Thursday Night

Fio, as usual, had a great time visiting with friends at her local writers' league meeting Thursday night. She started out enjoying the speaker too, who was billed as someone who would talk about using the paranormal in one's writing. Fio expected to hear about world building, consistency, and the wide array of fantasy beings available for literary exploitation. But nooooo! The talk was, instead, all about opening ourselves up to the paranormal, thus making us smarter, more creative, and in tune with the universe.

Well, as you know, if Fio got any more creative, she'd be certifiable, and she's fairly bright too, so the speaker's basic premise didn't sit right with her. She let it slide, though, because she was enjoying the lady's style--humorous, anecdotal, and charming--until the disorganization and self-glorification started annoying the heck out of her.

Nothing hung together. Our psychic was turning the pages of a looseleaf notebook which she apparently usually taught a many-sessioned enlightenment course from, picking out items seemingly at random to talk about--sensitivity, intuition, ESP, auras, ghosts, you name it. Her time ran out before she got to UFOs and extraterrestrials, which--I kid you not--were also in her landscape.

The questions afterwards settled on auras. Now Fio has never seen an aura in her life, although she doesn't doubt some people do, just like she herself heard music as color rather than pitch before intensive ear training.

On being instructed to trust their guts and look at auras of people around them, various members of the audience began seeing the glows and told the speaker hers was green, which she explained as the color of a healer. Fio focused on the speaker and sent her own subconscious roaming around, but instead of an aura, it came up with the word "evil." At Fio's nudging for a further explanation, her "gut" came up with "not who she claims to be." Fio received the distinct impression of a second identity, and shivers a little even now as she writes her intuition down.