Counter-Programming

Incongruous but true, I spent my St. Pat’s evening at a meditation class hosted by a local Buddhist group. I know it sounds kind of odd for a Guinness lover like me to be hanging out at a “dry” vegetarian restaurant, clearing my mind on the biggest Mick holiday of the year. But, frankly, if you need St. Patrick to nudge you into a pint, you’re not much of a Guinness lover. I find that any day ending in “y” is quite sufficient as a special occasion, thank you very much.

And I like to try something new on occasion. So why not a little of the meditation? Oh, yeah. Because I suck at being quiet. About 5 minutes into the first relaxation dealie, I got to a point where I had this nearly irrepressible urge to run around the room waving my hands in the air and screaming. I controlled myself only because I thought that might be distracting for the people who actually seemed to be getting it. It’s that "quite contrary" thing. Tell me to be still, and I want to start a conga line. Tell me to clear my head and I start hearing the Gilligan's Island theme. Conversely, when I’m in crisis mode, and my brain should be on overdrive, I get this Matrix like thing – everything slows down and becomes crystal clear. Ridiculous, really. Now if they had meditation classes in the ER, I might be able to make that work.

Then after some good discussion about reincarnation (in which I barely restrained myself from theorizing that in the context of a multidimensional universe, we live many existences simultaneously, but due to the linear nature of time, we only experience them sequentially – I thought it might be a conversation killer), and another round of meditation (sit right back and you’ll hear a tale), we headed downstairs for some dinner at the Cosmic Café, which as it sounds is the local hippie haven for global inflected vegetarian food with kitschy-cute names like the Dharma Bell (stuffed bell pepper) and the Socrates Plato.

And I guess you can add one more to the list of religious figures that kind of weird me out. I have no idea why, but I find myself under this weird pressure, not necessarily to be good per se, but more to not be bad. Pastors, priests, rabbis, and now monks. I spent the entire meal giving the poor monk the bug eye every time he tried to say something pleasant. I was watching my mouth so hard that I was practically going cross-eyed. I totally get they are normal human beings with, lets just say it, abnormal jobs. They dedicate their lives to something I spend most of my life avoiding - religion. I don’t actually think that they are some sort of hot house flowers that will expire if I drop the F-bomb. But still. You don’t want to be a big old heathen. Actually, I do want to be a big old heathen. I just don’t want to upset the nice religious person by acting like one in front of them. It would be impolite. I may be a heathen. But I do have manners.