My tooth extraction went fine though up until yesterday I was still pulling little shards from my gums. They weren't painful, just annoying. It's healed up quite nicely overall. I miss the tooth and my voice sounds empty or hollow to me now and I can't explain why but overall I feel much better without it. My mind refers to me as toothless redneck. I know that isn't the case. I am not toothless. My wisdom teeth are still intact and doing well so in reality I have three more teeth in my head than most adults I  know who have had their wisdom teeth removed.

For some reason I was thinking about a refrigerator that I owned years ago when I lived in Dowling, MI. My home was a small unfurnished cabin on the campus of the outdoor education center where I worked. It was a communal kind of life with shared showers and restrooms centrally located. There were some difficulties with this but overall I have to say that the people I knew there have probably had as much or more influence in who I am today than most anyone in high school (Patty, Kirk, and Sandy excepted) and most of the people in college. It was a time of growth, new things, new experiences, dating really for the first time in my live (at 25, yes at 25), having to work with the people that I shared living quarters with. Downsides: eventually everyone knows your business and there is no privacy and people really get on each others nerves. Plus it is a lot of hard work to co-exist peacefully. It doesn't always happen and when one person doesn't make that a priority it can be hellish. Upsides: you get to know some very good people very well, you learn who your friends are, you learn to work through differences and swallow your pride and admit when you're wrong. Carpooling is also a plus, though I've mentioned before that I abused that privilege for a year or two before finally getting a vehicle of my own. I think everyone was happy when I finally did get wheels, including me.

I no longer  have the refrigerator. It was a large dorm size fridge that I bought from Lynn Sagar when she moved on. I also was able to live in the cabin that she used before she moved. I don't know what happened to Lynn and am trying to find out. The refrigerator wound up going to a single mom who had left her husband because he was beating her and she was concerned he would start with their kids soon. So she took the kids and left, found a place but had no place to store food that needed refrigeration. I had moved and no longer used the refrigerator and found out through my sister this woman was in danger of losing  her kids because social services had some in and decided she needed to have one for her kids or they would find someplace else for her kids to live. She had an infant on formula so she really did need one but had no money for it. I game my refrigerator away when asked if she could use it to keep her kids. I was asking my sister about it today and that's when I found out all the details behind it. I didn't know before and I was thinking it might be nice to have it back. When she told me the whole story behind it I felt kind of stupid but am glad that I know now what actually happened to it and hope that it made a difference.

It feels lately that I'm so concerned about my own survival that I forget there are others around who really do need more and I honestly could do with a whole lot less. A WHOLE lot. I don't know when my focus changed but I think it was gradual and am grateful that I'm becoming aware of it once again. I want to be willing to lose everything and free myself from myself.