Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Emergency Contact

It's so weird. I'm leaving town for a week and I'm making all these arrangements for emergency contacts and what to do IF. I was even thinking of putting an alternate greeting on my phone message and turning on vacation notification on my email. That seems a bit extreme given that I'm only gone for a week. Everyone in my office knows I won't be checking my email (and I get few external emails on that account that require a response), my family knows I'm not reachable and my friends probably all think I'm already gone given that I've been talking about this trip for months! I remember when I up and went to Germany on short notice and almost forgot to tell my parents. Oh, how times have changed.

Worked my monthly early shift today, so I've had a nice long afternoon on the computer to get caught up on emails, reading blogs, paying bills online and other WWW miscellanea. I was surprised by how actually little there was to do. Thanks to Blogspot following, I have been keeping up on blogs of interest; I pre-scheduled most of my bill payments and there wasn't much needed doing in email. So...I guess it's going to be okay. My electronic and physical worlds will not fall apart due to my stepping behind the curtain for 8 days. And that's kind of weird.

It's that strange self-centeredness that humans (living beings?) exhibit - the world revolves around us...I don't think this is a bad thing, seems actually quite healthy that one should be the center of their own world. But, when something like this vacation shakes things up a little and we realize that how much bigger the world is and how small our part of it is...it's humbling. And exhilarating in a way. Puts all my little stressors into perspective. Time will not cease to exist as we know it if I don't do the dishes one evening (okay, for a week or more), the world financial structure will not crack if Chibo's nails grow a little long (or maybe that's really what's going on?) and the cure for hunger, poverty or war will not be missed by a hair's breadth because I wasn't here at a crucial moment.

Well, maybe something like that would happen, because we are all intricately connected, but I think it'll be okay to take a vacation. At least this once. Wowser, start down that line of thinking and it's all spirals and concentric circles. I need to sit down before I fall down or I'll be dealing with one of those IFs and calling my emergency contact before I've even left!

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