Staying The Course

by Lillian Csernica on February 14, 2023

Hello, folks. I hope you are all safe and well. I’ve been doing my best to keep on keeping on.

One of the biggest challenges a writer can face is the problem of chronic pain. Back in the days when I was younger and stronger, I was in a car accident that damaged my left knee. I can still walk, thank God, but time has taken its toll. My right knee has been taking up the slack ever since the accident. The result is Degenerative Joint Disorder in both knees.

Chronic pain is exhausting. It sucks away all energy and the power to concentrate. It makes sleep difficult and medication necessary. I know that my writing is different now than it was when I first began selling my work and seeing it published. That is so frustrating. If not for the pain, maybe I could write more and write better. Maybe I could endure the endless labor of online self-promotion more successfully. I am a mother of two boys, so what little time and energy I have to write is precious to me. Chronic pain robs me of that.

And yet…. The need to write continues. The desire to publish continues. Compulsive behavior? Maybe, but for me it’s a good thing. On the bad days when I just don’t have it in me to do the work, I ask myself, “How bad do you want this?” Days go by so fast now, running into months and years. There is no “later.” There is no “tomorrow.” If I don’t get something done right now, today, when will I get it done? It’s so hard. When I can’t stand up, when I can’t walk across the room, it seems impossible.

That’s when doing it matters the most.

Yes, there are times when I cut myself some slack and accomplish whatever I can actually manage to do that day. There are times when I look at my To Do list and just start laughing. As Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” I interpret that statement not as knowing what you can’t do, but knowing how much or how little you can do on that particular day. It’s the habit of making the effort that matters. If I don’t bother to make the effort, it gets easier and easier to just leave the work for some other day.

Dorothy Parker once said, “I hate writing. I love having written.” That sums it up. The labor of writing feels dreadful, but the satisfaction of knowing you did the work is immense. My favorite unit of writing is a twenty minute free write. Keep that pen moving. Just get the words down. The great part about free writes is the way I can just keep plowing forward, and not stop to think until the timer goes off. Then I get to bask in the pleasure of having written.

In the past week I sent three short stories out to market. Write, edit, submit. Rinse and repeat. Yes, my body aches and my mind get worn out, but I won’t give up. Each moment of success adds to all the ones that have come before it.

Gathering My Thoughts

by Lillian Csernica on May 17, 2022

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I enjoy writing by hand. I keep a personal journal along with writing first drafts in my work notebook. As satisfying as this is, there are two drawbacks to this approach. First, if I’m doing a timed free writing session where the goal is to blow past the internal editor, I often can’t read my own handwriting afterward. Second, I then have to spend the time typing in all those pages. That makes a drastic difference in terms of getting stories polished and out to market.

Last week I decided to plow through all the notebooks I’ve been piling up. That meant organizing the ideas and random scenes and large chunks of developing stories. I was delighted to discover quite a few I’d forgotten about writing. This prompted me to indulge in two of my favorite activities: shopping at the Dollar Tree and buying office supplies. Here’s the new binder for the various bits and pieces related to my Kyoto Steampunk stories.

I’ve got more stacks of notebooks to go through. That means more binders, more dividers, and the hunt for more stickers and whatnot to do the decorating. Dollar Tree, here I come!

R is for Relaxation

by Lillian Csernica on April 21, 2022

As you may have gathered from some of my previous posts, my life is rather stressful. Finding reliable methods of relaxation is essential. Here are a few of my favorites.

Watching the wildlife

Various members of the local wildlife community who turn up in my back yard. I live on an acre of land with a creek that runs along the southern property line. The wildfires in California caused such a loss of habitat I’m happy to see the critters show up here. The regulars include ravens, crows, ducks, wild turkeys, woodpeckers, and two dozen species of songbirds. Squirrels both red ad gray live in the trees on both banks of the creek. There are two skunks who snuffle around late at night. Once in a while I’ll see a ‘possum.

Coloring books

Entangled Night Skies from Creative Haven uses Angela Porter’s wonderful designs. It takes some work to color in all the separate elements of each page, but it’s well worth it. There’s no particular deadline, so I can go at my own pace and linger over the colors I enjoy the most.

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Bad ghost chaser movies

I find these entertaining if only because they’re so predictable. Ignoring all the warnings. Blowing off that creepy sense of being watched. The lights flickering. Will the problem be in the attic or the basement? The popularity of paranormal investigation movies has given me the opportunity to gain some insight into other cultures. Scandinavia, India, Poland, Turkey, France…. All over the world, things go bump in the night!

Q is for Quandary

by Lillian Csernica on April 20, 2022

Lexico.com defines quandary as “A state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation.” This is a perfect description of the difficulties I’ve faced when trying to balance a career as a professional writer with being the mother of two special needs boys.

In 1993 I joined the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association as an Active Member. In 1998 my older boy Michael came into the world at only 23 weeks. That he survived the next three and a half months in the hospital is nothing short of miraculous. The writing I accomplished during that time consisted mainly of the notes I kept in pretty hardback journals, documenting Michael’s growth, his tiny but meaningful milestones, the tests and surgeries and growing list of medications. Once Michael was allowed to come home, life became crowded with doctor appointments and physical therapy sessions. I tried to make the best use of the time available, editing manuscripts while in transit to the various appointments.

In 1998 John came along. Now I had two babies to care for. At that time it was just me while my husband was at work during the day. This is when I developed the habit of writing at night after the boys were asleep. Not the best plan when I wasn’t getting much sleep anyway. John was getting better and better at climbing out of his crib. At age two Michael developed seizure disorder, so I lived with one ear listening for any strange sound that might indicate John had escaped or Michael might be in distress. It’s very difficult to achieve the state of creative trance necessary for writing when one’s attention is constantly divided.

When Michael turned three and was eligible for the Early Start program, one of the benefits was nursing care. Thanks to the RNs who helped out and the support of my family, I wrote Ship Of Dreams. Getting that manuscript research took two solid years, then writing it meant daily labor. I suffered a disk crash that cost me two months’ work. (Words of wisdom: “Finish it!” and “Back it up!”) I found a literary agent who sold the book to a publisher. I’d been having some success with selling short stories and writing nonfiction pieces.

This might sound wonderful, and it was, but it meant struggling against my own fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and what I later learned were the symptoms of PTSD. When your brain already feels like dead coral, it’s almost impossible to summon up the energy needed to string words together. By that I meant just making sense when you’re talking to another person, never mind the effort required for creative writing. How was I going to keep writing? How was I going to complete projects, edit them, and do the marketing work?

There have been many times when I’ve wanted to “do it later.” As many wise people have said, later never comes. Today is tomorrow. I asked myself, “How badly do you want this? How badly do you want to work toward a Hugo, a Nebula, a World Fantasy Award?” The answers to those questions drove me to find ways to do the work even while attending doctor appointments, during hospital stays for Michael, and then facing John’s difficulties.

John had been hitting all the developmental milestones up until age four. We knew he had speech delay. The speech therapist was the first one to suggest we get John evaluated by a neurologist. The neurologist diagnosed John with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. At that time I knew nothing about “autism” other than the really drastic examples most people think of when they heard that word. Mind you, this was twenty years ago when a lot less was known about neurodiversity. I was in shock, frightened, depressed, and overwhelmed. Managing Michael’s care was already a complex challenge. Now John’s doctor and therapist appointments would have to be shoehorned into an already tight schedule. How on earth was I going to maintain a writing career when I couldn’t even manage a regular night’s sleep?

So I learned how to write whenever I had a few minutes. Free writing. Word sprints. Call it what you will. These bursts of writing are manageable, fun, and can be fit into a car ride, sitting in a waiting room, while having a meal in the hospital cafeteria. It’s not always comfortable, and it’s not easy, but practice promotes adaptation. I’ve written a total of seven novels and quite a few short stories. Now that some family issues and the first shock of the pandemic have settled down somewhat, I hope to move forward with editing and polishing these novels.

Living in today’s world makes it even harder to maintain a creative life. So many of us have had to take on the role of caregiver to a family member. Believe me when I tell you it’s essential to carve out some time for yourself, and for your creative work. Somewhere in your waking hours there will be fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, maybe even a whole hour. Use it. Sit down and take a good look at your daily schedule. You may find you have more time than you realize, it’s just a matter of making choices about what you spend that time doing.

Creative success. How badly do you want it?

M is for Mystery

by Lillian Csernica on April 15, 2022

I love a good mystery novel. Few things offer me the escapism and fine writing and entertaining guesswork of an excellent mystery. These are some of my favorites:

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Artists In Crime by Dame Ngaio Marsh

This was the first Inspector Alleyn novel I read. While clearly upper crust and possessed of impeccable manners, Alleyn brings a very pragmatic approach to his investigations. By that I mean he lets the suspects think he’s playing along with their nonsense while he seizes the available opportunities to gather the information he needs. Among the artists involved in this crime is Agatha Troy, a famous painter who captures Alleyn’s heart while he’s trying to figure out if she’s the one he has to arrest for murder. As the sixth case in the series, this story presents Alleyn in a new light with a depth of characterization that compelled me to read all thirty-two of his adventures.

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The Murder At The Vicarage by Agatha Christie

The first of the Miss Marple novels, in this story I discovered the world of the quaint little English village and what a fierce combination of deceit, resentment, and violence seethes just below its proper public face. A cranky, abrasive churchwarden is shot in his office at the vicarage. A total of twenty-one characters dilute the main story a bit with subplots, but the red herrings do keep you guessing. The characters are so realistic and well-drawn I can read this book again and again.

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The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

Nordic Noir is quite a reading experience. Scandinavian landscapes, brooding police protagonists, and crimes of dark and twisted violence. I admit I wasn’t prepared for that last one. Even so, the brilliance of the writing and the intensity of the characters make for a thrilling read. Harry Hole is the Norwegian detective in Jo Nesbo’s series.

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The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett

There’s trouble brewing in Uberwald, a dark, spooky country where power is split between the vampires, the werewolves, and the Low King of the Dwarves. A new Low King is about to take charge in a turn of events that will affect the reins of power all over the Disc. Lord Ventinari intends to protect the interests of Ankh-Morpork and its allies by sending Commander Sam Vimes of the City Watch. Vimes also happens to be a Duke, which makes him the perfect copper for the diplomatic mission. Vimes is anything but diplomatic, guaranteeing a bumpy time will be had by all. The plot concerns a theft that leads to murder surrounded by lies, lies, and more lies. Great stuff!

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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Philip Marlowe’s first novel-length case takes him from blackmail and a gambling den to drugs, murder, and madness. General Sternwood hires him to solve the problem plaguing his younger daughter Carmen. The cynical way way General Sternwood talks about both Carmen and his elder daughter Vivian as corrupt and “having all the usual vices” signals just how far down such high class socialites can fall. The movie version starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall is excellent, directed by John Huston with William Faulkner himself working on the script. Hollywood did sanitize the story a bit. For the complete story with every sordid detail, read the book!

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L is for Love

by Lillian Csernica on April 14, 2022

LOOKING FOR LOVE

The older I get, the more I realize how much I don’t know. Take love, for example. I don’t know much more about what love really is than I did when I was in elementary school. For me, love started out being this big exalted dream of perfect happiness, perfect harmony, and total devotion to each other. I think I got that from reading fairy tales. (Disney movies also have a lot to answer for.) Then I listened to what older girls said about their boyfriends. I got the impression that having a boyfriend was one of those Rules for Living that showed everybody else you knew what you were doing.

One night when I was nineteen years old, it was so bitterly cold my body heat wasn’t enough to warm up the sheets and blankets. I lay there alone, shivering and miserable, thinking if only I had boyfriend. If only I could find a boyfriend to keep me warm, inside and out. The intense desire to avoid another night like that one prompted me to do some pretty stupid things. As I look back at that cold night from the perspective of fifty-plus years, I can see that I could have saved myself all kinds of trouble if I’d just bought an electric blanket.

Ever since I met my first crush when I was in the grade, I thought the right guy was the solution to all my needs and problems. I don’t know how I got this idea. It must have been all those fairy tales, because I certainly didn’t learn it from my family. My grandparents got divorced twice and married three times. (It’s true. I have photos of two of the weddings.) My parents divorced when I was eleven. My older sister never has married. My brother had to divorce his first wife. Why on earth did I think attaching myself to some boy who probably had even less of a clue than I did would somehow result in that magical state called “true love”?

When I was on the debate team in college, the first rule was “Define your terms.” That way both the Affirmative and the Negative teams knew exactly what the Affirmative team meant by the resolution being debated. When it comes to the search for love, I think the same rule should apply. After all, the statement “I love you” can have several different meanings and those meanings often depend on context. Matchmakers, dating services, and our best friends all ask the same question, “What are you looking for in a partner?” This is where it starts to get really complicated. Does the resulting list of characteristics represent the idealized image of the person whom you want to fall in love with? Or does it represent the person whom you want to fall in love with you? Are you really looking for a healthy relationship based on mutual give and take, or are you looking for a human transitional object that will soothe your insecurities and pay for your evening entertainment?

At this point in my life, I can see that wanting this perfect person to fall in love with me meant more than just having a boyfriend so I could go out on dates. It meant proving to the world that I had achieved the ultimate validation, the concrete emotional evidence that I wasn’t a loser, I wasn’t the last person chosen during schoolyard games. I wasn’t cold, alone, and miserable anymore. That’s what I hoped. Life hasn’t worked out that way.

Right now there’s all that Easter candy out there on the shelves. Most of it is chocolate. As adults, we know which brands are better than others. We know how to compare them and get the most value for our money. This skill comes from time, maturity, and a lot of taste-testing. Kids are different. When it comes to chocolate, kids don’t care. In the Dollar Tree you can find the phrase “chocolate-flavored” on many of the Easter items. There’s no actual cacao, just a lot of artificial colors and flavors. Unfortunately, the same can be said of some people. In the quest for love, some of us who crave True Love, the Real Thing, can become so desperate they will settle for the off-brands that are cheap, flashy, and artificial. It’s so hard to resist the temptation for a quick fix that will silence those nagging cravings and insecurities. It took me a while to learn the importance of patience, of saving up for the quality chocolate and the quality people.

My mother had her opinions about my boyfriends. When I was in middle school and awash in all kinds of hormonal angst over whether or not I’d ever get a boyfriend, Mom said I was “boy crazy.” Accurate, if not all that flattering or sympathetic. Years later, after I’d graduated high school and had spent some adventurous years working the Renaissance Faires, Mom managed to sum up both the quality and the quantity of my efforts to find love: “Well, at least you won’t wonder what you might have missed out on.” Once again, neither flattering nor all that sympathetic. Thanks, Mom.

So now that I’m a woman of a certain age, do I really know any more about love than when I first started dating boys? I’ve been married for thirty-four years come July, but that’s less of a testament to romantic love than to maintaining a stable home life for my sons. In a world of uncertainties, I know three things for sure: I love my sons, I love my cats, and I love really good dark chocolate.

J is for Jokes

by Lillian Csernica on April 11, 2022

What do you get when you cross a rabbit with shellfish?

An oyster bunny!

Did you hear about the cowboy who was all wrapped up in brown paper?

He was arrested for rustling.

How does the snowman commute to work?

Bicycle (By icicle!)

Why did the two 4s skip dinner?

Because they already 8!

What kind of tree can fit in one hand?

A palm tree!

Did you hear about the first restaurant to open on the Moon?

It had great food, but no atmosphere.

Two windmills are standing on a wind farm. One asks, “What’s your favorite kind of music?”

The other replies, “I’m a big metal fan.”

I is for Insomia

by Lillian Csernica on April 9, 2022

When I was a teenager I loved to sleep. Stay up late, sleep late, linger in bed, the very definition of a layabout. Science now tells us teenagers need a lot of sleep because they’re growing both physically and mentally. Adolescence takes a heavy toll on the body and the mind. I’ll vouch for that. Living through middle school meant two of the worst years of my life. Sleep as a method of escaping reality became a coping mechanism. I had what the psychologists refer to as “peer problems.” I grew up alone due to my brother and sister both leaving home when I was only seven years old. Now I was in middle school, twelve years old, and my parents had just gone through a really messy, bitter divorce. The divorce meant Dad was gone and Mom had to go back to work, so I was a latchkey kid before the term had been invented. I was miserable. I could escape that only when I was sleeping.

For somebody who liked to sleep so much, how did I develop all three forms of insomnia associated with clinical depression? It’s been a long and stressful road from twelve to fifty-six, and life wasn’t exactly all rainbows and unicorns when I was a little kid. Just to be clear, let me explain the three separate forms of insomnia:

1. I have difficulty getting to sleep.

2. I have difficulty staying asleep.

3. If something wakes me up, I can’t get back to sleep.

Do I take medication for insomnia? Oh yes. Does the medication I take work? Yes and no. If I avoid caffeine, don’t eat the wrong foods and don’t eat too late in the evening, take my pills on an empty stomach and then go straight to bed, I might have an even chance of actually dozing off in a reasonable amount of time. All of that is referred to as good “sleep hygiene.” In general, my sleep hygiene is poor. I stay up too late. That’s when the house is quite enough for me to write. I watch exciting mysteries or detective shows or supernatural movies on TV. Many of these self-defeating behaviors are tied into my depression. Some nights I’m just too agitated to sleep and the medication makes no difference at all. Then there’s the problem of my body’s tendency to acclimate to medication within about four months. Am I still depressed? Oh yes. Will I ever be cured? There is no cure for Major Depressive Disorder. There is only support through medication and therapy, along with healthy living habits and a determination to keep on climbing up out of the darkness.

I know these things for sure:

Sleep deprivation makes depression worse and causes weight gain.

Depression will make weight gain worse.

Weight gain will make depression worse.

See how easy it is to get stuck in the labyrinth with no way out? The answer is sleep. When I’m asleep, my body is restoring itself and my mind processes what’s going on at various levels of my consciousness. That processing is essential. Picture your mind as one big file drawer. When you get enough sleep, all the files are in the right order and new material gets filed and cross-referenced appropriately. When you don’t get enough sleep, information gets filed incorrectly, memory doesn’t work right, and if the sleep deprivation goes on long enough, what you end up with is that file drawer yanked out, turned upside down, and everything dumped on the floor in an impossible mess. Sometimes the mess is so bad you have what the psychiatrists refer to as a “psychotic break.”

Bear in mind I’m talking about myself here. Different people need different amounts of sleep. Newborns do very little but eat and sleep. Teenagers need a lot of sleep not because they’re lazy but because of their mental and physical growth rates. Older people might not need as much sleep as people in their thirties or forties. Your mileage may vary. All I know is I need more sleep than I get, and that’s partly due to my own bad habits. It’s important to be aware of that. The more control I have over the causes of my depression, the more I can fight it. The more I keep up the fight, the more often I win. It’s when I forget that I can stand up against the depression that it takes over. Fatigue, chronic pain, the endless stress of two special needs children, and the pandemic make it very difficult to keep moving forward. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is my friend.

Right now I’m sitting here at 1:30 a.m. It’s been another long day in a long week. Before I go to sleep, I will write down at least three good things that happened today. I will light that candle and keep it lit against the darkness of depression.

F is for Future

by Lillian Csernica on April 6, 2022

I apologize for the delay in posting. Today I received my first cortisone shot in my right knee. It was a bit of an ordeal. Thank you for your patience.

FINAGLING THE FUTURE

I was raised Roman Catholic. When it came time for my Confirmation, I decided to leave the Roman Catholic Church. Confirmation meant making a commitment to act as an adult according to the Church’s dogma and practices. I told my mother I did not believe what the Roman Catholic Church taught, mainly because I couldn’t reconcile the contradictions between this God of love and mercy I kept hearing about and the really scary people who served him. In my parish, we had several fire and brimstone Irish Catholic priests, the kind with silvery hair and brick red faces who never smiled. We had nuns, too, the old-fashioned kind in the proper habits with veils and their skirts worn below the knee. For some reason I never understood, those nuns were replaced by an order of nuns who wore what looked like ’50s twin sets in beige polyester with skirts to match and no head covering at all. One of these “modern nuns” taught my afterschool class (Sunday school on a weekday afternoon). She was more like a social worker than an actual nun. (She talked like a lawyer, which makes sense given how legalistic the Roman Catholic Church tends to be.) This drove me even farther away from the Church. I needed to find a source of spiritual growth that didn’t send so many mixed signals.

Mom let me off the hook for Confirmation, but she didn’t give me any ideas about filling the sudden void in my spiritual life. Chaucer said an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop. He must must have known a few teenagers. I had an active mind, a strong curiosity, and a love of reading, so I started looking into subjects much better left alone. Back then I liked to watch horror movies, classics featuring Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, and Peter Cushing. I wanted to know where the filmmakers got their ideas for the monsters, sorcery, and strange occult organizations. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Lucky for me, my Holy Guardian Angel kept a lifeline attached to my silly soul and hauled me out of danger more than once.

I mention all this to give you a context for what I was like when I plunged into the world of divination, or fortunetelling. A lot of those scary movies I’d been watching featured curses, omens, and ancient artifacts, even items that could help foretell the future. So I rushed right out and bought myself a Tarot deck. Even in this new hobby I was very much a traditionalist, because I bought the deck created by Arthur Edward Waite along with his book on interpretation. Waite was a member of at least one of the occult organizations very prominent at the turn of the century when spiritualism was all the rage among the intelligentsia. The enormous popularity of séances, table-tapping, and Ouija boards, prompted professional illusionists such as the great Houdini to debunk the frauds. I’ve met a lot of people who have really wanted to believe they were psychic. A lot of them just wanted their dreams to be real. The problem with that kind of thinking is, you can’t just have the good dreams be real. The nightmares are part of the deal too.

When I was in high school I worked in community theater as a stage or lighting technician. That meant I got to hang around backstage, be part of the magic of a live performance, and go to the cast parties. The show onstage was nothing compared to what I’d see at the cast party afterward. At one of these parties I brought along my Tarot deck and set myself up in a corner. This was not a smart idea. Trying to peer into the mysteries of the Infinite for people who are drunk and/or wasted on recreational drugs does not end well. Divination should not be treated like a party game, like one more neat thing to do after you have your face painted. But there I was, sixteen years old and so sure I knew what I was doing.

A few people came to have readings done. The only one I remember clearly is the one I hope I never forget. An older woman wanted to ask the cards a question about a problem involving her daughter. I don’t recall the problem. I worked my way through the cards I’d dealt, watching the woman for her reactions. Fool that I was, I let my eagerness to please color what I saw in the cards and how I expressed it. The woman went away quite pleased, with a smile that seemed a little too broad. I was bright enough to spot that, but totally blind to what caused it.

A man who’d been sitting nearby watching me do readings asked me if I understood what I’d just done. By his tone I could tell he thought I didn’t know. He pointed out to me the way the older woman asked the question indicated she’d already decided what her daughter should do. I worked so hard for her approval that I totally missed the trap. I’d given that woman the answer she wanted. Now she’d go to her daughter and tell her daughter what she should do. If the daughter had other ideas, the older woman could back up her own opinion with the authority of my Tarot reading. I had given the older woman power she perhaps should not have gained. By doing so I might have set in motion events that would lead to a place that the daughter did not want to go, creating friction and hidden resentments and who knows what other emotional and spiritual damage. The man who explained all this to me wanted me to understand that I had no clue how much responsibility went along with presenting myself as any kind of fortuneteller. He was right. Even now, forty years later, I still feel ashamed for being so arrogant and ignorant.

E is for Enlightenment

by Lillian Csernica on April 5, 2022

EMBRACING MY INNER FOOL

Once a person reaches Self-realization, they are freed from their own desires and worldly attachments. They’re also liberated from external pressures, such as cultural and social expectations, or political and economic influences. They are beyond self-delusion and material attachments. — Yogapedia

If my life has taught me anything, it has taught me that I’m a fool. The older I get, the more convinced of this I become. (After all, the evidence just keeps piling up.) It’s amazing how bone-deep that foolishness can run. Of the many different ways my foolishness has manifested itself, a few examples stand out:

I have insomnia, so I exist in a state of perpetual sleep deprivation. That goes a long way toward explaining the bizarre things that can happen to me first thing in the morning. One day I put the box of cereal in the refrigerator, then tried to put the carton of orange juice in the full kitchen cupboard. Took me a minute to figure out why it wouldn’t fit. I’m so glad I didn’t try to lay the open orange juice carton on its side.

Another fine example of getting my wires crossed occurred the day my son John was about to go out for the afternoon with his aide, a young man named Dario. I was running around doing too much at once, my feet and my mouth moving too fast for my brain to keep up. That resulted in me handing John the money for gas and incidentals and then leaning over to kiss Dario goodbye. Perspective kicked in just before I crossed the line concerning Dario’s personal space. We both shied back with a yelp. I apologized profusely. By then Dario had been working for us long enough to know what a goofball I can be, so he laughed it off.

Early in my marriage my software engineer husband decided to take advantage of my trusting nature. We were out shopping for groceries. In the produce section, I was picking out items I needed for a particular recipe, concentrating on the list of ingredients. Suddenly my husband called out, “Put down those mushrooms! They’re covered with fungus!” I jumped and dropped the one I was holding. Only then did the truth hit me. A mushroom is a fungus. My husband has pulled that kind of thing on me more than a few times over the years. I’ve learned to watch out his “Mr. Wizard” voice.

Once in a while one of the worst symptoms of my Inner Foolishness will manifest itself in the form of me concocting some elaborate plan. This symptom usually comes out in one of two forms. One, I plot some elaborate payback scheme against somebody who has given me grief so intense it brings out my misguided Machiavellian urges. Two, I get caught up in somebody else’s drama and allow myself to be carried along in the wake of their personal upheaval.

My most memorable Machiavellian moment came back in the days when I was working at the Northern Renaissance Faire. I’d discovered a woman whom I believed to be my friend had in fact been conducting a campaign of deceit and character assassination behind my back. What she did not take into account was all the conversations we’d had that involved the exchange of personal hopes, dreams, likes, and dislikes. In trying so hard to pretend she was my friend, she had given me all the ammunition I needed to expose her vital emotional organs to the mockery of our entire Faire community. I got quite carried away with plotting her total destruction.

Did I go through with it?

I did not.

I could say my better nature won out, compassion triumphed over vengeance, etc. etc. The truth is, I just knew something would go wrong and it would all backfire on me. Also, I did realize it was a colossal waste of time and energy, a backhanded compliment to a who’d proven she was no longer worth that kind of effort. Karma would catch up with her. (The funny thing is, it did, about a year later. Stay tuned for K Day!)

The finest example of me letting myself get caught up in somebody else’s drama was also related to people from Ren Faire. I knew a woman who had some serious issues rooted in how her mother had raised her. All this baggage prompted her to redesign her own identity with an eye to becoming the person she really wanted to be. Self-actualization is a good thing, right? Not when it’s an excuse for shaking down everybody who cared about her in some strange effort to be compensated for what she felt her mother failed to provide. This person decided to change from being a Water sign to a Fire sign and switch everything in her life over to this new state of being. I’ve done a lot of reading about matters metaphysical. While I’m certainly no expert, I’m not sure this sort of thing is even possible. Just deciding to adopt a new birthdate and rising sign doesn’t make the planets line up differently on your natal chart. As far as what the Recording Angel might have to say about it, who knows?

I’m old enough now to know better about this kind of situation, but at the time I found it fascinating. When this person invited me to attend the wake for her Old Self and the Re-Birthing Ritual for her New Self, I accepted both invitations. I was hoping to witness genuine personal transformation. I ended up being a participant in two carefully orchestrated exercises in narcissism. The true dimensions of her commitment to a higher state of being were revealed after the Re-Birth Ritual. This woman got all bent out of shape because no one brought her a cake and presents. Where did my Inner Fool come into play? By allowing myself to be part of the audience this woman so desperately craved. In doing so I encouraged her ridiculous and self-destructive behavior.

It’s a great relief to realize your own foolishness. It frees you from the burden of maintaining a facade of sophistication and worldly know-how. If you embrace your Inner Fool, expectations fall away, agendas crumble, and you’re free to just roll on through life without the constant fear of looking stupid. You know that sooner or later you will. That confidence brings with it a certain relaxation envied by those people still ruled by their need to look cool.