I guess I am getting to the age where more and more people I am close to are passing away. Another friend died this last week of a heart attack at 61. He was in a very stressful job and that along with the diet he had of high roller cocktail lunches and his smoking all contributed to his death. I was sad to hear of him passing but he lived his life hard and enjoyed it most of the time as far as I could tell. I will miss him.
Which life is better the long and safe but boring life or the hard fast high energy burnout? Who is to judge? We all have to be our own judge of how we want to live our life. Is the pleasure derived from smoking and drinking worth the shortened life span? Does the pleasure of eating a high fat diet and drinking a bit in excess make up for a shorter life expectancy? Is taking risks in life worth the danger of injury or death? Who wants to die from nothing? Not me.
I have taken a lot of high risks in my lifetime. Wandering around Africa, Asia and South East Asia were all extremely dangerous places and I could easily have died of sickness or violence. I don't regret doing it though. I got a lot out of my choices in my life and I would not change much if anything if I had a do over. Sure I made mistakes, we all do. I don't worry about the mistakes. If I died in ten seconds from now I would have no qualms with it. Nobody ever will have to mourn my passing. I lived my life along the hard and fast path and enjoyed myself along the way. Sure I have health problems now with the high chronic pain that makes my life miserable sometimes but I still enjoy myself every chance I get. I suffer from depression which is triggered by the pain. I am aware of the connection and try to deal with it as well as I can. It might cost me my life one day, in fact I am sure it will, but I don't care because my life has been chock full of life and living.
I think about those that have passed on and think about their lives sometimes. Of course I don't know everything about their lives but nobody does. I try not to judge them as having had good lives or bad lives but it still creeps into my mind here and there. I hope that their lives were worthwhile to them at least.
I see way too many of my friends and family very stressed out and I know it is shortening their life expectancy. I would love to be able to help them reduce their stress and enjoy their lives more. Life can be short or long, you can never know when you are going to go. Please everybody learn to enjoy life no matter what the circumstances you are faced with. Otherwise I am not sure of the point of being alive. PURAVIDA
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Looking for a place to live
Well I am in Bakersfield today looking for a room to rent that I can call home. I left the San Francisco Bay Area because it was too cold for my old painful body. Bakersfield is plenty warmer by about 40 degrees. The temps have been over 100 most days lately but this week it is predicted to go just under the century mark for about a week. The heat has done what I needed it to do for me ie lower my pain. My pain is almost tolerable finally.
When I first arrived I found a room to rent for $300 a month including utilities and everything was going well until the landlord got evicted for failing to pay his bills. Since he got evicted so did I. I lost my security deposit and my last month's rent that I had paid in advance. The landlord had no money to return it to me. That is illegal and I could have filed a complaint and maybe gotten at least some of my money back but the stress involved in all that is just not worth it to me. So now I am homeless and looking for a new room to rent.
While I still had a room I was perusing the listings on Craigslist for rooms to rent and there were typically about six good new listings a day that were suitable for me. Now that I am out of my old room and homeless there are suddenly no rooms listed on Craigslist or any of the other room share listing services either. I guess it is just Murphy's Law kicking in and screwing it up for me. It has been five days now without a single place being listed that I could afford on my income of $900 a month. I do have a place to stay but the arrangement was for a few days. Now that it looks like it will be longer before I find a place to rent the nice woman that put me up so that I wasn't sleeping outside under a bridge is wondering if she made a mistake letting me stay at her place. I may yet end up under a bridge if I don't find a place soon.
I don't worry about the situation because I am honestly trying to do the best job I am able to at looking for a place. What bothers me though is that there is basically no help from the government to provide low income housing for seniors and disabled poor people like me. With the baby boomers rapidly getting into this group now there is going to be a very serious shortage of available housing for them. I see nothing being done to improve the situation. Renting right now costs more than owning. I am not able to own because I am too poor and that makes my credit rating to low for getting a loan. Houses around here are selling for as low as $40,000 now with the recession. The mortgage on a house like that including insurance and taxes is about $350 a month. Yet to rent a room in the same house is more like $450. So why aren't more investors stepping up and making more rentals available at a lower price? Greed I guess is the only thing. That is why the government should step up and either help people like me get into a home like that or help investors or maybe just buy them and rent them at their cost so that we could have a roof over our heads. It is only going to get worse as far as I can see.
I just hope I find a place to live soon. Sleeping under a bridge might make my life just not worth living anymore.
When I first arrived I found a room to rent for $300 a month including utilities and everything was going well until the landlord got evicted for failing to pay his bills. Since he got evicted so did I. I lost my security deposit and my last month's rent that I had paid in advance. The landlord had no money to return it to me. That is illegal and I could have filed a complaint and maybe gotten at least some of my money back but the stress involved in all that is just not worth it to me. So now I am homeless and looking for a new room to rent.
While I still had a room I was perusing the listings on Craigslist for rooms to rent and there were typically about six good new listings a day that were suitable for me. Now that I am out of my old room and homeless there are suddenly no rooms listed on Craigslist or any of the other room share listing services either. I guess it is just Murphy's Law kicking in and screwing it up for me. It has been five days now without a single place being listed that I could afford on my income of $900 a month. I do have a place to stay but the arrangement was for a few days. Now that it looks like it will be longer before I find a place to rent the nice woman that put me up so that I wasn't sleeping outside under a bridge is wondering if she made a mistake letting me stay at her place. I may yet end up under a bridge if I don't find a place soon.
I don't worry about the situation because I am honestly trying to do the best job I am able to at looking for a place. What bothers me though is that there is basically no help from the government to provide low income housing for seniors and disabled poor people like me. With the baby boomers rapidly getting into this group now there is going to be a very serious shortage of available housing for them. I see nothing being done to improve the situation. Renting right now costs more than owning. I am not able to own because I am too poor and that makes my credit rating to low for getting a loan. Houses around here are selling for as low as $40,000 now with the recession. The mortgage on a house like that including insurance and taxes is about $350 a month. Yet to rent a room in the same house is more like $450. So why aren't more investors stepping up and making more rentals available at a lower price? Greed I guess is the only thing. That is why the government should step up and either help people like me get into a home like that or help investors or maybe just buy them and rent them at their cost so that we could have a roof over our heads. It is only going to get worse as far as I can see.
I just hope I find a place to live soon. Sleeping under a bridge might make my life just not worth living anymore.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Foreign Aid
I have been hearing a lot of tea party members and republicans calling for an end to foreign aid because the US is so hard up right now. I agree that a lot of foreign aid is wasted and given out for a lot of wrong reasons. Giving aid including arms to insurgents in countries the US doesn't like is a common example of misguided aid. That has happened all over the world from Cuba to Afghanistan. I would like to see that "foreign aid" stopped.
However, large portions of the world's poorest areas that are in serious need of aid like Somalia (29,000 children starved there recently due to a major ongoing drought) or the area around Northern Democratic Republic of the Congo near Rwanda and Burundi (a forty year plus long war going on where women are being raped and mutilated as a form of genocide), Sudan (another long running war with starving masses) and there are many more areas around the world in serious need of help just to survive.
Somalia is in the news lately because of the drought there. Thousands of men women and mostly children are starving there right now. It is in extremely bad shape with no real government but rather a bunch of vicuous warlords running their own horrendously violent anarchistic self centered fiefdoms. The world is mostly ignoring this. The small amount of aid arriving there mostly through the United Nations is frequently stolen by the warlords instead of going to the starving people. The warlords then use the food to lure starving children into their armies to strengthen their position in the scramble for power in Somalia.
The US weakly tried to intervene in Somalia a few years ago but the warlords shot down a couple helicopters and the US quickly pulled out. I do not expect them to try again because the American people just don't care.
I doubt if very many Americans have ever seen a starving child. South Park just makes fun of them and that is about as close as Americans get to understanding the plight of a starving child. Sure there have been ads on TV since I was a kid showing pictures of needy kids that you can save for 17 cents a day or whatever the going rate is today. But Americans do not seem to have any empathy when they see those ads. Some people must be sending in cash because they are expensive ads to run so I am not saying no Americans care. I am mostly talking about the government when I say Americans do not care.
I was in Ethiopia during the war and drought there back in the 70s. Mothers tried to give me their starving limp silent babies to save them. I was overwhelmed by the reality of the suffering going on. I could not take their babies then and have harbored guilt about it ever since. I give money to UNICEF regularly but that is a drop in the bucket. So I am not much different than the average American. I wish I could help more.
I was also in Zaire when the fighting and genocide was going on. I saw truckloads of stinking dead bodies being carried to mass graves. The people were killed mostly by machetes and mutilated at the same time. It was and still is a gross war. Today there is less large scale open warfare but instead they are raping as a form of genocide (by raping I mean raping women and girls so hard that they become infertile). This has been going on for decades and the world doesn't seem to care at all. Very little aid is going on there.
Sudan has recently been broken up into two countries but that has not yet ended the genocide there either. Again warlords there have used violence and starvation to gain power over their little areas at the cost of thousands of lives. The world has done little to help.
These are just some of the places where foreign aid could help out. To deny these areas assistance when they are in such desperate need is not defensible with the argument that America is too needy to be able to afford to help. Americans just do not know what needy really is with all the overweight children and adults here. Starving here means they haven't eaten a 1500 calorie meal in over three hours.
Just think about this is all I ask and if you can help please do. Please, also let your government know you want them to help these people too. Stand up against these selfish tea party members and republicans that inhumanely want to ignore this problem. America can afford to help and should be doing it already.
Thanks PURAVIDA
However, large portions of the world's poorest areas that are in serious need of aid like Somalia (29,000 children starved there recently due to a major ongoing drought) or the area around Northern Democratic Republic of the Congo near Rwanda and Burundi (a forty year plus long war going on where women are being raped and mutilated as a form of genocide), Sudan (another long running war with starving masses) and there are many more areas around the world in serious need of help just to survive.
Somalia is in the news lately because of the drought there. Thousands of men women and mostly children are starving there right now. It is in extremely bad shape with no real government but rather a bunch of vicuous warlords running their own horrendously violent anarchistic self centered fiefdoms. The world is mostly ignoring this. The small amount of aid arriving there mostly through the United Nations is frequently stolen by the warlords instead of going to the starving people. The warlords then use the food to lure starving children into their armies to strengthen their position in the scramble for power in Somalia.
The US weakly tried to intervene in Somalia a few years ago but the warlords shot down a couple helicopters and the US quickly pulled out. I do not expect them to try again because the American people just don't care.
I doubt if very many Americans have ever seen a starving child. South Park just makes fun of them and that is about as close as Americans get to understanding the plight of a starving child. Sure there have been ads on TV since I was a kid showing pictures of needy kids that you can save for 17 cents a day or whatever the going rate is today. But Americans do not seem to have any empathy when they see those ads. Some people must be sending in cash because they are expensive ads to run so I am not saying no Americans care. I am mostly talking about the government when I say Americans do not care.
I was in Ethiopia during the war and drought there back in the 70s. Mothers tried to give me their starving limp silent babies to save them. I was overwhelmed by the reality of the suffering going on. I could not take their babies then and have harbored guilt about it ever since. I give money to UNICEF regularly but that is a drop in the bucket. So I am not much different than the average American. I wish I could help more.
I was also in Zaire when the fighting and genocide was going on. I saw truckloads of stinking dead bodies being carried to mass graves. The people were killed mostly by machetes and mutilated at the same time. It was and still is a gross war. Today there is less large scale open warfare but instead they are raping as a form of genocide (by raping I mean raping women and girls so hard that they become infertile). This has been going on for decades and the world doesn't seem to care at all. Very little aid is going on there.
Sudan has recently been broken up into two countries but that has not yet ended the genocide there either. Again warlords there have used violence and starvation to gain power over their little areas at the cost of thousands of lives. The world has done little to help.
These are just some of the places where foreign aid could help out. To deny these areas assistance when they are in such desperate need is not defensible with the argument that America is too needy to be able to afford to help. Americans just do not know what needy really is with all the overweight children and adults here. Starving here means they haven't eaten a 1500 calorie meal in over three hours.
Just think about this is all I ask and if you can help please do. Please, also let your government know you want them to help these people too. Stand up against these selfish tea party members and republicans that inhumanely want to ignore this problem. America can afford to help and should be doing it already.
Thanks PURAVIDA
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Trip to the Bay Area
I took the train to the San Francisco Bay Area last week. It was certainly cooler there by about 30 degrees which was a nice short change. I enjoyed seeing my friends and family while there. The one thing I really noticed was how stressed out almost every one of the people I came into contact seemed to be. That is no way to go through life.
Stress kills and steals quality of life while it is doing it. I asked some of them why they were so stressed and got reactions that did not make sense to me. They blamed everything from the debt crisis and the economic downturn to job stress and lack of control over their lives. I can understand some concern over all of their issues but the extreme stress that was so evident in their speech and interpersonal relationships is ruining their lives. Please! Learn to just take the world as it comes on a day to day basis people. There is no point in worrying about things that you have no control over like the debt crisis. Maybe some meditation to slow down your overstressed over stimulated minds and return to a calmer happier state of being would help you. We all have problems, such is life but don't allow the problems to take over and crowd out enjoying life.
I have my problems too. My physical health issues are something I can do very little about so although they negatively impact my life to a large extent, I work at not letting it take me over. I go out of my way to relax and enjoy life as much as I am able to. My financial picture is bleak. Trying to exist on $900 in California is all but impossible and leaves me little for entertainment expenses but such is life. I meditate daily and try to focus my mind over the pain and financial problems to allow myself to still enjoy my small slice of life.
Don't get me wrong, I have serious depression problems from all the pain. Pain rewires the brain and releases very strong drugs so it causes depression all by itself. It takes a large amount of my mind to overcome this physical problem but I do alright considering. Even so, I never worry about anything. Worrying is a waste of effort. I look at my problems, try to figure out the best solution then make a plan to solve it and then I follow the plan. It doesn't always work for me but it usually does. Sometime the depression wins out because the chemicals the brain emits are very strong but most of the time I can control it.
The worst time for me is when the pain first starts going up. The rising pain causes an inverse depression slide, or in other words when my pain goes up my mood instantly and violently goes down. This is my most dangerous period because I lose control of my thoughts and my actions until either my drugs like morphine take effect or the pain stabilizes or drops again. After almost 20 years of experience with this relationship I would think I should have a better handle on this but the truth is I am pain's bitch. That is why I so appreciate this respite I am experiencing right now from the most severe pain I get so often. I do have valley fever too but I don't worry about that at all because it is something I have no control over. I just do what I can and try to calmly enjoy life every chance I get.
So enjoy life and take Bobby McFerrin's advice, "Don't worry. Be happy." PURAVIDA
Stress kills and steals quality of life while it is doing it. I asked some of them why they were so stressed and got reactions that did not make sense to me. They blamed everything from the debt crisis and the economic downturn to job stress and lack of control over their lives. I can understand some concern over all of their issues but the extreme stress that was so evident in their speech and interpersonal relationships is ruining their lives. Please! Learn to just take the world as it comes on a day to day basis people. There is no point in worrying about things that you have no control over like the debt crisis. Maybe some meditation to slow down your overstressed over stimulated minds and return to a calmer happier state of being would help you. We all have problems, such is life but don't allow the problems to take over and crowd out enjoying life.
I have my problems too. My physical health issues are something I can do very little about so although they negatively impact my life to a large extent, I work at not letting it take me over. I go out of my way to relax and enjoy life as much as I am able to. My financial picture is bleak. Trying to exist on $900 in California is all but impossible and leaves me little for entertainment expenses but such is life. I meditate daily and try to focus my mind over the pain and financial problems to allow myself to still enjoy my small slice of life.
Don't get me wrong, I have serious depression problems from all the pain. Pain rewires the brain and releases very strong drugs so it causes depression all by itself. It takes a large amount of my mind to overcome this physical problem but I do alright considering. Even so, I never worry about anything. Worrying is a waste of effort. I look at my problems, try to figure out the best solution then make a plan to solve it and then I follow the plan. It doesn't always work for me but it usually does. Sometime the depression wins out because the chemicals the brain emits are very strong but most of the time I can control it.
The worst time for me is when the pain first starts going up. The rising pain causes an inverse depression slide, or in other words when my pain goes up my mood instantly and violently goes down. This is my most dangerous period because I lose control of my thoughts and my actions until either my drugs like morphine take effect or the pain stabilizes or drops again. After almost 20 years of experience with this relationship I would think I should have a better handle on this but the truth is I am pain's bitch. That is why I so appreciate this respite I am experiencing right now from the most severe pain I get so often. I do have valley fever too but I don't worry about that at all because it is something I have no control over. I just do what I can and try to calmly enjoy life every chance I get.
So enjoy life and take Bobby McFerrin's advice, "Don't worry. Be happy." PURAVIDA
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