If only...

Hi Stevie,

If only I still worked at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC...today my former coworker and still current friend Ted put a message on Facebook that the DALAI LAMA visited the Museum this morning.  I could have MET the friggin' DALAI LAMA!!!  AAUUUGHHHHH!!! How cool would THAT have been?!  I mean, sure, I've met Muhammad Ali, Jack Klugman, Gene Hackman, David Arquette, Connie Stevens and Fabio...not to mention being in the same room as the President (GW Bush, nothing to write home about really, he sucked).  But, COME ON, dammit, the DALAI LAMA was there today!!! FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD, that would have been the MOST awesome human EVER to meet.......dammit dammit dammit dammit.  I still kick myself for leaving that job.  Always will.  I miss it every day of my life, I still have dreams about it.  I really loved it.  I still do but it's a bittersweet love now.

Anyway, go to this link, and get a chuckle or two.....I did.....


http://www.movievine.com/news/ollie-klublershturf-vs-the-nazis/

Pete's stepdaughter posted this on Facebook today, and it made me laugh out loud a few times.  I dig that kind of humor, anything that kicks Nazis in the ass, is alright by me.  The weird thing, is that I saw this AFTER I looked through a very old photo album that we found among Florence's stuff this weekend.  It was full of photos of Pete's dad's brother, who was a pilot during WWII, only 22 years old when he crashed and died.  The photos are awesome and amazing, but so sad to see such a good looking young man like him...and so many others exactly like him...who didn't make it to see the end of the war.  He died in September 1941, while on a routine flight with a rookie he was training, when something went wrong right after they took off, and the plane crashed.  Both men were killed.  Pete's dad never got over it. That was his older brother, and he adored him.  Pete never got the chance to meet him.

If there WERE such a thing as an alternate universe, this pilot uncle of Pete's would be nearly 92 years old by now...only 3 years older than Florence is right now.  If only he had survived the crash, he would have then witnessed the defeat of the Nazis,  he might have even won the purple heart medal of honor!  I'm SURE he would have wed a beautiful woman, had 10 gorgeous kids, and who KNOWS what other awesome things he would have accomplished during his lifetime...I wish I could talk to that guy in the photos, and warn him not to get into that plane.

If only Anne Frank had survived.  Imagine that for a moment.  She may mean nothing to you, but to me, she's everything.  She changed my life, when I was 10.  I love her with all my heart and soul.  She is my guardian angel, my spiritual guide through life I guess---at least, that's what I like to believe.  If she had only survived the war, she would have been 16 when liberated from the concentration camps.  She would have reunited with her family, she would have gone back to school, graduated, and gotten married. Probably would have had 3 kids or more, and might have published the diary---OR, like ME, her diary may have sat in a dusty box full of cobwebs in her attic for 50 years.  The world may have never known her.  So....that begs the question....does everything happen "for a reason?" Are we all better off that she DID die, so that we could read her diary and be changed by it even 60 years after her death, like I was??

Anyway...so tonight I am pondering reality vs. fantasy...and, my reality is, I spent my day buying curtains and paint with my mom at Lowe's, when I could have been meeting the Dalai Lama if I still worked at the Museum.  It just kills me.

Do you ever sit and wonder what adventures YOU have missed out, now that you no longer work for Journey?  I mean, do you ever wonder anything about what they are doing, and what fun you might still be having with them, if you had never left?  Do you ever feel like a displaced person?  Like you really don't belong in THIS reality that you have now, but you SHOULD still be living in THAT reality you once had?!  Do you wish sometimes that you could rip a hole in the time/space continuum and go BACK to that reality, just to peek at it, to see what you'd be doing IF ONLY you hadn't made the choices you made, and done the things you decided were the right thing...

I don't know why I come up with this freaky weird shit, it only makes me sad.  But, there ya go, that's what I'm thinking about tonight.  I guess maybe Pete has me watching too many science fiction t.v. shows.  I'm hooked on "Dr. Who," actually, which (at first) I thought was quite lame and silly, but now it's becoming very cool and I love it.  I also love the Graham Norton show, (on the BBC channel).  He's hilarious.

But I digress...

I still think about my friends at the Museum, and the Survivors who are like my family...and I miss them every day.  I think about them every day.  I wish that I could just take a PEEK into the alternate universe if I had just stayed in DC on 9/11 instead of going to Michigan that day.  Have you ever made some kind of important choice, (like leaving Journey), that you sometimes wonder "what if" you had stayed? What if the boys in the band had waited for you to have surgery? What if you all went on to keep the band going together?  Do you ever wonder "if only?"

You wouldn't be human if you didn't.  So, I am going to presume that the answer is YES.  Does it make you ponder and feel regret?? Or does it make you feel happy that you chose the life you now have?

My mom put me into 1st grade even AFTER being told that my IQ as a kindergardener was a 2nd grade level.  I could READ in kindergarten.  I could have SKIPPED first grade completely, and then I would have had totally different friends, totally different adventures, a whole different LIFE.  Sometimes I wonder "what if my mom had let me move to 2nd grade?" It wasn't even a choice I made for myself, so I feel sometimes like I've been ripped off.  Maybe THAT is why my life was in the toilet all those years!! Maybe THAT is why I'm so weird now!! Maybe THAT is why I never amounted to a hill of friggin' BEANS in this life!!  AAUUUGHHH!!!  What if it's all based on THAT one stupid choice, when I was all of FIVE YEARS OLD, but what if that was the WRONG one, and THAT is why I've had such a tough time of it all these years??

Yeah, sometimes I have those moments.

But then I wonder about that vague phrase, "Everything happens for a reason."  Does it?  Does it REALLY??  I wonder sometimes if that is true...I mean, if I hadn't run home to Michigan on 9/11, I might never have met Pete...you know?  Though, that is debatable.  If I had stayed in DC, I would have still been with Peter, and he probably would have still sent me to camp, and TAH DAH, I would have met Pete.  So I really question that line of thinking.  What if I am a totally different person in an alternate universe, where I moved on to 2nd grade, won the Nobel Peace Prize at age 10, and somehow saved the entire world from war, famine, and man's inhumanity towards man?

Instead, I got stuck into 1st grade, bored to death all through school, ruined the only GREAT job I'll ever have in my whole life, and now I'm just a fat married wife-schlub, sitting in my batgirl pajamas, writing to a formerly famous singing man 20 years older than me, that I've met in person twice, but wouldn't remember me even if you asked him about it.  I am so insignificant, and tiny in this huge world.

I really am.  And so are you.  We all are.  Just tiny specks of dust floating on a doomed planet.

(But then again, in an alternate universe, maybe he would remember me....)? What if we met again?  For real?  Would we be friends?  Would we laugh at the silly shit I write to you on this blog? Would you even KNOW about this silly blog of mine? Would we just say hello, shake hands, nod, smile, and then go about our business? Or would we melt into a puddle of lust and go wild on each other.....hmmmm....

Insert Twilight Zone music here...and ponder...

Well, I'll leave you with those thoughts.  Goodnight.

Love, Rebecca