So, anyway, I was thinking

about the first of the trips this month.  The trip, except for the almost accident, was great, no highlights or anything, but an extension of what passes for my life these days and that is satisfying enough, simply to recognize that.  I have used three parts of the vacation month plan that I made and begin the final one tomorrow, but will be home by the weekend.  

One thing that I can share is that Dorothy was right.  There is not any place like home, even when home is not remotely on speaking terms with happiness or peace, much less perfection.  Sometimes you get to see and understand that your life is as wonderful as you make it and that despite our lack of control over most things, we do control how we respond to what we have and what happens to us.  I guess that has to be enough.  Maybe it is everything.

Well, for now it has to be the everything part.  No more close calls and even though the transportation vehicles were much larger than the shuttle vehicle that nearly crashed, I still am being hauled around by a stranger who may or may not stay alert and not potentially injure, maim or kill the passengers.  I begin the final part of the September journeys early tomorrow morning.  Again, in a really big coach and, again, with a stranger driving.  On the day trip on Thursday I sat near the front of the coach, but positioned in a way that I could not monitor or see the dashboard.  Except for a queasy stomach and some mild anxiety, I was mostly fine.  I was traveling solo and did not have anyone to distract me.  I read a bit, watched the scenery a bit and arrived home unscathed.  

Yesterday was a longer day-trip and was full enough so that I and my friends sat in the last two rows of seats.  From that vantage I could not see anything and that was just fine.  There were a few traffic related bumps and jumps and starts (of the startle kind) and I was still fine.  Tomorrow's trip will be the longest in a coach and I have a good feeling that I will not feel any alarm or concern at all. 

And, I think the most important thing that I am feeling is how stupid this is.  The thing is over, all is well and time marches on with or without me, so I might as well get back in step.  It is too exhausting to be on high alert all the time.  Things will happen or they will not.  Trying to control, or simply monitor, what cannot be controlled is insanity.  I think that I am finished being crazy, at least for a while.  

The next not quite a week of traveling will be wonderful and I will see lots of fall colors and have good food and a lovely room in which to spend a few longs days reading, sewing, napping and taking short walks along the shore.  I might even take a day train trip into Canada.  I have caught a train fever and more trips on the rails are certainly in my future. 

Two final things.  The first is that I have found that having access to a television is a mixed bag.  There is not a large variety of cool stuff to watch on the channels available in a hotel room.  However, that does not prevent me from having the set on most of the time that I am in the room.  I have watched some really dumb stuff, acknowledged that it was dumb and immediately went back for more.  The experience has made clear that I will never go back to having a television service at home.  I would waste huge and important chunks (days...weeks...years?) of my life watching dumb stuff.  Over the past several years of not having television access I often wondered what I might be missing.  I am certain that there are tons of stuff that would be informative, but I would likely ignore that good stuff and fill my time with the dreck.  And, besides, watching would severely cut into my mah jong playing time.  I mean, seriously.

The other thing is that even when things to not turn out very well, maybe especially when they do not turn out very well, that as long as your intentions are the highest and your efforts are the best and you are not trying to impose yourself or your beliefs or ideals on anyone else and things still go to heck in a hand basket, it is fine.  Fine is enough, even if some suffering and misunderstanding comes along with it.  Fine is fine, it might even be good, although not likely great, at least with the whole personal suffering aspects.

Now I have to go and find a ride to the pick-up location tomorrow morning.  My thoughts about the selfish nature of finding new friends who are able and willing to return favors and give me a ride once in a while still seem selfish, but they are also more immediate because my ride canceled on me.  I am sigh-ing and lordy-ing all over the place.

Cellular memory

One time I fell.  Well, I fall a lot.  I have crappy joints and no depth perception up close and personal unless I have the right combination of dollar store glasses in combination with prescription lenses with prisms.  Even then, it is an imperfect visual world and unless I go slowly and deliberately I end up on the ground wondering if anyone got the license number of the delivery van that just knocked me ass over teakettle.

Muscle memory and my long, personal history with gravity are not enough to keep me upright unless the correct alchemy of lenses, moderate speed in doing things and the planetary alignment is achieved.  Really. 

So, anyway, I fell that time and somehow managed to flip my right paw under instead of up to help break my fall.  I did not break the wrist, but I did remove a nearly inch and a half square chunk of flesh, right down to the muscle and whatever else is there, because there is not a whole lot of muscle in that area.  

I am a good healer.  I heal quickly, almost freakishly so and everything grew back with a little help from a plastic, although quite pleasant, surgeon.  This was at least twenty years ago, but sometimes, as in very infrequently, there is a sensation in that area that feels exactly like when the flesh was missing.  It is not pain, but kind of like the hole is back.  I cannot describe it, but people who have experienced missing flesh might know what I mean.

S'kay, that feeling is back.  Along with a myokymia in my lower lip that I used to have when I was under extreme stress. 

Two decades since that time when things were bad, even worse than they have been for the past couple of years.  

I cannot do this again.  I cannot have all of this crap in my life physically manifesting in the physical.  I simply cannot.  Guess I have to deal with this crap or deal with what happened. 

Crap.

Modern medicine is a wonderful thing

I am feeling much better with the little particles of antibiotics churning around inside of me.  

I am drinking too much orange juice; it is the only thing that makes my throat feel better. 

I am loving the Walgreens' version of the little plastic tabs that you stick to your nose to breathe more easily.

I used my inhaler more yesterday than I have in the past couple of weeks.  So be it.

The variety of over-the-counter meds available colds and flu is mind-boggling.

Choosing which to buy takes more than the brain power and concentration available to a person caught in the thrall of the flu.

Why is it that, just when you need to be the most effective consumer of this stuff, you are the least capable of making any reasonable decisions?

It translates into having to buy things that you might need (but probably will not), purchasing doubles of the things that you know you will need, and a selection of strange stuff that later baffles you and makes you wonder why you bought such strange things in the first place.

Oh.  Right.  You had (probably still have) the flu.  

You were under the influenzance.

Yep.

I know that feeling better is the most risky part of having the flu, which, by the way, I am not supposed to have because it is too early in the season.  Since the particular creepies that infected me were from a state several states from here, perhaps they did not know that I was not allowed to have the flu this early in the season.  Early in the season.  Lordy.

Yesterday found me coughing.  Oh, dear kind and loving Universe, please do not let this move to my lungs!!!  I am begging you.  I also sneezed.  Twice.  Double the please pleas.  No, quadruple them.  At least the body pain is lessened, and so have the fevers. 

I want to go back to bed, but cannot because I have to fetch my crap from the gallery so that the new show can be mounted and for which I will have no new work because I feel too crappy to haul the stuff over there.  Maybe I will feel better by December.  Maybe.

As long as I am whining, I did not know what the heck I was expecting, but it is still the case that no one talks to me except for the one time that I was scolded.  I hope that it is all right to continue to be sad about this.  

Now that I have made those decisions to stay, save, travel, save, travel and keep this as my home base between traveling, there is a certain amount of freedom that I am feeling.  Not the kind of freedom that makes me feel safe in coming back home each time, but more like knowing that I do not have to choose poverty, losing the kitties and the car and medical insurance just to make my point.  After all of this time, especially during the past couple of years, I am not all that clear about what my point was, or what I thought that it was.

Anyway, I will be seeing new and different and not-here places.  I will have the chance to meet lots of new people and, with any luck, I will be making new friends like I did on the last trip.  I guess it is properly the 'first' trip, but now that I will be doing this more often, particularly the single-day trips, it is the last trip, or the most recent one, or something.  My head is still too fuzzy to decide.

Trusting here

Trust your radar.  We have instincts for a reason and to not use them is a damn shame.

Call it what you will, instinct, intuition, gut feeling, the boogie-woogie-woo-woo, it all means the same thing.  It is our ability to consciously and un/sub-consciously observe what is going on around us and the sense to pay attention to all of it.

Use it or suffer the consequences.  It is when we ignore our natural, intuitive abilities that we find ourselves in trouble.

If it feels wrong, it almost certainly is.

I paid attention last week and acknowledging that might help me to sleep tonight.  Gods, I hope so.

Working on perspective and balance

Dreams woke me several times last night and were immediately followed by flashbacks of the thing that was avoided.  For fuck's sake, people have these near death experiences all the damn time, so why am I having such a hard time releasing this, disconnecting from my attachment to this.  Damn.

And, you know, it is not as though it was some life-changing event.  No revelations.  No gob-smacked changes in understanding.  Nothing.  Not a fucking improvement in the quality of how I view or manifest in my life or any other damn thing.  There should be, right?  Maybe that does not happen to everyone.  Maybe it has not happened to me because I have already been trying to live the best way that I can.  Maybe.  I do not know.

After the third awakening/flashback at 3:34 this morning, I decided that enough is enough and I did a visualization and release.  The visualizing went find and the release seemed to be doing the same.  And, then I got stuck and could not release my connection to the event.  I kept trying and it kept changing the attachments.  And, I am lying there, thinking, holy crap, this is my visualization and I am in control of what happens here and why the hell am I unable to break the threads and dust that are holding me to this experience?  

I finally gave up, totally and completely disgusted with myself, so far from the result I anticipated, and got up.  I had a piece of yesterday's pizza and played mahjong until I felt sleepy enough to try sleeping again.  I did sleep for three hours and had the same damn thing happen.  I stayed in bed and slept another hour and a half and finally got up.

O.K., then, the event was serious, but it is long over, so why am I unable to release it?  What is my attachment to this event? 

I have been wanting to nap for the past several hours, but I have to get back on my usual schedule, like right now.  This virus is not helping.  Man.

So, anyway, going away was not what I expected

Truth is that I am not sure what I thought this trip was going to be about.  I wanted to see the Grand Canyon, and it is not as though I had the expectation of the final experience in the Kevin Kline and Danny Glover film, but still.  I suspect, and this is still genuine speculation, that an unfortunate incident, one of a barely avoided accident on a mountain road, had something to do with it.  Days later, I feel recovered, but nightly bad dreams and flashbacks are leading me to feel that I might still be a bit shocky about it.  That said, I am not talking about it to anyone.  I suspect that the whole not talking is probably not the best idea, but it is one that I can go with for a while.

So, when a friend called this afternoon to say 'welcome back' and ask about the trip, I told her that it was fine.  She expected more, I am certain, but croaking out that 'fine' was nearly more than I could manage.  So, I switched gears and shared stories about the wonderful people I met, and often met again another day.  Four of them are from AU and are people with whom I will stay in contact.

Frankly, I would just as soon not talk about any of the trip parts because they lead directly back to how the experience was for me.  It was, except for that few minutes, a very nice trip, but I seem to be stuck in those minutes.  I know that time will help.  It is my hope that that happens, the time passing and feeling less of the other stuff.

It does not help that I picked up a virus thing and that my head is clogged, my sinuses drip and burn, the old throat is red and sore, and I have a blazing headache.  Only one day of work this week, thank goodness.  I plan to sleep as much as possible.  Even though I have tons of work to do, I really will be resting and sleeping as much as possible.

A three-hour delay in the train schedule meant that my ride home from the station was no longer available to me because she has to drive home in the dark from work and does not like driving in the dark at any other time.  My ending station is unmanned and on a dead-end in an industrial park.  Someone who is not me could not fetch me because he does not know exactly where the station is and it was too difficult to figure out the directions.  I spent the last three hours of the trip trying to connect with someone and finally reached a friend by accident.  He was at the gallery and picked up the telephone.  He offered to be there to take me home and he was waiting when the train pulled in. 

I cannot remember ever being so happy to see someone.  Not ever.

So, I think that it is time for another handful of ibuprofen and a nice nap.  I have been planning to see a play this week and to go to an agricultural festival in the northern part of the state on the weekend.  I will not have to drive, so may still do those things if I can stay awake long enough to shower, dress and make it out to the car.  I just do not want to ruin anything or the experience for the other people.  Oh, what to do?  I will think about it later. 

There is not any real food in the house, exceptionally bad planning on my part, but it would have been nice, would be nice to live with someone who is not me and have that person speak to me or say hello or even offer to pick up something when he went to the grocery store a while ago.  It is my own fault, though, because I never ask for anything and I know that nothing is ever offered. 

So, anyway, I just ordered a pizza.  Have not ever ordered from this place, but it is close and I ordered enough for a couple of days.  But, I am sitting here, thinking, and I just realized that I do not have any easily accessible support system.  I am the go-to person for a bunch of other people, but they are all older than me and more disabled than me and what the hell.  I have two safe places in case something happens here, but I do not have a single person upon whom I can call for, oh, like an emergency ride home from the train station.  Crap.  If my gallery friend had not just been there when I called trying to find my other gallery friend, the one who owns the place, I do not know of anyone else to call.  There is not any bus service or taxi cabs or anything way the hell out here. 

The problem with being independent is that you do for others, but they are unable to return the favor.  It is is not that they are unwilling, but that they are simply unable to do those sorts of things.  I am not like bummed out or anything, but I really do not have any plans or thoughts about what I would do or on whom I could depend in an emergency.  All I have is me.  Not only does that suck, but it is really kind of stupid, too. 

I have to make some new friends who might possibly be available on the off chance that I do have some emergency situation, although that seems like a very selfish reason for making friends.

Lordy.

Apparently

I am not anything  close to what I thought myself to be.

I am not a real woman because I do not willy-nilly shop for groceries by picking, gathering or harvesting foodstuffs that are growing along the pathways that I travel to and from wherever the hell I am going.  Real women take whatever they like from fruit trees and bushes and vegetable plants, and revel in their cleverness are not having to pay for the free food they bring home.  An important part of being this kind of real woman is to do your best to avoid thinking about who might be the owner of the properties where one does this kind of harvesting/gathering/shopping, and heaven forbid that real women ask for permission to do this harvesting/gathering/shopping from whomever owns the land.  Not-real women like me believe that even public owned property deserves the courtesy of a bit of investigation and permission garnering, but even that notion further disqualifies me as a real woman.  That there are differing standards for freely picking/harvesting/blah-blah-blah in different locations around the planet, and that there are different standards and rules for all of this is irrelevant in the face of how the practice of this makes one a real woman as apposed to those of us who live in a culture that implores us to be respectful of other people's property (even when the owner is unknown to us) and are thus not-real women.  Just saying.

Real women have and maintain strict standards for exactly how the house cleaning, polishing, laundry and other housewifely tasks are performed.  Real women make their beds with hospital corners, the proper coverings and stuff like that.

Real women bake and clean, cook from scratch, make their own cleaning supplies, garden organically, raise their children by the precepts of one religious book/practice or another, mend, sew, make their own clothes and household stuff.  

No one ever says, as in actually coming out and stating, that if you do not do all of those things that you are not a real woman, but the message, the implication and the agenda is that if you do not, you are not a real woman.  Perhaps, you are not even real.  At the very least, you can be held up as a person to be found lacking when judged, criticized, ridiculed and minimised by the standards and practices of the real women.  Worse, you are often thought of as significantly flawed, uninformed, uneducated, materialistic, commercial-driven, lazy, selfish, pampered, elitist, stupid, clueless and just plain, fucked up.

Please allow me to introduce myself.  

Hello, I am Juds and I am fucked up.

I am also weary of being judged and found lacking for what I am unable or unwilling to do, especially when it is something that someone else believes is the only way to do something.  Or practice.  Or think or believe.

There is no one right way to live.  Dammit.