Hyper-chondriac (13 page)

I sat next to an attractive red-haired girl who was most likely an actress. She seemed so emotionally fragile, as if all of her tears were lined up and ready to leap out of her eyes at a moment's notice. I wondered if this was a cumulative effect from life or if she had just had a fight with her boyfriend an hour ago. I grew tired of waiting for class to begin, so I introduced myself, making sure she saw my wedding band and throwing in the term “my wife” about ten times within the first minute so she wouldn't think I was hitting on her. Her name was Heather and as I glanced down at her bag on the ground, I saw one of her headshots poking out of the top. I was right. Actress.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“If I was okay would I be here?” she snapped back, a tear trying valiantly to escape from her eye. “Are
you
okay?”

“I guess not.”

The instructor entered. Whether he had a closely cropped beard or an awesome five o'clock shadow I wasn't sure. A dark blue suit covered his slight frame and he wore a yarmulke that blended in quite nicely with his hair color, which thankfully made it harder for me to notice. (Yarmulkes make me queasy, too.) The only reason I even knew he was wearing one was the occasional glint off the silver clip that affixed it to his scalp. He walked to the podium in the center of the room and spoke into the microphone, which I thought was totally unnecessary for such a small group, but I later learned was used to record the session so that anyone who missed a class could pick it up on cassette during the week.

“Hello, everyone,” he said in a British accent.

He'd better be British. Impersonations annoy me.

“My name is Ethan and I'll be instructing you for the next ten weeks.” Good. His accent was consistent; he really was British. Ethan seemed to be about my age and possessed a natural charm that went with his warm face and bright smile.

“First thing we're going to do is go around the room and tell everyone the reason you're here.”

A bald man wearing too much cologne was first.

“I want to achieve financial success.”

Then why not take the $270 you just spent and put it into a mutual fund? was my instant internal response.

“Well, you
will
achieve financial success if you open your mind and heart to Kabbalah,” Ethan assured him. The bald man looked elated and probably would've dabbed on more cologne in celebration had he not already finished the bottle.

“I'm having trouble meeting men since my husband and I separated,” said a chunky housewife.

“You will resolve
all
your relationship issues with Kabbalah.”

Or with a diet and not wearing polka dots.

And so we went around the room with everyone explaining why they were there and Ethan promising them that this was the perfect solution to their problems. Issues seemed to involve either relationships or money. Except for Heather, who just wanted “to become a better person” and nearly cried by the time she had reached the third word in her sentence.

Finally it was my turn.

“I'd like to control my anger so I stop inflicting disease on myself.”

Although I knew that the second half of my statement opened a can of worms and would provoke at least one additional question from Ethan, I didn't want to mention just the “controlling my anger” part. I didn't want anyone thinking I was a wife-beater or thug.

“Your anger inflicts disease on yourself?” Ethan asked.

“Yes. I need to be calmer. You'll just have to trust me on that.”

“Well, you will resolve all of your health issues with Kabbalah.”

He smiled and then consulted his notes hidden behind the podium and explained that
Kabbalah
in Hebrew means “to receive.”

Everyone in the class eagerly jotted that down.

“Did you know that according to medical science, we utilize only four percent of our brain capacity?”

Heather looked depressed about that information.

“And, according to science, we still fail to perceive ninety-nine percent of our universe.”

Uh, can I get some footnotes and sources here, please? Exactly “who” in science has proclaimed this? It's like those bottles of special shampoo that say “Dermatologist Recommended.” So technically, one dermatologist on the planet could have said, “Yeah, I'd use that instead of battery acid on your itchy scalp.”

Ethan continued: “
Our
world is called the one percent. It is a world of chaos. It's like the Murphy's Law planet, basically. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. However, the realm beyond is known as the ninety-nine percent. The purpose of Kabbalah is to bring the ninety-nine percent and the one percent together.”

Okay, I get it. We're not privy to everything that's going on. I was pleased that there didn't appear to be too much deep religious mumbo jumbo. I wasn't in the mood for an attack right now.

“We are all disconnected from our souls,” announced Ethan as if he were telling us the price of a plum. “The only way to reconnect is to understand the concept of the Light and the Vessel.”

Basically, once upon a time, each of our souls was part of one infinite soul—the Vessel. The essence of this Vessel is a desire to receive. A cup is a Vessel, while the coffee that goes inside is the Light. So, the bigger the Vessel, the more you'll attract Light, energy and success. It all seemed to make sense.

Ethan explained that the main objective of Kabbalah is to transform your nature from Reactive to Proactive. The Light is Proactive, the Vessel is Reactive. Kabbalah teaches you to embrace the difficult situations of your life by focusing on your reaction to these obstacles and not the external circumstances.

I was certainly Reactive and not Proactive. It was just hard to ignore other people most of the time. I would love to employ the turn-the-other-cheek strategy instead of my eye-for-an-eye mantra. However, my affliction contains a huge incongruity: that people are oblivious of me yet these same strangers are specifically saying “fuck you” to my existence. Which is the same behavior that my siblings and I constantly criticize my mother for.

Due to the multiple sclerosis, my mother has been unable to move around and has understandably gotten heavier. She also fell and broke her hip, had it replaced and had her thyroid removed, altering her metabolism for the worse—all before the age of fifty. Thus, on the rare occasions that we went out to eat, she would feel as though everyone in the restaurant was “staring at the heavy cripple.” At the same time, she would be insulted that these same people inside the eatery didn't notice her when she was creeping along the aisles with her two canes and one husband. So, wait a second…everyone at his or her respective table is simultaneously talking about you
and
doesn't know you exist…huh?

“By shutting down your Reactive System and letting in the Light, you can dismantle every obstacle in life,” Ethan went on. “However, it's not as easy as it sounds. Because there is an opponent in this game and his name is SATAN!”

Uh-oh.

Not surprisingly, Satan has a game plan, too. While we're trying to become Proactive, Satan is trying to make us Reactive. (FYI, in the handouts he's also referred to once as “Stan,” perhaps to either throw us off track or make us Proactive to sloppy spelling.) While we should be trying to share the Light, that rapscallion wants us to hog all the Light for ourselves. I bet Satan spends a lot of time here in Hollywood.

“The whole purpose of Satan is to challenge us,” Ethan told everyone. “He does this by dispensing momentary pleasures that will soon plunge us into darkness. Satan loooves to dangle instant gratification in front of our noses.”

Another drop of water emerged from Heather's tear duct.

“But we
can
defeat Satan! Does anyone know how?”

I wanted to yell out, “Poisonous cupcakes!”

One of the housewives' hands shot up.

“By giving him the cold shoulder?”

“Uh…what's ‘the cold shoulder'? I'm quite sorry, but we don't use that expression in Britain.”

“It means ignoring him.”

“Ah, yes. No. Kind of, actually.” Ethan was easily flustered if he had to stray from his script. “The key to defeating Satan is to shut down the Reactive system and remain Proactive at all times.”

I proceeded to write “Ignore Satan” in my notebook.

 

For the next week, I tried to shut down my Reactive side and stay Proactive. Although putting all my focus into
not
overreacting should take markedly
less
energy than exploding, in reality it seemed to require even more force. When a guy at a diner blatantly cut in front of me at the cashier, I shut down my Reactive side and let him. When I saw my neighbor not clean up after his dog, I remained silent and said nothing. When a woman in a pickup truck nearly crashed into me in a parking lot because she was looking down at her cell phone while simultaneously backing up, I merely smiled at her oversize vehicle and let her selfish behavior roll off my back, conscious of my reaction and unconscious of her action. Then the following morning I stepped in my neighbor's dog's shit and wanted to strangle him. Still, my life was improving in tiny steps. I would definitely go back to Kabbalah.

 

At the beginning of the following class, one of the hot crazy chicks raised her hand.

“Yes. You have a question?” asked Ethan brightly.

“Is it true that the Kabbalah water has healing powers?”

The question was delivered in such a monotone staccato, it sounded like a rehearsed question for an infomercial. This girl had never shown any interest in anything Ethan had said and all of a sudden she was asking a question as if she were on an audition. I looked around the room to see if she was reading a cue card off to the side. The girl had definitely been asked to ask this, probably while meandering around the gift shop—which is where Ethan hung out before class.

“The Kabbalah water
absolutely
has special healing powers.” Remarkably, Ethan was even worse at acting than the woman who asked the question. “There have been tests done on it throughout the world that prove it can change your body's properties. Believe me, this water can change your life.”

I remember that Nancy said she tried the water once at a party and that it rejuvenated her. On the other hand, she doesn't drink enough fluids and is always dehydrated, so whenever she drinks anything she's grateful.

“What's in it?” asked the balding cologned guy unexpectedly.

“We can't divulge the special formula but suffice it to say that the molecules have been altered to produce really special results.”

How can you alter the properties of water? I wasn't much of a science guy, but isn't it simply H
₂
O? I mean, what the fuck have these Kabbalists done—tossed in an extra molecule of hydrogen for good luck? Despite my skepticism, all of the Kabbalah water was sold out within ten minutes after class. Part of me was disappointed.

 

“If you hit a home run in baseball”—I could already tell from the change in his cadence that Ethan didn't know shit about sports; he was just giving the analogy he was required to—“you'd be pretty happy, wouldn't you?”

The class nodded like a group of bobblehead dolls.

“But if you later learned that the only reason you had hit that home runner”—home runner?—“was because your father had arranged it with all the other fathers before the game…how would that make you feel?”

The class looked none too pleased.

“Exactly!” chirped Ethan in an accent that was really starting to get on my nerves. “It wouldn't mean a thing because you would have had your bread without earning it. That is called the ‘Bread of Shame.'”

Everyone's hands wrote down “Bread of Shame” like good little students.

“Removing the Bread of Shame is one of the greatest gifts that the Light has given us. Every obstacle we face is a bar of gold!”

There was some overlap from my Anger Seminar. I guess if we always got what we wanted, the world would be a pretty boring, unsatisfying place. Plus, I'd rather my dad not stick his nose into my Little League games so I knew I was solely responsible for my lowly .231 batting average.

This Bread of Shame seemed sensible. I went to college with a guy named Darren whose parents were filthy rich. Darren never had to worry about money or what he wanted to do with his life. Throughout college, while I was working the night shift in a liquor store or being a concierge at a snobby condominium complex, I was always a little jealous of Darren's situation. Twenty years later, thanks to the world of compound interest, he's even richer but hasn't accomplished anything and is drowning in his sea of free time. Darren is miserable.

 

Before our fifth class, I accidentally spilled my complimentary piping hot tea all over my groin area. Fuck! “Bread of Shame, Bread of Shame!” I repeated to myself. Yep, these third-degree burns on my inner thigh were like a bar of gold that would teach me to slow down and not try to walk and sip at the same time.