Saw my friend's mother yesterday.

I had dinner with my friend's mother yesterday. We went out and got margaritas and some quesadillas at the local Mexican restaurant, and talked a lot about meditation and creative visualization. She encouraged me to write "Perfect health is the natural state of my being" and put it on my bathroom mirror so I would see it a lot. She used to be a court reporter and keeps a bundle of sayings like that in shorthand tucked into the plastic wrap of her current pack of cigarettes she has so if she's out having a smoke she can leaf through them and read them, though once she told me she was embarrassed since she had her cigarette pack out on the table when she was having dinner with a friend and a friend of her friend's, and the friend of her friend's, it turns out, knew shorthand and started reading out loud what she had tucked into her cigarette pack, and she got really embarrassed, though she didn't tell me what it was that got read out loud.

She was saying, too, at this one New Age store store she went to this year they had stickers saying "WEALTH" and "HEALTH" and stuff like that so you could slap them on whatever you were drinking and drink in health and wealth always so those things came to you through the power of positive thinking. I said I wasn't sure if that would work, but I sure as heck wouldn't have a cup in my house that said "DEATH" and always drink water out of it. She agreed.

She then told me that one of the worst things she ever saw in her life was at this New Age bible study she used to host, where a member told everyone that she was going through a lot that week because she had just found out that her cancer had come back, and you could tell, my friend's mom said, that everyone was thinking that it came back because this woman hadn't thought positively enough, and so she went up to comfort her afterwards since no one else had at all during the session. Too much of that positive thinking stuff is all about getting, she was saying, and there's nothing in it beyond that.

A couple months ago, too, she went to a Reikki-and-meditation retreat, and when she laid down on a bed with this one Reikki symbol, she got an intense headache and it didn't go away until she got up. She said it wasn't evil spirits, though, since she doesn't believe in them, but it was just her energy and the symbol's energy not jibing. She told me that a little part of her still believes in evil spirits from being raised Catholic, but if she had to steel herself to go into a Voodoo temple, she wouldn't cross herself or do anything like that, but rather imagine herself in a ball of light and tell herself she was protected before entering. She did admit, though, that finding a Voodoo doll under your bed with a pin stuck in it could probably kill you, if you thought it would.

"But," and here she got serious, "What always bothered me, is what about the dolls no one sees?"