Easter Week-end Faking It Till I Make It

I stated that I planned to act physically well until something that can actually be identified and taken care of shows itself and that is what I have done since I wrote that post. I did start taking wal-mart's claritin and using my nebulizer regularly. Do I feel much better? A little here and a little there! I think the key is acting as if I am well. Faking it till I make it came in handy as a survival skill over the years. It is now a valuable tool to use when my attitude or my belief system is not secure. If I know what secure looks like then I will just fake it until I make it. This would be delusional were it not for the fact that I continue to strive towards the "making it" part of the statement. Without that I am just a "poser".  Posers are boring, insecure and difficult to like. I don't wanna be a poser! The plan is to live my life without searching endlessly for the one diagnosis that is going to cure chronic illness. I have stopped. Finished! I remind myself that God will reveal whatever I need to see. Until then there is nothing for me to see. I'm making myself dizzy with repetition. I write as if anyone reading this post is too dumb to get the point! It is the opposite. I am too dumb to know when the point is made. My apologies to whomever...whenever.

Easter? Wow! We had it all in our family. Illness, drama, crying, love, great food, church, egg hunts and an unexpected guest. My buddy, the fellow I wrote about on another post, went to church and ate lunch with us. It was sublime having family and a visitor. My friend's name is Dean. He and I took out the Atlas and found a magnifying glass. We looked for the town in Missouri where he will soon be moving. It is right on the Mississippi River. Can't stop myself...M I crooked letter crooked letter I crooked letter crooked letter I humpback humpback I...Mississippi! Phew! Feels better now that is out of my system. We talked of snow, ice fishing, ways to earn pocketmoney doing errands for the new friends he will meet. Dean fell right in with our family. Lunch was a family meal with all the bumping into each other in the kitchen, "where is my fork", "what's to drink", "man, this food is great" one could ever want to here going on. No fussing. No hurt feelings. The fuse is always there and the match is always ready to be lit so no fussing is a miracle Easter. In our family having a chip on your shoulder is an art form during holiday seasons. Today was blessed. Today was lovely at lunch and at church and later walking four dogs round the park so they could stretch their legs a bit. There was a pre-teen riding circles around me on her bike. I threaten to smack her with the pooper scooper. A shallow threat given that I am walking and she is riding. Did I say that I saw Mr. Owl on the water tower night before last!! I did see him. He portends good things for me. Christ is risen! Our family worshipped and celebrated today. It really is true if I live in today without looking back or forward I can be pretty darn sure that my day is going to go well...even if it is going wrong. At midnight plus 1 minute I will be in another day with another chance. Christ is risen. Whom do I fear? It ain't about religion or formalities or much of anything other than the purity of a love that would die for me. For me?? If you knew me you would be a little skeptical of someone choosing to die for me. But Christ died for me and in a miraculous and unfathomable way rose from His grave and after a bit of running around on the earth and leaving the Holy Spirit as our own access to Him...Holy Spirit fully living in us Christ went to sit on the right hand of God the Father. Christ sitting on the right hand of God the Father interceding on our behalf. Great day! Beautiful day! The fruits of God's love for us displayed bountifully in my life today and my life ain't perfect. Nope! No way! I just got blessed real good today. Real good indeed!

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

 I spent the majority of the past 11 hours in hospitals and the doctor's office. Once again they could not find the reason for my symptoms which were dramatic enough that I seriously considered going to the emergency room before I called my doctor. So I feel lousy, cannot breathe well and antibiotics, stearoids and magic potions have not changed my condition. I made a decision. If I am not sick then I must be well. Until something happens that shows itself and can be identified I am going to live as if I feel great even if I have to struggle with every breath I breathe. No telling how much I have spent on doctors and medications and tests for symptoms that appear to support my general health diagnosis and the tests are good. I have good everything but I feel sick. Something is going on that cannot be identified so I am going to act as if there is nothing to be identified. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. If I feel lousy I am going to carry on with my life. I am going to "act as if" I am well. I have put it in God's hands. He loves me. He will reveal what I need to know when and if it is necessary. Until then my answer to questions about my health are going to be that I am doing well. Fit as a fiddle, in fact, and glad to be here. I don't know that I will ever get my medical debt paid as it stands at this very moment. I am God's and He will carry this for me. If I have a need to know then He will make it known. Until that time I declare myself to be fit as a fiddle.

The Heart of A Child

I have a friend who is around 30 years old. He is tall and strong and healthy. His mind is about the age of the boy in this picture. He has enthusiasm for life. He loves the world of t.v. wrestling and does the chicken dance when prompted. He mows yards and, if given the slightest encouragement, cheerfully digs trenches that he calls "edging" around the yards. He works out at the gym with a truly wonderful adult friend and shows me his muscles when I ask him. He plays in the pool with the children and needs to be reminded that he is strong and boisterous so "chill it". He cries and believes if anyone around him is angry that he caused the anger and he gets confused and lost and calls me on the phone and asks me to pray for him. He loves to go to the dances held for people like him and constantly has one girl or the other on his mind. He cannot follow more than one direction at a time and even then may get confused but he literally runs to my mother's house when she calls him to help her take in her groceries and gives him $2.00 and praises him. Jesus loved little children. He loves my friend. I told someone recently that my friend has an "olly olly in free" card to heaven. He is innocent and frequently influenced by others. He has to move with the people who have custody of him. He has to move to Missouri and he has cried and he arranged to stay here with a family that was willing to care for him but that fell through so he is moving in April. He was standing outside with the friend who takes him to the gym a couple of nights ago. He was holding two tiny teddy bears close to him and his eyes were big and he was hurting. He wants to please everyone and, sadly enough, people do not seem to feel his angst. He can be difficult to manage and take care of on a daily basis. He is a man with the mind of a young child and the yearning for things that he cannot have in this life. It is easy to lose patience with him at times easy to forget that he is so very young in that tall, lean body. So he stood in the cold night and I talked to him about God and his friend talked to him about not being to blame for other people's reactions and worked at helping him understand that he has not done anything wrong. He began to cry and I held him close and told him how much we love him and how much God loves him. He is afraid. Soon he will be in Missouri and soon after that he will have a life going on that he enjoys. He loves people. Not too long after he moves he will remember us in some ways and forget us in others. He will tell stories about his time here that are kinda/sorta like what happened. He will, for sure, embellish and build his own memories from the real memories. He is, after all, a child. I will miss him so much. It isn't often that we get to be in the life of a man like my friend. The picture I posted reminds me of him. Innocent. Joyous. Uninhibited. I could just as well have posted a picture of a worried little boy with his knees drawn up to his chest and tears on his cheeks for that is also my friend. But, God does love him so and we love him. He brought me joy and taught me his version of the chicken dance and chased me around to try to tickle me and drove me absolutely crazy at times. For this I am grateful and I am sad to see him go. God blesses us in mysterious ways and through people we never dreamed would come our way. I thank God for my friend and what he has given me.

Technically Speaking

Technically speaking I should be asleep by now and resting for a full 8 hours. My doctor would like that and praise me for my efforts. My body would benefit from it. My mind would rest.

Technically speaking I should eat less sugar and very little bread. I should eat vegetables and fruits and learn to cook in ways that will build up my immune system.

Technically speaking my house needs cleaning and sorting out and repainting and numerous repairs.

Technically speaking small butterflies will fly out of my nostrils fluttering in spiralling patterns when I do the things I should do....technically speaking.

Realistically speaking I will plan to rest, plan to have a healthy diet and plan to clean and paint and decorate my house. I will plan all of these things in detail. I will prepare myself for the changes and I will, in the final resort, wait until tomorrow and then until tomorrow and then until tomorrow.

Technically speaking? I don't know the meaning of the words!

Catch me tomorrow!

I am exhausted tonight from dr. and hospital visits. I could write but I'm not going to write more than this little bit  to say catch me tomorrow. Peace out!

I Ain't Just Whistling Dixie!

You want to see the real me? Take a good look! This is it! I live in a trailer park. I dress causal, to say the least, and I am happier than I have a right to be with my doxie, my grandson and his new dog, my colorful pants, Micah's spongebob rainboots and my son who is taking the picture. I'm southern, getting to be just a wee bit redneck, in love up to my eyeballs with my children and their children and thinking that I don't really need to wear those green crocs anymore. They don't really go with anything in my wardrobe as is clearly evident in this picture. I'm joking, folks, just joking.!

The little doxie has passed away now. His name was Sonny and I miss him more than words will ever be able to convey. The little puppy has had two puppies and my grandson is a year and a half older. The knee has been operated on and my hair is much shorter.  I still have the lovely ensemble I am wearing. I still get filled with joy just hanging out without much thought to the outside of things. I love people and animals and the ambience of a day spent around folks that I love. I live in my head with little thought of wardrobe or fashion which is, by the way, the reason NO ONE wants me to pick out clothes for them. Pretension has lost ground in my life. I 'm told that I am a character and a bit eccentric. I know I'm colorful Just look at my outfit. But give me some credit, I didn't wear it out of the park. Not even to Wal-Mart even though I would not have stood out on a busy day at our Wal-Mart. It is just another day in paradise with all the trappings that go with the reality of love, devotion, aging, accepting the things I cannot change and the shape-shifting of a recovering alcoholic's mind. Nothing is ever just the way it looks or seems. Nothing will ever surpass the gift of love in my life or the joy I find in my relationship with Jesus who blesses me with changing me so I can suit up and show up just as I am on any given day. Well, this is me, the real me, the me that I like the best. I ain't just whistling dixie. I'm living it!

                                                

Cruise Along with Me in My Stream of Consciousness

my favorite way of writing is just to write with no thought of punctuation or capital letters or any apparent direction other than at the beginning when i invite you, the reader, to take a cruise with me on my stream of consciousness. so here i go or we go i don't have any idea if anyone other than myself will see this blog and it is important to me in some part of my rather large ego that at least one other person read it but the other part of me that has long gone off on a tangent doesn't have much concern about who sees what i write but rather does have concern that i stop putting off writing and just write for writing's sake. this is how i do this kind of thought evolving and moving on to other topics and coming back to the first topic without trying to follow the path. watching t.v. today for a short time during my break from work and seeing the distraught family members of the marines killed in that blast this week and seeing the suffering in the faces of the people who loved them tore at my heart and i can't watch much of anything like that as i identify immediately and do not come away unscathed but rather beaten up and there is so much of that on the t..v.and in the news these days with one horror following the other so that i am not even able to finish watching ARGO which i rented immediately and watched about one third of until the stress of the build up got to me and i paused it and it has stayed paused for two days at a dollar a day while i contemplate if i should watch the remainder of that movie. everyone said it was so very good and is taken from a true story and i do watch crime movies on t.,v. but this movie is based on real facts with real people having been in that situation so i don't know, i just don't know so i am getting off that train of thought and thinking of the beautiful blossoms i saw on the trees today. lovely just lovely and poignant in the fact that they are so temporary which actually adds to their beauty, don't you think...as does standing beside a mountain stream looking through the water at the rocks and pebbles and catching a brief glimpse of a fish as it flashes by headed down stream and a leaf that is caught in a small eddy close to the shore of the stream and in that moment remembering that the moment that very moment will never happen again...ever...never...thoughts too large for my head and possibly superfluous with all the truly important things to think about in this world but i also am learning that i think in pictures so when i ask a client to spell their first and last name for me when i am working and it is me on a phone and them on a phone and my computer and they don't say their name but simply begin to spell it i have a really difficult time getting the name down correctly because the sounding of the letters without the sounding out of the words creates an entirely different kind of reality for me. my mind immediately wanders off on one of the letters like was that a d or a b or a t and i get complicated impressions of the person on the phone and images flow through my head as i don't have the sounding of their name to pin me down to an image of that name so i frequently have to ask them to spell their name again and then they get just a tiny bit aggravated and i feel a little freaky because the name Lisa  when spelled rather than said makes no sense to me at all and i come to myself rather harshly when i realize that i have just made Lisa a complication but that is not nearly as difficult for me as when someone spells their name using the military alphabet...you know the "alpha" "tango", etc. jeez o'pete. i am really screwed then because my mind goes chasinsg after an alpha and starts doing the tango. the part of me that is attempting to be a professional is running around trying to grab the unruly thoughts so that i can make a name out of the code being spoken but let me tell you or let me tell me if i am the only one reading this post it is not easy grabbing those bouncing thoughts attached to the "alpha" and the "tango" while paying attention to the person on the other end of the line and having no idea what other letters he or she has spelled because i am grabbing at the first two letters of their name as they go rushing by in my head so for the love of me would they please say their name first and spell it second...huh??? This cruise has ended. Please step off the boat carefully. It would be lovely to have you join me again for the Stream Of Consciousness! Perhaps we will bring a picnic lunch, hmm-mm?

Just to tell you...

Just a quick note to tell you I love you! Just a note to say all is well! Just a quick note to let you know you mean the world to me. Just a note to say you are o.k. and nothing, absolutely nothing can keep me from loving you. If you read this then it was meant for you from me. May God bless and keep you throughout the days and weeks to come.

An owl sighting and a goodbye...

As I walked home from my mother's about 11:45 p.m. I looked up toward the water tower in hopes of spotting Mr. Owl. I was not disappointed. There is no wind tonight and the evening air is crisp and clear. Good for my friend the owl but forboding for the field mice and numerous small critters skittering across the meadow below the tower this evening. I embraced Mr. Owl in that way that infers a relationship understood only by animal lovers and wayward dreamers. His presence brings me comfort.

After arriving home I set up my laptop on my desk, turned it on, told it who I was and went to do other things as it worked its' way through waking up and showing up for my pleasure. At some point in the recent past I installed something called Advanced System Care. Maybe Kim Komando suggested it in one of her daily e-mails. I am sure I ran it as a diagnostic tool and I have no doubt the diagnosis predicted dire consequences if I did not stop what I was doing and purchase the deluxe version immediately thereby avoiding an armageddon of the technical variety. This got my attention for, oh I'm guessing, 30 to 45 seconds. Few of the dire warnings made any sense to me and I didn't need the tool to tell me that this laptop is feeling a bit arthritic of late. Too lazy to uninstall the program and influenced by nagging thoughts of a possible, "I told you so!" from the Advanced System Care minions I left it installed.

There was one tiny little problem. Everytime I turned on my computer a small window appeared in the upper right hand corner of my screen with smaller little windows inside of it showing me the status of my system on several levels of which I had no understanding. I could cope with that information as I pay it no mind whatsoever. I could not cope with the smiley face emoticon thingy that changed from a smile to a grimace or a full fledged mouth curved down and from yellow to orange to let me know that my system was bad, very bad, distressingly bad. Tiny little charts with moving graphs were not enough. Just in case I was too dumb to know that this laptop is old and cranky Advanced System Care provided me with charts and a face. A face expressing varying emotions that changed for no apparent reason as I had done nothing to effect a change (unless downloading that piece of crap java update counts).

Tonight I took one look at the downturned smile on the orange face and I knew I was through with it and with the advanced care system that brought it into my world. I became willing to risk technical armageddon by bravely uninstalling the offensive system which by proxy would kill off the face of doom staring at me each day. I connected to the control panel, found the icon for programs, opened it, selected Advanced Care System and chose the uninstall option. Advanced Care System did not like my choice. A pop-up window suggested I needed to get the aforementioned deluxe system as I was now in danger of making a calamitous choice to uninstall their system. I clicked the continue to uninstall choice, watched the system disappear into wherever systems go when they are uninstalled and felt lighter of spirit. Lord knows I am fully aware of shortcomings, system problems, character defects and obligatory guilt over things left undone. But next time I boot up this old dame I won't have a deranged face made from two dots and a curve indicating an approaching armageddon of technical proportions. Goodbye, you technical party-pooper. I'm feeling mighty good right about now!

Where Did All This Come From?

It will soon be 1 a.m. and my resolve to be in bed by 11:00 p.m. is trespassed once more. How lightly I take the multiple warnings (usually a list of 10) of  lack of sleep. Night brings quiet, solitude and comfort. I get the dishes washed, the carpet vacuumed, t.v. shows watched and would, given a tiny bit less good judgement, stay up until the sun rises. Would I go to bed at that point? Probably not. As a teenager I did sleep deprivation tests on myself. I was a junior in high school and obviously disturbed in a way that it has taken many years to understand. At the time I would put "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" on my record player and turn the arm of the player so that the "45" would play over and over. I melted crayons over coke bottles making candle holders with each slow drop of liquid color. At some point I would turn off the record player and tune in to "WOWO", a radio station out of Fort Wayne, Indiana if my memory serves me correctly. They played soul music all night. Those were the years when small transistor radios were modern and hip. I dreamed of the city and found myself carried away by songs that pulled at my heart. I wanted to be a blues singer, weary with life, living in an apartment that was over a store where, as night fell, the neon signs from below would blink a cool blue color lighting up my living room in a haze of faded blue. Blink! Blink! I would, of course, be smoking a cigarette and thinking deep, philosophical blues thoughts. No one would know where I moved when I left the last town and I would become absorbed into the city. Just one face in a crowd...invisible...unknown.

Part of this imagining came true when my family moved to Taipei, Taiwan at the end of my junior year in high school. The decision was made quickly, school was out for the summer, our things were packed and we were winging our way to Taiwan without, as I later realized, telling any one of my friends. 40 years later they found me through Classmates.com and invited me to our high school reunion. They said they had been looking for me all those many years. I could not imagine anyone looking for me for so many years. Through a series of unfortunate events and personal choices, my name had changed a number of times. I decided to use my maiden name in classmates. BINGO! They found me. I was in a state of shock. Cullowhee, N.C. had long since become a dream to me rather than a reality. The smell of mountain air, the babbling of the creek near our home in the valley near town and the trauma of young teen years in the late 60's faded into a story I told myself from time to time.

In retrospect I realized that I frequently left people, places, marriages, jobs, sanity, memories, and large piles of emotional detritus behind me. I was not conscious of it. I just left either mentally or physically and mentally. I just left. As time passed each place became a dream to me. Visits to places I left baffled and overwhelmed me. I lived there; that house was on that street, I was that young and I knew those people. How very strange!

Once A Year Or So

So much for answering my craving to write...I forgot I started this blog. Recently I find myself leaving long, long posts on Facebook and decided that a blog would allow me the space and allow others the choice of reading what I write. I will post the link for this blog. Anyone who wants to read it will and those who don't will not. My main goal is to write regularly. I do want to do more than write for the sake of it and practice is a key component. This blog will give me a sense of others reading what I write even if they don't and maybe, at this point in my life, develp a commitment  from me. I mentioned wanting to be a writer to someone I respect a number of years ago and her only comment was, "It is really hard work." True to my alcoholic personality I took the comment personally and have pouted about it ever since that time. As a result this woman is doing quite well with her writing career and I am just released from using my pout as a reason to avoid writing. Silly woman! Silly, silly woman! Thank goodness she did not say breathing was difficult. I would have died by now! Scott Peck began his book, "Life is difficult!" I nodded as if my wisdom fully grasped that sentence and held my head a little higher. When a friend told me writing was hard work I walked away, shoulders down, ego deflated and used that one sentence to explain my lack of commitment to writing.

It is what it is..."Bloom Where You Are Planted." Oh how I use to hate that little phrase! How trite, I thought, smugly blowing off one of the most sensible phrases I have ever heard. Today I am blooming where I am planted. Writing is part of the blooming! If you are reading...cool! I'm writing and it is hard work. DRAT!!