"True genius is knowing where to find the answer." - Einstein

I'm told I have an attitude problem at work - usually by the boss who takes me aside to "coach" me (frequently) by starting off with this sentence or one very similar:  "I don't know what your job is here, but you're doing it wrong." The conversation from there usually consists of him telling me how long he was a manager with another company for X many years and how easy it was for him to coach the people there because he fully understood the part they played in the scheme of daily life at that other company. Since I've been with my current employer for almost three years now and was given my current title, Inventory Specialist, about 18 months ago and he hasn't even completed his first year with this corporation, I can't help myself....

I tell him that, if he REALLY doesn't understand what that job title means, he needs to ask the corporation to include that position in his training so that he can fully understand what I do for the company....

So yes, I guess that gives me an attitude problem...

But in my defense, my attitude stems from years and years of being told "If you don't know what you're talking about, RESEARCH IT!!"

That, my friends, is why I have several reviews that speak of my ability to weave a tale that makes one feel you're there with my characters. I don't just write a story, edit it, and throw it out there for your consumption. For "Night of the Tiger", I conducted several interviews with my then brother-in-law, who was a long haul trucker for several years. Dana gave me intimate details about life on the road, such as how many hours a trucker can actually drive before he has to take an enforced "break". My sister-in-law, a former exotic dancer, gave me details about what that was like, as I've never been on a stage myself. For "The Tiger's Cub", there was research into empathy, tornadoes, the bayou, etc. For "A Wild Tiger's Heart", there were videos of the various places that Kelly Starbird wanted to visit, the tensile holding power of hotel windows and what could cause the sealant used to break, etc.

And, of course, there are hours and hours spent in the Maine Room at the Portland Public Library, searching for information on family members that continues to elude me even after almost 36 years of research....

So why am I considered to have an "attitude problem" when I'm simply suggesting what one of the most celebrated geniuses in history suggested for future geniuses?

Ah well. Such is my life until one of my books catches the kind of fan base that made Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and other such authors rich and famous. I guess I just have to learn to bite my tongue when it comes to the "coaching" and take the praise like he gave me last night, when I was continuing to straighten out the top stock in preparation for our "Black Friday" season: Back To School. (The warehouse has already started sending us items that we will need to be able to locate quickly for the summer to refill the "Power Aisle", so whenever I'm left to my own devices and I'm done with my regular duties, I've been reorganizing things that have been a royal mess for almost two years now.)

Last night, both my other team member and I got a compliment from the manager on how good the store looks, and how we're keeping more stock on the shelves than any other store in our district, and how happy the DM is with us....

But I still have an attitude problem. It's called "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder" and it makes me ignore whatever mess-making foolishness I'm asked to perform in order to make the store into the kind of place I like to go and shop...

I think I'm very happy with my "attitude problem".....*grin*

"You've washed your hands clean of this"

I've been having a discussion on my Facebook page about certain things that one of my friends is on the opposite side of the fence about, as he is a Republican and a fundamentalist Christian. I am a Democrat and as Pagan as they come, even though I was raised in the Catholic faith.

The discussion lately has been entirely about North Carolina's Republican governor, who recently signed a bill into law that doesn't allow a transgender person to enter a bathroom that is for the "opposite sex" from what their birth certificate identifies them as. His stance is that this is entirely to protect women and children, my stance is that, unless you have someone standing at the door insisting that they look down your trousers, this "public restroom police" measure protects no one (and there was a video posted recently in which a woman, with shorter hair and looking somewhat masculine, was "escorted" out of the bathroom because she refused to pull out an id to prove her sex even though several friends were shouting "She's a woman" at the male officers who came in to escort her out).

Of course, my stance comes from a relationship that Alanis Morrisette covers in her song "Hands Clean", from which I took my title for today's blog post, and the relationship I had directly after that in which my sexual partner WOULD have claimed to be transgender for the sake of following me into the woman's bathroom so he could keep his eye on me....

This stanza in the Alanis song (which plays over the speakers at my workplace at least twice each shift) reminds me of my first relationship:

"Ooh this could be messy
But you don't seem to mind
Ooh don't go telling everybody
And overlook this supposed crime"

The man this brings to my mind was 19 when we first met and I was 14. I had long greasy hair, acne, and wore glasses that I hated. He was very handsome (and knew it), had family money and, as I learned in later years, he liked virgins, but not to have a relationship with after he got the virginity he so coveted....

He courted me until I was 16 and gave in to his desires, the whole time insisting that we not even tell friends who saw us together that we were "boyfriend and girlfriend". He encouraged me to cut my hair (which also helped clean up my skin) and stop wearing my glasses except to read (which my eye doctor eventually allowed), which made other men start to pay attention, then he dropped me like a hot potato the minute he got what he wanted, only talking to me twice after that: once when I missed my period and he thought he was going to have to come clean and "do right by the baby" (it was a false alarm and he disappeared as soon as that was confirmed) and once after he'd been in a severe accident in California, when he wanted to "apologize for all wrongs" just in case he was about to meet his maker. (He admitted to doing the same thing he did to me to no less than 20 other girls..jerk.)

Needless to say, my "first boyfriend" left me in a mental stew, blaming myself for "leading him on", thinking I was totally evil, and as such, I needed to be punished....

Enter boyfriend #2, who was actually a friend of one of my cousins (or so she said when she introduced us) who was into theater, as I was in those early days of college. He claimed that he wanted to help me to adjust to the college theater, as I entered during the spring semester of 1980 and he had been attending since the fall of 1979. We had one official date during which he got some liquor (we were both under the legal age at the time), we got drunk, and I allowed a sexual encounter...

Looking back even a week later, I was fully aware that I'd made a mistake, because in HIS mind, once we had sex, I belonged to him. He kept insisting that we were going to drop out of college, get married, and move to a place in Oklahoma that his uncle had given him in good ole uncle's will (even though Unk was still alive at the time, so we would be sharing the farm for a time). When I insisted that no, I was going to finish college, and no, I didn't want to move clear across the US and be that far from family and friends, and especially NO, I wasn't going to marry this guy just because we'd done the nasty, he started stalking me everywhere....

I was in an all girls dorm, so men weren't allowed on the upper two floors before 10 a.m., so I would head down to breakfast before my 8 a.m. history class and he would be sitting in the lobby, waiting on me. Despite my objections, he would "escort" me to breakfast, where he insisted that I needed to drink a glass of milk ("because women need calcium to prevent osteoarthritis later in life"), then he'd "escort" me to class, and he'd be waiting when I came out (at which point, I'd be feeling odd, as if I'd eaten something not quite right) to "escort" me back to my room. Often, I would settle down to have a nap until I felt better and awake - sometimes hours later - in HIS dorm room, wondering how I had come to be there, and whenever I tried to go to the ladies bathroom in the next section of dorm rooms, he would force me into the men's room in his section because "you're too drunk to go by yourself", at which time he raped me if I was unable to get the door shut and locked first....

A friend from my dorm started to pay better attention than I did to when I would start feeling ill each morning, and a few weeks later, when he insisted that I have a second glass of milk despite having got myself one (which he always went and got when I couldn't watch him), and when he brought the milk back to the table, she "accidentally" bumped him, causing him to dump the entire glass of milk down his front.  He went more ballistic than a simple drenching with milk should have caused, so when he got escorted out to go and change his clothes, my friend insisted that we bail - FAST - and then she proceeded to explain to me, as we went toward a friends room in another dorm than where we lived, why she thought he was putting something in my drinks.....

She started us off on an all night party that went from one dorm room to another, re-introduced me at one point in these "knock knock - the party is in YOUR room" proceedings to the man I would eventually marry, and, at some point, convinced me that I needed to get this fellow away from me before he made me overdose on whatever he was feeding me in my drinks.

This all happened the last night before we went away for spring break - at which time, I had a miscarriage of a baby that I never even knew I was carrying, because whatever was being put in my drink had resulted in several unprotected sexual encounters with this man who was so determined he was going to convince me to marry him. Needless to say, the miscarriage gave me the incentive to go to his room as soon as I returned to campus - at which point, there was a masculine voice and a feminine voice whispering in the dorm room, so I went to the local pub to grab a bite to eat and ran into my stalker's roomie - who listened to my tale, turned white as a sheet, and offered to go back with me to face down his roomie. When we got back to the room, it smelled like someone had recently had sex, but was empty, and the roomie opened a drawer in my stalker's desk to pull out several baggies that had the word "roofie" on it. (I had never heard of Rufenal until the roomie explained what this was, and with his help, we gathered up all the little baggies in the drawer and walked down the hall to flush them down the toilet in the men's bathroom - my thought being that we had never been interrupted while he was raping me here, why should anyone come in when the roomie and I were just flushing all the toilets over and over?)

Suffice to say, I was still waiting for him with all his little empty baggies in my pocket when he finally got back to his dorm, insisting that I was "mad about nothing" when I told him about hearing whispers when I first knocked on his door because "my roomie was entertaining someone". (I let him go for a while before informing him that the roomie was at the pub, and helped me come back to dump his stash of "date rape drugs". That was when he finally started to panic, going through several "secret hiding spots" that his roomie and I had already emptied.)

When it finally sunk in that he had no more drugs to feed me, he got an air of superiority, insisting that I was too late. He had already had unprotected sex with me, and had collected some urine from one of those nights when I was too drugged to notice, so he KNEW I was pregnant and would be forced to marry him....

That's when I broke the news about the miscarriage and he made the mistake of slapping me across the face for "ruining everything by having an abortion". I still don't know whether I hit him with just my hand or something I grabbed from nearby, as I was seeing red at the time, but suffice to say that, when I came back to being in charge of my temper, he was sitting on the floor with a broken nose, staring at me like I'd grown another head while I told him that he could STOP bringing me drugged milk at every meal or go to jail, as I was going to turn any further drinks or food he tried to force on me in to the campus police and turned on my heel to walk out.....

Suffice to say, it's been 36 years since that encounter, and I've heard from college friends that he insisted he'd been in a fist fight with a man to end up with his broken nose. I think back and wish I'd had the common sense to bring his baggies of drugs to the police instead of letting his roomie convince me to flush them. And I think about the lack of confidence that made me go out on a date and "give up the goods" that first night, stemming from Mr. Secret Relationship and the way he made me feel totally useless because of how he treated me.

It's taken a lot of time for me to become self-confident in myself and my own worth, and as my friends on Facebook insist that "not having trans-sexuals allowed in public restrooms" is going to "protect our women and children", OBVIOUSLY you didn't have someone rape you in a public bathroom in the 80's. OBVIOUSLY the ones who are going to take advantage of the ability to claim they're trans to get into a ladies room AREN'T going to be hindered by a law, as they already have been breaking the law for decades, as there will ALWAYS be men who think that women are only here for one thing, and that one thing is to make men happy no matter WHAT the man decides is going to make him happy.

Frankly, people, I expect that the same type of men who let me be in a men's bathroom in a college dorm without turning me in to the campus police still exist, and as long as we all bury our heads in the sand and pretend that some words on paper, drafted in some hallowed hall where the truth never comes to light, is going to "protect our women and children", we will NEVER take the steps to make ALL humans equal with equal rights.

*stepping down off my soap box so that others can come and make comments, whether they agree with what I've written or want to tell me that I'm nothing more than a sex toy for all the men of the world*

"I banish all negativity from this space. Only good and light may enter here."

Last night, my husband and I did our "normal" ritual for a Monday night. He was watching the NCAA College Basketball finals on his laptop while I was (sort of) watching the news and catching up with the day's news on Facebook. At 11:30, when both programs ended (and congrats, Villanova, on that "beat the buzzer" shot that won you the championship), we turned off the televison and, since I was actually the one in less pain last night, I took the dog down for his last trip outside while my husband went up and get settled upstairs. When I returned to the second floor, where the living room, a small room that has become Bill's fly tying space, and a weight room all are situated, I realized I was still wearing the reading glasses I wear when using the laptop were still in place, so I went back into the living room to drop them onto my laptop for morning. A quick glance around proved that all was in order. There were no candles left burning. The television was dark and silent. All lights had been extinguished.

I went up to bed.

At about the time that I was finally warm enough to start to drift off into the arms of Morpheus, with the bulk of my husband snoring as he pressed against my back and the small, furry weight of the dog pressed up against my stomach (also snoring), I started hearing soft voices. I lifted my head to listen for a minute, trying to tell if it was real or my crazy imagination, but there were no lights or sounds other than that soft murmur that I convinced myself had to be coming from outside the house. Maybe one of the neighbors was out by a car saying goodbye to a late night guest?

I dismissed the sounds and slipped off to sleep.

As always, I was awakened by the clock radio and the songs and chatter of the country radio station that my husband prefers. Since I'm currently on the late shift (12-8 four days a week and a morning shift on Friday, just to throw off my inner clock), I did my normal thing about getting up, dozing lightly until the radio shut itself off after an hour, hearing the weather report and groaning about it, same old same old.

Then I noticed something that WASN'T "same old": that soft sound of murmuring voices in the distance that I had written off the night before as late night guests leaving the home of one of our neighbors.

"Are you hearing voices?" I asked the hubster, who normally will cock his head to one side, listen for a moment, and then tell me I'm imagining things...

This time, he responded, with a confused look, "Yes, I am."

"Did you get up at some point and turn on the tv?" I ask, and again, that confused look.

"No. Did you?"

I start hearing the theme to the Twilight Zone as I respond in the negative, but then his face clears as he comes up with an explanation: "Maybe the dog went down and was trying to see if I had anything on the other side of my laptop and hit the button."

"The dog", whether he actually does it or not, gets blamed for a lot of things that happen around here, from closing doors that you could swear you left propped open, to knocking things off tables, and obviously, even to turning on the television by walking on a remote that, considering how small the dog is, should have been outside of his reach on the tv stand where my husband stores his laptop. But then I remember hearing the voices as I was drifting off to sleep at a point when I can solidly connect the dots to prove that both Pookah and Bill were snoring next to me, having remained within physical contact with me from the moment I settled beneath the covers until I was warm enough to not wish to go see if somehow the television had turned back on or if, perhaps, I was hearing someone talking outside in the middle of the night.....

Now, my children and I, and even my husband at one point before we ever moved in, have mentioned seeing something a bit off in this house. When we were painting the outside of the building in an effort to hurry the paperwork along when we were buying the place, my husband insisted that his Uncle Ken, who died in 1976, if I remember the stories correctly, had been sitting above him at one point when he was painting close to the peak over the garage and smilled at him, as if approving of our choice to purchase this property. If I were to bring that up now, he would deny ever telling me that, as he and I have different believes in the spirit world, and he is currently at an all-time Mr. Spock logic mode on most of the weird happenings in this house, so unless it's a thoroughly logical explanation that DOESN'T involve some prankster in another plane of existence, all is well in Bill's World.

I, however, being raised to believe that God, an entity that cannot be touched, but can be felt in one's heart, believe that there are things in the world you just can't explain with logic. Take, for example, my very mobile coffee cups when we first moved in.....

I am often left alone in this house, and at times, I have done things such as pouring a cup of coffee and leaving it next to the coffee maker while I do something on the first floor, which houses a bathroom, a long, narrow combination kitchen/dining room (or, at one point, our living room), a den/laundry room and a space we call "the rock room", as it has a rock floor that appears to have been a back deck space at some point in it's past. About four years or so ago, my husband walled off a part of the "rock room" that features a crushed rock floor (where the former owner built a "greenhouse" that was on the south side of the building and was too hot to grow the plants), but when we first moved in, this was a space one could easily reach from inside the house, and it often had spider webs trailing down one corner, as we didn't use that space much and the spiders love a good drafty spot....

It was the spider-infested corner where I would find my freshly poured coffee whenever it went missing, behind an unblemished wall of web, still steaming from the point about 15 minutes earlier that I had poured it and left it next to the coffee maker. (The first couple of times this happened, I searched for an hour or more before finding it, but after a point, I would roll my eyes and head for that one corner, where the seemingly playful poltergeist seemed to enjoy putting it because I would always curse under my breath about having to break my coffee free without having any web or spiders fall into it.)

There is, and always has been, a spot at the foot of the stairs on the first floor where I catch a chill every time I go downstairs for anything. Sometimes the chill I catch there is fierce enough to make me shiver to the point I can barely walk as I make my way back up to the living room for a blanket. My husband used to make fun of me for "being wimpy" until I started touching him with a foot or a hand that has suddenly become an ice cube just from walking through that one spot. He's now decided that I have something seriously wrong with my circulatory system, even though this house is the only place where I get those fierce, "you-can't-move-until-you're-warm-again" chills.

And, of course, there are the odd electrical things that happen here far more often than they should, like a television that turns itself on or a stereo system that turns itself down when the phone rings and back up again when I've hung up and, sometimes just for my own amusement, call out "Ok, I'm done. We can have the music back up."  (The stereo doesn't have any such thing as a remote, doesn't turn the sound up or down on a regular basis, and has been checked by Mr. Logical more than once for any weirdness, yet it still happens from time to time.....)

While researching and talking to various people over the almost 20 years we've been living with this, I've started using such oddities as last night's "voices" as an indication that it's time to relight a smudge stick and walk through the house, trying to get every possible space touched by the smoke from the ancient form of cleansing and repeating my title "prayer" over and over as I work by way from the third floor, where we have a master bedroom, a bath and my office, through the second and first floors (including the basement and garage) and ending at the front door, where I briefly open the door in a symbolic offer for any evil to leave before I "seal" the door against it's return. This is a temporary fix for the problem, but one that buys me from a couple of weeks up to a year without the return of any of the oddities (although that cold spot always remains there on the first floor, defying me to make whatever is causing it to leave). As I've been typing this entry and the sage smoke that I spread around circulates, it's an almost notable sensation of peace that's been growing around me, as if telling me that, even should it be only a temporary fix, I've managed to banish the spirits for another little while.

Of course, this also means that the house smells of burnt sage, so if I don't do anything more before I leave the house for my shift, my husband will be texting me about the "dump smell" in the house, asking which insence that is he's smelling so he can throw it out.  (He and I grew up in an era when dumps burned the garbage once a week, and a smell very similar to my sage would permeate the air for miles around the dump - right up until the EPA realized that, if you could smell the smoke, you were close enough to get ill should someone burn something toxic......)

So, if you have little issues in your house like mine, I recommend doing a search for "Smudging Protection" against spirits and emotional baggage left in your home. As I have to do, you may need to repeat it several times a year, and it always helps to start the session by drawing the smoke to yourself to banish all negativity in the practitioner before the real work begins.

Although I no longer believe in organized religion, I do still believe that there are invisible entities out there, some good and some evil. I sincerely hope that I have helped you to find the way to your own inner good and that you can benefit from a good "spiritual cleansing" to begin the spring cleaning (or fall cleaning, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere and are just entering your "prepare for winter" ritual). May only good and light enter your heart and soul, and may only good things come your way in this coming season.

Blessed be!