So. An interesting weekend in Arizona. Not quite the shakabuku I had hoped it would be, but at least I return feeling like I've actually been away for a while. (By the way, for those of you reading that last sentence and wondering what the hell I'm talking about, "shakabuku" was defined by Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank as "a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever.) Remember when I told you about that girl in Seattle my dad wrote? I found out why he wrote her -- my mom was good enough to finally oblige me with an explanation. It seems that, following my dad's recent quadruple-bypass surgery, his cardiologist took a rather cavalier attitude with him and didn't pay as good attention to him as he should've. This resulted in some medication having some really bad effects on him including a lot of fluid buildup in his heart, and then the doctor outright lied to my dad about some test results. Thankfully, my dad was able to read his own echocardiogram and saw that he was in heart failure again and went to his primary care doctor, who immediately made some changes to his meds and sent him to another cardiologist. My dad is now getting better -- slowly. However, if he had just waited to see his old cardiologist in late September like the cardiologist had said... well, he'd be dead now. Literally. And all this made my dad realize that all he really wants to see is for me to be settled down and happy, and with his life hanging in the balance, he sent the letter to her because he thought there might be something there. There was death in the cards this weekend, and not just because it was being talked about in a rather tear-filled late-night conversation with my mom last night. On my way home this afternoon, I happened to glance back in my rearview mirror to see the old-school Chevy Blazer I'd passed a minute before blow a tire at 85 mph. After careening all over the road, the Blazer went off the side of the road and flipped over a few times. I didn't stop... I was already well past the accident scene and getting farther away every second at 90+ mph, and I could see other cars pulling over to help. Besides, what could I really do besides get in the way? I don't know CPR or anything. The sad thing was that it happened so far out in the middle of nowhere that it wasn't until 15 minutes later that I passed the ambulance heading east towards the accident scene. I told one of my best friends last week that I don't believe in the whole philosophy of saying "Why am I bitching about my tiny problems? There are worse things in the world." The way I see it, we all have our own universes, and some of them happen to intersect with other people's universes. In our own universe, we each have our own Way Things Are, and they may not apply in others' universes. Our own problems may not be huge in the Grand Scheme of Things, but they're big to us, and just because they're not Earth-shattering doesn't mean they should be disregarded. I basically had to adopt this philosophy after reading Nick Hornby's How to Be Good, a book that threw me into a philosophical hurricane that kept me up until 5am the night I finished it, trying to sort through all the implications of how much we can/want to/should do to help others. In other lighter-side-of-things news, there are some fucking idiots out there on the road. Not only that, they're egotistical, prideful idiots. Look, if you're cruising along in the left lane at like 5 miles over the speed limit and I want to go faster than you are, I'm either going to make an end run around you and pass you on the right or I'm going to flash my lights and tell you to get the hell out of my way. It's not your right to tell me how fast I should be going. Don't be giving me that Look of Death™ when I pass you. It's your own damn fault. Don't ride the left lane if you can't handle the speed.