Red's World

People are unpredictable.

I installed filters on my facebook. Not about political posts. This was before all political hell broke loose, and my filters were more to weed out the psycho Covid-hoaxers, the anti-maskers, basically the people who made the pandemic seem like an anti-American extravaganza, which, can I just say, that attitude is EXTREMELY offensive and off-putting to the ENTIRE WORLD who is also struggling with this? I mean, "check your white privilege"? How about "check your American ethnocentrism!" DAMN! 

Try watching the world news once... and not from an American network. Rant over.

ANYway, I set up these filters because I was becoming enraged on the daily, and anger is - well, a strong suit or a bad suit, depending on your perspective. Suffice to say, I've learned to keep it in check, but my poor husband is now the only one who gets to (has to) hear my rants when morons wax poetic on my facebook wall! And I don't gain anything from flying into a rage, either.

Thus, filters.

Since then, I have rarely seen anything from family members. Haha. They weren't the most active facebook people anyway, but it seems telling that the specific keywords I plugged in as filters might be blocking them. Were they my triggers all along? Or have they just not been posting much of late? 

People are unpredictable.

Recently I suddenly started hearing from a friend from high school and college. She's someone I had been in touch with sort of regularly - messenger mostly. We had supported each other through grief, all winter. Then in May she stopped responding to my messages. I kept sending things I thought would interest her, amongst regular chatty messages, with no response until a week ago.

She apologized with the "things are stupid here" excuse, which I get. No hard feelings, truly. The thing is, in the interim I've learned to get on without her contact. I responded to her first burst, but her latest 4 messages (all this past week) sit unanswered in my inbox. I've read them, but ... what's that song? "You've been gone so long I don't know you at all"? Something like that. Not really. It's just that with no interim contact our lives seem to be splintering in different directions.

My closest friend now, the one person I am in the most regular contact with, is an old friend from Junior High, who lives in India. We were friends on Facebook before and we started talking through WhatsApp when I lived in China. Now we talk about every other week. Maybe the fact that she has her own issues to deal with is refreshing to me. Maybe it makes me feel good to help her out. Or maybe it's the consistency of her friendship.

I know that everyone in the US is going through unbelievable crap right now. India too. But at least India isn't in the middle of political upheaval. I try to think of things like that and be understanding. Life is crazy and I'm in the sweet spot. 

I need to answer those unanswered texts. I hated it - felt abandoned - when she didn't respond to me for three months. Is "justice" or "vindication" a good enough reason to do the same to her? Whatever she was going through, she's past it enough to reach out. That's more than I can say for most of my family. 

Apart from the everyday being everyday, that's about it.

Oh, and a typhoon. This one wasn't as much as was expected. I should have predicted that. I'm used to hurricanes from living on the US east coast. Same deal here, but different. The storm made landfall way north of us, and the winds calmed down and broke it up a bit as it went. So... Nothing major to report weather wise. 

Stay safe out there. Keep your distance, please! I would like to visit my home country sometime within the next 5 years!

Death Blog

I give up. 

I'll embrace it.

I'll become a Death Blog. Or "Grief Blog" if you prefer.

Only because the times that I feel like writing, the times that the words start actually flowing, are the times that I am thinking about, dealing with, or remembering death or grief-related things.

Today, I received a message from my sister's closest friend from high school. They had not been in frequent contact of late, but regular contact nonetheless, and she only now heard about my sister's death last January. 

I'm actually touched that she reached out to me. There are two other siblings between myself and my dead sister, siblings whom she knew - probably better than she knew me. So the fact that she contacted me to say, "Wth? I had just talked to her January 1st. She was feeling better!" means something.

I guess ... I win? Maybe my sister talked more about me than the others? Or maybe mentioned that we had become close in recent years? Of course, this random message came during the day in Asia, so maybe she'd sent equivalent messages to my brother and sister and I was the first responder. Who knows?

It was a welcome chat. 

This friend had lost her uncle the day before my sister died, so she took time for her own grief and now has a fresh wound to assess.

But don't we all? I mean, you can't help when you find out about things that happened while you were looking in another direction. These days we are all dealing with our own stuff to the extent of blocking out the rest of the world. Necessarily, I believe.

There are too many deaths, too many issues, too many problems, too many isolated frustrations, for any one person to tackle them all. All we can do is whatever we have the strength and energy for in each given moment. No harm, no foul.

Be you. Take care of you. Take care of others when you can. That's the honesty of 2020.