Sunday, August 23

Today I am grateful for:

Nice, sunny weather. Not too hot.

Some friends of ours dropped in to say Hi. It was nice to see them, but I have to say I really don't like people dropping in unannounced. With our current sleep schedule, it usually means that we are either still in bed, or just walking around half naked, and just beginning the day.

The last couple of times people just dropped in, my sweetie leaped into action and threw on clothes to greet them, and then I got up too, but I find it really startling to be awakened by people just pulling into our yard and knocking on the door, and the dog freaking out is what wakes you. By getting up and making as if we were up, my sweetie gives people the wrong impression that their impromptu visit didn't wake us up, and wasn't an interruption. I HATE people just dropping by. I hate it when they keep knocking on the door too, because the dog keeps freaking out. I know they're just sitting outside thinking "oh, I'll give them time to get dressed and come out". Well, if you have to do that, you need to consider if your visit was really welcome.

I would personally not get up, or just text them that this isn't a great time, but my sweetie gets up and acts like he's been up for hours. Everyone now knows he's working nights, so they should know better. He's really just making it worse by being social.

Our friends today just wanted to yack, which is nice, but I was just standing there like a zombie, listening to my friend talk about NOTHING.

Talking to my trainwreck sister. She still thinks she's going to move in with my Mom. My sister is almost 60, and needs to move in with my Mom because she can't afford to keep the utilities on in her trailer. She's also not selling her place. Her plan seems to be to live with Mom, and keep all her shit out at her trailer and garage, and then kind of maybe live there next summer with no power. She COULD clean out her property and sell it, or even sell it with all her shit in it, but here's the truth: she doesn't want to get rid of her stuff, or sell her property. Then she can pretend that she isn't more or less homeless. She'll just tell people she's living with Mom to take care of her. This is so depressing on so many levels, and it won't be good for my Mom. What's my sister going to do, get blackout drunk every night at my Mom's house, like she does at home? Smoke inside the house (she isn't going to go outside in -30 C all winter at night to smoke. She'll start pulling some kind of bullshit like smoking in the bedroom with the window open, and my Mom will just put up with it). She'll start hauling shit into Mom's house, or filling Mom's shed up with shit. She's a giant hoarder.

What's funny, is that this sister cleans for another sister of ours who has a lot of health challenges, and my trainwreck sister always talks like this sister's house is filthy. It's really not that bad, it's just that with health challenges my sister can't keep up. My hoarder alcoholic trainwreck sister makes it sound like they're animals, but won't acknowledge that her own house would be condemned if she lived in a real town. She literally always has to live in a rural place so that no one calls the authorities on her for her hoarding, and all the garbage in her yard. She gets infested with mice, and blames it on it "being a wet year" or whatever.

She's also NOW talking about people being irresponsible about COVID and not social distancing or wearing masks. This is the sister that all summer has been travelling to see her three sons and their kids, getting together at gatherings with our family, and then going to see our Mom, or a friend of hers who is dying of Cancer. Yet, I know she's still not wearing a mask or social distancing. Aren't alcoholics fun?

Getting the barn cleaned out. Once or twice a year I clean out all the hay on the ground, and anything that was set aside because it was dusty or moldy. The floor of the barn is just dirt, and this year with so much rain, the floor was wet a lot, so quite a bit of the hay was moldy. I cleaned up whatever I could, and took it outside and burned it. It's been raining a lot this year, so no concerns about it spreading. That took up a lot of my day.

Washing, cutting up, and freezing the beans we picked yesterday. Enough for a few meals.

Having a nice bath (I smelled pretty smokey), and mucked around with makeup a bit. I'd like to wear makeup again. I used to wear it when I went to town, and for the last couple of years I've just not bothered. Yet, I like to wear a little makeup now and then, it just seems like there is never enough time for me to take the time to find something nice to wear and put in a bit of effort. It's always just grabbing the same t-shirt and jeans (which is fine for groceries, but why not wear something nice if we're going to the city?). Even if I AM just running errands, why not a swipe of eye shadow and some lipstick? Half the problem is that I'm just out of touch with what looks good on me, and remembering how to put it on so that it doesn't seem startlingly different from me without makeup. I have TONS of eye shadow and lipstick. I also want to learn how to use foundation properly, so that it doesn't look like theater makeup. I don't need to cake it on, just a bit to even out my skin sometimes.

Saturday:

Picked raspberries and beans with my sweetie before he went to work today.

I rode River today, and his breathing was pretty good. He still got winded easily, but not coughing. I don't know if the barn owner gives a rat's ass about giving him and some of the other sensitive horses less dusty hay, or if his breathing will keep being a problem from one bale to the next depending on the hay quality.

There was another rider there, and it was nice to talk with her.

The problem I have with Eastern spirituality,

is this idea that everything is just an illusion, so don't take it too seriously. That death doesn't mean much because we'll just move on to the next whatever, and it's okay. That material things aren't real either, so don't get hung up on that. Etc.

I get that we shouldn't put too much emphasis on things like clothes or makeup or fancy cars, but you know, we also have to live. We kind of have to care about having somewhere safe and comfortable to live. It doesn't have to be a mansion, but it's where we spend a good deal of our lives, so shouldn't it be nice? We have to pay taxes, pay medical expenses, and so on and so forth, so we pretty much have to work. We can't just sit on a mat and think "oh, it's okay if I'm poor". It is NOT okay to be poor. Being poor really sucks, and I hate it when religions or other people try to make poverty noble in some way. Those are likely people who have never really been poor. Some people might think they grew up poor because they wore their older sibling's clothes or something, but poor means a lot more than just not being fancy. It means insecurity and powerlessness. It means working demeaning jobs and taking shit from everyone because you don't have options.

Personally, I would LOVE to be filthy rich. Not because I want to be obnoxious about it, but because it would be nice to have enough money and enough security to only be in places you want to be, with people you actually want to be with, and to be able to make decisions based on what you want to do, or what is optimal, an not based on what things cost. That's what money means to me.

I get that a great deal of Eastern spirituality is trying to deal with shitty lives with no money. Most religion seems to be about trying to find peace even though everything is shitty, and I get it. It's great to find peace in the sense of developing compassion, finding connection with the universe, and so on. I love that side of spirituality. I don't think it functions well if you have to pretend that the world isn't real, though. How do you function in this world, right the way it is, if your religion smugly tells you that nothing in it is real?

A table might be an illusion, but damn, it seems to work to put things on it. A jacket might be an illusion too, but it gives me the illusion of being warm. My body might be an illusion too, but yet, don't I want to take care of it so that it looks nice and I maybe live longer, and I have less pain?

Eastern philosophy often also talks about compassion to others, and to animals, and I agree with that whole heartedly. Yet, what's the deal, doesn't that mean that other beings are also illusions? My dog seems real enough to me, and I have to feed her and care for her physical being just as if it WERE real, or she'll suffer and maybe die.

How do you reconcile the idea that death and suffering are just illusions with the idea of compassion and reducing the suffering of yourself and others? The material world might be all illusions; we know that really we are made up of atoms, and that if you examine an atom, it can be broken into smaller and smaller particles that all seem to be made of smaller particles, and that an atom is mostly empty space, and an electron is empty space, and protons and neutrons and so on are mostly empty space too.

Particles can pass right through atoms. Particles can pass right through smaller and smaller particles that make up an atom. Apparently everything is made up of nothing more than energy fields, and energy is made up of photons, but a photon...isn't really a thing at all.

We know that matter cannot be created or destroyed. When we die, the matter of our body just goes on to be other things. It will do so forever, until nothing is left but photons moving outwardly into the vacuum. That is the projected end of everything, is a vast emptiness with photons pushing ever outwardly. Until something happens, and the photons all get pulled back together dramatically and the universe is reborn (maybe).

So why bother with clusters of particles that cling to life like it's all there is? Don't we have to play by the rules here, and treat our material bodies like they're real after all? It seems like a pretty weird thing to bother with, if you're an eternal bunch of photons.