Max died this morning. He was 95, and had been bed-ridden for years. He had to be fed and bathed and changed and turned. Before all this came about, he was a lawyer, and is well-known in this community for providing the legal representation to get it legal and off the ground. Greta, his wife, is 94. She is deaf as a post, but otherwise still in good health. She is fully mobile, keeps a close eye on politics and current events, and until this morning, spent most of her time taking care of her husband.
This is a trend I see enough around here to take notice of it. I see very old women doting on very old men, caring for men who are no longer able to care for themselves. Even some who aren't married will fawn over men and fluster over them like children. Agnes was adamant about sitting beside Chuck and helping to feed him. She was the one who complained at every meal that he needed his tray for his wheelchair to make meals easier for him to handle (though whether this is actually the case is very arguable). Gary actually had to move into the spare room of the care ward while Norma was in the hospital because he couldn't be trusted to take his insulin, eat regularly, or bathe himself at home while she was away.
I think that it would behoove every couple prospecting marriage spend time working in a facility like this. People today are afraid of things not working out, of relationships ending. I think they should have some dim notion of what happens when things do work out, when relationships go the whole distance.

A few nights back, a coworker of mine threw a dinner party where we all ate together, watched some of the LiveAid concert, and then had a Truth Mandala. The Truth Mandala was basically a circle of people with objects in the center. A person would enter the circle, hold one of the objects symbolizing their emotion and talk about their feelings. Supposedly, it is a sacred, safe space where people can air feelings they might not otherwise express openly. With one exception, this was not the case. The people who entered the circle mostly griped about things they would only be too happy to talk at length about given the right circumstances. I didn't enter the circle. I felt, and still do coincidentally, that any feelings I might have expressed (fear, regret/sorrow, anger, emptiness and confusion/other), were either too personal to air in front of strangers, even in an ostensibly "safe" place, or too mundane. What I wanted to say was something along the lines of, "You can't start from a place you're not at. A friend of mine talked about starting a life off-grid in Hawaii with her friends, but that land wasn't magically going to appear in her lap: it wasn't like the God of Green Living would drop it in her lap if she led an immaculately eco-friendly life. The money to buy that land would come from her friends, who would work for it and earn it in the world she'd be casting aside. No matter what, whether you want to change things to how they should be, how they were, how they've never been, or you want to keep things the way they are now, you start from where you're at this moment. And in the first place, you have to be wise enough to know where that is. When we talk about how people "should" live, we don't just need to assess how they are living now; we need to assess the essential elements. Like when considering a permacultural view of chickens. You talk about inputs and outputs. Chickens need food, air, water, etc. Humans need X. Chickens give outputs of eggs, meat, feathers, CO2, body heat, manure, scratching behavior and fighting. Humans outputs of Y. Now, you can find a way to incorporate most of the chickens' outputs into the system. Scratching and manure can be used to prepare fields. Eggs and meat can be eaten. CO2 and body heat can be used in a chicken/greenhouse exchange. But how can you incorporate a chicken's natural fighting behavior into the system? You can't. And maybe you can find a way to minimize it, but it's always there. There are certain factors that you just have to accept about the chickens' conditions, and the same goes for the human animal as well."

Of couse, while I was thinking this, I was thinking about the human capacity for violence and destruction, what so many people around me were boo-hooing and denouncing. Of course I believe that the majority of such elements is unnecessary. It would benefit us to reduce it as much as possible. But my point was, just how little violence and destruction is humanly possible? What is the minimum jealousy or anger or despair that you can expect from humans, even in an ideal environment?

But today, these thoughts came back to me, which is why I'm writing about them, to give me a taste of my own medicine. Because today, I was lamenting the human propensity toward kitsch. I hate kitsch. I hate a pleasant facade, and I can't understand why people would opt for something nice over something genuine. "Better a sad truth than a happy lie"... I've said it so many times, but I see everywhere I look that people disagree with me. They are living their rebuttal. I have the desire to tear down facade, to expose whatever lies beneath, to have others do the same. But then I must wonder just how much of it is essential to human behavior. In ideal conditions, what is the human tendency to pretense? It must not be any less than the tendency toward violence or destruction. The question is, just how much of it do I have to accept?

sa·cred /ˈseɪkrɪd/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[sey-krid] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective 1. devoted or dedicated to a deity or to some religious purpose; consecrated.
2. entitled to veneration or religious respect by association with divinity or divine things; holy.
3. pertaining to or connected with religion (opposed to secular or profane): sacred music; sacred books.
4. reverently dedicated to some person, purpose, or object: a morning hour sacred to study.
5. regarded with reverence: the sacred memory of a dead hero.
6. secured against violation, infringement, etc., as by reverence or sense of right: sacred oaths; sacred rights.
7. properly immune from violence, interference, etc., as a person or office.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Origin: 1275–1325; ME, orig. ptp. of sacren to consecrate < L sacrāre to devote, deriv. of sacer holy; see -ed2]

I've been pondering what I might consider "sacred" in my own life. Tomorrow is my morning off. I will spend it sleeping in. It also happens to be my coworker Kelli's morning off, and just before supper this evening, we were talking, and I asked her how she would be spending it. She replied that she would be attending services at Christian Community Church. I asked her then whether she went often, and she replied that she'd only been there once before, but that she wanted to go because she felt like some part of life should be sacred. I can't remember her exact words, because I've been reading the various definitions above, and now I've forgotten exactly how she used the term. The reason the definition is posted above is because, whatever she said, it made me stop and wonder if there's anything I hold sacred in my own life. Then I realized that I wasn't quite sure precisely what the definition of "sacred" actually is. Obviously, we all have our own personal connotations about what it means, the same way we have our own interpretations of what profane is, and what it means. In my case, any definition involving religion is clearly not implicated. But surely there must be something that I hold with reverence, to which I am dedicated, or that I wish to secure against violation. At the same time, I can't get over this sense that there's a personal connotation that the things I am reverently dedicated to securing against violation are not, in fact, "sacred."
I need to think some more. In the meantime, what do you consider sacred to you?

Other stuff I also want to do:

-learn better, more advanced ways of knitting and crocheting, and do larger projects.

-work with stained-glass. I learned how, now I wanna do it.

-find a bed or type of bedding that I can sleep comfortably in all night.

-sing aloud more often.

-Find a job that incorporates what I learned in the GA and allows me to work with my hands and my body, and makes me enough money that I can pay all my bills and still have a little left over to put away.

-Raise bees for honey and wax.

-Raise ducks for eggs, meat and fun.

-Have a healthy, stimulating romantic relationship.

-Have safe, mutually enjoyable sex. Lots of it.

-Spend three seasons of the year working, spend the remaining season (likely winter) volunteering.

-Travel to new places.

-Revisit Israel.

-Get a driver's license.

-Maintain ties with my friends abroad and reconnect with friends at home.

-Develop my drawing style more fully, and incorporate something of Gad Almaliah's into it.

-Learn to color.

-Cook for myself and others.

-Keep developing a sense of what I want in a community.

I keep having dreams, every morning after I wake up and fall back asleep. I've been having the egg dreams again, where I see broken eggs that have dead baby birds inside. But I've had other, stranger dreams, too. I had one where my areolae shrunk- seriously, they went from being the size of a tangerine to the size of a dime. I had just taken my top off in front of a bathroom mirror, and seeing my breasts shocked me. I was really worried for a moment, but then I realized that I could make them larger again just by thinking about it, and I panicked, because I remembered that I always hated how large my areolae were, and they were finally, magically smaller and I'd ruined it without meaning to.
I had another dream that I was back in the apartment in Israel, sitting with my laptop, when my friend Geoff messaged me and told me that I should come hang out with him. So I got up and went outside and we were in a huge rolling field with grass up to our waist. We ran around catching butterflies in huge nets, and then we took them back to his house and poured them into an enormous jar, but as we poured them in, they fell out of our nets into the jar already dead. We were both really upset, when Giselle walked in. She saw the dead butterflies and started yelling at us, telling us how stupid we were.

Message:

I am inspirational (as I note are you), warm, tall, Australian, witty, and musical. I am also a dancing, geek, author, widely-traveled, digital-artist, ex-teacher, muse, investor, and photographer.
I note our friend rating in OKCupid of 87% is extremely high.
Our combined match/friend rating of 170% is one of the highest I have seen on this site.
Please reply if you would like to chat.

Reply:

Well, it's a damned good thing I took the time to read this twice. The first time I read this, I thought for certain that you had absolutely nothing to offer me. I'm up to my armpits in warm, witty, musical, inspirational people, and a modest percentage of them even happen to be Australian. But then, on the second reading, I realized you do, in fact, have one redeeming quality: you're tall. I don't know any tall people. Tall is the one demographic my circle of friends is sadly lacking (which explains why my social pool of warm, witty, musical, inspirational people only comes up to my armpits). As far as I am concerned, our high percentage match ratings are icing on the cake. The tall cake.

It's been a while since I've rage-dumped here, so I guess I'm entitled. Tonight I am absolutely seething about what has been going on here. I've talked to a friend a bit about this, but basically tonight, a situation that has been gnawing at me has really broken the skin.

( Read more... )

For those of you who have been wondering where the hell I've been and what the hell I've been doing, I'll go as far as to tell you where I spent the weekend:
( Read more... )

My sister just had her baby, Deakin Taylor Reyes, 12/14/06. I'm now an aunt, so congratulate me. I demand it.

Date:	2006-11-18 11:45
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	disappointed

It's become apparent, while looking over the info, that the Green Apprenticeship is not going to work out afterall. I didn't even bother writing people and begging them for money (god knows I put that off for as long as possible), because I realized that changing my flight alone would require someone else funding me. I hate myself for even hoping, and I'm pretty annoyed with Matthew, the former volunteer-cum-GA who convinced me to try. I have no problems investing physical and mental effort in things; in fact, I often enjoy it. Even if it turns out that it's all been a wasted effort, you sleep, you eat, you read, listen to music, watch TV, and eventually, you're replenished. But I hate investing emotional effort, because I don't know how to replenish that effort when things fall through. I hate it, too, because I know it's inevitable. I was reluctant to even look at the program again because I knew that I wouldn't be able to look at things clearly on a numbers-basis, that I would end up hoping for something that wasn't very likely to happen.

"You know, your negative attitude toward everything is ultimately self-defeating."
"Well, it's good to know I can defeat someone."

Don't feel badly for me, though. I'm still here.

Things are going fine, though I am in a bit of a sitch. Basically, Kibbutz Lotan has a Green Apprenticeship program, where they teach you all sorts of about sustainability and ecology and permaculture, etc, which is what had originally interested me in this particular kibbutz in the first place, but at the time I was planning my trip, it hadn't seemed feasible. Well, I met one of the other volunteers who'd become a GA, and he encouraged me to try and make it work. The next program (a ten-week course) starts up in two weeks, but the program fee is just over two grand. I don't have that kind of money, especially now. I also have to consider how this would affect my visa status, since I'd be staying about a week longer than the three-month allowance (til Feb 5th), and whether changing my plane ticket will be cheap enough to afford. My only course as far as the funding is concerned is to beg it off of my grandparents, although my mother's parents are always lending everyone money, and I still owe them some money they lent me so I could go back for my second semester at EIU. My other grandparents... I don't know if they have the money, but I'm equally as dubious as to whether they'd invest it in me. I'd be willing to make it a loan that I would pay back, but I still don't know. I guess the only thing to do is to ask, and in all fairness, they were willing to loan my brother the money to repeat his final semester (for all the good it did anybody). This is something I really want to do, and now is the perfect time to do it, while I'm already here. I can always come back and do it again later, but that means saving up for plane tickets and making more travel arrangements, and spending a whole nother set of months overseas, away from people and things. So I really hope it works out for now. I'll keep you posted.

Hi everyone, I need some one, or several people, to do me a favor. For some reason, hotmail isn't sending my emails. I sent one on Friday with my contact info, and since several of you on the list are still asking for it, I'm assuming it didn't go through. I'm also assuming that the one I just sent didn't go through either, since all I'm getting is an error message. Hopefully my dad will read this, but in case he doesn't, someone please contact my mother at precious_few_@hotmail.com. Her name is Erika, and I'd like you to let her know the situation. Also, I can't call. I don't have a phone card, which you need to use the payphone, and apparently, having one wouldn't do me any good right now, since it's out of service. If the email did go through (please check your inboxes first), don't worry about it. If not, please let her know as soon as possible, and ask her to fill in the rest of my family on the situation. Please don't be shy. Being bombarded with the same email from several people will be better than not hearing anything at all. Thanks in advance. If the trouble with email continues, I will post my contact info as a friends only post within the next day or two. I hope everyone is well.

P.S. Sarah and Gretchen: Since LJ is working much better than MSN, I have heard the sad news about Travis from reading your journals. My thoughts are with both of you. I have my own fond memories of Travis, though I don't think I was as close to him as either of you were. My love to both of you.

Ok, I am here in Israel, I am safe, and I am on Kibbutz Lotan. The trip here was so thoroughly exhausting that I went to bed before six last night and slept (though not soundly or all the way through) til seven thirty this morning, and I'm still tired. Luckily, I don't actually begin working here until Sunday. I'm working in the kitchen, which is not ideal, but it was what I had anticipated doing, so I've no ill feelings about it. I've worked in a kitchen before (thanks to Sarah for that) on EIU, and I actually enjoyed that quite a bit, considering it was, you know work. You can check out Lotan for yourself by googling it. I'll try to update soon, but I'm working from a shared computer, so don't hold your breath.

P.S. Those of you who want and didn't get my contact info should email me, and I'll get back to you ASAP.

Hello again, everyone. I am once again safe, and back in London for the night. The next time you hear from me, I will be in Israel. The European leg of my journey is over, and I am glad. I was exhausted and lonely most of the time.

Someone once told me about a trip he took to Amsterdam: he did shrooms and spent hours talking to himself about his life. He said it helped.

Amongst many places, I went to Amsterdam. I didn't do mushrooms: I didn't need them.

I was in Paris as of this morning; it was one of my favorite places. It rained, but it's rained almost everywhere I've been, yet it was warm. I caught the flu from my roommates, but I was determined to see the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower before I left. While I was in the Louvre, it started raining. I considered going back to the hotel to get my umbrella, but I knew that if I went back, I'd find excuses not to go back out again, and I would hate myself when it was time to leave. So I braved the rain, and it stopped for a while. It went off and on all afternoon, and walking along the Seine, I was mostly kept dry by the trees and random bus stops. Finally, though, I had to leave the cover. I could tell the rain was getting heavy again from the ripples on the puddles, but the first drop I felt landed square on the center of my lower lip, as though Paris giving me a concillitory kiss and saying, "Sorry bout this, darling, but you know how these things are." Then it poured and blustered, and by the time I reached the Tower, I was dripping, and my shoes were soaked. And it stopped raining. I took pictures without getting my camera wet.

Hello everybody! I'm typing on a European keyboard, which is very difficult! For one thing, the 'z' and the 'y' are reversed, and I needed help finding the @ (it's under the q). And the ' button is ä, and the _- button is ß. Anyhow, I'm in Salzburg, and half way through the Europe part of my trip. I'll update when I can!

So I took the time to mass email everyone last night to let them know I'm okay, and I get a reply from my grandfather this morning, thanking me for the email and the link to my photos of the trip so far, adding: "Judging from your itinerary you don't have much time for emails, etc., if you are going to take in some sightseeing."

I can't tell if he's chiding me. Clearly, based on the pictures, I have plenty of time for sightseeing. Free WiFi is few and far between here; I like to make the most of it when I can. Yes, I'll be going out today and sightseeing in Berlin. I didn't yesterday because I took a six-hour train ride here from Amsterdam and then got lost once I arrived, so I left my last hostel at 10 a.m. yesterday and didn't check into this one until 7:30 p.m. and I was quite happy to sit back, chat, email and veg. Plus, the sickness I thought I had the other night is just the onset of my period. I haven't been able to keep up with my pills regularly, and now I'm paying for it. Once I settle down in Israel, it should be much easier to get back into it again.

I suppose I'll go out now. I will be back on later tonight though, as I need to see about train reservations and other practical stuff. I also need to do laundry at some point. I'm down to my last clean pair of panties.

This will not be an overly long post, as my laptop has run out of battery power, and I am left to type this in the lounge of the hostel within the next fifteen minutes and in plain view of everyone. Anyhow, I'm here, safe... good.
I had a bit of trouble with the customs agent. Apparently, getting into the country when you're an out-of-work ex-nanny is a bit troublesome in the eyes of UK customs. I was asked to provide my itinerary (which I could have done if it hadn't been so early, if I'd gotten more than an hour's worth of sleep the night before, and was thinking clearly, etc.), and couldn't, asked to provide proof of my funding, since the ticket reciept I did have was just for my Air India tickets, which indicates that I will be returning from LHR to JFK at the end of January, so it looked to him as though I'd be staying in London/UK for at least four months. Eventually, I "convinced" him that I was telling the truth, those being his words, although he sounded anything but. I think perhaps he's only allowed a certain amount of time in which to grill people without coming up with any actual evidence or probable cause, as we'd say.
I was exhausted my first day here, and I spent the entire ride on the tube to the hostel wondering why in the hell I'd decided I needed to spend a day in Europe, much less a month. I felt a right fool. But I cheered up a bit once I was checked in and I went out sightseeing with my roommate Minnie. I accidently spent much more on tube tickets than I should have, but I got to see stuff. We went to the British Museum, Notting Hill (better called Nothing Hill, because as far as I was concerned, there was nothing worth seeing or doing there), and London Bridge, from which I took blurry nightime pictures of Tower Bridge. I hope to be able to post some of the 100+ pictures I've already taken, which will be even more by tonight. I just need to find a damned outlet. The one in my room doesn't fit my travel adaptor, so I'm screwed until I find one that does. It also means that my iPod, which is likewise down on battery power, cannot be recharged either. Ugh.
Anyhow, I spent yesterday wandering around by myself, as Minnie (a fellow NYer, as it happens) had moved on to Amsterdam early that morning and I hadn't made friends with anyone else. She's also headed to Berlin, although we'll end up missing each other by a day. I'm not too worried about the loss of her, though. It's nice to have a buddy around, but she's a little...um, dippy. She was the one who insisted on going to Notting Hill because of the movie by the same name. In fact, most of the references she used came from movies. Walking through the Museum, she whispered to me as we passed into the Ancient Greece room, "You know what they say about Greeks and um... homosexuality? Do you think any of it's true?" This might be a little less overwhelming if she was 19 rather than 27. I could hardly believe her when she told me her age. So I didn't miss her too much yesterday. I eschewed the tube and decided to walk everywhere, which wasn't too bad, and made me feel young and hale.
But more of that later. I'm almost out of time. Ta-ra.

In nine hours, I will be on a plane to London. I will not return to this country for at least four months. If I post again in that time, it will be from far away.

My love to you all.

Hanging out in Chicagoland with my family, alternately being reminded why I love them, and why I hate them. One week from now, I will be on a plane over the Atlantic on my way to London.