Faith in Man

Almost every time we go anywhere we drive by a church that has a sign that says "It is better to trust in God than put your confidence in men" and it offends me. It provokes me. I want to run in there and yell "You put your confidence in men every time you go on an airplane or use tap water! You're insulting thousands of years of brilliant human engineering, it's not God lifting the airplane or cleaning your drinking water it's the hard work, blood and tears of generations of amazing people!"

If there's anything you *should* do it's put your confidence in humans. We've gotten where we are together, and that's what we should celebrate and be proud of and use as inspiration for our future.

Travel Diary - Florida 10 days in.

I may have presented the US in a bad light in my previous Florida post. I can go to the movies for cheap where the space is nice and the sound excellent, the pizza is great, and I did see both a bike shop and three people biking today.

Today was the first day of Storms, and when I say storms I mean that places with this kind of weather tends to have thunder/rain storms, although in this case it means "light showers and exceptionally sudden and horrendously loud thunder". The electricity went out for a few seconds and the first bang nearly blew my head off. First thought: that would have scared the shit out of Loki. I instinctively looked around for him to make sure he was alright. I miss him tons.

I miss some other things, like my own bed, my own space, my clothes... I'm not entirely sure how my reasoning went when I packed but it wasn't flawless. I also have to make some decisions. Things are cheap here but I can't buy everything. There are space and money constraints that I must consider.

I sound super negative but that's not the full story. Good things are just more abstract. And I am slow to get used to things, I think.

Florida

I know I said I'd start again and then disappeared for a week. Bear with me, I'm still getting used to the whole blogging thing.

Also I'm in the states. Pretty cool. I read somewhere that it takes about a week to get into the homesick stage, and true enough, yesterday I started missing "normal" things terribly. Everything here makes me slightly uneasy, although I don't know why. The nature is nice, people are very friendly...

Things I think about Florida:

1. This town is super perfect for bikes. It's 100% flat land here, with big wide roads, warm weather... and not a single bike. Everyone drives. I don't think I understood how much the US is built around cars. There's drive-in everything. The town itself is so incredibly spread out, stores are scattered all over the place, because you drive between them.
2. There's signs everywhere, probably because stores are so scattered. And there's stores for everything, like auto parts, pesticides, pet massages. (Still haven't seen a bike shop though.)
3. Variety. There's much more different types of cars, different shapes and sizes and brands. Low old Americans, next to super polished Toyotas, next to fat pickup trucks. There's tons of different trees, just outside the door there's probably like 10 of them, thick branches crawling across the ground next to thin tall palm trees, next to little fat things that look kinda like pineapples. Sitting outside I was visited by a bunch of birds, and a few little turtles coming up for air in the pond. A crow-like bird taking a bath, a pair of canards, two black turkey-like ducks (that for a moment I thought were attacking me, because they decided to walk by so close) and a beautiful white egret.
4. Store people are very friendly. Every one of them say things like "You have a very nice evening", or "Have a wonderful weekend". It should make me happy, but I'm Swedish and socially challenged and just find it creepy. There's also people putting your stuff in bags in convenience stores. Which also makes me uneasy, because it means I'm just standing there awkwardly.
5. Obviously it's warm, but it's warm in the humid sense. It's lucky most places have AC, although I guess it's not super good for the environment, but I don't handle heat excellently, especially not the humid kind.
6. Stuff is pretty cheap, but in some places there's a sales tax that's added after the price you see on tags, so it's hard to keep track of how much you're spending. Also buying like a pizza or a Chinese food box for 5-7$ I could eat 3-4 times of each. Not healthy but certainly pretty cheap for food you don't have to cook.

Things I think about me:

• Traveling is great for reestablishing that I like Sweden. Even if we've clearly forgotten why we're such a great country and how we became that way.
• My actual location matters less because the things I like to do are mostly not location-bound. Long as I have electricity and internet, I could probably live anywhere. 10h on the plane was fine because I was writing and watching movies, which is what I do at home too. Actually living in a place is more about the... people? Culture.
• Leaving Loki alone for a month isn't so much a problem for him as it is a huge problem for me.
• I have a big need for alone-time. I like people and talking to friends and stuff, but I need a lot of time to myself to feel at ease. It's okay having people around if they're not in the way and they ignore me and my activities.
• Not recognizing any labels or store names is very tiresome. You have to actually look at everything. Didn't quite realize how annoying it was, I mean sure the first time in Lidl many bottles and stuff don't look like you're used to but it's much more tiresome when everything is that way.
• I think of tons of things to blog about, and then promptly forget them once I actually sit down and make silly lists instead.

One important piece of advice: if you for any reason are offered a wheelchair at airports, just accept them. Forget honor, forget whether or not you actually need it, just say yes. It will save you endless amounts of time and annoyance. Trading pride for two and a half hours of standing in line? Hell yes.

Like a Phoenix (Down)

For one reason or another I decided to read backwards a bit, and I met a person that I'd almost forgotten. Hello Old Me, I can't say I know who you were anymore, any more than a pine tree knows the pine cone it came from. I remember spots of it, and most notably, I remember the positive. I remember A Spirit World of Concrete and Glass, for example, from September 2010, I even remember where and how I felt as I crafted it, on the bike. There's also a clear pattern, that 2010 I wrote about the difficult things and how hard they felt, but the years that were truly trash and terrible, 2011-2012, I'm mostly writing about other things even as that's when I failed school and dropped off the social plane as my leg and back got worse and I drowned in the task of trying to come to terms with who I had become (decently packaged handicapped shit, as I thought). But that 11-12 girl I remember. I'm still her, I'm still fighting her battles although I've come a long way.

2010-me, you may be gone now, but I'm glad you left footprints behind for me to find and decipher. I'd like to know you, if for nothing else but to remember what I've survived. Because I survived, 2010-me. I may not have succeeded at everything, but we made it, we moved on to other problems, and we've come to terms with some of the ones you had.

It occurred to me, that with the knowledge of public posting as a filter to sort away the most useless stuff, blogging from time to time may be leaving finds for future me to dig up. Planting dinosaur bones.

So I'm casting a Phoenix Down on this blog, and I don't care if anyone reads it, this time I'm doing it 100% for my own sake! A public diary. The life of a Me. The Lifestream Chronicles.