Wishful Thinking...

I received this email today from astrology.com. Their horrorscopes never really work for me. My Mother was an astrologer. She once told me that I was supposed to be born around November 7th or so. I was born eight weeks too early and entered this world as a 4 lb. September baby.

Anyhow, my mother once told me I should read the Scorpio horoscopes rather than the Virgo ones because of my intended due date. Neither work well. If I resonate with any pseudo-personality profile, I'd say that it is the sign of Pisces. So that's what I read.

Always do whatever works for you.

Below is the email that I received. I'm on a mailing list for folksy superstitious wishing rituals. I can tell you right now that this wish ritual does not work.

Nope...

Start of Email:


Dear S.,

Here is your Daily Wish for Saturday, November 29:


Should you spot a man wearing a kilt in some country other than Scotland, make a wish. If you can manage to touch the kilt, your chances of the wish coming true are enhanced.

End of Email.

Several years ago, a former beau paraded around in one of those outfits and I made a wish. It was shortly after we broke things off. I always thought he was parading his hot legs around just to make me miss him.

Part of me still believes that, too....

As he floated past me, I made my wish.

Well, it didn't come true.

Nope.

I know this because I didn't get the chance to, ahem, "enhance the chances" of my wish coming true.

Oh, well....

I wasn't wearing a blue ribbon that day, anyway.....

Siegfred's Jezebel Curse

Warning and Disclaimer: If you are a City Attorney who makes a living perjuring yourself in court, do not read the remainder of this rant as it could be hazardous to your ability to make a dishonest living. By reading this rant, you agree to take full responsibility for whatever may occur within your mind due to the content and free the writer from all liability. Honest lawyers may proceed without concern....

*****

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

~Martin Luther King

I am frustrated by the fact that certain lawyers, who represent my municipality, get away with lying in court and generally treating citizens badly. I've tried asking the powers that be in this city to work towards change, to no avail.

I did get a little lip service but it doesn't look like anything has changed. Bummer. I'm not going to be over it until I see confirmation that their policies have changed. They made my life difficult: I want to see that they are not going to do this to anyone else ever again! I've tried to get them to listen. Now, I've decided to submit my formal complaint to the State Supreme Court.

That bad city lawyer really irritated me, on my dime, too!

• A good lawyer does not threaten to embarrass someone for pointing out wrongdoing or even illegal activities that can get them sued (i.e. allowing a tax audit supervisor to diagnose a co-worker with a mental illness, then fine the family $500 promising the man that he could keep his job, but then firing him anyway because his supervisor practiced medicine without a license... I suspect projection on the part of the supervisor).
• Then, that lawyer doesn't insult the citizen (i.e. claiming that she sleeps with a certain man every night and sees him everyday so she should be able to diagnose him with health issues...after 18 years that wasn't the case and mentioning my sex life surely felt like an inappropriate and disrespectful insult. There were other very personal insulting comments made about my personality, too..).
• A good lawyer should be able to argue without slamming the phone down in the citizen's ear.
• A good lawyer does not threaten to embarrass members of the citizen's family if that citizen chooses to continue to point out the problem to the people in charge (i.e. illegal fines that risk the exempt status for city employees*, playing doctor without a license, violating the ADA, not using the EAP, unfounded and embarrassing accusations about domestic violence, not investigating reports of domestic violence, and so much more...We didn't break the law. Why would we be embarrassed?).
• A good City Attorney doesn't send a colleague into a hearing to lie about that citizen, whom they have never met, in a transcribed court hearing (I'm not even going to go into the sexist bull that was spewed about me...Progressive All America [sic] City, my @$$).
• Furthermore, a good City Attorney doesn't send a Paralegal to harass a citizen at her home and over the telephone the day before a hearing for her estranged-husband.

This is an incomplete list of city related irritations.

Reading the hearing transcripts made me laugh. It is potentially the most expensive gossip I have ever read. There will, most likely, be legal complications due to the garbage spewed in that hearing. It has certainly cost me a pretty dime.

That hearing had absolutely nothing to do with me. I never worked for the City. I've never met these people: how could they know such supposed intimate details about my private life and personal thoughts?

They don't.

They should have nothing to say about me except that I am concerned that they are violating a few Federal and State Laws and not following their own human resource policies. They need to update a couple, too - Here it is so that the ego-searching PR guy can drill it into someone's head! In a nutshell: don't let your people play doctor or shrink, don't let them accuse people of crimes that never get reported to the police, and always refer to suspected "mental cases" to the EAP....is that too much to ask?

I've tried working with the city to change their policies. It's time to bring in other people. I'm going to start with the lawyer regulatory agencies.

What I would really like to do, is publicly state that I really want to hire a Magickal Spellcaster, Voo-doo priest, or Satantic High Priestress, so that I can pay for the casting of a simple curse.

The curse?

Should any attorney working on behalf of the City knowingly lie during any hearing: the City Attorney's office will automatically lose their case.

Period.

Now, the fun thing about curses, is that they only work if the target believes in them. Curses are like a major mind screw. If you think you're cursed you are going to behave in self-sabotaging ways: you will stammer and turn red when you lie. Your eyes will twitch. And every time you tell a lie in a court of law, no matter how well meaning, you will start to grin so widely no one will ever believe you.

Tell me, Ms. Nasty Lawyer, are you superstitious?

Let go of the need to lie. Tell the truth from now on.

To to her bosses, you really don't want a liar among you, do you? She who lies for you will eventually speak against you. Remember that.

***************************************************

I am a citizen. My taxes pay part of the salaries of city employees. If they lose the exempt status for the audit department (which fining an exempt employee for "rumors" that he took breaks during business hours potentially does) our taxes go up. As a taxpayer, I have a vested interest in sharing what I know. A suspension would have been legal: a fine is not. And, there is no exemption for government entities under federal law despite what the Department of Labor tells you.

Finally, I wanted to start a business in the City until I realized how dishonest the Tax Audit Supervisor was. I had already spent $1,000 on logo artwork for the business with the expectation that it would be here. The $500 that was raided to pay that fine came directly from my seed money (and yeah, I know who I blame for that annoying act). Still, the City Attorney can't skirt the fact that they created the crappy situation by breaking the law in the first place!

I was angry prior to hearing all the nasty gossip about myself. How can you testify about someone you've never met at a court hearing? I was not even asked to be present! It should never have involved me in the first place.

Yes, the truth seems to come in short supply at the municipal building. If a Tax Audit Supervisor is going to lie about someone she's never met, what is she going to say about the small business owner who can be tricked into paying too much in taxes and padding her numbers?

A liar is still a liar no matter what hat she chooses to wear.

When I pointed this out to the city lawyer, she yelled at me!! That doesn't change the fact that City Managers allow this type of behavior from those in their employ. It makes them look incredibly bad.

I tried alerting them. They don't care.

I can't, in good faith, start a business here and I've actually advised business people against it. You'd be surprised who you meet on networking websites. I'd say that this has cost them at least 100 times more in lost revenue what they fined our family (probably more).

I hope they chew on that fat fact. They should take care of this soon, so I can change my public opinion of the City. People talk. The truth can sting a heck of a lot more than any lie.

.

By the way, the curse thing, well....the simple threat of one can be just as effective as inducing a full blown hypnotic trance. We'll see. It makes for an interesting form of self-hypnosis. I like calling that trick my Jezebel Curse, because like the biblical Jezebel, it is certainly manipulative.

.

If the superstitious subject sees this, and gets this far after reading the original hypnotic commands, they most likely have already been accepted into her psyche.

.

It's fun being a brat.

Cheers!

Edit 4/17/09: I received a copy of letter from the Colorado Supreme Court advising us to sue the Assistant City Attorney in a civil court of law and speak to the personnel director for the City.

Trying to speak to her boss was my first course of action, unfortunately, I was informed that there was no one who will talk to me. After sending several letters to the Mayor's office and every single member of the City Council, the personnel director did contact me. The problem was that this occurred shortly after a City Councilperson told us to sue and my estranged spouse started interviewing lawyers. I did send the contact with the City some of the information I collected about recommended HR policy, mental health issues, and domestic violence. I don't know if he is going to do anything constructive with it. Unlike other metro area cities, this City has a reputation for being lazy. The powers that be will probably have to be embarrassed into action.

It's just a shame I can't go into detail quite yet. How many people will be hurt in the interim?

God does weird stuff for a reason. The trick is figuring out why crap happens in the first place. There is always a lesson for every situation life throws at us.

Why do bullies create so much drama? Whenever I read the paperwork, I realize that someone really spent a lot of time making a bunch of crap up. It had to be a woman. Men, if they lie, it is usually one well placed lie and that is it. If you are bullied by a woman, though, they make everything complicated and you have to sort through convoluted stories and tons of petty bull crap in order to figure out exactly what happened.

Just when you think you've figured it out, Ms. Bully pulls a new trick out of her hat! It is so darn annoying!

I also learned yesterday that someone posted one of my hastily written blog articles on a disability website. I guess I can't complain that the story is getting exposure. I'm just a little embarrassed at how convoluted the story is. It is actually quite tortuous to read and, darn it, my grammatical errors don't help. Next time I'll be sure to run the article through a really good word processing program. As a dyslexic, I know better.

Sigh..

Take care of your wonderful selves.

Cheers.

Elect Change

To change one's life: Start immediately, do it flamboyantly, no exceptions, no excuses.

~ William James

Wild Boys

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

- George Bernard Shaw

****

Except you, Pat.

Happy Birthday - May all your wishes come true.

Spooky....

Bring forth the raisins and the nuts-

Tonight All-Hallows' Spectre struts

Along the moonlit way.

~ John Kendrick Bangs

***

Okay, I went to the cemetary to visit my parents. I was hoping to spook myself on Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

According to various Pagan traditions, the veil between the land of the dead and the land of the living is supposed to be thin. From sundown at Samhain until sundown on All Saints Day (Nov. 1), it is easy for the dead to have contact with the living. That's why we have the tradition of dressing our children in scary costumes - it is supposed to scare away the ghosts.

My last couple of visits to cemetaries have been strange, to say the least. In July, I visited my parents and hallucinated. In September, I accompanied a friend as she visited her father's grave. I actually hallucinated in front of her. I heard her father's voice. He told me to have my friend call her mother.

Once I uttered the weird thought to my friend, she received a call from her young niece telling her that her mother was picked up by an ambulance and on her way to the hospital.

It gets weirder. The girl did not know what hospital my friend's mother was in. My friend called other relatives, no one knew anything. I had a hunch to drive to a Catholic hospital a few blocks away. My friend ran into the emergency area and discovered her mother. My dear friend laughed about the coincidence.

I wasn't laughing. It was spooky...

Due to those experiences, I decided that I absolutely must visit a cemetary today, that way I could try to prove the weird stuff to myself. I loaded up my camera and flowers. I hopped into the car and drove to the cemetary.

Nothing happened.

Nothing.

No noise. No birds. No hallucinations.

Nothing.

It was dead quiet.

Well, there was one thing out of the ordinary. My parents' plot was sunken in today: you could see a rectangle extended out in front of the gravestone for several feet*.

It wasn't sunken in a few months ago.

That's curious, maybe they left for the day.

Hmmmm.......Where would they go?

Would they visit the grandkids?

Crap, I didn't clean the house.

My mother in my filthy house?

Now, that's the definition of horror!
Can ghosts hurl brooms and dust rags?
Just kidding....
She wouldn't do that. Mom would just short out the electricity so no one would see the mess.
Good ol' Mom. I sure miss her.
But on this Day of he Dead, nothing was freaky or out of order.
nada....zip....zilch.
sigh...

***

* Okay, I'll admit it...the ground was wet and the dirt was a little compacted. Still, the belief that the dead can roam the Earth or watch the living is a scary one: there are things that I don't want my Mom to see me doing.