I get a few emails every day asking me I moved to California, adding, “I read your blog and I get all that, but, no, really, why?”  The story about my medical treatment and falling in love with the Pacific Ocean evidently rang false to a lot of people, the number of which seems to exceed the normal skepticism factor.

Okay, truth-time.

Did I mention the whole save-my-life aspect of this blog, and of the move?

Save my life from dreariness, despair, distress, dystopia? (Why doesn’t spell-check like ‘dystopia’?)

Save my life from blame-placing, back-stabbing, bending-over-backward to escape responsibility for my own damn self?

Save my life from the constant tendency to condemn anyone who walked away in disgust from what they found out I was, which they could have known all along because, well, *glancing around*, I don’t exactly keep secrets now, do I?

No, I don’t like to dwell on all of that.  Who does?  One of my newer friends, let’s call him “Paul in England”, (because that’s his name and the country in which he lives) says that i give too much personal information in my YouTube videos.  He’s right if you mean facts such as where I park my tiny house, the year and make of my vehicle, and my shoe size (37 European).  But the real dirt, whatever that might be, lurks between the sentences of this blog.  By bleeding for you every day about my quest to live joyfully, to abandon complaint and keep a goshdarn smile on  my face, I try to share the critical stuff.

What I divulge here makes a lot of my friends uncomfortable. Acquaintances roll their eyes and say, “We all got troubles, dude, suck it up and get on with life.”  So, here’s the thing:  That’s why I moved to California.  That great thwack you heard when I exited Missouri?  That was the sound of me pulling myself up by my bootstraps and turning over the heaviest new leaf ever grown in anybody’s spring garden.

Yeah, well, I know it was winter but it’s a metaphor, people.

I don’t chant, subscribe to Zen Buddhist principles, divest myself from worldly comforts, or disdain others who enjoy a fine glass of wine and a juicy steak. I’m not pure of heart.  I won’t win any medals for complicated insights on vegetarianism or moving essays on the ability of grass to feel pain.  I’m just an ordinary woman, trying to get by, who happens to blog every day about the process of acceptance and survival.

That’s why I moved here.

So now you know what it is:  A love fest.  I’m a smack-talking Midwestern ex-pat but I’m also something else.  Something undefined and maybe a little tired, a little tawdry.  But still trying.  Keep those cards and letters coming.  I love you all.

It’s the second day of the fiftieth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.