Ms. Marya Hornbacher

I just emailed Marya Hornbacher.


Look her up. I'll blog more about her later.

Infestations... Head Lice.. Bed Bugs.

So, unfortunately, the house I'm renting has been infested with bed bugs. Which has me suffering from flashbacks from elementary school. Every year, a few times a year, we would have "head lice" checks to make sure we weren't carrying the parasites around and spreading it to our classmates. I, though I've never had head lice, have always been anxious about those days. The humiliation that comes along with having head lice... being ostracized.... being an outcast and being thought of as dirty.... I dreaded that threat each time the nurses came into our classrooms.
Our bed bug infestation reminds me a bit of those times. People immediately think you're dirty (though, it was my old man roommate who brought them in and then moved out). So, I've had to hold back in telling a lot of people about the additional amounts of stress my sister and I have had to deal with recently. Basically, we're trying to keep it on the down low, until the issue is taken care of.

So, reflection on money and bug infestations....
All throughout school, it was the "poor" kids who were singled out and told they had head lice in front of the rest of the class. It was those same kids who brought lice to school, and who I kept my distance from in my classes. The kids with money never seemed to have those issues.... head lice or bug infestations seem to have only affected the poor kids. The truth, however, is that head lice, or bed bugs, don't target the rich or the poor. They don't target people with dirty hair, or dirty houses. These parasites are equal opportunity bugs; they will attack and infest wherever they can. (I'm not saying that a cleaner house may/may not slow an infestation.) What I'm saying is that maybe bug infestations like bed bugs or head lice seems to be a poor person's problem because it's the poor who can't afford treatment for the infestation. Maybe it's the poor who are harder hit by the bugs that take over their residence. Maybe it takes longer to financially, as well as emotionally, respond to such an infestation.
Our bed bug problem alone is costing my landlord $1200 to take care of. Someone with limited income could not pay the bill upfront.
I'm learning that a bug infestation does not just target the poor, or the dirty. Bugs target whoever they can. It's just the the people with limited income don't have the means to keep their problems under control, or to pay an exterminator right away.
Just sayin.... our socioeconomic roles effect EVERY aspect of our lives.

Feeling Low? Try List-Making.

Someone, at a meeting I recently attended, suggested making a gratitude list when you're feeling angry/alone/hopeless. Try to pump out 10 things you're grateful for. If you can't get 10, try 5. She said it will help alleviate your bad mood and get you to start thinking on a more positive track.

It's worth trying. Next time you're feeling low, just try creating a list. Get your mind off of the negative, if only for 10 minutes.Controlling your thoughts can do a lot for your mood. It might just end up changing your mindset for the rest of the day.

Loss: As Viewed by Gail Caldwell (And Me)

Shortly after Christmas, I read Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell. A few months earlier, I had come across the book in a small book store in the outer banks of North Carolina. It was too expensive for me to buy at the time, but I sat down and read about 30 pages, instantly falling in love. I'm drawn to anything that attempts to express grief and/or loss as I experienced, but couldn't articulate, it/them.

You can't imagine the incomparable pain, the hopelessness, the relentless longing for what's lost, unless you've personally had someone very close pass away. You want the world to stop, because your world has stopped. But it doesn't, it keeps going, and it expects you to keep moving forward too.

Gail Caldwell expresses this really well:

"Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead."

I could easily relate to the next two quotes:

"Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

"The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it."
 — Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

Not only do you want your entire world to stop, but you don't want it to ever start up again. If you feel how I felt (and I'm assuming Caldwell felt), it seems almost like a betrayal to move on and continue your life. As long as you're feeling that excruciating pain, the loved one is still an active part of who you are, a part of your life. The pain serves as a constant, stinging reminder that you haven't forgotten about them, you haven't started moving forward. But, recovery manages to sneak in no matter how hard you fight it. Hope slips in and at first it feels like you're violating your lost loved one. Just the thought of moving forward while loved one can't is an amazingly difficult concept to fathom. Nonetheless, hope exists so your world continues forward, even if it seems like that's the last thing you want. You'd otherwise stay stagnant, overwhelmed, and overcome....(which is tempting but unrealistic).

"Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

So, while we can never stop or really even prevent death (because inevitably everyone will die), we can find some comfort in who our loved one was to us. We can share how that person helped us become who we are and how beautiful that person was. "Memory was all that eternal life really meant"... and that person lives on through our memories of them and our outward expression of said memories. In the end, that's all we really can hold on to.

"I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

"It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)  

Green, Healthy, and Safe Product Reviews

I stumbledupon this website yesterday. It's awesome, and informative! This site rates numerous products in three different cateogries: healthy, green, and socially responsible.
This is a helpful guide if one wants to be mindful of the products she is purchasing.


Find healthy, green, ethical products according to scientific ratings:

http://www.goodguide.com/

Weather.

It's dreary today. It'll be dreary tomorrow. A lot of our activities are being canceled, rescheduled, or windchecked (a fancy name for a raincheck). The store has been mostly dead today, with random spurts of people/calls. I can't believe I'm working for a corporation that has little to do with the environment (environmental preservation). I like the company, and I like recreation. But, if you asked me three years ago where I'd be today, I never would have seen this. What a surprise.

Which makes me think.... if it comes between instant gratification or long-term satisfaction, I think someone will chose instant gratification nearly every time (the Buddhists realize this as being one of the Four Noble Truths). Especially if one is desperate. No one living paycheck to paycheck will turn down a promotion, even if it's doing something she hates. They'll take the promotion and stick it out "until things get better." Instant gratification is more tangible, but unfortunately leads to discontentment and continual yearning. Whereas true contentment might only come through long-term planning. I guess it boils down to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. No one can move up on the pyramid until their most immediate needs are fulfilled. 

Extending this idea further, I feel like we often times neglect environmental preservation because so many people are stuck in the lower levels of the "Hierarchy of Needs." If one can't afford to feed her family, she's not going to buy, or even care about, energy-saving light bulbs that are more than double the price of incandescent light bulbs (not to mention the "eco-friendly" products that are wayyyy more expensive than light bulbs). Most can't even consider leading an "eco-friendly" lifestyle because it's so expensive; it's a luxury... Almost a status marker. Environmental preservation, in this country, is an elitist system set up to fail. We've created a way of life that is unsustainable, and the sustainable options are just out of reach of the common person. But, how to we solve this? Make sustainable options more affordable? Subsidize "eco-friendly" products? Provide incentives and bonuses for companies who promote/make sustainable products?
I guess that's all just a start..... I just want to see that there's more progress and that "green living" isnt just a fad.