Missing you. Loving you. Missing you more...

Massage License Call

Today I had a conference call with the Florida Board of Massage Therapists to determine if my application for a Massage Therapy License would be approved. The call began promptly at 11 a.m. and I was released from the call at 1:36 p.m. (The call continued but my part was over.) The license was approved, which is what all my friends and family want to know, but I thought the call itself deserved a mention because of just what all happened in the 2 hours and 35 minutes leading up to that.

No, the Board did not spend all that time discussing just my application. The time spent on my application during the call amounted to less than a minute. Thankfully.

Here's a synopsis of what did come before me: The first "tab" as they called it was a decision whether to permanently revoke the license of a person who is currently serving out a 15 year sentence for sexual battery - on a client at the massage studio where he was working part time. They voted unanimously to revoke the license.

The second tab was to revisit a second-time appeal to a denied application for a person who had quite an interesting history in the massage world. The initial application was denied because it was discovered that the person had been practicing unlicensed, but represented herself as licensed. Further discussion showed that she had submitted more than one application, with conflicting information provided on crucial points. Also, she had worked in a massage establishment (not in Florida) with a known history of sexual misconduct. It was also disclosed that the school she attended was never actually a massage school at all. The Board unanimously voted to uphold their original decision. This decision was reached about 35 minutes into the call.

After this, the decisions and discussions became much more muddy. January joined me in the room to listen to what was going on, because it was all just crazy to me. For the next two hours, minus a 10-minute break, they debated back and forth over what seemed to be the same thing, but paused a couple of times for motions. I won't go into what this was about, but I will say it felt like I was listening to a verbal tennis match on acid. Then there was the one board member whose sole purpose in life seems to be to vote opposite of whatever everyone else says.

But there were a number of people who all benefited from the last of these debates because it resulted in the approval of several more applications based on the outcome of that one discussion.

Finally, they got to the easier cases. They said my name, I stated I was present, and they pulled up my file. As soon as the file was open, someone spoke up and moved to approve my application unencumbered. Two people immediately seconded, a vote followed and without pause was approved unanimously.

Hallelujah!

So, I am approved, and should have my license either later today or tomorrow. I'm guessing it will be tomorrow since the call was still in progress when I said "Thank you" and hung up.

Buster's Still Got It

My car recently passed the 50,000 mile mark. I responded to this event with, "Crap. There goes my LTV." (Loan to Value)

I just checked my loan balance against a "Good" rating on kbb.com and was quite relieved to find that I still have a little wiggle room before my payments flip upside down.

I don't plan to sell my car any time soon, but would like for the value to stay above the loan balance for as long as possible. So all I can say right now is WHEW!

Grinch Has the Answer!

I was just thinking, while waiting for my nail polish to dry. Because that's pretty much all you can do while waiting for nail polish to dry, unless you want everything around you to match your nails.

So what craziness was I thinking? Well, I'll tell you. My first husband, Dave had a tendency to want to limit how many and which people we hung around with, or became close friends with. Any time I made a new friend on my own, he disapproved, and actually asked me a few times why I felt like I needed more friends.

Being the (mostly) friendly and open person that I am, it is natural for me to start finding common interests and having deeper conversations with people whom I spend more than a little time around. Doing this tends to cause me to have a few friends with whom I am very close, rather than tons of friends who only touch the surface. While I still have lots of "surface" friends, I am very drawn to those who become close and want to communicate with them as much as we can manage.

Dave is a self-proclaimed "social dinosaur" who does not particularly wish to have more than one or two close friends, and everyone else falls into the group in which he "hates everybody equally."

I tried several times in our relationship to explain to him why I needed to be so friendly. I would reply that my heart was too small to have only him in it. I couldn't explain it clearly to him and usually resorted to the useless and (usually) untrue statement, "You wouldn't understand." Maybe he would have understand if I could just think of a way to express it clearly.

This morning I was thinking about how to explain that. I was actually thinking about the Grinch when it came to me. See, I knew the chorus was good for me in more ways than just a musical outlet! (We're singing a song from that movie this year.) You know how the story says that the Grinch's heart was too small? And how it grew and grew once he let himself be open to the love and joy of the residents of Whoville? That's it!

The heart, soul, spiritual being connects to other beings, and by doing so it gains depth; it expands further out into the universe, into the oneness that brings us all together. By staying remote and remaining only within in ourselves, we are not able to reach out into that oneness. We remain small and singular, and thus get all our love, joy, comfort, etc. only from within, or from whatever soul happens to be the only outside source.

So by saying that my heart was too small to only hold Dave in it, what I really meant was that I didn't want it to be only him and me in it. I wanted to somehow reach out into that connected oneness that is the whole spiritual universe that I knew existed. To do that, you have to open yourself up, let others in, and share yourself with others. That's how it works, and I really can't think of a better way to say it.

Grinch had the explanation all along, which is really ironic since Dave liked to be more Grinchy than anyone I knew. I wonder if he stepped out of that little shell and learned to share in the world around him? I hope so. It would be an awful waste if he didn't.

Perfect Timing

At work the other day, a plumber had to come fix something for us. I hadn't seen him yet, but knew that someone was in the restaurant doing some work.

Some girls up in the counter area were having a discussion about the baby one of them is having. She is white, the daddy is black, and her nickname happens to be "Panda". Someone said that she was going to have a baby panda, too, because of the mixed races (1/2 black and 1/2 white). That comment was followed by someone putting out the old, worn out, "Once you go black, you'll never go back."

This, of course, set me off. I have had boyfriends, lovers and yes, even husbands throughout my life - relationships which were based, not on color or race or culture. These relationships were based on who that person was and who I was. (Except for Dennis, whom my parents forbade me to date during high school, because they didn't want me to be called a "nigger lover". Yes, really.)

So, my immediate reply was, "Wait just a minute. I am married to a black man, but that doesn't mean that if something happened, and I lost him, I wouldn't find myself with a white man, or some other race the next time around."

As I was finishing the sentence, I turned from the fry vat to walk over to the counter and finally looked up to see what was blocking my path. It was the plumber: a tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed mountain of yummy. And he was looking at me and smiling.

I don't often turn red in the face, except from physical exertion, but I'm pretty sure Santa would have looked pale next to me at that moment.

If all I looked for were physical beauty, he'd be it. But I also looked in his eyes, not just at them, and I'm sure from that and from a brief interaction later in the day, that he would have fit in my world somewhere if things ever came to that, not because of what he looks like, the color of his skin or any of that. Because the person I saw behind those eyes, and the person who spoke to me, felt like the kind of person with whom I can relate.

It could be that on further interaction I find this to be untrue, but that's not the point. The point is the person that I am is not just what people see physically - the 44-yr-old who is overweight and whose body is not happy with her current job. I am the person who loves nature, the world, space, who looks up at the sky and says, "There is my church!", and wants very badly to be back in the same home with her husband. You are the person who loves what you love, who believes what you believe, who desires what you desire, who works through your struggles.

We are WHO we are and not WHAT we are.

(And that guy was really yummy to look at.) ;-p