My Skeletons Aren't in Haiti

I know I totally owe you big, juicy, scathing blog posts about our governor and his plot for world domination running California into the ground and, also, about the antics going on in San Francisco this week.

I thought about writing about the earthquake in Haiti. I thought about telling you the ugly truth about how I sometimes feel snarky and eye rolly about natural disasters that occur in other countries.

There's a part of me that feels distanced from events and people so far away. I tend to avoid news of situations because I don't want to get sucked into the emotional aspects of it.

I'm a very bad, very jaded Piscean and I have a hard time, sometimes, with allowing myself to feel connected to things that I know are just going to break my heart.

I'd tell you that "it's a problem I'm working on", except that would be very close to an outright lie. By and large I've learned how much of myself I can invest in caring about things I have little or no control over. Not surprisingly, this changes over time and based on what I have going on, personally.

It's probably not right or fair that my default setting, otherwise, is avoidance.

Hell, what I write in The Verbosery is probably a fairly good barometer for what's going on for me, personally. The fluffier it is here, the more likely it is that I'm deep into something that I'm not talking about.

Ah, avoidance.

Often after a natural disaster has occured *somewhere else*, I think about how poor their construction is, how ill-prepared they were, what they could have done previously to improve their circumstances now.

And then I really stopped and thought about it and I realized that the reason I tend to avoid news and information about natural disasters that happen *somewhere else* is because they also happen here.

Earthquakes.

Wildfires.

Flooding.

Oh, the flooding.

And the thing about it is, even though any one of these could occur at any time, I am totally not prepared to *shelter in place* or evacuate or be cut off from civilization because the ends of my street are under too much water.

Even though I know better. Even though I've gone through training specific to these types of preparations. I've totally failed at the part where I get my family on board and get ourselves prepared for the not-quite-unexpected.

And I think we've all noticed how, sometimes, it's easier to cast aspersions against someone else than to clean the skeletons out of our own closets.

So I'm totally owning this.

Go donate. Whatever you can. Anything you can.

When you're done, get the information you need to be prepared.

Nobody expects it to happen to them. But we're fortunate and blessed enough to have access to the knowledge, the tools and the resources to help ourselves prepare for a better outcome.

As my stepfather says:

Hope for the best.

Prepare for the worst.