No really, I am a weird-shit magnet.

If you know me, you know that weird shit happens to me all the time. Like today, for instance. I was interviewing a renowned researcher and clinician for a very serious piece I am writing about stress and happiness for a national health magazine. And then all of a sudden I was bawling my eyes out and ordering this off the internet:
Here’s what happened just before that:

“Clients pay me to give them happiness makeovers,” the doctor was explaining. “If you give me three months, I can guarantee you happiness for the rest of your life or you get your money back.”

“What about if someone is terminally ill or totally broke or living with an abusive partner or weighs five hundred pounds?” I countered.

“Bring it on,” Doc quipped. “I love a challenge.”

“Okay, my dad died nine years ago, and I miss him every day,” I told her. “Make me happy about that.”

She explained the process that she would take me through and I agreed to give it a whirl. First, I had to verbally acknowledge that his dying was out of my control (which might sound blazingly obvious but holy crap is that hard to say out loud), and then I had to say–again, out loud–that I accepted that it had happened. I could barely choke out the words.

Snot was dripping down my chin by this point.

“I don’t typically ofter this, but… would you like to talk to your dad?” she asked me. “Because I can do that.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said between sobs. (Yes, I said shut the fuck up to a PhD, during an interview in which I was sobbing.)

“I’m also a Reiki master, and I think you need to do this to be healed,” Doc informed me.

So I lit a candle and got a glass of water like she told me to do while she got my dad on the phone.

“Your dad wants you to talk to him more,” she said. Which totally freaked me out because shortly after he died I had this crazy-real dream where he said to me, “I hear you talking about me but I want you to talk to me,” so I proceeded to drive around and talk to him where nobody could see or hear me and if they did they might think I was just talking on the Bluetooth that I don’t technically have.

“He wants you to get an angel statue to put on your desk, and talk to him through that,” she added. “A male angel.”

Now I am sobbing and chatting with my dead dad and also Googling for angel statues, so you can imagine how totally professional I felt.

Turns out there are a shit-ton of male angel statues to choose from. But most of them were just… wrong.

This one was too holy. (Dad might be the only person I’ve ever met who liked the word fuck more than I do.)

This one was too garden-y.

This one was WAY too naked.

But then I saw Black Angel and I started cracking up. Doc couldn’t see what I was looking at (shit, maybe she could!), and she couldn’t have known how funny my dad was (or maybe she did!), but my cackle was all she needed to hear. “You just found your angel,” she told me.

So now I feel good because Black Angel is on its way, and Doc also told me that I should totally get a new car because it will make me happy on a daily basis. (Just so you know, a new car only makes most people happy for 30 days before they go back to being just as miserable as they were before the purchase–even if the new car smell is still there and everything–but because I want a new car so I can take my kids and their friends places, it will lead to legitimate, ongoing, sustainable happiness. Or something like that.)

Joe is going to be so on board when I tell him that the Reiki master who talks to dead people says we should get a Mercedes! (Fine, she didn’t say we should get a Mercedes. But she didn’t say we shouldn’t get one either, and I’m pretty sure my dad would want me to drive a Benz. Damn it, I should have asked him when I had him on the phone.)

When Black Angel arrives, I will vlog one of our conversations if you guys want.

p.s. I absolutely am not mocking the good Doctor in this post. Just so we’re clear. She’s brilliant and fabulous (and not because of the ~~Mercedes~~ car thing, honest) and she thanked me for “opening up to her so willingly” (i.e. hysterically sobbing) and if I wanted to grow up I’d want to be her when I did it.

p.p.s. I’m adding these pix for Joy Meredith, who would like to be able to picture my fantastic dad without espresso-colored skin and fluffy wings, not that there’s anything wrong with that.