Dragging Myself Out of My Comfort Zone

I DO NOT like to waste money. Have I? Of course, personally and professionally. That jacket that looked sooooo right in the artificial lights. That “everything you need to know about …” course. But those were mistakes, and I’m OK with mistakes. Took time to get OK with mistakes, but I’m there. The next step, logically(?). Waste money. On purpose. Take a big ‘ol roll of greenbacks and deliberately squander it.

I’ve been feeling very restless lately. Not a miniscule clue why, and it’s probably not important. We can paralyze ourselves trying to understand every single impulse, every single flash of emotion. If I understand the literature, physicians and therapists increasingly know that letting ourselves feel our emotions may be even more important than understanding their origins: feeling propels control and action – mindfulness. So, what to do when a client cancelled very last minute a couple of days ago. Gamble. At one of the biggest casinos in the state. FIRST TIME EVER.  Hurl myself past my comfort zone and see how it feels, see what happens.

I have no idea how many blogs I could write about those three hours. That the place was so large I got lost repeatedly. The frightening lighting. The noise. The amusing coincidence that when I went to put my money into a coin-sorting machine (I’ll explain in a minute), the machine jammed and the outgoing clerk who came to help had never fixed one before: two strangers side-by-side in a den of iniquity, bewildered newbies. The jarring fact of more alcohol choices than coffee choices in the coffee shop. The hundreds of ash trays. The intrusive silence of no one talking. I was hoping for glamour, even dressed up a little – maybe a Monday afternoon wasn’t the best timing. Maybe that didn’t matter at all.

I brought my own coins, dimes pennies nickels and quarters stolen from the Mason jar which usually gets filled and then brought to the bank for deposit into a CD, me so innocently behind-the-times I thought there really were still metal-eating machines in the world. And so I didn’t spend more than my allocated $25.00 – I might have been shoving money down the slots, but I wasn’t going to risk the rent! Nonetheless, had to shovel those coins into that uncooperative sorter and get snappable dollar bills.

No patience for table games, so straight to the push buttons I went. I didn’t keep track of how many I tried, and I have no idea what the rules are. I didn’t understand how I won.

Twice Your Monkey is funny enough it would be allowed to grace my home rec room if I could – cartoon monkeys doing the hula will never grown old. Maybe jigger it so it blows soap bubbles when someone wins. It was unsettling to feel exposed when I laughed at it in the casino – that silence again. I think that was my lesson: that I could find something fun so very far out of my realm.

Not gonna say whether I came home in the black or red.