My Tonsil Has Grown Back
Music: VHS or Beta: Night On Fire
Julius and Amy gave me a fitting gift to thank me for marrying them in March: a sitting with locally renowned psychic, Mary Jo McCabe. Her new book, Cracking the Coconut Code is apparently doing well. I don't know what the coconut code is, but I suspect DaVinci is behind it. In any event, one reader at amazon.com's website urges potential buyers to "dig into this book and reap the blessings." That marvelous mixed metaphor aptly describes my experience, which you can listen to by clicking some hyperlinks provided below.
In any event, for innocent reader who stumbles on my website, let me offer a brief tutorial in psychic-delia: psychics really do not talk to spirits, although they may believe that they do. They use something called the "intuition," which is usually an unconscious ability to sense things about another person from their body language. Psychic have practiced using this ability so much that is more conscious. In fact, communication scholars have a name for the practice of reading other people: active listening. Last year I wrote about this more extensively. Here's what I said about active listening ("cold reading" in the argot of psychics):
So, I went to McCabe's small office off of Bluebonnet, near the Mall of Louisiana. It was a nice office, well cleaned, and copies of her books littered the waiting room. I sat with the secretary in the front office for about fifteen minutes while I waited for Mary Jo to come get me. I could hear Mary Jo in the next room in consultation with a client on the phone. She talks loud.In a cold reading the psychic performs "active listening," a technique of interaction that has become the staple of most courses in interpersonal communication: (1) one listens both to cognitive and bodily information; (2) one paraphrases what s/he hears; (3) one listens for confirmation; and then (4) one asks follow-up questions. Because the West is a low context culture (stressing the content of messages above other information), listening to bodily or relational messages is a hard skill to develop. Psychics, however, are experts at reading the body and paraphrasing that information verbally to the Other. Hence, cold reading is a kind of active listening that uses the content or verbal information of an individual to confirm bodily and relational information. Cold reading is a careful (if not sneaky) solicitation of information from a person, which is then fed back to her in a novel reformulation. The solicitation of cold reading is termed "fishing." Cold readers typically speak very fast while fishing until the participant affirms something (in recounting his first show, Edward remembers a woman in the gallery who raised her hand: "'Can you start over?' she asked. 'You talk way too fast'"). When there is affirmation, it is called a "hit." Gradually, by carefully phrasing interrogatives as statements of fact, the psychic can get very specific information from a person or "mark." Further, like reading a horoscope, the person being "read" tends to embellish enthymematically the partial and vague statements of the psychic, sometimes making even the most ludicrous observation fit past life events.
Mary Jo came and got me and took me into an office. There was a computer desk and a computer on one side, and two chairs facing each other separated by a table on the other side, near a window overlooking a parking lot. On the table were a lamp, a tape recorder, and a large bowl full of sugar free candies.
She was very friendly, open, and smiled a lot. She asked me to sit in one chair and I sat in the other. She asked me if I had ever done "anything like this" before, and I explained that I had not. She asked me how I came to be there. I explained that I had married Amy and Julius, and they gave me the sitting because they knew I was "into this sort of thing." She asked something (I don't recall exactly) that led me to disclose I was an ordained minister. She asked me where my congregation was. I explained the Universal Life church was a non-denominational Internet church. She thought the church was wonderful, and then started to tell me about the reading.
She said she did two kinds of readings. The first kind was completely in trance, and she said her guides told her what to say. She said she was not gone, and that she was conscious of her speaking, but that she goes into a "higher" state of consciousness. She other kind of reading is more "back and forth" and "one-on-one." I asked which is better. She said it depends on what the client wants. The trance stuff is more particular to my soul, while the other kind of reading was more particular to my life and day to day living. I said that I was fond of fast food value menus, and wondered if I could get a little of both. She said many people ask her for that, indicated it was not what she liked to do, but that I was special and so she would do it.
The trance message (track one below) is a bunch of jabber-jab and mixed metaphors. I was pretty bored with that. For the beginning of the reading I was pretty stone faced, trying to see how good she was. She wasn't very good until I started willfully volunteering information. Once I let more information out (a few times, you'll notice, she even asks direct questions), she got better. One time when she was stumped, she grabbed a piece of candy and sucked on it a while (you'll hear it).
The information that sticks out to me, and that which I'll keep a watch out for, concerns: (1) my spirit guide Elliott; could this be Calvin Elliott, my Masonic mentor? (2) I will have two important mentors at Texas; could this be Barry and Dana? (3) I will get hitched when I am 37 to an independent lady; who will that be? (4) kidney disease runs in my mother's side of the family, three generations back; (5) my bones are brittle, and the spirit guides warned me; (6) one of my tonsils has grown back; (7) something big, perhaps a promotion, will happen in 2007; god I would be thrilled to peeing in my pants if that means I'll have tenure by 2008.
Here's a photograph of me with Mary Jo. Finally, without further ado, here is the reading. Each track is in mp3 format:
1. Speaking in Trance as "Elliot"
2. I'll Have to Think About It"
5. Leading People to Their Deaths
6. New Job and Your Tonsil Has Grown Back
7. Romance