Facebook is so nice to remind all our Facebook friends that we have a birthday today. I just read through so many greetings that it made me very happy to know that people would take the time to send me a greeting. Believe it or not, it does touch me that my friends do that much for me.
I am going to go to the Fort with Sandra and Elijah who wants to take me out for my birthday, so this will be a special treat for the three of us.
I will admit that at my age few of my old friends are left and I know that one of these days I too will be going to my grave. That is what one thinks about when one is past the 3/4 century mark. I have been thinking about it for some time now. I have not accumulated any great wealth to share with others. Since I am unmarried, childless, I do not have heirs to consider in the disposal of my worldly goods. Most families have already made their wills to include all their children. When one is childless, one does not think about who should or will gain possession of any worldly goods that one has.
All that I have is a lot of things that my mother and dad left to me after they passed, and I must find a way to finally settle their accounts for them. Many things I will simply give to charity but there are a few things that I may have to sell simply to help me in my final years. I do not have social security coming in due to the fact that while a teacher in California my salary was not converted to the social security system but instead to the California Retirement Fund, which I naturally drew upon once I left the state. I had exactly a 711 amount paid into that system which tells me a lot to this day! In social security which I had paid into prior to that teaching experience I only had $17,000 so total for my retirement at that age I had $24,000. Is this a fix? You bet your sweet ass it is.
I am a big girl and I do know the facts of life. I know what it will take for me to survive in the next ten years, and so I have been reading facts from International Living which seems to point me in the direction of becoming an exPat to settle in some other part of the world in which the cost of living is commensurate with all that I have left to spend on my retirement years.
Yes, I have been trying to find a way out of this dilemma of life in America. None of us are ever truly prepared for our final days no matter how many times we are told to be prepared for its coming.
It is unlikely that I can be hired for any job since I know myself that I do not even want to consider that. I do look to other means of bringing in dollars, one of which is to write a blockbuster book but that dims daily as well. Publishers are playing new games today and writers who want to be successful have to do what the so called publishers want instead of really writing the story that they want to tell. One has limits of words, titles, and even character development, and frankly, in my opinion, most books today have no real value at all. The world was a better place for quality writers years ago. Today, most publishers want the writers who jump when they say jump. I personally do not like that at all.
However, one topic has caught my fancy recently. I have read two books which actually do refer to these same situations but neither has made a dent in the book world as far as I can see. Yes, they did get published but they did not make headlines. Fifty Shades of Gray seems to be the ongoing style book that publishers want.
The New York Times has a series in its newspaper now on billionaires who live in the grand high rises in Manhattan. These billionaires stories are being told with a journalistic bent. In my opinion, this is the kind of book that needs to be written in a style that will not only shed a bit of light on the problem while sensationalizing it as well. The realization that Manhattan is owned by so many foreign billionaires fascinates me. Why would anyone want to park their butts in NYC is more than I can comprehend but it is obvious that it appeals to the very richest of the rich.
I became involved in the past due to some internal diggings in my mind. I knew absolutely nothing about any of these men until I embarked on this self discovery program. Learning what i did while in a state of self hypnosis has truly made an impact on me. I have no final conclusions about it except that it gave me an insight and look at life in times past that I truly loved and enjoyed learning. I have had to undergo many different ways of assimilating this into my self awareness so as not to be overwhelmed by it all. My experiences were so satisfying to me that I eventually learned to let them rest in the past where they are still buried to make today count even more profoundly than I had thought possible. We are all caught in the environment that gives us birth, and we can only become what our destiny allows us to be with the resources that are at hand as we grow to maturity in this lifetime.
I do not expect that much of my life now as I am slowly coming to its end. Whether I shall return to the earth life in a future generation is yet unknown to me even though I had thought i had gleaned a look into it. In many ways, I understand why most hope that this time round is the end all to an earthly life and that our souls should simply rest in that Heavenly promise that so many religious beliefs seem to offer.
Life is NOT what we make it. Life is not totally within our ability to make it anything that we think we might want it to be. None of us is able to overcome the family life into which we are born which is the real basis for our growth into adulthood. No matter whether born into great wealth or poverty, one is nurtured by that lifestyle so that it dictates to us which road we have to take in order to survive.
Most children follow in their family's footsteps while a few rebel against the family to reject that choice offered to them. In many cases, parents want better for their children than they had so that they do not require that they follow their pattern. In my case, that is how my parents treated me. They wanted better for me than what they had had in their lives.
Thus, I got a college degree, went out on my own, and became a part of the community which employed me to do the job that I had been trained to do. However, family did interrupt my own career plans so that I ended up reuniting with my parents to end up living with them for the remainder of their days so that I am finally alone with only distant relatives and a few really true friends.
Age happens to all of us. Before you know, life has followed the same old pattern of the normal life cycle many times over so that now I have relatives who have grandchildren and great grandchildren. I have learned to adapt to this ever changing world but I miss the simplicity of the dial phone, the non computer age in which cars used stick shifts, and typewriters, egg beaters, and even coffee percolators were standard. Those days are gone but they are a big part of my youth. Today's children have an entirely new world in which we aged have had to cope learning how to use a smart phone, a computer, fancy cars that are totally computerized, and even coffee makers that make a single cup of coffee. The young will always have that as the basis for their life experience. What a world we are having to learn and understand.
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