8:03 p.m.||||2003-08-13
So um, I have been distracted by the onion-like layered sequence of crisis' going on in our lives, none of which make sense.
I realized today that I have become every one of those cliches in which girl hates mother in law. I mean, it is pretty ridiculous. But the very real, very visceral and destructive, living breathing contempt I deal with daily isn't. The very worst part is that it's mainly a reflection on me, and will be something I have to let go, I have to amend, and from which I must move on. That part seems so unfair. Thinking about it today, I thought, really, she's so dumb she wouldn't even grasp its depth.
Remember when I mentioned the journal she kept when she was twenty? Now I have oodles and smears of false superiority to dump also, as well the need to re-subscribe to my missing edition of "Humility 2003". It is a battle field in my soul - hating her so much it's a mantra, realizing as I'm droning it, that it's MY weakness, MY problem.
Bah humbug.
And then...there's a ton of other shit.
The reckoning seems to be happening to no-one else the way it's hitting me. Things/issues do not ever just resolve themselves, the way I wish they fucking would. And when I put them off, in whatever reality avoiding why I choose at a given moment, like the cliche has it, they - the "troubles" - are just lying in wait.
What a total buzz kill.
In other news, my son is well, the picture of two year old, tantrum having, hell-raising, curiosity feeding, and rose-smelling, dog-petting health. He is the one and only thing in my life that has consistently ruled.
10:52 a.m.||||2003-08-12
I've never heard of these chums, quite. Forgive me.
What fashionable underground band/style are you?
this quiz was made by the sunni bunni bear
9:43 p.m.||||2003-08-10
WHAT "ALTERNATIVE" HOLLYWOOD STARLETTE ARE YOU?
this quiz was made by the sunni bunni bear
Of course, if I had a dime for every time I got compared to this non-actor, I'd be able to buy myself a decent lobster. It's better than Lynda Carter, however.
I got a hair cut the other day in a feeble attempt to lift my spirits. Actually, I did feel better, but the rest can only be so after I am out of here and living my dream of reading real books in the privacy of my own living room, a room with a hand made slip cover and a nice mix of periwinkles, tangy limy green, coral and beige and other dimmed down jewel colors with more luminescence than matte. I will treat myself to some wildly delicious and outrageously expensive angora or el paca yarn in corresponding colors with which to knit our little family of three a throw afghan for the couch which we haven't bought.
I have a soul-shaking, committed-to-the-core thing/process I have to do first, and it will be like reckoning with God. It's enormous, bigger than me, all consuming, but unfortunately, intensely private, so I will allude to the emotional and psychological ramifications which, in the history of my journal keeping life wherein I fail to nail down both time and sensual detail, as well as practical, is nothing really new to my writing history, wherein I look back and go "yeah, but where the hell was I living, what did I like to cook for dinner, was that before or after he went to jail, and she had her baby, etc...."
How do you like the bangs? I'm sort of thrilled.
5:41 p.m.||||2003-08-08
Oh, you guys...lowercase sigh. Things are low, slow, low down, as Dr Seuss would say in his collaborated book My Many Colored Days - one reason why I haven't been writing much. You can always assume things are going either fantastically bad or fantastically great, based on my frequency.
.
Ugh. Side track. Who cares???
Dave is wrapping up a couple side jobs so that we can move.
ALthough I swore against them for the entirety of my life, I have reconsidered and because they usually havae deals of all shapes and sorts and sizes for apartment complexes around here, that's what we're goonna do.
I have been fantasizing about a new color scheme. We need a couch, and whatever couch we get will probably be decorated by hand made slip covers... the last ones I made when I was seven and a half months preggers were so great and easy - oo oo oo!!!
I have been imagining a room for Josh, and all the lovely colors I'd like to use for him/ more on all this later.
I want this computer table I saw at Office Max - a triangular deal made of gray and black and white mottled formica, with chrome legs and interesting, modular looking shelves. I'm still drooling - very minimalist - a look I usually don't care for, but looks wildly cool for a computer set-up.
OK>
More later
10:12 p.m.||||2003-07-23
One of the things that bothers me about MIL is that I cannnot really have a decent bad mood in this house. I can't frown or she starts an awkward conversation. I can't tune out because then she tries to start one over any television program I might be trying to use as my escape. Sometimes she has to ask about my bad mood. I wish she wouldn't.
It looks like we might be moving sooner than later now, assuming we don't do anything to fuck it up and right now, that is a TALL order. We're just so prone.
Oh, to be able to sit around in my underwear, compete with only one person for the bathroom, and discipline my child with confidence instead of feeling like anything negatively toned that comes out of my mouth is a sin in the eyes of God; to be able to buy and plan for diverse meals that both Dave and I will like, and to rid our diets completely of Doritos, cheese, salsa (ok, the salsa can stay...if made by me), fucking Wonder Bread, and butter.
To be able to have the killer bad mood I am so desperate to have.
To skip a day of dishes in lieue of anything and feel liberated by this small and stupid freedom.
To decorate according to my tastes.
It goes on.
I'll spare you.
But, seriously, I cannot wait.
11:47 a.m.||||2003-07-20
Oy, someone update, ok? Bored.
In other news, Dave is on a job right now that very well may launch us into a new apartment. Please say a prayer or mutter a fond thought on my behalf, in that direction.
I am thinking it's time to redo the ole layout - maybe something a little more conventionally blog, with more bells and whistles functionally, with a litte less eye sugar factor. I get distracted by visual ideas and neglect to really create anything linkally interesting.
ok. I bore myself/ OUT>
12:39 a.m.||||2003-07-14
Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.
What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
About my former entry. I suspect it was an immoral thing to do, and while I'm dealing with that, I do plan to publicize some of my ill-gotten knowledge of her denseness. Maybe. Ack. It's a quandry. Part of me is deeply moved and brought to a better level of insight; the other part is exasperated that anyone could be so naive, so dumb, so unchallenging and unchallenged, and so typical all at once. It is made all the more ironic that she went on to bear the love of my life and the father of my child.
I wish I were more of a threat to the Bush administration. I think. OK, big brother, I'm kidding, ok, oh god, please let go, no, give me back my hand....
4:13 p.m.||||2003-07-13
You are a Complete Idiot. No matter what you do,
you just can't be anything but an idiot. Your
celebrity icon is Carrot Top.
What Kind Of Idiot Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
11:44 a.m.||||2003-07-12
I waas looking for the Calamine lotion in the hall closet, which is usually right behind the "Depends", which we keep for Grandma, when she visits, because she's in the incontinent stage of Alzheimer's. I found a small, pseudo-locked journal from the seventies, one of those bedazzling affairs with a murky sunset and the silhouette of a couple. I checked it's dates: '73 and '74.
I took some time deciding what to do. I have never in my life read the journal of another, even when Harry and I lived together, and left our journals lying around like coffee table lit.
So I wasn't sure.
And then I decided.
It was a long morning.
It's made me think about journal keeping in general, and what constitutes the real deal.
Suffice it say, this wasn't.
I haven't decided whether I want to say more about this. I'm disappointed with myself in general the way I've completely given in to anger and a certain level of contempt for this woman, who is just average, you know. Not a criminal because of her level of naivetee, not to be despised because she's so much your typical American consumer, your average product of post-fifties culture. Yet, I do, I do feel so inflamed by her very composition.
It's bizarre, really. So, I try to think about letting it go. It's hard, though, because every day there's new quip, some subtle reminder that she sits in righteousness, in her mind.
I will say that the day she gave her life to Jesus was a one-liner followed by a direct recap of what time she had lucnh, followed by the name of the restaurant.
Booooooring.
8:00 a.m.||||2003-07-10
Remember when I first started this journal? Oh come on, sure you do - what!?! - you mean, you haven't been with me since the beginning? Shame. Shame on you.
Ha.
Well, if you happened to have been here this whole time, in addition to coming to think of me as the world's biggest whiner, ahem, you might also remember that I was at the oustset of this, um, publication, a new mom, with a whittle four month old bebe, enfant, lamb, etc ceterahhhh - (strings of Morrissey there, please) - who was....
...trying so desperately to escape the isolation and boredom and loneliness that is sometimes new motherhood. I did a lot of refreshing venting about the trials and tribulations of young baby rage, as well as wondering and pondering about my love, Dave, and the odd journey we took that brought us to this new phase in life, parenthood.
We were living in a shoe-box, remember, which featured a living room, dining corner, occasionally roach-riddled kitchen that shored against the dining corner which was cozied into the living room, as well as two bedrooms, one off t'other, and a bathroom scarcely big enough to turn around in, much less spend a week in, hoping to birth what is now my two year old.
That apartment, albeit sucking - across the street from a prominent crack dealer, next door to a prostitute...cross the hall from toothless, bearded lady and also a nice man named Noel, who, as well as being our building watchman, turned out to be tight with an ex-roommate of mine from college, said roommate being a Nader supporter, a Green's man, into organic food on the weekends, bagel eater, coffee drinker. By default I assigned Noel cool qualities based on the roommate with whom he was an associate, and occasionally we broke up the monotony of ghetto life with an afternoon coffee, jazz, and talks of politics, and books. He lent me a book, I have forgotten what, oh, something, um, think "Unbearable Lightness of Being" author (begins with an M, followed by an I, and I tell you, I have been stupid all week with this shit, dammit)*("where is my mind, where is my mind, where is my mind, where is my mind?" Cool guitar solo) and I lent him Jersy Kosinski's biography. (which I almost just spelled 'big-rophy').
Kundera! M - i Kundera. Fucking duh.
Noel had some nice spice plants, an interesting layout, the only one of its kind in that terminally square building; he had a rustic wooden, blackish floor, revealed upon ripping up the carpet.
I digress.
The ghetto. It has tangential flavor. I fought with myself morally while we lived there over feeling guilty for not loving the diversity of the ghetto more. Every day I reconciled by counting down til a time when we would escape.
Dave's painting is, of course, seasonal much of the time, and that fall we hit a dry spell, ran out of dough, and when his mother, Linda, offered to let us move in with her for a while to get back on our feet, like the morons we have lately proven ourselves to consistently be, we agreed.
I was thinking green grass, a neighborhood with no syringes or condoms on the walk. You know. I was thinking, achieve this before Josh learns to walk and by default, fall and spear himself on some errant ghetto glass. That.
So we moved in....
HERE.
And my goal of sharing the baby wealth just enough to reintroduce adult conversation and an occasional book about something other than the alphabet has been replaced by the nobler goal of resisting spray-painting Linda's car with obscenities while she's at work.
For those of you just tuning in, you won't automatically roll your eyes and wonder why you bookmarked me when I say, I hate her, this hatred is beginning to consume me, and I despise even more the rigmarole of negative feelings she engenders in me, making me question my own hypocrisies and my own insecurities, some of which I must be projecting, right, in order to give such a shit?
OK. Well, in a nutshell, and I must disclaim by saying, none of these things in and of themselves evil make, and we are certainly not some vague composite of our political ideals, and I can forgive and even love deeply, those with ideas and values very different from my own, in the aforementioned nutshell, she is everything I am not. Republican, Christian in the prophetic, self congratulating and Arabic dis-trusting vein, conservative, a believer in completely shared resources among marrieds, pro-life, anti-feminist (although I'm sure she has no real idea of what that particular ism entales....eh, who does really?), a believer in stay-at-home moms to the point of economic disparity, two-faced, a putter on of airs which are lies, etc. Is there an etc? Surely, there must be, for the differences are so vast.
I'll back up with a preface, if that's possible.
She married Dave's dad young, because she was pregnant with their first child, who died due to premature birth - a very tragic thing which happened because she has an incompetent cervix. She dilated three months early and this first son only lived a week before he died.
I'm sure there was so much grief and sadness that they clung together to survive. However, it is important to notes that she and Dave's dad would never have survived a marriage in the long run because, in addition to his priorities, which were at the time sometimes similar to Dave's....beer and pot and partying....it turned out a decade later that all along he had been a bi-sexual cross-dresser. He now lives in Vegas with a lovely collection of dresses....
So they made a married life together, there in the muddled late sixties and seventies, and a couple of years later, Dave was conceived and born. As with her daughter a few years after Dave, her cervix was stitched shut for the duration of her pregnancy and she was on bed-rest for many months. I mention this as back-story, and to indicate that I have a pretty good grasp of her story as well as some pretty abiding empathy, otherwise her car would already be sporting some of most bitter thoughts.
Dave was a great kid - bright and out-going, often a typical Leo, always thrusting himself forward and center in the social arena. From the very beginning he was a superior sibling - at three, he was helpful and a willing attendant to his baby sister, whom he loved a ridiculous ton. Unlike my half sister and brother, wherein my sister, being five when my brother was born, also prematurely, never recovered from her dethronement and made it her life's work to torture and embarrass the kid from then on.
Around the time when Dave was ten or eleven, one day Dave's mom discovered a dress or some underwear in his dad's collection, and assuming he was having an affair, she went ballistic. He was in fact having one, but with a person of his own persuasion. Knowing her as I do, I simply cannot even put a face on that scenario. I would expect, and Dave has confirmed, that it was hell...the worst. And I can relate. I mean, at least when an affair is with someone with whom you feel you can compete, at least you have a fighting chance. But to be surprised by something like this, well, ouch.
Further complicating things is the fact that Dave's dad is, quite frankly, a self-centered attention whore, with a completely disgusting sense of humor and absolute lack of propriety. I find it nearly miraculous that Linda recovered from this at all, and that she went on to have a fourteen year relationship with a very shy, seemingly generous, but kind of slickly reserved guy, who quite realistically refuses to marry her. Still. A-ahahahahha.
Around the time Dave graduated from high school and got out on his own, a best friend of his died of an overdose, and what might have been recreational drug use became for Dave, a dependency problem. When he was going through the meat of his "trials", he was sickly and amoral, doing some bad things in a bad city not so far from here. He was tied up with a drug dependent, mentally ill girl, who had a baby that she said was his (it wasn't), with whom he tried to sustain a relationship, but couldn't and although she eventually put her son up for adoption, Dave's mom came very very very close to adopting him herself. Dave had to beg her not to.
Around this time is when Linda decided to join her church - the one where every fifth out of six sermons has to do with tithing, and they "speak in tongues" (instant disqualification for any church, in my book). Ever since she has been a very decent, very reliable, Sunday's Christian. And although she can't cook, and hates trying, she lovingly overextends herself on a regular basis, but thankfully keeps her bitterness and martyrdom to a minimum, saving up the anxiety and resentment for later, when she unleashes it upon us.
To wind this up - I just wanted to give you an idea. An idea why I complain about this. Some of the issues that go on between the three of us are pretty near to my heart, and reflect some deeper problems I have with myself that I am struggling to get a handle on.
What inspired me this morning was a new incident.
Last night she DID tell me she had to work especially early today. Dave worked especially late last night, though, so I forgot to mention it, and he unwittingly parked behind her in the driveway. The last couple of mornings he has been irritated with her because she spends an hour in the bathroom every morning, perfecting that stupid, Pantene powered HAIRDO, so that no-one else can either shower, shave nor shit. He always leaves before her and he takes less than five minutes to do his biness, so he finds her monopolizing of the bathroom aggravating. Well, today, early - 7:00? - she pounds on our bedroom door frantically and overloud (and Josh's bed is in the hall, right next to her pounding - we DO have a third bedroom that she refused to let us have for him when we moved in because 1. that's where her iron is and 2. that's where the obese cat that the other cats kicked out of the basement lives. Don't forget there are five cats and a crippled dog downstairs, festering with urine.) and says something so fast I couldn't catch it. Then she storms away. Dave went to take his morning daily, probably fucking relieved to be able to get in at all and ten minutes later she stomps back upstairs, pounds on my door again, to which I reply "he's in the bathroom". I hear her say "DAVID, I'M GOING TO BE LATE FOR WORK!!!!!" and then she storms back downstairs and slams the door so loud that the upstairs windows shake.
I'm thinking, now whose fault is this, really? Mine, because I forgot to mention she had to work early, and so he parked behind her, which, ironically, he never ever ever does. But she can't know this. But why, God, why, is it necessary to bring me and anyone else within earshot into this? I swear, she was actually trying to wake Josh up. I hate her.
But the entire point, hah, yes there seems to be one, is that after she left and we were grumping about her attitude, is that Dave said something so insightful that I was shocked. In fact, the other day when no-one was around and I was venting aloud to myself, I said almost the exact same thing....which was, as he put it "you know, it's her. SHE's the one who fucked up my self esteem so much. She was always so fucking concerned that I behave well, she was always worried about my behavior that I never had any self confidence. I still don't have the confidence necessary to have a successful job or a successful relationship."
I told him, hey, I know he feels like shit about himself a lot, and that he feels like he doesn't, but he does - he has a lot more going for him than he thinks, whether he feels it or not, because, like me, he's surviving it. The key is to own it, and get past that emasculation to the point where he can let go of all of that.
It's hard to portray so much of this bizarro, complicated thing here because, obviously, this is one tainted little corner of it. I'm just the daughter-in-law here, after all.
But the strange thing is, since I'm living it, and forced to fucking psych-analyze the two of them to death, I did come to his conclusion, almost to the word, yesterday.
She puts on this great public face. She comes across as this super-friendly, giving, benevolent soul, but simmering beneath the surface is something so seedy, and mean-spirited - she's a ball-breaker. If people could hear the way she speaks to Dave when no-one else is around, they'd be shocked. She degrades him, really, and easily, like it's effortless and she might not be aware that she addresses him....like he's a dog. It's twisted.
Once, not so long ago, she was remembering his childhood and she said, as she's said before "oh....Dave was SUCH an out-going little boy....he was such a TALKATIVE little boy...I wonder what happened?"
I can tell her. She took a high-spirited, giving little boy who loved to be the center of attention, and when she discovered her husband no longer, or possibly never, found her sexually adequate (because he's GAY and a CROSS-DRESSER!! Helllo!!!), turned her unresolved anger redirecting it at her son, making him, as he said it himself "her bitch" rendering him incapable of acting on his own, at a time in his life when, more than ever, he needed to have a positive male role model. And in that, his father too, totally failed.
I realize, as Dave is going to have to one day, and just as I will have to come to grips in my own life, that these are the wounds that, though perpetrated upon us by others, we will ultimately be responsible for healing.
8:51 a.m.||||2003-07-07
Ah...the musical, magical sound of the door shutting as MIL leaves for work. Her boyfriend of 14 years' birthday was yesterday, and so, as with all familial events, the house was a given over to the "onslaught". Perhaps twenty-five people, including toddlers, crowded the corners of every room. Always such an effort to secure one un-trafficked corner in which to set up Josh's high chair, a chair for myself (a luxury, to be sure), and a place to set a plate. I shoved us into crevice next to the piano, out of foot's way, and still almost every single person decided they need to traverse that side of the table for something. At 5"10, with the mouthiest toddler on the block, it can be hard to be inconspicuous.
I was given a block of "gimme" time, when I first entered this family, where, they were happy Dave found a girl, a smart girl, an experienced - albeit by ten years - girl, and a girl who seemed to like the idea of the long haul, especially since we got knocked up. That latter bit didn't matter so much, 'cause Dave's ma got knocked up in her day, and the year Josh was born, he was one of three born out-of-wedlock.
There's still love for me, sure, but now they know I'm not your basic God-fearing, conservative, Republican, stay at home fucking happily, give the man the pants, sort of gal....and they probably have seen a tinge of the darkness in me which is an important part of why I stumbled upon Dave; and they combine that with their perception of Dave, and their vague concern that we don't seem to want to get anywhere, coupled with the inane complaining that I know Linda MUST be doing, coupled with the other fact that her daughter is too fucking good and pure and right to be fucking believed - AND - you get this conclusion wherein we are a bit of the black sheep. We are the "element".
Thank God for literature, and film, and politics. Thank God for my own peculiar but particular upbringing and the intellectual and creative benefits it bestowed. I'm always going to be this fuck-up, but at least multi-faceted. AT least cognizant of my own short-comings and stupidity, in a way the blandly and conservatively self-assured aren't.
Dig?
1:40 p.m.||||2003-07-05
Thanks to Scratchmittens for this - I think - Friday Five.
(to be continued later this afternoon.....)
1. What were your favorite childhood stories?
"The Swan", by Roald Dahl...A Wrinkle in Time, The Trumpet of the Swan.Charlotte's Web
The Secret Garden
Anything by Judy Blume, predictable, I know. I, Trixie. I loved Harriet the Spy.
I could keep adding these infinitum, and probably will come up with more. Actually, I am a huge Roald Dahl fan to this day, although of the lesser known stories...also, anything and all things E.B White.
Also I have a deep and abiding love of A.A. Milne, who doesn't?
Few people know this about me: my nickname growing up was "Missie Pooh Bear:, "Pooh" for short because of the namesake, Pooh, Winnie the. My father was a regional manager for Sears - the retail store responsible for my parents divorce - and so I had everything Pooh, as a less fortunate child today might have everything "Bob the Builder" (sorry, but I think "Bob" is too benign to be interesting; but in the flip side you get hallucinatorially weird stuff like "Rolie Polie Olie" as a sad replacement.)
2. What books from your childhood would you like to share with [your] children?
Any and all of the above: I modestly believe I had fanatastic taste in literature as a kid and I stand by those choices today.
3. Have you re-read any of those childhood stories and been surprised by anything?I have re-read many, but one which never ceases to amaze me from the sheer depth of its poignancy and morality, is "The Swan", which is a short story featured in a compilation of short stories by Dahl, and meant for readers around the decade mark. The story was about a young outcast who is bullied by local kids who murder a swan, make him swim for it and then do something so unspeakably evil and sad that, in my life, it changed me forever. It's one of those stroies meant for the kids who get bullied and which elevates what seems like an inescapable jail to a tragic prominence rarely seen in kids lit. I think, anyway.
A story which is not meant for kids but one I would have loved if I had discovered it then is Salinger's "For Esme, with Love and Squalor". (I'm pretty sure that's the title; a sure sign of my age is that I sometimes struggle for an author's name or a story's title, when it use to reside easily on the tip of my tongue.
4. How old were you when you first learned to read? Around three, I believe.
5. Do you remember the first 'grown-up' book you read? How old were you?
I remember reading the following books in the fourth grade, straight from the contraband shelf in my parents "little bedroom": "Sybil", "Dead Ringers", "Helter Skelter", "The joy of sex", and in French, "Charlie Brown". (Please pretend these are underlined) Needless to say, these books reordered some of my sensibilities and I was oversexualized and interested in twisted violence far too early. C'est la vie.
10:23 p.m.||||2003-07-03
So then, the true twist to the entire saga is the day after I completed my near but necessary infantile bitching about the drama (thanks, Lazy and Worldgurl, for the notes of encouragement; yes, it has been that trying and I reassure you, if it hadn't been the focus imposed upon me by the flock, I might have found more riveting shit over which to update. Or not)