I hope all who have decided to share their time by stopping by to read this had wonderful holidays and are enjoying the beginning of a promising new year! I had the unexpected pleasure of having my brother come up for the holiday. Between him and my sister I found myself the recipient of the truest spirit of the season. Sometimes family can prove just why blood is a stronger bond than any other. *smiles* ..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Unfortunately I awoke the day after Christmas to find that my computer had died. No matter how many times I tried to start it up it just refused to obey! Ah, but no worries – this chica is a strong believer in extended warranties for computers! So I stripped it of all the multiple peripherals and off to the store we go! Now if I hadn't had access to the other computer in the house that my husband and son use I'd have gone mad because it took nearly a month to get mine back. A new motherboard and CD Rom drive later and the most tedious and damnable of tasks to hook the thing all back up and I'm back up and running! Took me three hours just to get everything back up to date, scanned and readjusted to my settings again. Sometimes they are the most miraculous of machines and at others they can be the undoing of a sane person's hold on their hair follicles!
On with the subject of this entry… I'd not been online till New Years day, I just don't care much for using a computer that isn't my own so even though I had access to the other computer I just didn't use it much. When I got online I went to the chat room that I don't get to visit often but have gone to for nearly ten years now and instantly got a pm from someone who I know asking me if I'd heard the news about a friend of mine named Jille. Now I met Jille through the room but we'd met and become friends with in real time too. Well of course I hadn't heard so she informs me that she'd heard Jille had a stroke. My first concern was for Jille but I also needed confirmation of this news because this person and Jille aren't at all best buds by any stretch of the imagination so I didn't really trust that she knew what she was talking about. It was too early to call Jille's husband Randy so I PMed another friend from the room to ask for the news. Yes, it was true, she'd had a very severe stroke the Saturday before New Years… Then she went on to apologize for adding more bad news but by the way did you hear that another regular to the room, Hooter - who many cared a good deal for, had been killed in a trucking accident two days before Christmas? NO!!! All I could think was please God, not again! The new year the year before had seen the tragic loss of one of our rooms beloved soldiers, killed in Fallujah while locating mines. Here was another year starting just as heartbreakingly. All I could do was sit there and cry. When it got to be a time that I felt comfortable calling her husband I did so. He gave me all the details and I promised we'd be up in a couple days to see her.
The first time we saw her it broke my heart. She is such a strong willed stubborn cuss. *smile* And I say that with nothing but absolute love. She's known for often saying what others perhaps wouldn't and not saying perhaps what she should. You know exactly what you get with her. Many either love her or hate her and if you can tolerate her tendency to brutal opinionating then you can't help but to love her. To those she dislikes she does so passionately but she has also been known to change her mind about a rare few. When she loves you she does so with all her heart and let me tell you she has one very big heart. *grins* Even if you don't always like everything she may do you allow her to be herself. At least I do. My feeling about anyone is that as adults we answer for our own actions and we stand alone in our responsibilities for the most part. She's made more friends than foes but just like her friends, her foes feel their emotions for her just as strongly. There were some who came to the room who'd not been there in a while simply to gloat over her misfortune; a form of callousness I can't fathom. It took only a short time for the news of her condition to be deemed off limits in the room due to those few who would use it to their own nasty delights. You may wonder where this is going but I had to explain her personality to eventually get to the point of this story down the road a bit further…
The second time we went to see her she was MUCH worse. It was very touch and go for a couple days but eventually the medical profession put their expensive degrees to work and resolved the issues. Now she's on a very good road to recovery I am very pleased to say. *smiles*
During the time when things we bad another regular from the room and close friend of hers came to visit her as well. We were both there when we started talking about the news of the man who'd died, Hooter… Imagine my horror and shock when she told me that it was a ruse. That some of Hooter's friends had called his place of employment to get information to set up a memorial fund only to be told this 'person' was perfectly fine, they'd just seen him and he was perfectly healthy… A memory flared and I remembered a conversation we'd once had in the room when he'd come in fuming because something had happened. What he said stuck with me because it had just seemed so odd. He said that he's almost decided to just fall off the face of the earth, he'd done it before and he'd do it again but for right that second he'd decided not to. I asked him what he was talking about. He told me he'd disappeared before and if he didn't want people finding him they wouldn't. Now the saddest part of this story is that his wife was in on this trick. I don't know if she had been in the room before but she'd made a point of seeking solace and planting information in the room to make it all believable. How sick is that? Someone even set up one of those online memorial pages so that friends can leave messages. The funny thing was that there was no birth date or other personal information about him, just his name. Of course that was closed down because it was a freebie and payment to keep it going hadn't been made. No obituary, no report about any accident, absolutely nothing in a world that is so geared to information that all you have to do is Google a name to find tens of thousands of results… NOTHING! What is the content of a man, or lack of it, which could do such a thing to others emotions?
Now we come to Karma… Another regular from the room PMed me to talk about Jille. Previous to this PM someone had told me that this room regular had said what she was about to repeat to me and at that time I'd refused to believe this person PMing would be so cold. One of the first things she types is that she knows that Jille is my friend but that Jille had this stroke because karma is catching up to her… Wow, so much for empathy. Yes, I knew they didn't get along but in such a situation if you can't scratch up some compassion for another human being who is suffering or even for the suffering of those who love her how can we expect to find any given to us when we need it? Isn't the truest state of compassion not that which we can give freely to those we love but that which we can to those we don't? Which is exactly the question I posed to her. She went on to tell me that Jille had made her miserable to which I told her that people only have the power over you that YOU give them. It takes two people to argue, if you refuse to respond the result is the other person just looks ridiculous. She praised my good heartedness but I couldn't help but think that I hope that karma judges us less cruel than others might wish it to. In speaking to another friend about our MIA trucker I remarked that I would be scared to death of putting those kinds of ripples in the water of karma to come back to me as a tidal wave later…I do believe that what we put out comes back to us which is why I do my best to put out that which I want to be returned. I'm not perfect or saintly but I really do make a concentrated effort. But then I began to wonder at the impressions that we leave with others. What percentage of that is our responsibility compared to how we're perceived through the filters that are forged to the positive or negative that colors the acuity in another's view? From where does our karma come? Who deserves a harsher judgment and do we have the right to make suggestions, do two wrongs ever make it right? Is someone else to blame for our misery or is it solely our own for allowing another that condition of power over us? Or better still, should we tread lightly while covering our own heads/asses and pray for mercy. As with all things I'm sure I'm looking for a single answer where a myriad of them exist. Or perhaps I'm more naïve than I'd like to believe because I'm perfectly aware that for as much as we want to believe that people think, feel, process and live by the same ideals that we do they simply don't. That doesn't make someone who doesn't mirror us right or wrong, just makes them someone who's not us. I still insist on believing in the best of people in spite of themselves. I feel that if you look for a monster that's what you'll find and if you look for good you'll find that too. Perhaps that's why for all I know of the human heart I can still be saddened when I find one that's turned cold. Karma comes for all of us everyday and perhaps we should be looking over our own shoulder instead of wondering or hoping for what's behind someone else's…
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