(written on the 20th from notes)
Why is it that most of my escapes are destructive to me in one way or another?
Crap food… news, sports news, TV, movies… porn…
Ok, news isn’t inherently destructive… well… actually… maybe? Most news nowadays probably qualifies as destructive, because the vast majority is negative and designed to incite fear and anger and corral you into a particular perspective.
TV shows and movies can be uplifting, but so few truly are.
Sports news is generally pretty benign, though fans can be awful, so spending time in the comments sections isn’t always the most uplifting. 😅
But even if some of those categories are not inherently destructive, they are for me, because I’m an addict with a disappearing, reappearing escape off switch.
I waste hour after hour, day after day consuming whatever content can hold my attention, consuming, consuming, consuming, when my heart and soul are screaming at me to stop, to snap out of it, to be the person I long to be, to spend my life doing the things that lift others.
But I just keep running.
The pain and discomfort caused mostly by my spine issues are pretty much continuous, and, on their own, are enough to exhaust me mentally and physically and significantly dampen any drive I might muster.
But add fear, and I’m done for.
And that’s… an issue, because internally, I’m ruled by fear–hence the continual escapes, the dying hope.
“This just keeps getting worse. I’m already miserable. What on earth is life gonna be like in [x] years?!?!” 😰
For my mental health, it’s similar… though also different. I think I mentioned that the other day and forgot to mention the massive physical component.
Twin pillars of internal destruction… because of fear.
[sigh]
I’ll get to that a bit more later maybe…
I was up quite early this morning… maybe 5:15 ish?The dentist office replied, but the message wasn’t very helpful. They pretty much ignored the picture I sent, which was a little discouraging. It would take but a glance from a dentist to be able to say… Yeah, we can take care of that, or no, looks like you’ll need an endodontist, or… we might be able to handle that, but if…
Figured it wouldn’t be too big of a deal given I’m not in the state and it could potentially be serious, and I’m trying to figure out if I should cancel my Arkansas trip to go back to South Dakota and get this looked at, or if it’s not something they can do. I don’t want to cut short a visit with family and friends to go all the way there only to find they can’t help me anyway.
I can’t just get a 10-second look at a picture?
😕
Though I didn’t reprise the cave again last night, I did this morning, spending a fair bit of time both at the Geode and at Starry Night.
It was hard to leave. I kept trying to take mental snapshots to remember because cell phone cameras just can’t capture the experience.
And then I’d start to leave, but then I’d stop, close my eyes (because I’d just turned my headlamp on and wanted to get my eyes back used to the dark again), and just keep trying to mentally capture the experience.
I bet there’s a studied way to enhance sensory focus on the moment to improve experiential recall… maybe concentrating on each sense, one at a time, and adding it to the mental image, so the mental picture also has sound, smell, touch embedded into it.
A concerted effort to upload into long-term memory. 🙃
Though not pictures of the glow worms, here are a couple of pictures from the cave today.
I spent a fair bit of time journal writing while in the cave as well (mostly back at the Geode, I think), but eventually, I tore myself away, heading south, as if on automatic pilot, before realizing but I didn’t want to go south and wanted to go to the beach. So I turned around, and headed over to Uretiti Beach.
I spent most of my time there in my van or standing next to my van on my phone trying to get stuff done.
My sister Heather in South Dakota very generously paid for my car registration and the ridiculously exorbitant $120+ fee to overnight a piece of paper. Paper!
😶
Many thx, sister! 🤍
I spent a pretty significant amount of time trying to get things figured out with Progressive and State Farm. When I saw the price that I was paying for Happy’s portion of the bill, I started investigating, and after a heck of a lot of work going through Progressive records, trying to find State Farm records, my bank records, my mom’s payment records to me, etc, here’s the gist of what I figured out:
When we first insured happy, it was $60 a month for her to be able to drive it, and the insurance company was State Farm. My mom paid me for those first six months, $360.
I forgot to bill her for the next… 14 months? I think I kept telling her that I’d let her know, and that I never did? Six of those months had been with my new insurance company (Progressive).
Well, when I went to get everything squared away from my trip to New Zealand, I saw that the insurance for the Z3 was going to be $360.
I didn’t think anything of it, thinking that it had been $360 for each of the renewals since the first one.
Wrong. 🙃
So my mom had overpaid. I didn’t feel good about charging her for the back payments that I never requested. I don’t think it’s fair for a company to forget to bill me and then to come back later and tell me they should have billed me. When I look at my account records, I’m not looking to make sure everyone properly charged me: I just… expect it. So if one comes to me several months later and says, hey, we didn’t charge you in February, so now we’re charging you for a 2-month in October, I don’t think that’s right.
Anyway, since that’s my policy for myself, that’s how I was treating it with my mom, not wanting to charge her for my neglecting to bill her. But she didn’t feel good about that, so we settled on her paying half.
What I didn’t realize was that when I switched over to Progressive, her bill was a heck of a lot cheaper. I didn’t have any idea, and didn’t think to look because the next bill that I paid attention to was the same as the one at State farms. But that was with Happy on the policy as the only vehicle being insured.
Now that I have another vehicle on there, I get the multi-car discount, so insurance for Happy for 6 months is only $196.
And realizing that until Happy was the only car on the policy while it was in New Zealand, Happy’s portion of my insurance bill was a lot less, I went back and figured everything out and realized that my mom had a $60 credit. 🙃
So she could either choose a $60 refund for me or choose to pay the last $136 to be able to ensure Happy for another six months, and she chose to go ahead and pay for insurance for another six months.
😊
Anyway, I chatted with my mom for a while about the whole insurance thing, and I’m glad she can keep driving happy for about half of what the expectation had been. 🥳
Phew! That all took… so long. 😅 (The whole effort, not the call with my mom. 🙃)
I spent a good while in communication with Frontier Airlines to figure out whether or not my ticket was refundable. I felt like I had paid extra for something when I bought the ticket, but I couldn’t remember exactly what that extra was. 🙃
Gratefully, I found out that I had paid extra for the ability to cancel it should I need to cancel it. I won’t get a refund if I cancel, but I’ll get a credit, so that’s something.
I’m still not sure if I’m going to cancel or not. I’ve got up until three hours before the plane leaves, apparently, to cancel and still get my credit, so… I’ve got time to make my decision and see how my tooth is.
I am pretty worried and scared and discharged about my tooth and my overall oral health. Gemini thinks significant soda intake might have caused the weakness that led to my tooth breaking if it was an already weak tooth to begin with.
It might also be that the teeth on that side of my mouth hit first much of the time, so maybe there’s a lot of extra pressure there that shouldn’t be there? Maybe a combination of things.
With everything rattling around in my brain, I spent some time just staring out at the ocean.
I needed to figure out where I wanted to spend the night, so I looked on CamperMate and found what looked like might be a nice place at the Port Albert Wharf Reserve, and I headed there, stopping along the way to check out a viewpoint that turned out to not really be much of a viewpoint. 🙃
Oh well. Still pretty, but I’m New Zealand spoiled. 🙃.
As hoped, Port Albert Reserve was a nice place. Bathrooms, playground, a very long and skinny pier that I walked to the end of. 😊
Texted back and forth with my sister Tish. She’s been super supportive in my struggles. 🤍 As have pretty much all my siblings. 🤍🙏🤍
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 