i'm spending time in the city at the moment, firmly entrenched in the cogs of the 'health' system, and the cancer industry. it's such a dispiriting experience for me. i feel so sapped by the artificial air, the unnatural lighting, the chemically enhanced water.  my hair is dry and brittle, my skin grimy and dirty - breaking out in festy suppurations.  i feel truly feral here. how's the irony, hey?

i guess the heat doesn't help.  i spent the day today with my lovely daughter, her close friend and her mother (also a close friend).  we planned to go to a movie to escape the heat. saw a cracker of a movie - 'pitch perfect' - at the cinema at indooroopilly. that place was HUGE.  there were THIRTEEN different cinemas! i wore a dress with a halter neck and very little in the back and as soon as i sat down i regretted it. i was so aware of the grimy, scratchy seat i was sitting on. it felt like the carpet on a pub floor on my bare back. it was awful. 

anyway, we just hung out in the shopping centre all day, in the airconditioning and the fluoro lighting.  overstimulated by the huge array of STUFF. the sheer amount of it. and each time i see a $10 piece of clothing i think 'how is it possible to produce that and transport that here and pay someone to sell it AND make a profit????' and the whole place seems so impossible in it's very existence... 

i'm getting a bit more used to it now though, but it still doesn't fail to chip away at my spirit.

 

...........i actually just had to take a break from writing this to go and wash my face and brush my teeth...i was so uncomfortably aware of how festy i felt!.....i'm a tad more refreshed now........

anyway, there's also the matter of staying in someone else's house for an extended period. i'm staying with my exparents-in-law, in the suburbs, in the house my daughter's father grew up in. i have my own room here   :)   with carpet    :)   and air con    :)

but it is someone else's house though, ultimately, and i am confined to a room on the topmost, western side, where i read, sleep and obsess throughout the greater portion of each day and night.....geez, it sounds VERY bleak when i put it like that....

i guess that my life is really quite bleak at the moment...there's no hiding the fact!!

all i can hold onto is the wisdom gleaned from several decades of living - the surety that this too shall pass. NOTHING lasts forever in life. nothing. loss is an integral part of gain.  they need each other to form a totality.

and there are always little gems in there....somewhere...sometimes they're really small, and you have to dig around in the shit to find them! but they're usually there!

and so, we just plod along, don't we? mindful of the very shit we trudge through, searching for the glimmer...