18 September 2003: Yes

Yesterday at work I officially resigned as Assessment Manager.  In fact, I officially resigned from all duties except for teaching my students.  I have a backlog of assessment paperwork to do which will keep me busy for another couple of weeks, and I'm committed to seeing through one project: arranging for our old special ed students from the Oakland public schools to be sent to the Center again this year.  Once I've arranged that, and finished the paperwork, I'll just be teaching.  Right now I only teach three students, two of whom come once a week and one of whom comes twice a week.  If I succeed in arranging for the Oakland special ed students to return, then I'll have a couple more students - but all in all, by the beginning of October I'll probably only be working about ten hours a week (plus the five hours a week of teaching aikido, of course).

If Dragon Lady doesn't find a job soon, I'll be looking for temporary work for the rest of the year - maybe temporary retail work for the pre-Christmas shopping blitz or something.  If she does find a job soon, I might just spend the time marketing aikido classes and outlining my book.  I've got enough in the bank to pay October's rent for both me and Dragon Lady, and ten hours of teaching a week will at least feed me after that.  Anyway, after the end of this year I won't be working at all, except for the aikido.  I won't be working for pay for a long time, except for the aikido classes and the aikido workshops and seminars I'll be trying to market during the summers.  I'll be going to school full-time starting in January.  I'm meeting with a financial aid officer at Vista in three weeks to discuss student loans.  I'm going to go to Vista full-time for the next two years, get my AA degree, transfer immediately to a four-year school, get a BA, go straight on to grad school.  In about eight years I'll be horribly in debt and have a graduate degree, probably a self-designed Master's degree in Somatic Psychology or something like that.  Something that will allow me to earn academic credit for doing what interests me most, and will then give me credibility with the squares so that I can spend my middle and old age getting paid by various organizations to teach whatever my aikido has mutated into by then.  I figure a book and a Master's degree, plus Dragon Lady's expertise in the world of nonprofits and grantwriting and such, will open the doors to all sorts of projects I've dreamed of over the years.  (A charter school for troubled teens with an extensive somatic-arts-based P.E. program... a foundation dedicated to teaching aikido in battered women's shelters...)

This is what comes of praying to Lakshmi.  Lakshmi has spoken unto me, and she has said, Live your dreams.  Do not settle for what you think is a safe bet for tolerable work and reasonable security; that is a strategy of fear.  Open your arms and reach.  All the riches of the world await those who choose their dreams over their fears.

I'm terrified.

This is all Argus' fault, by the way.  It was his idea to suggest that our Pack start actively supporting one another in reaching for our dreams, and his idea that we try praying to Lakshmi as a part of that process.  The bastard.  Anyone else foolish enough to want to destabilize his or her life by getting involved in his sinister cult of fulfillment and prosperity can do so by joining the Pack's Moot Jungle discussion board and checking out the forum entitled Project Lakshmi.

On November 16th Sherpa will be giving a public lecture/demo at CellSpace in San Francisco, on the work of Paratheatrical Research.  I'll be participating in the demo.  On November 30th, the new paratheatrical ritual lab, entitled Initiations, begins.  The lab runs through January 20th, and then segues into training/rehearsals for an intermedia paratheatrical performance work set to go public in late Spring.

Confidential to Yoko:  Utah.  Fetuccini.  I'd take the Scrabble game as long as I got to choose which drugs each of us took.  "Not sole."  Yes.