Up to Here

Imagine me, holding my hand to my forehead as if I'm shielding my eyes from the bright sun. "That's how full I am," I squint. "Up to here."

Sena, my old college friend, has joined me after her board of directors meeting. "I can't believe they let me do this," she marvels. "Me, the principal of a school with a budget in the millions of dollars? It blows me away!" We sit at a round metal table in the garden courtyard of a little restaurant, me drinking wine and trying to shake a two-day headache. Sena ponders the plants growing on a nearby terrace, and wonders if they are celery.

Digging, she wants to know if I have friends to play with on the weekends, if I have anyone to talk to, if I am taking action in my life.

I share my "up to here" woes. First of all, a student's father stared me down like an alpha-male at parent/teacher conferences last night. He angrily bored his eyes on me for several minutes. I ignored him, trying to focus on the angry wife, but I wanted to look at him and say, "Are you attracted to me or something?" His son is one of the rudest students in the school. Go figure. But conferences were better than last year, when a father practically jumped over the table at me because his son's failing grade was my fault. The salt mines are emotionally exhausting. It feels like I have no time to think.

Another thing. I finally spoke with a lawyer about bankruptcy and student loans. He said there's not a chance that I can have them discharged. Apparently a case just went down where an attorney-turned-pastor tried to discharge his student loans through bankruptcy (his income was less than $20,000 a year) and the judge ruled that his student loans were non-dischargeable. So my student loans need to find a dark corner in my head where they are not continually demanding my attention. I can't pay them. Hell, I can barely get from one paycheck to the next. And all my great dreams for paying them back now seem like halfwitted schemes.

"I don't feel like I have matured at all since college," I say, and Sena happily agrees. "Neither do I." She takes control, just like she used to do when we were all beginning to take off on our tabs of acid and make stupid communal plans like, "Let's walk across the wild hills where the horses roam until we reach the trees on the horizon!" An adventure! It was raining that day and she cut holes in plastic bags and slid them over each of our heads. Hours later when we came back a frantic, muddy mess, drenched and freaking out because some cowboys chased us on horseback with guns because they thought we had cut a hole in their fence, she greeted us with cookies and warm blankets. She never drank, never drugged, and never judged.

"What do you want," Sena asks. She gives me a good long hug. "OK. You will write an affirmation every day and send it to me. Our lives will not be carried along on unthinking days and unthinking nights. We will decide. We will have purpose. We will be spontaneous, have fun!. We will direct our lives toward happiness. We will have hope. We will enjoy other people. We will care."

Good girl that I am, I have already begun my assignment.

I won't think of decisions I have made as "bad decisions". I will see them as opportunities to learn and grow. I will not let my self-concept be controlled by other people. I will consider myself worthy of having goodness come my way. I will not be afraid of wealth. I will be open-hearted.

How am I doing? Whew. Affirmations are a bitch. Sorta like chain-posts.

But I will step out into this sunny day and be glad for what comes my way.