Summary: It's been a week—a rickety emotional ride for every frigging minute of the 168 hours that comprised the last seven days. More or less. Well, if you want to break it down, I suppose you could take away the 56 hours I slept and the 40 I frittered away at work, which account for a different realm of headache than the issues I'm addressing here. Then we've got the time with friends, perhaps some of which was allotted to discussing the issues I'm about to lay out for you, but, for the most part, the time I took enjoying my friends isn't the focus of this post, so yeah, let's subtract 15 more from our running total. By now, my 168 hours of angst and upset is looking more like 57, but since I'm on a kick, I've got to go one better and tell you I burned lots of hours on the basics, too—maintaining my general upkeep and securing food, clothing and shelter type stuff—in addition to meditation and true minutia like texting, cyber jiving and thumb twiddling that I won't bother to detail here. So the final tally for time in hours spent pissed off and emotionally locked in the jaws of this week's beast was more like 6. I'm happy to report that I've got some perspective now, so I can see more objectively into these events, which couldn't have been any more divinely timed—or absurd. And I assure you, it didn't feel so "divine" being on the receiving end at the time. Still, upset is upset—whether it's 6 seconds or 6 hours. Granted, we all have those moments that challenge our good natures and make us want to call it all off, go fetal, pull the blankie up around our ears and not come out of our darkened rooms in the victim 'hood until further notice. Believe me, I get it. Let's take my week of outrage as an example—okay, my 360 minutes of anger. On Sunday I had a phone reading with a lovely client who was referred to me by a dear friend we had in common. At the end of our session, the client and I had begun to chat about our wonderful mutual friend and during our exchange it turned out that this client and I had been to several of the same social events without ever having met officially at the time. The client and I went on to talk about how much fun we'd had at one particular party when the client added how funny it was to see that one van full of black people driving around in the dirt parking lot. Hmm, I thought. What do we have here? I asked myself. Nothing, I decided. Very shortly thereafter we said our polite goodbyes and ended the call. As I considered the client's comment, almost immediately my mind raced back to earlier that morning in the hardware store when, after finally having found the perfect terra cotta pot for the new plant I'd just bought, I rounded the corner of the aisle in the direction of the register when I noticed a woman who, not a moment before had been engaged in a lively chat with a man across the aisle roughly 4 feet away. Her eyes meeting mine, she scrambled back over to her shopping cart to secure the zippers and straps on the purse sitting unattended in the top compartment of the shopping cart near the end of the aisle from whence I had emerged. Okay, I thought. Here we are again. I say again because a similar incident happened in the Safeway a few days prior when a woman reaching for a can of beans down the aisle from me noticed my approach and quickly abandoned what she'd been doing to close the 2-foot chasm between herself, her cart and her precious purse. Skip to the Saturday night concert I attended with my Kenyan friend Adimu as the two of us are laughing and chatting when a handsome white guy named Steve approached us and spoke of how he'd noticed us earlier at the bar, but he'd been too afraid to talk to us because, well, he said, he just didn't know. Didn't know what? Adimu and I smiled, inquiring in unison. Well, he flushed, you were just standing there talking and you're so exotic and beautiful. I just had to say hi.
