The fast train to enlightenment

And then, as suddenly as it had all started, it was over. The eleven white robots ascended through the seething cloud in a tight formation, and with a few last flashes of flame entered the bowels of their hovering white ship, which, with the noise of a hundred thousand people saying "foop", promptly vanished into the thin air out of which it had wopped.

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Welcome (she said, conspiratorially rubbing her hands together). The statement above could easily be paraphrased to describe the tail end of my marriage. In retrospect, it was clearly coming, but it ultimately arrived much more quickly and dramatically than I could have expected, as if the train flying toward me through the tunnel was not very far away after all, but in fact simply a miniscule headlight mounted on a massive, impressively fast, and very solid engine. This realization would begin form in the brain about two nanoseconds before it was pulverized by said train.

The world is a wibbly-wobbly place for the recently dumped, in which a person's state of mind can very quickly be yanked from its philosophical, Zenlike state of compassionate abiding (ok, so I'm not really Zenlike, but that's what I'm shooting for, OK??) into God knows what extremes of emotional weirdness and ick.

I got The Yanktm tonight in the (racka-bracka micky ficky) card aisle at Target. In my version of the story, the aisles were packed to the seams, like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie, with soppy, sweet Valentine's day cards that actually whispered to each other and smirked at me as I innocently walked by.

Damn you greeting card companies! Damn you all to hell!!

I was unsuccessful in finding an appropriately Bitter Party of One card, so I left in disgust, wheeling my 30 pound box of cat litter ("5 pounds free!") off to the checkout. Existentially speaking, not the best moment.

But I am tying oh so hard to be mature and philosophical about the whole thing. As I said to a friend of mine, whose wife pulled the rug out from under him just weeks before my husband did it to me, "I'm reading a lot of Pema Chodron. It helps me enormously. Ohmmmmmmm."

His response made me laugh. Hard. "I'm impressed at your positive attitude and studious reading. I cannot begin to claim to be that profound as yet. To paraphase you, 'I am drinking alot of chardonay. It helps me enormously. Blarhfhfyidjgj.'"

So many paths to enlightenment.