Lost and Found: One Mind

I’ve put off writing for a bit because I found that I was rehashing things that I’d already spoken about.

The last time I sat at my PC I started writing about my version of a walking meditation while mowing the lawn and I found that I’d actually spoke about many of my thoughts and concepts about continuing my existence in this world. And while at the time, I thought many of my ideas were profound, I went to look at a few of my older rants and found that I’d covered many of these things.

Two and a half hours down the drain.

However, today was a little bit different. Today I’ve come to realize that my mind has indeed left me. I’ve found that the warm womb of madness is the universe’s way of giving a person a nice time out to play with a coloring book and perhaps cut out interesting shapes from construction paper. These times are required. For I’ve realized that while I can have perfectly rational thoughts during the day when I get home and try to put them together they disappear like a diamond in ice water. Even now as I write this my wonderful, beautiful, interrupting wife has broken my concentration with unscheduled house chores. At that time I’d wondered if George Orwell was thinking, “Big Sister, Big Uncle, Big Daddy…” And then his wife says, “Eric! Can you help me open this jar?”

We were this close to “Big Cousin is kinda looking in on us.”

Well, this week was one of the worst, most mentally stressful weeks I’ve had in over twenty years. A few weeks ago, I decided to take charge of my life and investigate an opportunity with AFLAC.

Originally, right after I got out of college, my father had arranged for me to get a job with a large insurance company selling life insurance. No, I’m not going to tell you the company. I’d majored in marketing and thought it might be a good idea. I took the New York State Insurance exam for Health and Life and passed it on the second try (the first time, I’d failed by one point). So I was licensed to sell insurance.

Let me ask you this: Does the average 23 year old college graduate know anything about life to sell life insurance? Yeah, I didn’t either. What’s more, I was asked to sell something I didn’t believe in to my family and friends. Those were my prospects. What’s more, they wanted me to sell this stuff to my father’s rich influential friends.

I really wasn’t up to it.

A year later, one of my closest friends asked me to come to hear a “presentation” from a young company called A.L. Williams. They did their sales pitch for young recruits. My friend really bought into it and I… was on the fence. I knew I didn’t need to take the test because I was still licensed in New York. But something didn’t resonate right about the deal and all I could envision was the same thing of selling to my family and friends about something I really couldn’t endorse.

I never took the job and eventually I wound up at the company I’d spent 15 years of my life at - doing IT.

When AFLAC kept calling, I kept envisioning a time when I felt I could not in all good conscience do that job. I’d been in IT for my entire professional career and that’s what I was going to do. It was either that or writing.

But things change.

Now, the job market is relatively sparse. I have not had a good job opportunity in months. At the moment, I’m doing some web freelance work for an old friend. While I can still do stuff with websites, I’m not the same guy I was ten years ago. Also, in regards to pursuing the life insurance route, I’ve experienced some amount of personal loss and can readily persuade people I know that it’s better to have life insurance than not have it at all.

Eventually I said, “What the hell.”

The AFLAC recruiter called and I told them I’d be at their “seminar”. What you need to know is that most of these seminars are all the same. It doesn’t matter what shop they come from. They will have a group meeting to tell you what they’re about. You go, you wear a suit, you listen to them, and then you decide if you want to do it or not. They make it sound like you’ve been chosen to be one of the elite, but the main qualification for having one of these jobs is that you be a decent human being, are willing to work for a commission, and have a pulse.

I decided to try this 1) because their office was nearby (not in New York or some god forsaken place in Western New Jersey or Pennsylvania) and 2) I was tired of working my ass off for places that were for a finite time of work. If I was going to work, I was going to have a career - period.

And, surprise, surprise, they said I could work for them. All I had to do was pass the New Jersey State Health Licensing exam and I’d be on my way.

I enrolled in one of the Pre-Certification Classes (also apparently required) for Life and Health. It had been over 20 years since I’d taken the New York test. I remembered nothing. The class started at 8:15 AM. At 10:30 there was a break until 1:PM and then, as I found out, we were tested on the entire course of Life Insurance Law.

Do I need to repeat that?

Two hours, I was given materials (which I’d planned on reading that night), and tested on something I’d heard with just one cup of coffee in my system. I’m good, but I’m not that good. So, naturally I failed with a 58 out of 100. My ADD does not make me a good classroom student. After the test, we were given a bit of a Life Insurance lesson and told to take another test at home that evening.

I went home and began to read Life Insurance Law and started to read through the other materials and because the material is duller than… a really dull thing… I fell asleep. I didn’t do the take home test.

I told the instructor the next day that I just fell asleep and couldn’t do it. I’m 46 years old and quite beyond “the dog ate my homework” phase of things. Personally, I knew that what I was responsible for was passing the final. She gave another test. This time I failed with a 68. 70 is passing.

She completed the Life portion of the course and told us to study hard for the final exam the next day. Now I had three quizzes at my disposal with an answer key. I read the materials, highlighted the test answers and studied the questions. My wife helped me study by asking me all the questions I’d highlighted.

Now I had time.

I walked in the next day and scored an 85 on Life and a 90 on New Jersey Life Law.

When it came to the Health Insurance test, things didn’t go as well and in the limited amount of time and the intense cramming I’d done, I did not pass any of the exams. I told myself that this time I just didn’t have it in me. I knew where I’d gone wrong. I knew that I needed to study deeper not harder. There was information on tables that I just had overlooked or saw that they were not part of any of the practice tests.

Still, it was a defeat. No pre-certification for NJ Health. I could take just the Life Insurance Exam – the one I didn’t need.

Here is where things started to go really awry.

At first, the woman who gave the course told me that all I’d have to do is take the exam sometime next week, probably in Toms River. While my feelings were still a little raw, I was not angry. I was just disappointed. However, I knew, with just a little bit of time to really look over the materials, I’d pass the test easily. And that was the factor – time.

Class ended and I drove home.

As soon as I got home, after I told my wife of my failure, I called the school to schedule the retest. The woman at the desk said she spoke to my teacher who then said it would be best to retake the course. While I knew that I’d failed the exam, I didn’t want to really waste any more time in a classroom environment. Plus, I really could be spending my time doing other more profitable things.

I want to make something perfectly clear. There are people out there that will claim or, at the very least, paint themselves to practice empowering , positive, constructive thoughts and actions all of the time. I’m not one of those people. I fall prey to my own dark thoughts. Sometimes when they come, they stay in their own vicious circle to lap over and over again until I see nothing but the black abyss of depression. Do I do this intentionally? No. However these nasty little thought parasites come when I’m not really aware of them, striking my subconscious like a ninja assassin.

Conversations, like the one I was having with the training school administrator, usually begin with the following sentence.

“What?!!”

“We feel it would be best if you retook the course,” she said with practiced concern.

“Why?”

“Well, you failed by six points. If you’d failed by two points, we’d feel better about signing your pre-certification to take the test.”

“I just want to get this straight,” I said speaking with the deliberation that can only be done when your canine teeth have been bared to the air for several seconds at a time. “You are telling me that I have not proven myself smart enough to take a real test and should repeat a time when someone else will read materials to me for a day and a half. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Oh no, we’re not saying that.”

“Because that’s what it sounds like.”

“We just feel that if you spent some more time with us, you’d have a higher certainty to pass the test.”

“So you’re saying I can’t read.”

“No, that’s not what we’re saying.”

“Okay,” I said while straining to keep my tone under a fever pitch. “This is what I’m hearing. You are telling me that after I spent a day and a half listening to a person read to me, you’d feel better about me taking the test after I spend another day and a half hearing someone else read to me rather than me reading to myself for…”

I had to calculate the days between now and the next time I’d have an opportunity to take another test. Today was Friday. The next opportunity to take a test would be Wednesday. That’s five days reading on my own.

“… five days. I will bet you that within five days of me ingesting this material on my own pace, that I will pass that exam.”

“I’m sure you would. I’m sure you would,” she said in a tone usually reserved to stop a gunman in a hostage situation. “We just feel you’d benefit more from one more round of learning. You have to understand that the New Jersey Health Exam is difficult. Why, there are many times I sneak in to take the test over again and I’m an instructor. It’s not an easy test. Yours is a common complaint. I’ve had lawyers that have passed the bar tell me that it’s a hard test with very little time to learn the material.”

The logical part of my mind kicked in. “If it’s not an easy test and there are so many complaints, then why does your school only spend a day and a half on it? Certainly you’d have more success and less complaining if you increased the time for knowledge retention prior to a test.”

“We recommend that you take the course again.”

This was going nowhere. It was time to think outside the box. I took a deep breath and exhaled.

“It seems we’re at an impasse. Here’s what I propose: I will read up on the materials between now and Monday (three days). If I don’t feel prepared to take this test again by then, then I will happily attend a class again.”

She agreed.

In the meantime, I’d forgotten that I had to schedule myself to take the Life Insurance Exam. After I’d gotten off of the phone, I went online and prepared to schedule myself for the first available test. After all, according to both the instructor and the school, it was an exam that I needed to take while the knowledge was still fresh in my head.

I’ve said repeatedly that the universe has a sick sense of humor. This is yet another instance of that. According to the state insurance website, the first opportunity I’d have to take the test would be Wednesday. The same day I’d take the Health Insurance pre-certification exam. It was also the same day that the new class would start.

As I looked at the schedule, I saw that I could take the Life Insurance exam at 6:PM to 10:PM that evening.

It was noon and now I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I was in no mood to study anything. All I wanted to do was just lie down and figure out why I wanted to continue this entire inhale/exhale thing.

But alas, things aren’t that easy for God’s favorite cat toy.

My wife began to complain about the cable internet connection.

For weeks now, we’ve been getting power spikes to the house. It’s summer. When the AC kicks on, there’s a small power surge to the house. For some reason, every time it does, the cable connection and the router time out. This happens despite the fact that all of the power sources are hooked into a surge protector.

I am not an engineer. I do web design, QA testing, project management, some amount of analysis, and a bit of writing. My knowledge in the cable troubleshooting arena is a bit limited. That said, my wife was “more than a little concerned” that she’d fail the online nutrition exam for the nutrition course that she paid $5,000 for because she might lose internet access in the middle of it.

Her pain becomes my pain – whether I like it or not.

I tried to diagnose the problem using Ockham's razor: the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. As I needed to reset the modem by unplugging and replugging the co-ax cable to the modem, it must be the modem that is at fault. I took the modem to the local Cablevision branch and had it replaced with a newer one.

Unfortunately, this was not the problem. After configuring the new modem to my residence, I found that the new modem went down just as easily as the old one did.

I called Cablevision. I will save you some time on the specifics of the call. This is not only for your benefit but also for mine. Whenever I think back on any call I’ve made to the Cablevision automated help line, I get an involuntary facial tick and a vein near my temple starts to throb. After several volleys with the automated system, I was able to get through to a human tech and got him to schedule a call to send someone to the house for the next morning.

By 3:PM my mind was jello. I’d used my mental resources debating a myopic training school hun and troubleshooting a cable issue that I could not diagnose. I’d spent a week doing nothing but studying life and health insurance and insurance law only to meet defeat.

My wife suggested lunch.

We went to one of the local Japanese restaurants on the border of Freehold and Marlborough. I thought that if I just took a time out with some green tea and sushi, I’d be okay. Why is this? Well, eating Japanese food is an exercise in patience and focus. A person eating Japanese food does not gobble. He needs to think and be deliberate. Each bit of the meal requires some amount of commitment and thought. You break the chopsticks. You use the chopsticks to pick up your food and slowly bring it to your mouth. When you eat your sushi, you take time to pour the soy sauce and wasabi in a small bowl and mix it. Then you slowly take your chopsticks and move the ginger and wasabi onto the piece of sushi and dip it into the soy sauce mixture. When the piece is ready, you bring the piece to your mouth and eat it. If you are doing it correctly, you are in the moment.

This is Zen.

Did it help me that day? Nope… not a bit. I was lucky that I didn’t drop tuna or salmon in any of the other customers’ hair. I did eat, though.

The mind snap came silently and without warning or fanfare.

By 6:PM that evening my mind had already packed its bags and got the large box of ethereal Crayola crayons – you know, the one with the sharpener built right in there – and began to pick out which pictures it was going to color in first.

I grabbed a bag of honey mustard pretzels and a large bottle of water, paid and left the store – skipping across the parking dividers because it seemed to be the thing to do.

My wife had not noticed my change of sanity. She’d forgotten the rule: It’s always the quiet ones that go first. She was in her easy chair reading more about integrative nutrition and only looked up when I began to eat my pretzels.

She began to glare.

I would have thought the glare came because I was eating pretzels by the fistful. No, she wanted to know what the ingredients were on the bag.

She went to grab the bag. I pulled it away, keeping it close to my arms as if it were a newborn baby on an island full of cannibalistic vampires.

“MINE!!!” I yapped. “You cannot have.”

“Do you have any idea what’s in those… things?”

“Angel dust and love?”

“Try again,” she said with only a small bit of patience.

“Mustard and Satan’s dandruff?”

By now I’d realized that my wife had become a food Nazi. And by my duty as a junk food addict, I was forced to keep my supply secret in my own little stalag. I want my junk food when I want it. The motivation to eat better would be tied to my desire to continue living. This goal was on shaky ground right now. If I played my cards right, the salt content in my snack combined with the soy sauce I had this afternoon would give me enough excess blood pressure to make my carotid artery explode in a glorious fountain of blood.

She glared at me again as only a wife or food Nazi could. She wanted my papers and I would not surrender them – not even under torture. They were my pretzels. MINE!!!

“Fine,” she sighed. “Go ahead. Eat that poison. It’s really bad for you.”

“I will.”

“What do you want to watch tonight? Nothing’s on.”

I thought for a bit. My DVD’s were downstairs where I keep all of my science fiction books. I went down to spelunk. I needed something really stupid. My mind could not handle another moment of anything more complex than a clothes pin. I needed a really bad movie. I needed to riff on something. I could either find a MST3K movie or something I could just mock on by itself. The former is good when I’m just bored. I went for the latter.

“King Kong versus Godzilla”

This is a movie that begs to be made fun of. It is collaboration between Universal International and Toho films in Japan. So insidious is it in its cheesiness that I’m sure there’s a warning label on the jacket somewhere warning that a viewer’s mind may need to shut down after one viewing.

All I could do while watching the movie is say, “So… very… wrong.”

By the time the monsters actually had their fight my body had shut down. I had fallen asleep.

When I’d woken up, I’d asked my wife how long I was out.

“Only a few minutes. But you were snoring.”

“You’d better watch out then,” I said to her. “Those Japanese are sneaky little bastards. If I start offering cigarettes to children or suggesting that an ad agency can improve their revenue by capturing a monster, I’ll know my mind has been infected. Sure, laugh now. But you’ll be singing a different tune when I answer the phone and someone asks me to pass the time playing some solitaire. I draw the queen of hearts and everyone dies.”

“You should go to bed.”

“I should go to bed.”

I did. No one died.