High five! You're awesome!

Within the first 15 seconds I wanted to kill her.

That feeling subsided and was replaced with wonderful, little inner voice feelings of self-acceptance, mental wealth and other granola-fueled terms.

Claudette registered me for this self-improvement course which I attended last night at the Ottawa Alternative Health Care centre in Kanata (hyperlink purposely left out). She got me all excited by saying it was about wealth and how to achieve it. What she forgot(?) to mention was that it was about *mental* wealth and not the kind of wealth I've been after all my life with the billion dollar ideas and all.

So there I was, among a group of 12 strangers who all looked strangely subdued yet anxious at the same time. What were they so anxiously awaiting, I asked myself. This guy (who looked like he might have been part of the famous 'Bill Gates and his crew before they got rich' photo) was sitting to my right and had his finger poised over the play button of a small sound system. Then, a female answer to Anthony Robbins, equipped with a cordless microphone à la Janet Jackson so her voice would carry in our 300 square foot room, gives the cue to our her husband/sound tech.

It all went downhill from there.

A latin pop song comes blaring out of the Walmart-purchased stereo and suddenly everybody jolts out of their seats and start cheering, dancing and clapping hands. OMFG are the first words that popped in my mind. Our hostess and inspirational leader/deity, Marcelle, is shouting for everyone to dance and go crazy. I get up, start a subtle 'white man' dance, and look around at the spectacle. It's important to point out at this time that some of these participants have been to Marcelle's sessions before so they know the routine like clockwork. I, on the other hand, have just been caught in some headlights on the 417. All I can think of at the moment is how to plot my escape. The door is 8 feet away on my right so perhaps I could do it while everyone is hugging or something like that. But then again, Techno-hubbie would most likely leap out and tackle me before I could escape Endorphinville.

Next came the ‘get to smell you classmates after five minutes of foolish dancing’ session, where she made us go to each class mate, shake their hand and say “Hi! I’m Alex. Thanks so much for coming out this evening to help me break through!” Some of these people were so well programmed it was scary. I felt I was shaking the hands of Stepford wives at times.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the whole outline of the evening, but in a nutshell, I had personal one-on-ones with complete strangers about feelings and how I’d like to change myself and the world. The evening was peppered with enthusiastic high-fives followed by the words “You’re wealthy!” and “you’re awesome!”. I hugged people I didn’t know, made a crafty poster with glitter glue and markers, made frequent hand gestures to represent I had just learnt something new, and all I along I was thinking about how good my DiRienzo sandwich was going to be while I washed it down with a beer…or twelve.

I also kept thinking about how my guy friends would have reacted in this situation. I couldn’t think of one that would have liked this. Well, maybe one, but he’s into that kind of stuff anyway.

As soon as the last word came out of Ms Jackson's microphone I was out the door. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder on the way out for fear of seeing all those pudgy arms reaching out and wanting to hug me one last time. Sorry Eugene, but I couldn't bear look at that giant mole one more time like when we looked deeply in each other eyes during the 'positive energy transfer' exercise...