My mother became obsessed with Feng Shui two years ago. I came home late to discover her rabidly dusting the guest room. We never dust in our house. Why clean something that inevitably replaces itself?
"What's wrong?" I asked, worriedly. Then I spotted a vacuum cleaner in the corner. This was obviously a crisis. She pitifully waved a dirty rag. "You know how the guest room is the Prosperity Room?"
"Uh huh."
"Well. It turns out ... it's not."
"What do you mean? It's on the left, farthest from the front door ..."
Mom cut me off. "I forgot to include the garage in my calculations. Going from there, the Prosperity Room is actually behind the guest room in the back yard, where your baby sister dug her pit. Our Prosperity Room is missing!"
"Are you telling me that instead of a Prosperity Room, we have a Prosperity Pit?" I asked. But our spiritual journey had only begun. It turned out that our front door was in the wrong place. The Feng Shui expert, who had been on Oprah, recommended knocking down the entire front wall and rebuilding it with the door at a more Feng Shui friendly angle. My father objected to the cost so instead my family placed a giant bowl of salt by the door. The salt acted as a talisman, fighting the evil energy of the door. It was also good for tripping guests.
With so much spiritual progress, we consulted a second Feng Shui expert. According to this one, our prosperity room was not where my little sister had dug her pit. It was the garage.
This, if possible, was spiritually worse than the pit.
"The garage?" my mother moaned. "We keep cars in there!"
"Yeah, and aren't there spiders?" asked my sister.
"And expired earthquake emergency provisions," my mother said. "Imagine the damage outdated soup cans are inflicting on our money energy!"
We cleaned. But the Feng Shui expert said it wasn't enough. We teetered on the chasm of spiritual disaster. What we needed, she said, were goldfish.
We needed life in the garage, the expert explained. We needed color. We needed movement. Goldfish were the obvious solution.
With our prosperity mending, the Feng Shui expert decided to take a gander at my room. We stood in silence as she surveyed the piles of clothes and textbooks and considered in what direction she should flee. Nobody but the cockroaches was talking.
"I am feeling considerable yin energy here," she said.
"Is that a good thing?" I asked weakly.
"No. Yin is the dark. Yang is the light." She gestured grandly like a realtor in a ballroom, scratching her acrylic nails down a wall that had once been white. "Yang is happiness, breathing spaces. Yin is dark, ghostly. It lies in a dead room like a rotted lily pad on a stagnant pool."
"Oh," I said. "That sucks."
She stepped over my piles of stuff and glared at me. "Your bed's in the wrong place," she accused.
"It is?" I asked. "I'm, uh, sorry."
"Don't apologize to me. Apologize to yourself. And your bookshelves! They block an important channel of yang. The mess! It is truly amazing that in this room, you manage to get out of bed in the morning."
My mother looked very concerned and was taking notes.
"So, what can I do?" I asked. "Paint the walls a different color?"
The Feng Shui expert clutched at her chest and landed in a heap on a pile of clothes. A pizza crust fell out of them. "Paint the walls?" she gasped. "That's like asking what you can do for your skin when your very bones are out of alignment."
My mother gasped.
"So, what can I do?" I asked, getting comfortable on another pile.
"Clear out the crap," she said.
I perked up. "You mean I should throw away the textbooks that I've had since eighth grade?"
She wilted. "Oh, my god. YES."
"Cool."
Alexandra Toumanoff '06 keeps it real.
