Sorry I haven´t written in a few days. It´s been a rough, boring couple of days. But now I’m back. I’ll give you a quick rundown and then philosophize.
Sunday, I finished my first round of chemo.
Monday, I was wiped out and slept most of the day.
Tuesday, Jakob and Hannah came for a visit and brought me cheeseburgers. They were definitely the bright spot (the kids, not the cheeseburgers). I got a bloody nose that wouldn’t stop and the maintenance crew raked up the apples and now the birds are gone But apparently the big rat is still there. In the evening they took me to see an eye, ear & throat doctor because that bloody nose had been raging for nearly 6 hours, despite two different clotting medicines and a bag of platelets. I will not go into detail about what happened in that room, but I came out not bleeding and have one hundred yards of gauze packed into my right nostril.
Now your up to speed. Nothing has happened today except I finished up Andor and am currently watching it snow.
Most of what’s been going on here has been going on inside my head. I was thinking about what I wrote earlier about things being better here this time around. I am so grateful that things are better. Not much in life actually changes for the better. I guess medical treatments improve – My marriage gets better every day, My relationship with Jesus, and probably a few other things, but not much.
When I was kid I was oblivious to what was going on around me, let alone what was going on in the world. If something big was going on I usually only found out about when it interrupted my life, like a new bulletin interrupting my TV show. Life was easy. I played, I watched TV, I slept and went to school. It wasn’t more complicated than that. There weren’t the social pressures kids have today or the material need for every new thing that came out. If saw some awesome new GI Joe or Transformer toy in a commercial, I could want it, but I knew that my chances of getting it were 0, outside of Christmas or my birthday (I guess I could have bought it, but at that age most of my cash came around Christmas and my birthday).
As far as I remember everyone at school was nice to everyone else. We could fight as kids but never over anything important.
We had to wait and be on time. Apparently those are skills which are learned, not just virtues we display. Cartoons were on when cartoons were on. Your sitcom was on when your sitcom was on. If you were doing something else you missed out. Today you can record any show that’s on or stream any one that isn’t, I’m sure that that is a good thing. Prioritizing and keeping a schedule seem optional today.
With cellphones you no longer have to keep plans. You can call and back out 5 minutes before your commitment starts. You don’t even need to call you can send a text and never have to look the person in the eye or speak to them. The threshold for backing out has been removed. It keeps people non commital so that if something more fun or perceived better pops up, they can ditch commitment and go to the next until the next and better thing comes along. I bet that hurts a love feelings and wrecks a lot relationships.
This is the world that are kids are living in and its not an improvement. Ear thermometers are better than rectal thermometers but the world isn’t a better place. And its not because of the climate, or hate or any of the other things we’d love to be able to blame it on. We’re letting the world get smaller and more impersonal and we’re buying into it. Nothing is special anymore, you can do what you want when you want it with no problem. I wish my kids could experience the magic of the Sears Christmas catalog, wanting something bad enough to save up for it instead of asking for it, I wish they could be out all day, unconnected, with “be home for dinner” as their only instructions. That’s the world I want my kids to live in, even if they don’t have ear thermometers.
