In which a very good question is asked.
The whole maternal side of my family is converging on the ancestral home in Walla Walla, WA next month for Grandma’s 80-somethingth birthday celebration. In email discussions, both my aunt and my grandmother have mentioned that I might like to ‘come home.’ Gramma informs me, “You might find something interesting to do here. The town has changed a lot the past few years. Wineries, fancy restaurants, bedroom community for the bigger cities etc. so employment picture has changed. I still have a spare room.”
Last night AmmZon came home hot and tired and verging on cranky and couldn’t decide what she wanted for dinner, so I made nachos because it was the only suggestion she didn’t crinkle her nose up at. While I was cooking and she was snapping beans, she asked, “So, really, like, what are your plans? Do you have any goals for yourself?”
I’m such a piece of shit that my first – and ruthlessly rejected – response was, Why? What, do you want me to move out now that I’ve finally quit thinking of this place as temporary? But I didn’t utter my first reaction because not only was it defensive and confrontational, but I know that most of my first responses are crap and have trained myself to discard them. Instead I said, “Well, uh, a full-time job, I guess. I need money. I’ve been separated from The Ex a year this month, and I just started feeling better a few months ago. I didn’t realize I’d been clinically depressed until I stopped being depressed, but I think I’m ready to get my shit together now.”
Soon the topic changed, but I spent the rest of the evening trying to look truthfully at my life: I’m nearly 40, I rent a room in someone else’s house, I work a part-time job totally off of my career path, and I drink vodka and read and sleep a lot. Sure I have great friendships, and I feel strongly about the music The Seventh Ray band is making, but other than that what am I doing with myself?
What I’m doing is nothing. Nothing at all. And to be fair that was the point for the past year: rest and recuperate, relocate myself. I was depressed, had been depressed for a few years, and didn’t realize how badly until the fog lifted a few months ago. (Lately I’ve been having moments during which I’m suddenly overcome by how cool my life is, how wonderful it is and how very much I dig it, and these moments amaze me because I used to always have them but they’d been gone for years.) I’m verging on being well again, being the active and life-loving and positive person I used to be, and this little nest I’ve made for myself is starting to feel less like safe and nurturing and more like lazy and cowardly.
Continue reading »
In which we take a look at the ‘box’s stats!
The top search strings for July 2007 have been:
hall and oates
copy pod
foot fungus
wisbar themes
my little pony porn
ttc blinkies
wisbar advance skins
jock itch
heart virus
polaroid 103
ipod
hex calculator
ppc skins
A porn server named bang-real.com sent me traffic: [Referrers]
677 hits were from networks reporting themselves as “old-style ARPAnet,” which is totally so cute.
I have no idea what’s going on with the Internet half the time. What’s up with these blown porn sites and all the referrer traffic? How can the world possibly need 1418 agents combing my site? Why on earth are people doing searches for “my little pony porn”? (I thought I’d made the term up. Seriously!) And why did my eyeOS directory get 1534 hits?
The Intarwebz: oh how she baffles me.
In which a day of swimming and sunning on the river is so fun!
Yesterday I got to go boating on JW’s pontoon again. I had so much fun! Besides JW himself, Core and Baby Girl were there, and I invited Bghead along because the other people who were slated to go lamed out. (It turned out to be Bghead’s birthday, so I was doubly glad he was able to come along on such short notice.) We ate, we drank, we swam, we lounged in the sun! It was so fantastically relaxing! I took Bindu along too, and she freakin’ loved it. She thinks she might just be a boat dog at heart; she looked so cute in the prow sniffing the wind.
We went to the closest lock first and anchored and swam for a bit. The water felt great (yes, yes, I swam in the Mississippi: I’ll probably grow extra limbs soon). We went back to Burlington to air up the inner tube, and then went out to a nice sandy beach and parked. I laid out and swam for a few hours. Bindu met the other dogs on the beach. We humans talked and ate sandwiches and met our neighbors and people-watched or sat quietly soaking up the sun. I sat in the water and rubbed my dog all over with wet sand and she loved it. JW wanted to play cards, but I said, “We can do that at home. Here, we should enjoy the sun and the water!”
The boat had engine troubles, though, so we had to be towed back to Burlington, which took forever. Then we had to get the boat out of the water, which was much easier said than done, but suffice it to say we did not lose the trailer to the bottom of the river after all and the boat is safely trailered. After that debacle, Bghead took our sunburned and sandy selves out to dinner at The Drake.
We were seated out on the patio. There was a band and, I shit you not, they covered Big Balls! For the dinner crowd! (Our table screamed along, natch.) I sang back-up with the band for awhile, because apparently that’s the kind of attention-getting self-involved diva I am, but the river bugs were dive-bombing the stage lights something fierce and kept ending up in my cleavage so I went and sat down again. I had the pan-seared tuna and fries, but I didn’t eat the mango chutney that came with it because I think mango chutney is yucky.
Eventually we got rid of the drunk 19-year-old girl we’d picked up along the way, and piled into to the truck for the drive home. (Baby Girl did the driving because she’d managed to stay sober.) We rolled into Fairfield a little before midnight, I think, and the group parted ways.
Today I’m sunburned and lazy and didn’t even bother doing laundry. The redness of my face and shoulders is easing, so I might end up with a tan rather than having to spend the next week peeling my skin off in chunks, for which I’m prepared to be grateful.
I was napping earlier, and I had my door open to let the air conditioned air into the roasting, sweltering sauna that is the blue room in the summer. AmmZon came upstairs and informed me that she’d purchased Fudgesicles, so naturally I got up and ate one because Fudgesicles freakin’ rawk.
Oh, and then I ate an entire frozen pizza and watched television for an hour, because that’s the kind of exciting rock star stuff I do. Now I’m going back to bed because I’ll need to get up early enough to wash something to wear to work tomorrow and pick up that loan check and pay Goodyear the rest of the money I owe them for fixing the jeep last Friday.
In which I’m trying to figure my own shit out by observing my reactions to others.
Let me preface this whole thing by saying I know I’m hideously flawed myself and that I’m hardly one to talk about anything, ever. I’m sorry in advance if you see yourself here and get mad at me. I’m talking to myself as much as anyone, k?
That said, I need a t-shirt that reads, “Shut up and listen.”
It drives me nuts when people – my roommates are the most ready example [but not the only ones by far and they mustn’t, when they read this, assume I’m speaking only of them, because I’m not, m’kay?] – pick at each other. It doesn’t upset me in a ‘mommy and daddy are fighting’ sort of way, it offends me because they’re communicating badly and they’re doing it on purpose. And it reminds me of my own failed relationships… He’s not hearing her subtext, and she’s not hearing his, and they’re both saying the same thing – “I need you” – but are too busy being hurt and going on about themselves to listen.
Listen.
You know what the root of virtually all communication is? It’s simply, “I need you.” That’s what we’re all saying when we’re talking to each other. I need attention, love, validation. I need you to see me.
I need you to find me clever, useful, strong, resourceful, funny… in short, lovable.
Love me.
The actual content of the majority of our talking is irrelevant. On our death beds we won’t remember the content, but the feelings. Looking into someone’s eyes while you spoke and seeing love and acceptance is what you’ll remember, not the gossip you were actually speaking at the time.
Lately I’ve been noticing a trend when my friends tell me their stories. “So-and-so was a jerk to me,” they say. “And I’m mad, so I’m not telling him. I’m telling you.”
Oh, great.
In other words, they’re upset, so they ‘punish’ their friends by not telling them what they’ve done. They nurse these hurts and avoid the one whose ignorance (or selfishness, or awkwardness, or laziness, or stupidity) caused the hurt in the first place, and triangulate another person to bolster themselves.
Love me.
And just how, I ask you, is anyone supposed to improve themselves if, when they fuck up, their victims slink off into brooding silence?
I realize that we’re supposed to say nothing at all if we can’t say something nice, but there’s a limit to this axiom, people. Defend yourselves. Stand up for yourselves! Love yourselves! And love me enough to let me improve by telling me your truth, rather than brooding silently and vibing me bad, won’t you?
If I ever hurt you, let me have it. I want to know. (I rarely try to hurt anyone on purpose, so it follows that any pain I may have given was an accident.) Give me the chance to fix it, please.
But. If your hurt is so incredibly stupid that you’re ashamed to bring it up to me? Then adjust yourself. You’re an adult. Do it. No, it’s not comfortable but it’s not exactly difficult, either. Be the person you know you’re supposed to be. It’s that simple.
Listen. Are you being loving? As loving as you can? Are you giving enough? Are you doing all you’re capable of? Or are you just being a horrible, selfish, petty little baby?
These are important questions, people. And if we don’t ask them, who the fuck will?
I read a blog post last night by a young woman who had survived surgery. She said that it had pissed her off to listen to people bitch about such petty, stupid shit all the time. The message, in a nutshell, was that life’s too short to waste.
So, shut up.
Listen.
In which you will please let me know.
I think I have the new theme tweaked to render the way I want it to in all the various browsers… I don’t like the font size in IE or Opera and will have to figure out how to address that later, but otherwise it seems to be working.
If you notice anything wonky about the layout or function of the site, please let me know in case I haven’t seen it yet?
It’s five o’clock. Walkin’ home now.
In which it’s just a few things.
I changed the template! (No doubt you’d already noticed.)
My nails look fantastic.
I had tacos for lunch.
Last night, in exchange for a ride home, I tried to troubleshoot Baby Girl’s wireless connection. I think the card in her laptop failed. She bought me a drink for my time and dropped me off at home. Yay!
The guy at Goodyear thinks the jeep’s problem is actually the PCM, and he’s ordering me a re-manufactured one. The part plus labor will run me somewhere between $300-400. I hope to God the guy’s right, because if the module doesn’t solve the fuel-delivery issue… well, I won’t be able to afford – for another month – another crack at the problem.
I’m supposed to be in the studio next week, either Tuesday or Wednesday, for about 12 hours of recording. Afterward I’ll crash in a tent, then drive the two-and-a-half hours back to Fairfield for work the next day. (Well, assuming I have a running jeep by then, that is. The guy running the recording project is one of those people who becomes overly controlling when he’s overwhelmed, so he gave me a lecture about how I had to let the shop know I must have the jeep ready by Monday afternoon latest. I said I’d get right on that.) A ten-hour day of recording sounds a lot like it’s gonna kinda suck, but it’s what one does to end up with an album.
In other news, this book is amazing. (If you love old pulp sci-fi, that is.)
It’s after five. Time for me to trod home.
In which I’ve been tagged, by God, tagged!
Sin over at Venial Sin has tagged me (the wench), and I, in a fit of weakness, have agreed to continue. I’m not sure who I’m going to tag, because I don’t think I want to annoy eight entire people, but for now, on with the show!
The Rules:
- each player lists 8 facts about themselves
- the rules of the game appear before the facts do
- the player ends by tagging 8 people, which means listing their names and then going to their blogs to tell them that they’ve been tagged, then going back and commenting on their lists.
Here we come to eight facts about me:
1. I don’t like eggplant.
2. I often go several days – sometimes weeks – without brushing my hair.
3. I can ride quite well (but Western-style only: I mistrust those slippery, silly English “saddles”).
4. By the time I stopped studying voice, I had sung in English, French, German, Italian, Gaelic, Japanese, Latin, and Greek. And a few more languages I can’t remember because they’re hella obscure.
5. When I was in sixth grade, I was told I possessed a “post-collegiate reading level.”
6. My first kiss was from a boy named Trey, who, playing the part of the rescuing prince, kissed me, in my role as princess-in-need-of-rescue, under a table which covered in blankets to make a fort, and serving as a dungeon at the time at daycare after school when I was in first grade. (I didn’t get kissed again until I was 16.)
7. All of my teeth are cavity-free.
8. When I was little, the word ‘stomach’ upset me all through. I didn’t mind ‘tummy’ and I had no issues with the body part itself, but the word stomach made me shudder – the sound of the word, the very taste of it – I felt deeply ashamed and uncomfortable whenever confronted with it.
So, the people to tag – and I apologize, dears – are:
Note: Yes, I pretty much lifted Sin’s entire post verbatim, and only changed the parts I had to, because my laziness? Is a feature, not a bug!
In which I take a whole day and totally girl out with myself.
Sunday I gave myself a pedicure. And a manicure, too. I painted all 20 of my nails frosty pink while sitting on the front porch in the breeze and sun, drinking a beer and talking with Bghead and Truck and AmmZon as they came and went. Bindu slept under the porch swing, her legs squaring off her cute little stocky body, black pointy bat-ears flicking lazily.
Later, I dyed my hair with the second of the three boxes she sent me last winter. I walked around the house smelling of chemicals with my hair ‘piled loosely’ atop my head per the instructions, waiting for 35 minutes to pass. Truck and Bghead were playing darts in the front room — Truck had been hanging the dart board as I’d put dye in my hair — and saying things like, “Okay, motherfucker, let’s make this a bettin’ game!”
AmmZon said, “I would have done that for you, you know,” indicating my dripping head and pointing out that I had a big glob of dye on the back of my neck. I wiped the dye off with toilet paper and thanked her for the offer. I thought I’d actually gotten pretty even coverage, though, for applying it myself, even if I did have dye all over my neck and shoulders.
In the kitchen Truck said, “I don’t think women should dye their hair. I think they should make it look like they’re dyeing it and go out like that, because you look hot.”
“Yeah, you love the smell, right?” I said, putting a pinch of salt into my drink.
“Actually, not at all,” he replied. “It reminds me of when I dyed my own hair. Ick.”
When my 35 minutes had passed, I stepped into the shower and rinsed and conditioned. I love the conditioner that comes with hair color, I truly do.
I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much time on personal beauty in one day in my whole life.
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4 random books from my Library!
