-- Tuesday, July 13, 1999 --

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10:08 a.m. Oooooh. Last night I watched the Sci-Fi Channel special on the Blair Witch, in the dark because it was too hot to turn the lights on, and I also found the perfect link (to a ring of links) to the phenom, if you're interested. I'm keeping my distance. Got to keep thinking Happy Thoughts. Thinking is my job. My brain is my instrument.

Some people believe that you attract other people and things to the same vibrational frequency you inhabit. Negative thoughts attract negative people. I used to worry that if I entertained too many scary thoughts that bad things would find their way to me. They probably did. You think you're going to fall off the high wire -- you stupidly look down -- and dammit, you plunge. You think you can succeed, you think you can, you think you can: and duggonnit, there you go, chugging along.

My mother always used to say that if we didn't listen to her, we were listening to the devil. And here's what the devil is always whispering in your ear: "What's the use?"

Your diet is going great until that foul thought crosses your mind. "What's the use?" Despair. I'll never succeed. You've got the perfect resume, the perfect opportunity to make-the-call, and you fold up your cards or your petals and you slump away. The devil is right there on your shoulder, whispering in your ear: "What's the use ... whatstheuse? Who in the hell do you think you are, anyway?"

So, for now, I'll leave the witches to those who need to visit them. For me, I've got bright things to think about, laundry to do, a stretch of concrete to scrub. In her interesting book, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, Christiane Northrup writes that women think and reason in a multimodal, multidimensional, multifaceted way. I see that woman she writes about every day, dropping her 2.3 kids off at the nursery school down the street: Multi-mom.

Dr. Northrup says that this feminine form of thinking has been denigrated by society and that the masculine straight-line, get-to-the-point way of thinking is still valued most highly. Yet women, from the beginning of time, have had to do at least two things at once. They have always had to 1) live their own life and 2) take care of that other task: the regeneration of the species ... tend to periods, tend to pregnancy, tend to childbirth, tend to the child at the breast, on the hip, in the heart, for the rest of measured time. Always, from the onset of puberty, always there is a dualism to consider: me and the other. For women without babies, the "other" just expands and expands until it encompasses the entire office staff and every pet and plant in the vicinity.

Men have the "luxury" (or is it the affliction?) of concentration. And maybe that great, sought-after perfect act of concentration that I'd worked so hard to achieve was not such a prize after all. Maybe it is -- aha! A limitation.

Just think! We may be in the rosy dawn of a new era of thinking. I mean, whoever invented all these buttons and underlined words to press and explore on the web was certainly not thinking like a man, now was s/he?

You all come back again, you hear?

Tomorrow: just press and go.