15th
Erin Shows You How to Use The Secret
I used to go to a healer in Irvine. Unfortunately, being stuck in traffic two hours each way seemed to undo any positive healing that was happening so I quit her. But before I broke up with her via email she taught me that when speaking to the Universe, it first likes to be capitalized and second, gets confused easily. It doesn’t understand complicated phrases like, “I don’t want to be a loser anymore,” and instead hears only keywords like, “loser,” and focuses on that. Kind of like when you tell your Nana (again) that extra work isn’t the same as an acting job and that no matter how closely you are placed behind the actor who is talking and no matter how believably you mouth the words,”peas and carrots,” like you’re having a real conversation, you still won’t get promoted and that even though Zach Braff went on to make Garden State the fact that you quit walking through the background of Scrubs is neither here nor there because he was an actor and you were sitting in holding listening to other extras talk about ways to steal multiple meals from Craft Service. She only hears “peas and carrots.” It’s best, instead, to filter out all the unnecessary and negative messages in your dealings with the Universe. That’s what she said, anyway. And I’m pretty sure she was just quoting The Secret. As an example I’ve included some of my requests for the coming year and shown in parentheses the original phrasing that would have surely baffled the Universe and my Nana:
1. Please make my thighs look like sinewy antelope thighs. (I want you to make magic real so I don’t have to work out and I’m tired of being skinny fat like Vince Vaughn was between Swingers and being actually fat.)
2. Make me a horse. (I’ve been wishing to be a horse since I was eight. You made a mistake and put me in the wrong body. Fine. Fix it. Have you seen my body hair? I’m halfway there already now just do the rest.)
3. If I can’t be a horse give me a baby and some bookshelves. (To be clear, I don’t want to HAVE a baby because growing a human inside another human is the kind of thing Stephen King would think up if it didn’t already exist. In the book the characters would be all excited and then suddenly they’d be all, wait, how do we get this human out of this woman? And what you call “birth” would be the horror element. You know, when a screaming, bloody monster claws its way out of the woman’s pink parts ripping her from vag to anus and then demanding refuge. No. I want a bunch of cozy bookshelves and a ready-made baby so that when people take night walks they look up into my window and wish they were me. Do you hear me, Universe? I’m tired of being the one on the dark sidewalk looking in! If I stole that line from Bonnie Tyler, I apologize.)
4. Give me my own tv show that I wrote. And act in. (For reals, writing is HARD. The way I sit when I’m on my laptop makes my back hurt and then I think I have a kidney infection which you can die from and then I end up drunk in Urgent Care. Again. You have to get drunk in Urgent Care otherwise they send you to Cardiology because your pulse is so fast they can’t take it. What I’d appreciate is 1) a great idea that doesn’t sound like a depressed person watched Lucas too many times and decided to write the adult version, 2) some sexy secretary hands that type like lightning and don’t google things like, “what happened to that guy from the Sprite commercial in 1989 that I had a crush on, you know the one my mom taped onto VHS as a present for me?” 3) Will power that actually chooses correctly when the choices are “live your life” and “watch 4 seasons of Brothers and Sisters on Netflix while kneading your weird, non-sinewy thighs and eating peppermint ice-cream long after Christmas has passed.)
5. Please, really, please make Harry Potter real and then make me Harry Potter. Or Dumbledore. (Look, I’d even be Malfoy. Or one of those God awful girls who keep trying to sneak love potions into chocolates like date rape in the magical world is adorable or something. The thing is, Universe, I fucking fell apart after I finished the Harry Potter series and I still haven’t gotten over it. I mean this isn’t even a relevant time to be bringing it up. This might have been funny three years ago. Now it’s old. That’s how much I want to have dead parents, a wand, and a purpose in life, ok? The thing is, you can’t create a whole world in which magic exists and people can fly and wizards talk about their feelings and there’s no drinking age limit and important things are happening and the way to fix them is to collect antiques with soul bits and then TELL ME IT’S FICTION. Who wants to be in this dumb world when that one exists??? So if sinewy thighs and horses and happiness are too much for you could you at least make me some sort of tragic fictional character whose sole purpose in life is to save the world so at least I feel like I’ve got some reason to get out of bed in the morning? Could you at least do THAT?)
