November 10, 2004

• I feel some FAQs coming on.

  Okay.  That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, or maybe it is
  both.  Such dualistic judgements are inappropriate, anyway.

  After I finished writing the first wave of FAQ pages for KaiOaty
  a year and a half ago, I felt a sense of anticlimax.  I thought,
  “this surely can’t be all.”    I assumed that if I went
  through my client files, the carbons (at first, on my old manual
  portable Hermes Rocket typewriter) and (later) duplicates I kept of the
  mail-order readings I’d done since 1987, I could find more general
  Cosmic Wisdom to post for the edification of All.  But poring
  through boxes of my past work held little appeal for me.  No,
  that’s inaccurate.  “Little appeal”???  Shit! 
  Abhorrence, repugnance… those words come closer. 

  Yeah.  Finding typos I’d missed fifteen years ago, rehashing the
  readings where the clients just didn’t get what I was saying, and the
  ones where I didn’t make that essential connection and couldn’t answer
  their questions, doesn’t sound like fun.  “Little appeal,”
  fershure!

  Yesterday, I did two readings.  The first, I felt, was okay,
  probably accurate, maybe helpful, but lackluster.  I’d have to go
  over there and look now to recall what I said and who I said it
  to.  Out of thousands I’ve done, I guess a small majority are like
  that.  I spread the cards or cast some other oracle and read
  it.  The reading falls together and seems clear enough to me, and
  I sense what the client is experiencing.  When I’m done I feel as
  if I’ve done an adequate job for the client even though it didn’t
  sparkle and sing.

  There are a few readings where it just doesn’t fall together, where I
  end up making a patchwork of it, doing a “cookbook” sort of
  reading.  Those are cases where I make no connection at all with
  the client.  I’m seeing the cards but feeling nothing, getting no
  sense of the client or her life and feelings.  I’m glad there are
  few of them, even though occasionally I’ll get feedback indicating that
  such a reading proved helpful to the client.  That, for me, is the
  primary value of the “tools” I use, the cards and crystals and other
  “oracles”.  When I fail to make a connection, sometimes the tools
  fill in that gap.

  If the majority of the work I did were of that sort, I’d have quit
  before I ever got into the professional phase of this work.  For
  me, those readings are frustrating.  For the clients… I
  dunno.  Some of them have said they were useful, but most of them
  never get back to me.  Even in cases of the readings that do
  sparkle and sing, many clients never get back to me.  The
  percentage of online readings that DO get feedback is higher than it was
  when I was working by mail, but there are still some clients who just
  don’t respond.

  And there are some who don’t respond for as long as three years,
  before writing back to me with thanks and payment for work well
  done.  I never know when I post a reading how the client will
  react.  Early on, I used to think sometimes that I knew,
  especially with the sparkly singing readings.  I’d have
  expectations of glowing responses to glowing readings.  Enough of
  those expectations were disappointed to have taught me the futility of
  expectations.

  Yesterday after posting the first reading I did other things.  I checked email and the comments at  KaiOaty
  where people leave their requests for readings.  I posted feedback
  to a few who required it, then I posted here on SuSu and read a few of
  your sites.  I have been keeping the posts at KaiOaty down to one
  per day, for several reasons.  I don’t really want this current
  backlog to get all used up and come to an end.  I want to have a
  continuing source of work.  Also, posting just once a day might
  ensure that each reading gets more attention.  I’m not sure about
  that, but anyway, I’ve not been working through that backlog as quickly
  as I could.

  Last night, I could have moved over to the PS2 after I finished up here
  and checked email again.  Instead, I had an urge to do another
  reading.  It turned out to be one of the sparkly shiny singing
  ones.  In trance I hooked up with the client’s Higher Self. 
  I felt the connection.  My fingers flew on the keys, automatic
  writing at its best.  Afterward as I read what I’d written, I was
  impressed.  I’m not easily impressed by this stuff, not after all
  these years.  It was good.

  I posted it, went to the client’s site and let her know it was done,
  then found a new “comment” posted by someone wanting a reading, someone
  who apparently didn’t read the FAQs and was asking a raft of
  inappropriate questions.  As I wrote a raft of explication and
  explanation to her, I thought of two more topics for FAQ pages, one on
  why the future is not predictable, and another on why some readings are better than others.  There are bits of this post that will serve as a first draft for that latter FAQ. 

  I’m not kidding myself that the former FAQ will have any great impact
  on future clients who might present me with further rafts of “what will
  happen” questions.  There is a category of people who don’t read
  the FAQs.  When I created KaiOaty’s site, I set up a wicked little
  trail designed to channel the clueless ones around in a big circle
  ending in a semi-insulting sort-of “pay attention” page and then a
  truly insulting, sarcastically amusing “you aren’t paying attention”
  page, with sly jokes concealed within the obvious jokes.  The joke
  was on me.  Clueless people are clueless because they don’t look
  for clues.  No matter how I present my point some of those people
  are not going to get it.

  Originally, I had viewed my system as a screening device to weed out
  the clueless and to give answers to common questions to genuine seekers
  who didn’t really need readings.  If the feedback I’ve received is
  an accurate gauge of its success, it has turned out merely to be a
  source of wry amusement to a few curious people who clicked the
  obviously wrong choices and found my wicked pages.  I can live
  with that.  I can because the alternative is unattractive.

  Meanwhile I’ll be writing a couple of new FAQ pages which will probably
  never be seen by the people who need them the most.  It appears
  that I will also be doing the screening that my little system was
  designed to do, on a personal case-by-case basis for the people who
  refuse to read the FAQ.  I, at least, have gotten that point.
  

  • 12:54 pm
  • 6 Comments