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Eastern Medicine hocus pocus
Thursday, November 5 1998
This morning I dreamed that my workplace is actually a Heaven's Gate-like cult, but that this fact was being revealed gradually, starting (in this particular dream) with a gradual imposition (as dictated by our overly-exuberant Member Support person, Karen) of a Heaven's Gate-style dress code. Remember the sweat pants and the Nike Sneakers?
In the evening Kim was reading to me (as she often does) from a text associated with one of her Eastern Methods somatics lectures. Some Chinese doctor thinks that blood cells are made from food in the spleen, circulate through the body and go on to become various body cells in the healthy subject. But should a person weaken, (losing that magical balance of yin, yang and Qi), these body cells revert back to blood cells which may (in some especially bad cases) turn cancerous. I usually smile weakly and nod politely to such hocus pocus nonsense, but tonight Kim really seemed to want my opinion so I made the mistake of giving it to her. I told her that the "theories" she was reading to me made absolutely no sense and didn't serve to explain anything at all. It was wasted paper, wasted typing and, frankly, a waste of time. I told her I knew way to much about physiology to accept such garbage or respect any text (or field of study) containing or acknowledging the validity of it. At first we managed to argue fairly benignly, but inevitably the argument turned personal. Kim was appalled that my thinking was so "fixed" and that I wouldn't at least contemplate these preposterous theories. She went on to suggest that I didn't see the value in anything in her field of expertise and that we "can never live together." Using some of the mumbo-jumbo from one of her classes, she suggested that if she touched by abdomen she'd find my liver "hardened," since it is the apparently the seat of my stubbornness.
But Kim has a lot of Italian in her and these kind of fights, and the words contained therein, are (in the words of programming) local to the specific fight and not meant to apply outside of it. As usual Kim sought to bring a happy resolution to our conflict before we fell asleep.
Meanwhile, Kim's mother has rekindled her interest in Kim, sending huge four digit checks and mail-ordering boxes of fancy new clothes. Kim usually intercepts these orders before they are processed and amends them to suite her particular clothing tastes. I'm a little concerned that such lavishness might allow Kim's mother to assert excessive control over our lives, but Kim insists that we're safe from problems this far away.
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