January 17, 2005
One of the reasons for creating this website was to give me a chance to share myself with the world. Well, too much time passes and no one hits my site much, so I gave up on changing the world through those words. But, what am I thinking? Do I write words for others to read or am I creating them because they have to be exposed and leave the confines of my mind? For this purpose, I choose the second. My words are important to only one person, me. And I guess that I can find enough of them to put down on paper (or on a sliver of silicon as the case may be).

I spent an entire Memorial Day weekend last year purging stuff out of my life. It was quite embarrassing to realize that I had that much junk in my life! But, there it was – and now it’s gone. This all came about because I realized how much of my former life had been betrayed … by me! I had left it behind. The excitement, the fun, the learning, the creativity. Everything had been tamped down to a flat, boring, one dimensional person. I had quit listening to music on a regular basis, I wasn’t reading novels any more, I was only associating with the comfortable, the status quo, the white bread of society.

I’m the girl who met my friends online, in a day and age when being online meant traversing through cyberspace on a 2400 baud modem (I’d jumped to 1200 baud early on, but as soon as I could go faster I did). I was on GEnie (General Electric’s network) in 1987, meeting people all over the country. I discovered that there were people who understood my interest in the bizarre and odd. In fact, they encouraged it. I would stay up late at night talking to these people. I remember the excitement of being able to email people on other network services (Compuserve and others) from within the GEnie network. That was really something. It was all text driven. The emoticons popped up as ways to inject a bit of your personality into the words you were typing. But, we were having a blast. People would get to know each other and then have parties in different parts of the country, inviting everyone that could get there to come meet in person! And the people I was meeting were highly intelligent. They stirred my mind into wonderful paroxysms of thought. I left the dull, flat life I was living behind for just a few hours.

However, as much I love thinking on those higher levels, and being exposed to strange and odd minutiae, I found that some of the left wing extremism I was encountering was more than I could tolerate. I was trying to find a way to blend my joy at being exposed to everything that was out there, and my faith in the one God through Jesus Christ. That’s been really difficult. I can’t justify right-wing conservatism any more than I can accept left wing extremism.

Much of this was happening at the height of right wing conservatives wielding Christianity like a terrible weapon. All of a sudden, moderate Christians weren’t allowed to be Christians. We couldn’t accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior if we didn’t vote along the party line. If we did, we were called hypocrites. It was an awful feeling. To have the church that I had loved all of my life, not accept me because I wasn’t ready to vote against abortion blindly, or believe that capital punishment was the only way to punish murderers. That laws needed to be enacted to deal with individuals who screwed up within the system. Unless I accepted all of the truths mouthed by the extreme right-wing Christians, I was thought to be less of a Christian. It didn’t matter that I had given my life to Jesus, because I didn’t accept their single-minded approach to Him, I was something to be abhorred.

Fortunately, I had met a man online who was wonderful and as strange as I. And it didn’t take long for us to connect. Max came into my life at a time when I had given up on being married at all. I was going to be content being single and living with my dog. Plans were being set in motion for me to move out of the house in which I was living with my sister. I had enough friends around the country that I was looking forward to spending time with them over the years and that would care for my intellectual growth. My dog and my family would care for my familial connections and I would find a church to help my spiritual growth.

Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, when I was least expecting to begin a new relationship, there was someone very interesting on GEnie. He was interested in the strange and bizarre. He was highly intelligent and he had a deep faith! This was a man I needed to meet. And we did. We met online January 9th, 1994 and on April 23rd we were married. A new life was starting for me.

Which brings me back to the purging of the old from my life. As I was ‘freaking out’ during the spring of 2004 over the state of my life at the age of 45, I realized that I had to actively pursue the interesting parts of my life. I have created fabulous friendships and family relationships over the last ten years, but I have gotten lazy and allowed my mind to be caught up in the easy and nearly comatose. I spent a few weeks blaming Max for that. For heaven’s sake, it began while we were married, of course it had to be his fault. And I suspect that in many ways, it is. He accepts me for whoever I want to be – and sometimes I need to be challenged to be more than that. It’s a truly loving response on his part, but it has allowed me to stagnate.

Then, I began to put a plan together. First would be the elimination of junk from the external part of my world. I enlisted my sister and brother. They were more than willing to help me. Max took off to see his brother over Memorial Day and plans were brought to fruition. Carol and I tore the house apart on Saturday, and Jim and his family helped put it all back together on Monday. By the time we were finished, I had a home that I could function in again. And the sense of relief was nearly palpable. I was no longer being bound to my home by the ‘stuff’ that I had accumulated. I was bound by the fact that it was a haven, a place for me to be safe from the world. And it was a place I could enjoy my friends and my animals and my husband.

Without having to deal with all of the impediments in my way, I was free to begin to think again. I began exploring the odd and bizarre on the web, and in books and novels. I found my music and re-discovered the pure joy of deep harmonies and interesting melodies. I was on my way back to normalcy.