A Stay at the Spa

At County Hospital, Clementine told me that she has arranged with someone in the NICU for me to be trained to hold babies. However, that person said there might not always be a baby to hold, if I wouldn’t mind doing some administrative work to fill in such times. I would rather just hold babies, and I could probably do that at the Truly Wonderful Medical Center, but I want to serve the population the County Hospital serves, and TWMC no doubt requires an extensive training program, whereas the training at County Hospital will probably be pretty straightforward: “That’s a baby. Don’t drop it.” I also am already reporting to County Hospital every week, so it would be simpler just to tack on another hour or so rather than to go somewhere else.

Then there are my assignments for school. Evidently the cohort prior to mine treated deadlines rather casually, because our teachers told us over and over when we were there in March to do our papers right after getting home. For that training period, we had two papers due, one on Buddhist fundamentals and one on systems theory. These are simple papers with three sections apiece: what we learned about, what insights arose, and how we might apply what we learned to chaplaincy.

I don’t like to have tasks hanging over my head, so I started drafting these papers very soon after getting home. I also figured I’d better try to be as good a student as possible to make up for all the ways I’m going to be a thorn in their side, such as complaining about the incense in the zendo. In the post-course evaluation, I was very direct about that, and suggested that they might want to stop using incense altogether, as the San Francisco Zen Center and Berkeley Zen Center have done. I also mentioned that a creepy person who is one of their residents touched me several times when we were working together in the kitchen. It wasn’t a sexual thing; he was just jabbing me to emphasize his instructions. I said that I plan to ask him politely not to touch me, but for all I know, he’s their favorite resident, and now they don’t like me because I don’t like him.

One of the many smells that really gets to me is certain kind of laundry detergent. In my mind, I call it Springtime Fresh Tide. Fortunately, there is just one person in my cohort who is redolent of this, so I emailed our coordinator and said it’s not a problem being in the large group with her, but I’d prefer not to be roommates. All of this seems very reasonable to me, but I can easily imagine how it might seem to others. Sam nervously told me that I should not have suggested to them that they stop using incense, and advised me to choose my battles.

I sent my first paper to my mentor and got a couple of excellent suggestions back. After I did what she suggested, she said it was ready to send to the faculty. When I sent the draft of my second paper, she said, “Absolutely beautiful,” and to go ahead and send it in, so both are done. I got warm thanks for my papers from our coordinator (who had ignored my email about not putting me in the same sleeping room as the Tide-using person) and a nice note from one of our three teachers.

I got a call from the assistant at school about my housing for the sesshin (meditation retreat) I was planning to attend (and did attend) in April, and then we exchanged a few emails as we worked out the details. In one of them, I said, “As for the sesshin itself, I’d like to choose the meditation-free Spa Package,” which I thought was quite funny, but I guess she didn’t, since she didn’t respond.