I think one of the most interesting things about this entire hurricane is how different each person’s perspective is; and each person’s story. I remember being in Ethiopia 3 years ago and hearing all about hurricanes Katrina and Rita and thinking it was terrible. I sat in my house and had a fan blowing on me with music playing in the background while I clicked through pictures on aol of all the devastation. I read emails about the horrible 12 hour trips in cars that should have only taken 2 hours. My thoughts were always, “thank God I didn’t have to deal with that,” or “I feel so bad for those people.” I never once really and truly understood what they were going through.
Even now, I still cannot relate with my friend from work whose roof crashed in on them during the hurricane. They had to rush to their neighbors house and lost EVERYTHING!!! They drove to Dallas with all they could fill their cars with; it was two trunks worth, and these are small car trunks, too. They have no house now. They have no clothes. They have no tv. They have nothing. How do you relate to that? I can only symathize. I don’t really want to have an experience like that in order to empathize, but you start to feel guilty that you have never gone through anything so devastating. Is it okay to NOT feel guilty? I think you must be heartless to not have some sort of guilt, but all the same you can’t beat yourself down. You can, however, give all that you can to those you know. We are seeing so much hospitality and communication between neighbors that has never happened before. Trevor and I have lived in our house for over 5 months now, and Friday was the first time I walked to all my surrounding neighbors and said hi.
These days have been boring. Now that we are staying with the inlaws, with power and all that, I am bored. I was still bored at the house without power, but there were things to do there. Now there is nothing to do, and there is television. The television has become evil. Instead of digging deep down and trying to fix the fence that was knocked down, that we don’t really know how to fix, we’re watching tv and checking our facebooks. How do I inspire those around me to get up and do something?! I want to be busy. I want to say I was helpful and charitable. I want to have the block parties and stay up playing cards and telling stupid jokes, or reliving childhood memories. Instead, I’m bored. I had a little entertainment today. I got a call to come to the YMCA and help clean up if I wanted to, and I was bored, so I got excited to go to something. When I got there, the damage wasn’t obvious so there really wasn’t anything we Y-ladies could do since we lack the education for electicity and such. There were a couple IDIOT members who came by and asked, “when is the Y going to be up and running” in their exercise clothes ready to come run on a freakin’ treadmill. I wanted to piledrive one lady. We just got hit by a hurricane, why don’t you ask, “is there something I can do to help,” instead of being so unabashedly selfish. She was a bean-pole, too, so I wanted to smack her for that as well. RUN OUTSIDE YOU RETARDED PEOPLE!!!!!
Our home smells. I could go do some cleaning, but what is the use? I’ll clean when I have power, I tell myself. When will that be? I could really and truly breakdown and cry because our world has been turned completely upside down simply because of grocery stores and gas stations not being plentiful like they always were. I have lived in Third World style living for 2 years and yet this is almost harder to handle because it’s not supposed to be like this! What exactly am I supposed to learn? I know I need to learn to be less careless of the fact that everything is plentiful. Billions of people live like this everyday for their entire life, can’t I handle a week or two? Americans are so spoiled. I loathe even more all the people who worship celebrities right now. Isn’t that terrible? Even with devastation to occupy my mind, I can still get pissy about materialistic morons? I am a moron. When will I ever learn to ignore the exponentially increasing “me-mentality” of this world? Could we ever reverse it? All signs point to ah…hell no.
This hasn’t been the most fluid thing I’ve ever written, but then again, my thoughts are always a little bit like rabbit trails.
