Perfect Saturday

Feel like this is my idea of a perfect Saturday, sitting here blogging after a relatively full afternoon of organizing and cleaning the various piles of clutter in my home (mainly my home office and books, am going to tackle the junk on my dresser in the bedroom next). I'm not feeling my best--that time of the month, y'know? Sorry to those of you for whom that's TMI (too much information)--and putzing around the house clearing old junk and recycling random papers I'm not sure why I keep is somehow therapeutic for me, physically, mentally and emotionally.

Sometimes, at times like this, though, I feel like my life--and the lives of many of you reading this blog, as well as the lives of many of those living around us--must be a fraud, a sham, a strange and utter illusion. Because beyond the transparent borders of our relatively neat, precious and well-organized lives, full of busyness and activity, work and play and family and social activities, lies a world of war. No, I'm no exaggerating, there is a world at war around us, and it is too easy, most of the time, to ignore this world.

But I'm not going to sit here and quote statistics to you about how many US soldiers have been killed in Iraq or my friends and family members who have loved ones there. I'm not going to talk how ridiculously racist and inhumane it is to only talk about the lives of these soldiers as if they are the only ones that mattered, or pontificate about how unjust this war is. All I want to do is acknowledge it, and bring some attention to my own lack of awareness of war. And not just the war in Iraq, but the wars being waged in our own neighborhoods, communities, cities, states, our own country. While I count myself blessed to not be an active perpetrator or recipient of the violence that rages around me--and know that I have helped construct my life in a way that I don't deal with many of these wars, and that can be a very good thing--I still want to acknowledge the suffering and rage and bitterness that exists because of it.

So there, I've done it. And hopefully gotten you to do it too.