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Purple Sleeping Pills

It was a rousing old time in Nightmare Land last night, and I am getting sick of this.

Woke up at a little after two, or maybe it was three, I don’t remember, trying AGAIN to throw up. I’m starting to wonder if my own body has it out for me. Woke up feeling very disoriented and a little scared and drank lots of water, which helped a little. Managed to fall asleep, finally, and instantly dreamed that I was dead. When I tried to fall asleep after that particular piece of fun, I realized that I was starting to choke every time I lay down. Gave up on the whole idea and went onto IRC, woke up Todd and got lots of reassuring cuddles and hugs and felt much better by the time I did fall asleep. This sort of thing is why I’ve never allowed myself to take sleeping pills — from as far back as I can remember I’ve had trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, and sleeping pills sound so wonderfully tempting that I know I’d be hopelessly addicted to them in about two days.

Got a really long letter from my British aunt yesterday and spent a long time reading it — she’d taken a batch of letters written over the past few months to other people and sent them all on, so in a lot of ways it felt very much like a diary, which of course fascinated me. I felt for the first time like I was getting a picture of who she is, and that probably has something to do with the age I was last time she wrote me, I guess I must have been thirteen or so, but in any case I was very glad to read the letter and am starting to really appreciate having gotten back in touch with my family.

I say “my family” and as I was typing that I realized that I do call my father’s sisters and brother, father, mother, etc. “my family” and don’t ever talk about Kitey’s side — it’s because I don’t know anyone from Kitey’s side of the family. I saw them every once in awhile before I was five years old, but don’t remember any of it. Kitey and I talked about it while she was here, about families and the awful dynamics that are involved in most households. One of the things about life in America that continues to fascinate me is this amazing ability of most anyone to treat people they supposedly “love” in absolutely horrifying ways and then look at the ceiling and whistle and say “Oh, but my, like, FAMILY life was like that when I was growing up, so of course I can treat people like horseshit because my FAMILY is at fault, not me,” and that sort of thing just leaves me staring at people in a stupefied “What in the world are you talking about?” sort of way. Kitey grew up in a really weird stupid atmosphere, nothing anyone would want to experience in a million years, but my point here is that she didn’t bring it into her own life. Yeah, she spanked me until I hit about two years old and sat her down and said, “Listen, lady, what gives you the right to hit me? I don’t hit you,” and she absolutely stopped. She saw that it wasn’t right and she stopped. She didn’t look at that two year old baby and say, “Well, but my, like, PARENTS did it to me so I have to do it to you,” she JUST DIDN’T DO IT ANYMORE.

So anyway *wry laugh* I didn’t mean to go into that whole rant, what I meant to talk about was the fact that we were having this conversation and Kitey mentioned that her brothers had taken the way they’d been treated as children and she could see very clearly that they were treating their own children this way now. That it was somewhat easier for her to understand, having grown up in that house and seen what went on, to understand why her brothers were doing the same thing. Because they just simply didn’t question it. It wasn’t like they were looking at the way they’d been treated and thinking, “This is wrong and bad,” they were looking at the way they’d been treated and thinking, “This is the way childhood works. It may not be much fun but it’s the way it works.” So why isn’t the question there? What is it about people that makes them question or not question a lifestyle?

Because I don’t think it can be that simple. Todd grew up in a horrific way and didn’t question it — again, it was “this is the way childhood works, I sure hope it’s over soon, but surely everyone is treated this way” — but his not questioning it didn’t preclude not acting that way. What I’m trying to say is that he didn’t act that way himself, even though the questions weren’t there. He wasn’t condemning his parents (I do. I’d like to get them both in a small room for five minutes.) but he knew that he didn’t want to be like them. He knew that from as far back as he can remember.

Well, gad, that all sort of took off in a different direction then I was intending it to, but I’m glad it did. It’s been a long week and I’m very much looking forward to the weekend — I’m thinking about repainting one of the upstairs bedrooms (tried an experiment the first time of using a rather dark shade of purple, which just ended up looking rather dreary instead of cozy and warm) and Todd has been home so late for most of the week that we’re missing each other quite a bit.

David Lynch Possessed My Computer

Relief!