on and on.  So I say to myself the hell with it, I'll just bite the bullet and register at a Wiki website for the 100th time.  But every username I come up is either already used, as is the e-mail address, of course, because they're mine but just not good enough for this Wiki Wacko.  Then the person starts finding fault with every e-mail address and username I come up with.  I finally snapped and did what I should have done much earlier and just left.

Well imagine how I felt today when I was nosing through the Subversion, Google Project Hosting and Wiki Wacko pages and found a script for what happened to me with the login last night.  It seems they use a special cookie so that even if you check on the login "remember me"  it really won't.  There's also a faulty code of some kind that ensures your login will never be successful.   I am not lying.  I may post some of these scripts next blog.  They have actual scripts with pretend persons written out showing how it should discourage a bad seed from darkening Wiki's weird door with offers of help and voluntary slave labor.  There are dates and actual quotes of what the facilitator said to the poor schmuck minding his or her own business and just trying to login/register.  There's even the sort of snide remarks about usernames that I was getting.  I am publishing it next time.  It has to be seen to be believed.  These people are out of their geeky minds.

FREELANCE WRITING LED ME TO BEING FODDER FOR FOOT FETISHISM

 I just learned about the remarkable cult of the high heel from a practicing foot
fetishist, who almost hired me to write a story for him about the practice.  Could have fooled me.  I thought that because my friends and I had given them up as nonsencical long ago, that most forward thinking, independent women of the year of our Lord 2011 had had a similiar raising of fashion consciousness versus sane walking practices.  Think again.  Want to see the shrine that was just built to celebrate the great passion and worship for the high heel? And not just any high heel.  It's an homage to a Manolo Blahnik stiletto.  .  Check out the size  perspective of shoe vs. person on Broadway now in this picture:

 It has a name, the Priscilla.  The link for the article in Refinery29 by Kristian Laliberte that goes with this picture is here.  I just have to steal  the first paragraph because it encapsulates what I've been seeing in my recent field research of the religion built around the high heel and the enormous popularity of foot fetishism by women as well as men.  Check this out, I thought I was back in the 1970's:

"In a move that isn't too much of a jump from his Sex and the City heyday, shoe guru Manolo Blahnik has partnered with new Broadway musical Priscilla Queen Of The Desert on a silver patent leather Mary Jane high heel adorned with a Swarovski crystal button (portion of the proceeds from the sale of the heels will benefit New York Restoration Project). Billed as the official stiletto of the production, the shoe figures primarily on stage, with drag queens sliding down the arch in a foot fetishist's wet dream. Bette Midler, who produced the musical, can't wait to get her hands on the sparklers, saying, “If there are three things I love, it's shoes, drag queens and live theatre!" Featuring a cast of 27, a score of over 20 dance classics, and more than 500 outrageous costumes, Midler and a whole lot of gay guys are going to be very, very happy. If the shoe fits...a drag queen will wear it."

Google "stilletos" and you'll get 5,720,000 search results including a lot of photos, framed and unframed, and articles on everything from how to walk in them, to how to cook and bake, hike, and rock climb in Teva stilletos wearing them.  I wouldn't shit you.  Yes, climbing in 4" stacked heels, called "the most comfortable, performance high heel on the planet.  ...Anti-fashion at its purest."  You can read all about it here. 
Here's a picture of it in action:

What is the draw that turns normal men and women into crazy high heel fetishists?  I learned it is what heels, especially stiletto heels, do for a woman's body image. Stuffed into the narrow, pointy-toed confines, the size -8-B or -C foot doesn't look like a 3" lotus flower that has been bound the traditional Chinese way, but they do make feet look smaller.  They also make legs look longer, leaner, and raise the chest and cause the breasts to stick out in a provocative way. They lift and smooth the buttocks too, which explains the tight skinny pants wearing that are frequently seen on the artificially elevated.  One might think when seeing a woman past 40 in short shorts or a mini-skirt and stilettos that they also impair circulation to the brain and promote irrational thinking on a fantasy level in which she somehow thinks she looks hot with her skin folds flapping in the breeze and her varicose veins on public display in living color. 

And that's just the Google results for stilettos.  "High heels" has a whopping 53,200,000 results.  Again, with plenty of pictures, and advice on what to do when your feet refuse to wear them another nanosecond without sending you in tortures of the damned  There are quite a few forum posts and e-mails to high heel newsletters and ezines all repeating the same mantra, "No, my feet may be killing me, but I will not stop wearing my heels."

Did you know that if you go on ignoring the pain and just keep propping yourself up there with Band-Aids, epsom salts, aspirin, and massages, eventually the foot shortens and will no longer reach the floor?   Then you have no choice but to wear your favorite pair of lace-up stilleto sandals to pickup your son at kindergarden or to your favorite aunt's funeral.  It's the only pair of shoes you can walk in any more.

Women grow so frantic when they can't wear their heels, that they do unspeakable things to their feet.  For example, when the toes refuse to come unstuck to the ball of the foot after being lodged in their like extra appendages from an alien body unclaimed by the owner,  women actually go get surgery and have those interfering toes lobbed right off their feet.

Here's what one Beverly Hills podiatrist says about high heels: "Doctors of podiatric medicine see no value in high heels (generally defined as pumps with heels of more than two inches). They believe them to be biomechanically and orthopedically unsound, citing medical, postural, and safety faults of such heels.

"They know, for example, that high heels may contribute to knee and back problems, disabling injuries in falls, shortened calf muscles, and an awkward, unnatural gait. In time, high heels may cause enough changes in the feet to impair their proper function. Most women admit high heels make their feet hurt, but they tolerate the discomfort in order to look taller, stylish, and more professional. In a Gallup Poll, 37 percent of the women surveyed said they would continue to wear high heels, even though they did not think them comfortable"*


Thirty-Seven percent would continue?  Amazing, isn't it?  And some are lying because they're too ashamed to admit they won't give up their obsession.

getting back to how my  eyes were popped open to this bizzaro world of the cult of the spike heel, yes, I agreed to write a 1,500-2,000 word story for a gentleman who specified that he would be the only reader of the piece.  I read his reviews by writers who had written the same story he wanted me to write, and they all couldn't say  enough positive things about  how quickly he paid, how easy he was to to work for, and how nice he was in general. His job description said that it was to be a story about a fashion victim who loves wearing high heels, or feels she must wear them to be in style, but they kill her feet every single  day and night.

I knew  her name was Esmeralda.  She came to me as many of my fictional characters do, with a story she dictated to me and wanted told.  She  was one of those flawless natural beauties who believes she is a plain Jane.  She was 27, single, and didn't date hardly at all due to her terrible shyness and low self-esteem. But she had had a good friend at the bank where she worked as a teller for several long years, and this woman, Janie, had left the bank to go make real money as a dancer at a gentleman's club.  When she told Esmeralda how much she would be earning, estimating her tips on what the other dancers  told her, Esmeralda wanted a body transplant.  She wanted to be young and sexy enough to strut her stuff on a pole in front of a room of oogling men, and do lap dances too for extra tips.

She was young and sexy enough, she just was the last to know it.  She lost sleep over the prospect of getting out of the boring bank and joining Janie, who told her that the manager had told her to invite friends who were interested.  Shechalked it off as impossible, and then she remembered her college reunion.

She  went to  the reunion with the same group of women she had hung out with during college and lived with in the dorms.  They were elegant women, she thought, and she made sure to dress up even buying a rare pair of high heel pumps for the occasion.  The high heels had done something to her. It was almost like being under the influence, except she barely drank and she didn't take drugs.  She had loved how she looked and felt in those red patent leather 4"-heels, and she loved the way that people, men and women, looked at her twice or even more.

She grew extroverted at the reunion, and left her shell at home.  She danced with anybody who asked her.  She kept the group laughing until they begged her to stopfor fear they'd lose control of their bladders.  She had one glass of white wine and didn't finish that.  She had a great time.

She really hadn't figured out for quite a while what had happened to her that night.  She thought it might have been just being with her old college buddies, or out and dressed up, a rarity for her.  It was only when she wore the heels a second time, to a family restaurant dinner for the holidays, and she noticed similiar effects, that she attributed them to wearing the "magic shoes," as she had begun to think of them.

Anyhow, you're not paying me big bucks like he was, the man who contacted me about my bid on the job, so that's about all you need to know except that he insisted that the heels give her lots of suffering, including bunions, but she continued to wear them.  He wanted a lot of details about the pain and suffering.

Now I'm not a foot fetishist, and this man came right out and told me he was, in case the theme of the story for one didn't tip me off, but I would have thought all that talk about bunions, blisters, calluses, etc. would be a major turn off.  Not for him.  He asked if we could chat about the story online before he hired me, and I foolishly agreed.  It was then that he confessed that he was a foot fetishist with a twist.  He needed the gory details.  He wanted to hear about the throbbing of the bunions, soaking and massing the feet without getting any relief, putting Bandaids on the latest crop of blisters--all of it. Not at all what I imagined, since I was thinking more of the famous picture of Marilyn Monroe in heels getting her dress blown up into her face.

We didn't talk immediately about the story, although I had some questions and some ideas I wanted to bounce off of him.  No, we started with my own quite painful history of high heel wearing when  I was a young office worker in the Seventies and didn't know any better. Today I have horrible bunions and feet so flat you couldn't insert a dime under them as a result. It was kind of embarrassing to talk about, but he kept asking questions about what the pain was like, whether I kept wearing the heels, how long after I gave up wearing heels until the bunions formed.  It was pretty gross.

Finally he made a remark that we would get on with discussing the story itself.  Now I am ashamed to tell you that we had chatted for perhaps an hour without discussing the story, only my podiatric history.  Suddenly he said he had a meeting that he was going to be late for if he didn't leave immediately.   He was in such a hurry, I thought, that he forgot to tell me what would happen next.  Would we chat again and talk about the story?  Was he going to hire me for sure?

The next real message came from him to me at the agency where I get most of my freelance gigs.  It said that he was closing the project.  He felt now wasn't a good time for me since I was winding up my novel and had been late for an online chat appointment.

But that wasn't it, boys and girls.  He had sucked the sap out of this flower, and having got his jollies listening to my high heel saga of of pain, bunions and suffering, he was ready to move on to a new source.

So there's the rub as well as the twist.  I kept my shoes on the whole time, but it did me no good.  He got what he really wanted from me, and he got it for free. 


*http://www.lafootdoc.com/cosmetic-foot-surgery
 Jamshidinia, Kamran, DPM Newsletter to Patients