Hi everyone!  I’m back.  First, I want to thank everyone for all your kind wishes, good karma, lovely thoughts. It helped tremendously.  I’m happy to say that all the scary possibilities came to nought, and although I’m left with a lovely, large scar and a few looming weeks of too much daytime television, I’m doing just fine.

I just read over my last posting about the question of planning or not, and I must admit that, although all my plans were unnecessary, I do now know that they helped me keep a sense of myself not spiralling anchor-less out into the cosmos (so to speak).  If that makes me a control freak, well, so be it.  Being hyper-focussed on yourself the way I have had to be lately brings up all sorts of thoughts, and one of them is the dichotomy of learning to accept who you are while also finding ways to help that person be the best she can possibly be.  I think there’s some vague Buddhist philosophy lurking in there somewhere. But I do believe that mustering up as much self-awareness as is possible can never be a bad thing, and being confined to bed is as good a time as any to find it.
The other thing I realized is that I may not be quite as lazy as I had always thought.  I had actually been looking forward to having a few weeks when I couldn’t do much other than watch daytime tele and dvd’s.  But already I’m getting bored.  Although I’m still finding it hard to focus, the fact that I’m writing this blog just 2 days after coming home shows that there’s still plenty of kick left in the old girl yet.
My friend sent me a copy of the 1st season of a newish US drama called “Mad Men.” I’ve been watching that rather addictively, but I’m not sure how I feel about it.  It’s about advertising executives and their wives/families in 1950’s New York.  Visually, it’s a stunning period piece full of fabulous details like little kids playing with plastic bags while their fathers spend their days constantly drinking scotch and smoking cigarettes.  Their mothers wear amazing dresses and those impossibly pointy “brassieres.” But man is it depressing.  Women are treated horribly, and often by other women.  Men are cruel, lost and repressed.  The “Golden Age” of 1950’s America was clearly not as golden as we had led ourselves to believe (is it ever?).  But it does show an eternal optimist like myself that, in may ways, despite everything, we have come a very long way since then.  Here’s the opening sequence.  I think it’s haunting, and from an American who has been looking at her native country from the outside for most of her adult life, it shows me that television is clearly where many of the most talented and creative people in America are working today.  Why that is, is another interesting ramble — but one for another day.