The World is Your Oyster

I have recieved several complaints about not having updated my blog. I'm shocked. Does this mean people are reading it?! My dear friend Laura noted that the last entry I had I was about to enter a pain experiment, and then she hadn't heard anything for weeks. In retrospect, that IS bad practice to leave everyone desperatly awaiting the results of an unknown venture. I'm alive folks, I actually didnt know what to write for a while. I did make an entry at some point but didnt post - I wasnt confident about the entry. But now here I am, worrying my loved ones, now forced to type on this horriffic French keyboard. Why do the French insist on changing a keyboard that is functioning and good? My life is so difficult, I have to press shift to make a period, the question mark and apostrophe are hidden somewhere and it takes forever to find them, and they took the letter "a" off the main row of keys. What are they thinking? Here's the blog from last week that I didnt post:

I know there are many desperate fans impatiently awaiting my next blog entry (many, in this case, indicates my mom and dad), but I'm sorry to say I haven't come up with any profound and witty musings to report in the past week. Perhaps you'd like an update on the pain experiment?

Falk, the experimentor, placed a metal device on my arm that could, in a controlled way, increase and decrease rapidly in temperate. The first part tested my pain limits, by which I pressed a key at the point of 'unbearable pain.' Then we went through a series of random temperatures and I guessed what temperature I was feeling. And, strangely enough, Germans use the METRIC system, so every time I felt pain on my arm I'd have to quickly calculate the temperature into degrees centigrade. That was fun, a little math project! Then we measured how accurately I measure pain: every 20 seconds the device would heat to a random temperature for a duration of 3 seconds. I indicated how much it hurt, on a scale from 'Is this thing even on?' to 'My arm is burning, turn it off! Turn it off!' Of course, it wasn't all that bad. The test was kind of fun really.

I got to thinking about pain. There were times when my arm was incredibly uncomfortable, my face would wince, my arm muscles contract. Yet I was always ok with it, because I knew that the pain would be over in less than 3 seconds. Imagine how wonderful life would be if only we knew how long we'd be experiencing pain! Having an end point in sight made, in this case, a remarkable difference in my level of comfort. Think about it. Your cold will end on Sunday night at 7 pm, you'll be sad he dumped you for two weeks exactly. Actually, think of it in another way. You're in the sun and you risk a sunburn (clearly this isn't meant for you, Craig), but it'll be gone by tomorrow at 4 guaranteed. Would you spend your afternoon surfing then? Yes! Well, no, not me, I can't get a sunburn because I worked at Island Dermatology and now have a paranoia complex about sunburns. But it works for other people. We'd be so much more willing to take risks if we knew ahead of time what pain we'd feel!

In Tuesdays with Morrie (wonderful recommendation from my beloved friend Cheryl), he talks about feeling pain, how everyone is afraid of pain and does his or her best to push it away. In my humble life I have discovered that if the pain is there, I'll feel it one way or another, and that it's never really possible to push it away. So I have been working on feeling all of my emotions, whatever they may be, give them their proper time and effort. Overall it work much better than trying to hide or change them, I do believe.

This entry is rather sad, I feel. I will soon write another entry about my current life in Thonon-les-Bains, France, where I am spending two weeks at the home of my friend Krystel and her 12 year old daughter Célia. Life is so funny here, such wonderful observations to be made.