As per my blog of yesterday, yeah, life is totally an adventure.  Just about everything is challenging.  And I don't usually think it's so hard, but today was just a big stinky shit.  It was Moral Test Time and I flunked everything because I didn't know the answers.

Bad thing #1:  I sent a friend and his family a lovely Christmas card featuring two photos that my husband had taken and printed.  My husband actually designed the card and printed it on his own printer for them.  Then, when my friend liked the photo on the card and scanned it, and put the picture from the card onto his blog, my husband got all upset about the picture being on the internet.  This type of thing is really difficult for me to deal with.  To me whether the photo appears on someone's blog is trivial past comprehension.  I'm a very open person, and everything I have is something I would share with you.  I even seriously contemplated donating part of my liver to someone once, but you want complicated?  THAT was complicated.  This photo thing was just a pain in the ass.  But looking at it from my husband's point of view, he believes in copyrights.  Corporate America stole his "identity" and his health, and he hasn't figured out how to get them back, so to him, his photos are his "identity," and of course how he sees himself IS how he sees himself.  He has the right to his view of himself, just as I have the right to mine.  The bad thing I did was not to stand up for my friend who scanned the picture.  I didn't want to "make waves."  I said nothing. 

Bad thing #2:  My friend who has recently had a serious operation, and some of you have been following the story over the last couple of years and you know the situation I'm referring to, was transferred once again.  The incredibly STUPID and CALLOUS medical personnel involved in the transfer "lost" her prescription for pain meds, so my friend suffered in agony all day.  (This happened before when my friend was transferred to this facility previously.)  A friend of ours who is a social worker made some of the necessary outraged telephone calls.  She should have her meds by now.  I chose to stay away.  I did nothing. 

Bad thing #3:  Instead of talking to my friend, I went with my daughter to work on restoring my website, which had been destroyed and needs to be completely rebuilt.  My daughter was teaching me how to use Website Tonight.  Progress was slow.  I restored 3 of about 50 links, and reloaded a picture, but the picture wouldn't publish.  (It was the one of the marigolds, which I took in San Diego.)  Leaving the coffee house where we were working, I was unlocking my car, when a girl who looked to be about 17 (?) ish walked up to me and asked me for spare change.  This is unusual in my neighborhood.  She was wearing a jacket.  I looked at her, and got the immediate feeling that there was a man waiting for the money.  The words, "Where's your pimp?" came into my mind.  Swallowing them, I thought that she should be in a program, and my feeling was that spare change would not help her tonight, but encourage her progress down a wrong path.  I'm not sure that I'm correct, of course.  These were my gut reactions.  Sometimes I give spare change, anything I've got.  Sometimes, like this time, I clam up.  "Nope" is all that I said.  "Excuse me for taking your time," she answered with slight sarcasm.  I should have asked her where her pimp is, I thought.  In a perfect world, if she lied about not having a man who is running her, I'd make him cool his heals and wait while I bought her a cup of coffee.  On the other hand, I felt I didn't have what it would take to bring her around tonight.  So I did nothing.

The point of these stories?  Doing the "good" thing is hard to do sometimes.  And there are times when I honestly don't know what the hell that might be.  And there are times when I don't feel something inside me that I could give.  What if that girl gets really hurt, or killed, or really does go down the wrong road, because I did nothing?  What if my being with my friend could have brought her some comfort?  What if I should have said something that might have brought a different window into my husband's life?  What I don't know could fill a cold and empty universe.

Oh, and the picture above is from some guy named Judah's myspace page.

In about 5 hours today, I learned to use WebSite Tonight.  It's the website builder package that Godaddy includes with some of their web domain packages.  I've been putting my poor website back piece by piece.  Here's a link to it: Unfoldingdreams.com

Here's a couple of reviews of WebSite Tonight:  http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/09/07/website-tonight-on-godaddy-hosting-reviews/
and
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/52181/website_tonight_30_from_godaddycom.html?cat=9

The reviews say that you need a little patience with the tool, and that it has a couple of glitches, and I suppose that's true.  Sometimes you have to try a move, like changing a photo in your template, or changing the template color, a couple or three or four times before it works, but the main thing for me is that I can use it without knowing any HTML, and it really works.  I think it works pretty well, too.  Once you get the hang of it.  But that's not so different from anything else. 

Of course, I got it for free, as a birthday present from my daughter last year, and then this year when there were difficulties with my old website, my daughter again set me up with this package as a Christmas present.  She sells webspace for Godaddy, so she enjoys this type of setup.  I'm pretty lucky about that.

In general, I'd recommend this.  You can get it at a reasonable (well, I think it's a reasonable) price, and for my skill level, which is "I have no problem with MS Word or other common software packages," it's a very good fit. 

If you'd like to have your own website, why not make one?  Get yourself out there!

I can't believe it's been six days since my last blog.  Gee, that reminds me of movies I've seen, where the penitent tells the priest how long since the last confession!  Well, I'm not Catholic, although I do want to assert that Protestants can be raised with Protestant Guilt.  It does exist.  Catholics and Jews aren't the only religious communities that can go overboard on the guilt-tripping thing and create gratis and celebratory neurosis in their next generation! 

Today I was going to answer the Q&R, but I was luke warm on it, and after reading Mimi's critique of the question, I just gave it up entirely, and decided to blog on a random word instead.  Then, the next thing I did was to accidentally open one of the many wonderful silly-spam emails that Margo sends me, and this one was about an orange festival in Holland.  Wow!  I sure do learn a lot about the world from those emails!

And Phoenix could learn a lot from this, too.  Almost everyone's backyard has citrus tress, here.  In our yard, we have grapefruit and tangelos.  Next door, they grow oranges and lemons.  We give a few hundred pounds of fruit to the food bank every year, and still somehow end up throwing away a couple of hundred pounds of bad ones.  Now, why couldn't we do something creative, like this?  This looks like fun!!!

Did you ever wonder why, when people have a really serious illness, and they don't have the greatest health insurance, that they might have to sit around for months, or even years, until they find a doctor who is willing to operate on them?

Did you wonder why, during that time, not the slightest effeort is made by any health care provider to provide appropriate treatment or mitigation?

Have you wondered why, when the patient gets worse, the patient is blamed for being ignorant or lazy and causing the situation to worsen?

Have you ever wondered why, when the patient finally DOES get their operation, their care is inadequate afterwards?

Have you wondered how people can languish at home without proper nursing care?

Have you wondered whether there is a connection between proper care and the continuing spread of resistant strains of bacteria?

Have you wondered why patients have to lose their home and their car, all of their money, and be destitute, and yet they STILL can't get proper care?

Have you wondered why prisoners in prison are entitled to operations and rehabilitative care that humble working class people are unable to obtain?

Do you and your friends joke about robbing a bank so that one of you can get their operation?

Have you wondered why doctors are willing to allow their paitents to go away and just die?

Have you ever met a patient who started to feel like they were expected to just shut up, go away, and die?

Have you wondered why doctors are able to write orders that the patient can never, ever, in real life be able to follow?

Have you wondered why physical therapy is so expensive?

Have you wondered why only expensive drugs and complex technologies are seen as agents of healing?

Have you wondered why nurses who don't like their patients get away with telling them that they are "lazy" and "don't deserve" to receive treatment?

Have you wondered why nurses' aides can get away with telling patients that the patient is "only imagining" that the patient needs assistance?

Have you ever wondered why people call health care in this country a "system"?

Have you ever wondered whether the insurance executives living in their 80,000 sq. ft. mansions think about the people who died sooner than they had to, and in pain, in order for them to live like nobility on the "profits" they have squeezed from their "profitable" industry?

Have you ever wondered why people accept a health insurance code which is built on a principle of "moral hazard" which means that it is assumed that if people are allowed to receive as much medical care as they need, that they will inevitably abuse that "privilege," and do things such as go to the doctor to avoid going to work that day, so it is therefore requisite that strict limitations be embedded in the system to avoid this unavoidable dishonest abuse by any and all patients?

Did you ever wonder if any of this will ever, ever get any better?

Life goes on.

Obviously, yesterday was ANGST day.  Lots of frustration, resentment and social-level anger.  Today it's time to clear away the debris and move forward again.  It's just life.  Things are hard.  If one thing is easy, another one is difficult.  What I need to do is hang in there and work for the positive stuff, stay in touch with the Love, create the space where it's safe to do kind and good things, and hold the light. 

Going down.  Going up. 

There are circumstances where going down is good, but they are rather limited.

It's silly to take the elevator seriously.  It's just there.  Life is like that.  Up   and   down.

I suppose the magic is to understand the nature of the cycle that you are on, and live it in the best way that you can.

Photo by Ian James

There has been a sea change that I feel recently.  For the last three or four days, I have become more future oriented than ever before in my life.  I don't know when I've been so fascinated by the possibilities of the future.  Even the sixties, with all the new cars and technologies and business models and ideas and colleges and social movements can't rival for me these last few days.

I think this entrancement with the future is because I know in a few days Barack Obama will be sworn in as our Commander in Chief, and all the people he has asked to assist him will step into their roles.  I don't think I realized just how sad and discouraged I had become about our country and its position in the world during the W years.  It reminds me of when we got a regular mattress to replace our waterbed, and the 2nd morning I woke up without back pain.  It was so odd to realize that a simple, meaningful change could make such a difference in my life--a change I really didn't know was so very necessary.

I rode the light rail to work this morning.  And despite what I wrote in the blog before last, my friend really is getting better, despite everything.  I made dinner, and it was good.  I shared some kitchen time with Max.  Things are coming along.  There are real possibilities.  Before I give up for the night, I'm going to check out the MLK Day volunteer page that the Obama network sent.  There are so many possibilities!

While reading the loveable reprobate Maze's latest blog, I wondered, how much do we really know each other by now? 

And what better way to find out, than by seeing whether we can identify the Gaian by the contents of their medicine cabinet? 

I wish I could do a blog with pictures of the insides of people's medicine cabinets, and their names in random order.  The challenge to each reader would be to match the medicine cabinet to its owner. 

You can help me set this game up very simply by doing the following:

1.  Post a digital picture of your medicine cabinet in your Photos section and send me a quick email that it's there.

2.  I'll copy your picture from your photos into the game blog and add your name to the guess list.

Of course, people could "cheat" by going to your photos section and peeking (ah, there's Maze's theme again), but hey!  it's their game experience...

Whadaya say?  I hope at least 3 or 4 people could do this.  And, of course, I'll throw in a picture of my medicine cabinet, too!  It just doesn't get much better, does it?

There are so many levels to ask questions from.

I 'spoze the obvious one to me is:  "Why do the innocent have to suffer?"  You know, like sweet little babies dying of thirst.   Is it karma?  Perhaps, but then, is that really the way we "have to" learn?  Probably not.  Maybe part of the progression of souls is that they learn how to learn? 

You might like this...

From the sublime to the ridiulous.  Yesterday's blog was a share of a hilarious video, while today will offer a pathetic forray into religious philosophy.  Oh well.  What do you want for free?

Anyway, I've discovered the location of hell's fires, and I'm not talking about heatburn.  (Gee, this font makes "heartburn" look like "heartbum."  But you, brave readers, know the difference!) 

It's this:  When I get really pissed about something, I feel the fires of anger.  That has been my own metaphor for anger--to me, it's like a burning.  My anger is always there.  Like one of those campfires that you could swear is "totally out," because the flames are gone, and you threw water on it, and then you got out the shovel and put some dirt on it.  But "hot damn," there it is again.  A tiny spark and WHOOSH!!!!  My anger rushes up to fill it's spot and then eagerly reaches out for more and more of my consciousness. 

I can see why they call such passion "eternal damnation," because over and over, life after life, one would be pulled into the intensity of all this, and one would...suffer.  And make others suffer, too. 

The four levels of truth:  literal, metaphorical, political/moral and mystical. 

There are all kinds of fear. 

There's the kind that is the absence of love, and serves as the motivation for cruel and destructive behaviors of all sorts.  If love can somehow be given and brought in and felt in those situations, progress is made.  After all, love conquers hate. 

Then, there's neurotic fear.  I get that.  When I was a kid, I feared television antennas and tall buildings.  I would look up and become paralyzed with fear.  This kind of fear is best addressed through knowledge.  As I learned what these things were, and the nature of them, it helped me to deal with those situations.

There's deep psychological fear, like when you wake up from a nightmare.  My worst nightmares are about time travel--about being a vagabond in a universe of time but without any home.  This type of fear is eased through examination and analysis.  If I can read psychologies and theories, I can try to create a story about what this might mean, and add in elements that make the picture more whole, so that I can feel safer.

There's fear of physical mutilation.  Every day that I live, I feel thankful that I can see and hear, and that I'm healthy.  I try to use my body and my faculties in service of a life well lived, and I tell myself that this is right action.

Fear of something terrible happening to my children.  I don't think there's anything in the world that I can do to address that, other than to love them and keep a constructive and thankful attitude.

Oh yeah!   Time for a positive blog!  I just realized that I wrote about anger, and then about fear.  No wonder I ended up staying away for 2 days after that!!! 

What brings me peace?  It's doing what I know is right.   Peace of mind.

I also got a "Fwd:" email the other day from Margo.  It was a story about a passenger in a cab who observed his driver being subjected to rude and incompetent driving by other drivers, and then being cussed out on top of it, but he also observed that none of this upset his driver.  He asked the driver why he was still in a good mood after being cussed out for no reason.  The driver told him that his philosophy was that people "dump the trash."  He explained that people let things upset them and they feel really bad and get angry, and after a while they can't carry that around anymore, and they have to dump it.  And sometimes we are accidentally in the dump zone, but it really has nothing to do with us.  The cab driver said that knowing this helps us to remember not to take them personally.  So, I thought about this story, and I used the philosophy just yesterday, and it worked great.  I didn't get nearly as upset as I normally would. 

Also, a piece of pie can be a piece of heaven!

I always wanted to learn everything.  I couldn't wait to start school.  I read everything.  Sometimes I was too restless to concentrate, though.  I'm kind of ADD.  Still that way.  There is nothing I don't want to understand.  Einstein said that there are two ways to live life:  as if nothing is a miracle, and as if everything is a miracle.  I hold all of life in my heart, very, very sacred.  Openness to what I see, that is how I'm present in the world.  That is me.  I know that the trick is in how you frame what you see, where you put your focus.  It is what it is.  When you start calling it "a chair" "a flower" "my lover" you start to hack away at it, but this reformulation of reality though a human lens is inevitable.  Still and all, to see is to learn.  Learning how to see is a sacred discovery.

Photo by Inkwina

I vote with this video.  Except that I think we make our own "heaven" and our own "hell" whether we're livin' or whether we're dead.