"Sometimes I don't sleep at night, i hear the wind in the morning trees, I wonder how my child will fare with wars and bombd and things, the thunder has begun" Piers Faccini
2009-03-14, 12:49 am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mudlkrSMeWw
Link to the song in the title. Great song, except I can't seem to buy it anywhere! Let me know if anyone manages to find it (not on itunes).

I contemplated death today. After two perkeset on an empty stomach you would be too.
I went to the dentist in the morning and had a tooth extracted (the basic procedure is something like this- take a set of pliers, get a grip on intended tooth, pull).

With my face still numbed from the four needles they put in me, everything was kosher. It was when the anesthetics started wearing off that everything began to go to hell. The problem is you're required not to actually consume any sort of real sustenance after the surgery at least for a couple of days (god love jello) yet the pain meds they give you require you to have eaten.
Well, because I have a sort of wild abandon when it comes to my health, i took two perkeset after I'd eaten a bowl of cauliflower soup with a little milk in it.
It was the thickest soup I could think to make- but it still wasn't enough. I spent the next five hours sprawled across my crouch worrying my roommate who was kind enough to cart me to and from the dentist today. After the plethora of hours feeling like I was going to throw up I actually did throw up (never eating cauliflower soup again).

The point of all this was to paint a picture of the misery I was in. I thought I was going to die, and I thought about what that would be like. Note, in my defense I had just watched Heathers that morning which treats death as a rather mundane act.

But if you dwell on the concept any longer than you need to it becomes to big of an idea to fathom, but if you think of it in terms of life, and an end of it it's a more serious topic simply because it's now understandable and predictable. This is why I get so fucking angry when people treat life as if it's easy to replace even with something so simple as a plant or an insect. These things are gifts to us from nature in all their intricacies and glories. And I'm not speaking as a vegetarian, my bit to most people is to cut back on meat, not necessarily to cut it out of their diets entirely. Circle of life and all that but that's not how our current world looks at life. To this nation, to the people of today it's disposable, and since it is definable it's easily replaced. Kill a couple hundered palestinians and you've killed potential terrorists, and since there are already terrorists around and there always will be, we need not think about the consequences of our actions.

Or how about an even more difficult topic, something other than innocent children and cows- what about capital punishment? A criminal is a nuisance, another annoyance, a bug staining the truths that we hold so dear. But take the most insane socio path and even that person is an extreme of thoughts we all have, that are inherent in every person. It doesn't make what they do excusable but our actions are still not justified. It's cheaper to keep someone in a cell for the rest of their lives than it is to keep them in a cell for half of it then stick expensive chemicals in their blood stream and run a bunch of paper work on them.

Most people would write off this kind of thought process as the talk of a god damn liberal hippie female. That's bullshit- I'm saying them because I want people to put into society as much as they take out so that there's enough left for me and my family and the people that I love. I don't want the children I work with to grow up in a world that's riddled with thoughts of blowing people up, or ridiculously annoying old navy commercials where manikins break off their fingers (wtf!)

Then I started thinking about how no matter how wonderful it sounds to have a society that is self sustaining people love misery. People gloat about it, they revel in it. They can't live without it- misery in itself is a beautiful thing. People like inflicting in on others or themselves. I have to be careful with how I word this because depression is a very very real sickness. It's all consuming and it's painful to endure but even with something like depression people have choices. It's hard, it's so incredibly hard, but it's there. There is this woman I work with whom I admire so much for her strength and for her coping style. She has major depressive disorder, but at some point in her life she made a choice to work with it, to take medication regularly and seek aid. She is an absolutely amazing person.

I feel like on some levels I've made that choice to live life. I recognize misery and sadness as a beautiful human emotion that can be expressed, but it isn't the only one out there. If I were really to have died today (I really could have, I signed a consent form that listed that as a "side effect" of todays procedure. When I handed it to the nurse I noted that I'd just signed my life away and she gave me an evil chuckle) I think i would be ok with myself and my accomplishments.

I have flashbacks of rather frightening things that happened while I was growing up mostly having to do with unpredictable rules with unpredictable consequences. At a rather young age I had dealt with more adult problems than I would have liked. In some ways I think I try to repress it and transfer my feelings to other areas, such as philanthropic work(and the classes I'm taking now make it so much worse since all we talk about all day is child maltreatment). I wasn't always able to deal with it. I've hurt those around me, pushed people away, a lot of people, lied to myself. But in the midst of the bad decisions I've made, I feel I've also made some good ones. If I were to drop dead right now, I wouldn't feel unfinished. granted i wouldn't necessarily be all that happy, I want to see my sisters in prom dresses and have little nieces and nephews.

But here's the catch. I didn't do a lot of it by myself. There are people who have reached out to me. Something as simple as my middle school librarian, or even a college professor who didn't even know my name, but who taught like it was the only important thing in the world, and author who wrote with such abandon that the work is almost incomprehensible, jarring, debilitating to the reader, and transforming. I still maintain the people who raised me are Charlotte Bronte, Tolkein and a host of other authors who touched my life.

Each thing I do I do with the thought that I could be one of those people too. I can be someone who makes a lasting difference for someone else and not even know it.

But in order to do that I have to make admirable choices, and find constructive ways to express myself and not be selfish. Then maybe one day I might inspire something out of the doldrums that benefits my community, and so in turn, me and those I care about as well.
Not hippie liberal bullshit- self preservation.