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Deeply.
You know Miss Cleo. She's the bossy Jamaican woman from those tarot-card-reading TV commercials. She's always telling put-upon women what worthless and trifling scumbags their men are. Like it takes a psychic to know that.
"Did he tell you he was at the library last night? Uh-uhhhhh, girlfriend!"
And lately she's been sending out thousands of urgent e-mail messages. According to my own e-mail, Miss Cleo is dreaming about me just about every night.
It's urgent that she talks to me. She knows things about me. Important things that will change my life. And she cares. She cares so much that she wants to tell me personally on the phone for $4.99 a minute.
She can't warn me for free--in a cold, impersonal e-mail--not to step off that curb at 4:40 p.m. Tuesday and into the path of that bus.
"It's not often that I have the time to write to one of my clients," Miss Cleo e-mailed me.
"This rare vision I had connected you to me in a remarkable way, Mike! You must have a strong energy field," she gushed.
That's me, all right--a strong, manly energy field.
"Mike, I know you have difficulty making the right decisions," Miss Cleo said.
Um, well.
"Mike, I see what you're doing and I know where you're going," she said.
Ruh-roh! Please don't tell anyone!
Anyway, Miss Cleo needed to give me a reading right away or I'd miss the chance of a lifetime and spend the rest of my miserable existence ruing the day I failed to call her 900 number.
I have to admit that possibility made me nervous.
My next "personal message" from Miss Cleo started: "Amy--I had an exciting dream last night that could affect the rest of your life!"
Amy?
Despite that, I found myself growing curious about Miss Cleo, so I checked out her Web page.
It turns out she grew up in sunny Jamaica.
"Dead people used to come and talk to me in my dreams when I was a little gal," she writes.
"My mother wanted me to be an attorney," Miss Cleo says, "but me wasn't feeling it at all."
Hmm. Same as my story.
I grew up on sunny Falmouth Beach. I heard dead people like George Washington and Stonewall Jackson talking to me all the time. My mother wanted me to get a real job as a federal bureaucrat, but me wasn't feeling it at all.
And ignoring my own mother's advice to get a real job (over and over and over) was on my mind when I decided to find out what Miss Cleo had to tell me that was so darned urgent.
Turns out I didn't get Miss Cleo, with her Jamaican accent, when I called. Instead, I got a pleasant woman named Andi who sounded like she was from Texas.
My mother's voice ringing in my head, I blurted out, "Am I in the right career?"
That was supposed to be the first of a number of quick questions. I had put together a short list. I was also going to ask who was going to win the election for governor in Virginia, whether Northern Virginia would get a Major League Baseball team, what the next few months would be like for the stock market, where Angelina Jolie's next tattoo would go.
Uh-uhhh, girlfriend. When I asked the career question, I left a hole big enough for Miss Cleo to drive a truck through.
Andi rambled on and on and on, turning cards over and exclaiming in surprise.
Anyway, I'll boil it down to the equivalent of a $100 sentence in Miss Cleo billing:
I am really great and my bosses stink.
Amazing. How did the tarot cards know that?