Dinner By Candlelight

I would just like to say that it is MEAN to write me and say that you’re going to an Ani Difranco concert just to make me feel green with envy, and don’t look so innocent, you know who you are.

Seriously, I hope you felt guilty the whole time that you were seeing it and I wasn’t. No *laughing* really really seriously, I do hope you had a wonderful time there.

Woke up this morning to two pieces of lovely touching email that made me a little teary. It’s so… oh, I don’t know, I over use the word wonderful and it isn’t even quite the word I want, but it’s all I can think of to say — it’s so wonderful to me that people like what I’m doing here, that they would take time to actually write and say so. It means so much to me. And on that note, I suppose I’d better apologize for the zillionth time to all the people I owe email to — please be assured that I will write soon, that I am always very happy to hear from you and that I haven’t heard from Marian in over a month so I know exactly what it feels like.

I’ve been feeling guilty for not calling Sarah, but even so I haven’t called her in over a week. I just have no idea what to say to her, I just don’t know how to respond when she talks about how she’s going to be alone for the rest of her life, how she’s lost the only person and the only house she ever felt anything for. I know, I truly do, that not everyone is going to react to any given situation the way I would, but my god, if I were in that situation, with the house I mean, I’d be out there looking as much as I possibly could. And when she’s talking to me and I’ve exhausted all of the avenues of response to the variations on the “my life is always going to be horrible and I can’t do anything to change that” song my impulse — because this is the way I grew up, because I’m a physically affectionate person — is to give her a hug and do my best to make her feel better, and if she wants to have a cry on my shoulder that’s okay too. But she really shies away from any physical contact with anyone, so that isn’t a possibility either. I just don’t know how to deal with the situation. And by the way, L., in case you’re thinking that I lied about feeling burdened the other night, I just want to remind you that I really wasn’t and Sarah’s is a totally different situation. Honest.

Stayed up until after midnight last night because Todd was working late and I was in the middle of a very well written mystery (I know it’s ridiculous to feel like British writers are more sophisticated than American ones, but I do — well, I found England to be much more sophisticated than America in every way when I was there, but how difficult is it to be more sophisticated than America…) and then fell asleep and woke up again just before Todd straggled in a little after one. Before he went upstairs to get into clothes to sleep in he came and sat on the bed and we leaned up against each other in an exhausted way, glad to be together. When he came back downstairs we fell asleep in a big happy catpile.

Oh, gad, I was about to say something about how beautiful it is outside — very still and damp and really, if I didn’t love this part of the country so much I would move to Seattle where it rains all the time — and then remembered something I’d been meaning to tell about here. We have this neighbor, he’s on the opposite side from the family with a twenty something daughter who I swear could pass for Tonya (Tanya?) Harding in a police line up, I bet she gets asked for autographs all the time, but anyway, this guy is on the opposite side. For the most part he’s a perfectly okay neighbor, sometimes he plays cheezy music at top volume, he lives alone and actually spent Christmas Eve with his radio tuned to the local soft rock station which was playing elevator music versions of Christmas carols, how depressing is that — so aside from that he’s quiet and good-natured. Actually, it’s quite interesting to see what sort of a lonely life he leads, considering that he looks like what Hollywood central casting has in mind when they say, “Okay, now bring me the quintessential GQ model type looking stockbroker kinda guy, we’re going to make ‘Wall Street: The Sequel’.”

Todd and I have all kinds of speculations going about his personal life, we do that sort of thing all the time, we’ve been known to spend an entire afternoon just people watching and speculating on people’s lives, and so we both had the giggles when I actually saw this guy ACTUALLY HAVING a candlelit dinner with some model looking woman in his dining room. The window of our dining room looks into the window of his dining room, there are only a few feet separating the two, so I could see very clearly that it was the whole set-up, some fancy dinner with tall candles, they were staring into each other’s eyes, wine glasses on the table, everything. And my question is this: given that he went to that much trouble, why did he leave the curtains open, given that until Todd and I moved downstairs, this room had nothing in it but litter boxes for the cats?

Tyrtle Tutt

Please, someone tell me that there’s such a thing as an intravenous Advil drip. And where I can get it.

I’m having a horrible day and I feel grumpy and mean and awful. But then I’m the one who decided that it would be a fabulous idea, since I was having cramps from hell, to clean up all of my papers that were still upstairs in the old computer room. Ha. It was unfun. I tried listening to NBC on the radio for the first time in a very long time and the people on the soap opera were managing to project their bad acting through their voices, no less. I shudder to think of what they were actually like, to watch and listen to at the same time. So I cleaned up most of my papers, found a bunch of tapes I thought I’d lost, my cramps got progressively more and more painful until I just wanted my entire lower back to drop off because I figured, hey, what do people need lower backs for anyway, and so finally I remembered that taking a bath always helps so I did that. And it helped. A little.

So then I went downstairs and was in the kitchen and was looking for something under the sink, I container I think. Ugh. The weird smell we’d been smelling intermittently wasn’t some old tea, it was the leaky water in the bucket under the sink that was extremely gross. Of course, I couldn’t just dump out the water outside, I had to get over half of the water out first because the bucket was really high and I hard to get out from under the leaky pipe. So I got stinky disgusting yucky water all over my hands and legs and feet and even though I’ve washed with heavy soap three times it still smells horrible. Really. I’m about as far from a neat-freak as a person can get — I thrive in chaos, it’s how all of my papers are organized — so when I say something smelled terrible, it REALLY SMELLED TERRIBLE.

All right, I’m done whining.

I finally, after months and months, came up with what I feel is a good name for these pages — I was never completely satisfied with “The Web Empire” because I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that people who saw it assumed it was a page belonging to one of those men who think that Beavis and Butthead are the height of sophisticated humor. So I’ve changed the name to The Words of the Tyrtle, which is much friendlier and I like it quite a bit. The word “tyrtle” has been around in my life since I was sixteen years old and went to visit Kitey for the first time in two years. Before that she’d been living in San Antonio, in the suburbs with her girlfriend — the one before Casey — and so it’d just been the two of us spending time together, for the most part. When I went, two years later, to the women’s land in the Midwest where she still lives, I was able to spend two weeks with some completely amazing women, the last vestiges in my mind of lesbian stereotypes were shattered, and I changed tremendously. It was the beginning of end of my efforts to fit in, to wear and think and be and talk like the popular kids at my school.

A lot of the women there had changed their names and weren’t using the ones they were born with. For example, Kitey isn’t my mom’s real name. Her real name is Carolyn, but I don’t think she’s used it since soon after I turned five. She actually has quite a few different names that people call her by, but because I associate names so completely with people it was difficult for me to call her whatever the latest name was (Old Thing, Fluffy, etc.). So I settled on Kitey, which is short for KiteWeather and that’s what I call her, even though hardly anyone else does anymore. And gad, now that I’ve started telling this story I’m realizing that I don’t particularly remember exactly when “tyrtle” came from. The alternate spelling was originally my silliness about all the zillion different ways “women” is spelled, that whole womyn wimmin wymyn blah blah blah thing had just started getting noticed that year. I knew that I wanted to live on that land for at least a little while, I knew that when I was sixteen, and the ruins of a house that a woman named Karen had had there twenty years before looked perfect to me. She’d called it the Turtle Tutt, and everyone there started calling me Turtle, and somewhere along the line the alternate spelling came along.

Writing all of this is helpful. I’m feeling much better already.

We went to the grocery store last night and I saw a guy there who I swear looked exactly like the accountant character from — ack, I got really distracted looking for a photo to link to here. They were all dumb. Anyway, so this guy there looked exactly like the accountant character from Shallow Grave, who also looks exactly like Todd except Todd and the guy at the grocery store don’t have big noses. It was fascinating, I kept a close eye on Todd so that I didn’t find myself walking up to this guy thinking that he was Todd.

I’m Such a Fool

If anyone ever had any doubt that I am a fool for snow, it can be instantly eradicated by knowing that I actually said the following when I realized it was snowing this morning (keeping in mind that I’m the only one home): “It’s snowing! It’s snowing! HI, snow! Hi there!” (turning to Habanero, who is sitting on the kitchen table next to me) “Little Guy, do you see? It’s snowing! Isn’t that great?” (Habanero has this look on his face like, “Well, that’s nice. I’ll let you know when I start caring.”)

We had an absolutely wonderful weekend, despite the sad demise of our umbrella and losing the car in a mall parking lot while it was pouring so hard that we both looked like we’d taken a shower in our clothes by the time we did find it. The most exciting news is also really ironic and funny news, beginning with our having bought the December issue of The Net magazine last time we were at the grocery store. It sat around the house for a week, we both had flipped through it but I was feeling sorry for myself and depressed that I wasn’t in it so I didn’t read any further. Then on Friday I added in a form on the main Coffee Shakes page that asked where people had found a link to that page, giving examples for url (http://www.fork.com) or title (Internet World Magazine — I can dream, right?). On Saturday night, when we got back from shopping and buying treats for ourselves in a town about an hour and a half away — there’s a computer store in this town but they know they’re the only one that carries anything worth buying within an hour and a half radius so they charge as much as $20 more than they should on any given product — I checked email and there was a filled out form for the Coffee Shakes link that said, “The Net magazine — you’re not dreaming.” so I ran and got it and looked through it to see where Coffee Shakes could possibly have been and couldn’t find it anywhere.

So, being cynical old self-doubting me, I thought that the person who’d filled out the form had done it just to be cruel. It was a kind of horrible disappointment and I was feeling terrible, and then there was another form for the link that gave the page number (63, for anyone who wants to see *beaming*) and I looked and it was really there! Which was a huge enormous thrill and, as my friends could tell you, I was largely incoherent for the next hour. I wrote my aunt letting her know this morning, it was really nice to be able to do that — not having been in touch with my family for so long I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to be able to write them and tell them something great like this. Todd took the magazine to work today to show to his co-workers..

So, gad, let’s see. In other news, we finally bought a new mouse and got rid of our old trackball which I just couldn’t use effectively — after an entire year it finally occurred to me that I couldn’t use it because I’m just not right handed and my motor skills in my right hand aren’t developed enough to be able to handle the small adjustments that a trackball requires. Also bought a new walkman to replace the one I’ve had since my sophomore year of high school, the radio’d been broken for about five years and the cassette bit was starting to sound extremely draggy.

It had been getting progressively more and more stormy as the day progressed, driving was getting a bit scary (oh, that reminds me, I’m going to make an appointment today to do that stupid doctor’s appointment so that I can get my idiot driver’s permit and finally my driver’s license, I swear, you’d think I’d done something more horrible than just letting my California license expire) and by the time we’d parked the car and were walking into the mall to buy the walkman, it was really pouring like crazy, the wind was whipping everything around, and it was getting difficult to hang onto the umbrella. So we were sort of walking, sort of running, to get to the entrance and suddenly the whole umbrella turned itself inside out and I started laughing really hard and Todd tried to say something pompous like, “It’s not funny!” but he was laughing too hard himself and we were probably in some real danger standing in the middle of the parking lot in the rain laughing that hard, mourning our sad ruined umbrella. We threw it away when we got into the mall and it did look awfully sad and lonely, all ruined sitting in the trash by itself. We felt better when we walked back past it and it had another ruined umbrella to keep it company.

On our way back home we were both hungry, so we stopped at a deli sandwich chain that was in two old train passenger cars, and got our sandwiches and sat down. There was a family sitting about two tables away from us, we were the only people in that particular car, so it was easy to hear what they were talking about. The family consisted of a mother and father and little boy, maybe about nine years old, and it was soon painfully obvious that the mother and father had absolutely nothing to say to the little boy. I’m not kidding. It was like one of those really horrible first dates where you’re sitting at a restaurant and looking around for the waiter, praying that s/he will show up soon, so that you can order and so you comment on the decor of the restaurant because it’s the only thing you can think of to say anything about. The kid was being very patient and nice with them, sort of humoring their attempts at conversation and trying to help them out, but even with his help the conversation was truly limping. Todd and I tried to figure out on the way home what kind of childhood could possibly have produced that kind of unfamiliarity — maybe the kid was brought up by a nanny? I mean, at one point the kid even mentioned a friend’s birthday party that a friend had had that the mother said was actually the kid’s birthday party, and she couldn’t even pinpoint which one she thought it was, which gave an awful lot of credence to the kid’s certainty that it had been a friend’s birthday party. I know that I remember my pre-ten-years-old birthday parties extremely well. (Carrot cake. Lots of carrot cake.)

I said to Todd on the way home that it seemed like a business lunch, that the parents were trying desperately to make the kid like them, as if he were their client and they were a product, and Todd said that huh uh, business lunches he’d had were a lot more fun.

On Sunday we went to the movies, saw the new Woody Allen film called “Mighty Aphrodite”, which while entertaining was pretty disgusting. Watching Woody Allen in a sex scene with a 25 year old woman is about as attractive as watching a rotten corpse in a sex scene with a 25 year old woman. Ugh.

Went to pick up our clothes from the dryer at the laundromat last night and I swear this is true, we walked in and saw a woman in there folding clothes that she was taking out the dryer. We tossed all of our clothes into our laundry bag and laundry basket and were putting it all into the car when we realized that the guy sitting in the car that was parked next to ours, with the trunk open half full of folded clothes, was waiting for the woman in the laundromat to finish folding the laundry. We both just stopped in our tracks and looked at him in absolute amazement. I know some people are shitheads, but how can anyone possibly be THAT BAD?

Evil Rotted Monster Plots

Despite having rented two cheezy scary movies, and watching half of one last night after Todd went to sleep, I didn’t have one nightmare! Hurrah!

We were talking about it this morning and Todd said that he thinks that my nightmares are coming from my avoidance of my rotted monsters (*laughing* I should really put a description of them on my key page so that people know what I’m talking about when I mention them — I call my insecurities and fears my rotted monsters, because so often my insecurities and fears lead to me telling myself I’m stupid, or lazy, or unpleasant to be around, or boring, or unproductive, so on and so forth). He did this hysterical imitation of me, walking somewhere outside, he picked up my book and started walking and pretended to read, all the while saying loudly, “La la la la la, I can’t hear you” to the rotted monsters.

Then he pretended to be the rotted monsters, lurching around the room saying, “Aha! She’s asleep, we’ve got her now! Let’s see…let’s toss a scary dead body over here, and then an evil ghost to haunt her house over here, perfect! Can’t ignore us while she’s asleep, can she!” which was really funny and I can see that he probably has a point. Not sure what to do about it, though — if I do, for example, go for a walk without bringing a book the rotted monsters get so loud and so vehement that I just get terribly sad and feel worthless.

Woke up this morning to email from yet another aunt and uncle, I should really ask about fake names for them, this aunt aunt aunt thing is getting silly, which upset me quite a bit. All they’d said was that my father “deserved forgiveness” which is pretty much the way that the two of them live, they’ve been missionaries for much of their adult lives. And it got my hackles up, for a myriad of different reasons. Partly because I’ve never been honest with these people. I think I mentioned that when Kitey and Jill came they brought a lot of photos that I had left with Kitey while I was in college and Todd and I spent a long time looking through them. What I saw was literally frightening. The smile on my face, in these pictures — approximately 95% of them taken by Ruth — is so plastic, and fake, and insincere that I looked creepy to myself, and to Todd. I spent many years, all through the hell of living with Patricia and summer, then through the years I had to live with Ruth, writing to these people saying how wonderful everything was. Letters that perfectly matched that scary smile on my face in those photos. And it has been such a relief to be honest with them, to be able to tell them what’s going on without being afraid of repercussions from anyone, and for everyone to say repeatedly to me that I need to “forgive” him or “be his friend” makes me feel furious!

A man who could stay with a woman who beat her son with a belt for five minutes straight on his sixth birthday because her son spilled ink on the floor is a man who I do not want to associate with.

So anyway, I was upset after reading that email and Todd talked to me about it for a long time, being helpful and finally I did realize that they don’t have any idea what it was like. And even if they did, their expectations of him are different — as a brother and a brother in law as opposed to a father — my father has been lying his head off to everyone in his life for years and they not only don’t know that he has, a brother telling you a white lie is very different from a father looking in your face and deliberately telling you untrue things. Which is all made weirder by the fact that their son is living at his house right now, and, life being the way it is, is probably having a wonderful time and reporting back to them that Ruth and my father are just lovely happy great people. So I wrote this back to them:

Well, as I told [name], we hadn’t had a relationship, per se, for the past seven years. I knocked myself out trying to be the perfect daughter, and finally realized that because of the moral code I live by — “Don’t hurt people. Don’t associate with people who hurt you. Be honest.” — I couldn’t allow him to be in my life anymore. It’s a decision that has made me much happier and much more at peace. He lives his life by lies — I live mine being by truth and it made it impossible for us to associate. I understand that you’re saying what you are with the best of intentions, but please do understand that nothing will change my mind on this subject. It’s not a matter of forgiveness, it’s just impossible for me to allow him to hurt me any more than he already has.

I feel kind of weird going on and on about my father like this, every journal entry having something to do with all of this, but in a strange way it’s helpful. Somewhere along the line this journal stopped being simply a fun, interesting addition to my web pages and started being a truly helpful way to express myself.

In other less ghastly news! Last night we had to go and return Nell, which we’d had out since Sunday. We were both feeling kind of bad, neither of us had had particularly good days. I’d been uninspired all day, unmotivated and grumpy because of it, and finally just got on IRC and talked to Laurel, which cheered me up quite a bit and made me feel much better. So when Todd got home we went to return the video and were both feeling much better and talking a mile a minute to each other — we were halfway to the video store and Todd stopped in the middle of a story about his day that he was telling me and started to laugh and said, “Um, did we bring the video?” and I said that no, we hadn’t, and then he said, “Well, fuck me ’til I bleed,” in a really silly way which had us both giggling helplessly, because it wasn’t any epithet I’d ever heard before for one thing, and something like that coming out of Todd’s mouth is really unusual. So we drove back home and got the video and went and returned it, I got my two cheezy scary movies and watched, like I said, about half of one of them after Todd went to sleep, Single White Female which I’d remembered as being cheezy and scary but at least interesting and found that I really couldn’t stand it the second time. Those of you who have seen this movie will appreciate the irony in my logging into email after watching it and finding a question for Auntie Lois asking how to kill an obnoxious roommate.

Talked to Laurel and Sherlyn on IRC some more, I wasn’t sleepy and I didn’t feel like reading, and then eventually crawled into bed around half past midnight. Woke up around two thirty convinced that I had my period, and I’d been sleeping so horribly that I was actually glad because I thought that I hadn’t been able to sleep because I had cramps. After Todd left for work I went back to sleep and had a dream that he’d decided he wanted to be the “master butler” (don’t ask me, I just dreamed it, I didn’t write it) of a big mansion and that we should move to New Zealand because we had a good friend there.

Bleary, Sluggy Morning

I am SUCH a slug. I crawled out of bed this morning at 11:21 AM and bleared around the house for about half an hour trying to wake up.

At least I didn’t sleep the whole night through that way — I put my book away and turned off the light around eleven thirty, then woke up at six with Todd, and then went back to sleep at around eight, so it isn’t quite as embarrassing as it might have been.

Woke up to a rather disconcerting email message from my aunt, the one I’ve been corresponding with. She’d sent the same message to everyone in the family with net access, giving out everyone’s email addresses. Which means that my father now knows how to get in touch with me via email. I must say, though, there’s some kind of ironic poetic justice in knowing that my father, who has published several computer books, is a computer programmer, and lives in the heart of the Silicon Valley in California (this is the part of the country where much of the computer technology is coming from these days) is on America Online.

Had a wonderful time last night on IRC talking to Laurel, Sherlyn, and Damon, when Todd got home from a late night at work I showed him the new Auntie Lois answers and we hung out on IRC together for a little while longer then went to bed. I had one terrible dream and then another which involved Todd and I switching bodies on New Year’s Eve, extremely weird.

Todd and I had a shower together this morning — no, I’m not starting after all these months to talk about sex in here, and I never will, because I don’t want people who are searching for porn on the web to come across my journal, if you see my point — because we’re Traigic and it’s lonely to take them by ourselves, and then when we came back downstairs I was looking out the front door, which has glass in it so you can see through it, and saw a light dusting of snow on the ground. Hurrah! I adore snow. I really really really adore snow, and winter, and everything about it. My aunt asked if there was any chance of Todd and I moving to the southern state where she and much of my family lives, and I said that unless it started to get some extremely freak weather that no, there wasn’t much chance…

Self-Righteous Arrogance (mine)

If I hear one more person call into the pop-psych show and whine about how their spouse/boy-girlfriend is a creep and they hate them and now the marriage/relationship is disintegrating I’m going to

fucking SCREAM.

I’m so sick of the way relationships and love are viewed in this country, I’m so sick of people acting like the person they’re supposedly so “in love” with is the person they love to betray, and lie to and do hateful things to, say hateful things about. Look, people, if you hate the person you’re married to — DON’T STAY MARRIED TO THEM. See how easy that is? See how easy it is, to instead of lie to and crap all over and ruin someone’s life, you just walk away? Guess what: my cats know how to walk away. Cilantro comes across Karma in the hallway and they don’t like each other, and what do they do? They don’t have a big screaming fight about it, they narrow their eyes at each other and then one of them walks away and that’s it. It’s over. And okay, they’re spayed and neutered, so it isn’t particularly an option, but do you see THEM having children with each other? Do you see THEM “accidentally” ending up with 18 kids and then whining because “Oh, gosh, I just didn’t know that s/he hated children with such a passion that s/he would never speak to them.”

Hasn’t anyone in this country ever heard of actually loving someone? Being so intimate with someone that it’s like that person is your other self, who just happens to live in a different body? Caring so much how that person feels that hurting them is like hurting yourself? Hasn’t anyone ever heard of HONESTY? Has the truth turned into some kind of horrifying plague that people are terrified of? Why does anyone bother to get married? Why doesn’t this country just stay a country of single people, and stop screwing up children’s lives, stop screwing up their own lives, just to — what? I don’t even know. I don’t even know why people get married.

I’m going to be really irritatingly self-righteous and pompous and arrogant. Well *wryly laughing as I type this* more self-righteous and pompous and arrogant than I’ve already been in the previous paragraphs of this journal entry. Really. So if you don’t want to get irritated, skip this paragraph. Here goes: Listen, all of you out there who are in one of those relationships that I’ve just described. I have a question for you. If I can do it at 23 years old, if Todd can do it at 25, if we can love each other and care about each other and be so happy and it’s this easy, why can’t you?

Gad, I’m exhausted now. I’m tempted to go back and delete all of that but I’ve never deleted anything out of my journal entries that I wanted to say before and I don’t want to start now.

I had a very fun time yesterday updating the Justine pages, chortling and grinning as I typed. Sherlyn wrote email saying that I was so mean, you know, in a good humored way (right, Sherlyn? *grin*) and I wrote back saying that I was going to show all of my arch enemies the parody and say, “I may be only 5′1″ but I can be extremely mean, see?” — now all I need are some arch enemies to show it to — but it did make me think a little. I’ve never really been a mean person. After spending so much of my school years at the bottom of the ladder, and I do mean truly the bottom — I remember once I was waiting outside of my eighth grade English class, reading a book while I waited for the door to be opened, partly because no one ever talked to me but mostly because I just wanted something to do while I waited. This guy who was also in the class stood next to me and I thought, “Wow!” not because the guy was someone I liked, or respected, or even could stand, but because someone, anyone, was actually standing next to me. People never did. So, of course, then he noticed that he was standing next to me and said, “EWWwww,” and got away from me as fast as he could.

Which is part of what’s so satisfying, for me, about the Justine pages. I am finally having some small revenge on all those hateful people out there who judge first on the basis of good looks, secondly on the basis of good looks, and thirdly on the basis of hairdo.

And that’s really not to say, “please pity me because I had a hard time in school” because I’m well aware that it could have been thousands of times worse. Last night I showed Todd the new Justine pages and he had quite a fun time reading them. We went grocery shopping to the store we aren’t particularly fond of and as we were pulling up we saw that there were two police cars parked out front. The following conversation ensued:

Todd: Hey, look, it’s a police line.
Sage: Really?
Todd: Oh, wait, no, it’s just a line of police.
Sage (laughing): That makes as much sense to me as if I said to you, ‘Oh look, it’s a cat circle. Wait, no, it’s just a circle of cats.

We went inside and, being very hungry, bought about eighteen more food items than we needed to, I mean, we’re planning to go grocery shopping again in a week — did we REALLY need two packages of four each of fake chicken patties? As we were checking out a manager type told our cashier that “Bob Smith wants to talk to you upstairs when you’re finished,” and I thought that that was really rude, telling her that she was in trouble while customers were standing there, but it turned out that Bob Smith was a cop. She told us that someone had tried to pass a bad check and she’d caught the person herself. I was curious and asked how she knew that it was a bad check, although come to think of it I don’t really even have any idea what a bad check is, and she said that it was because someone else had tried to pass off a bad check issued in the same name the day before, and also that she could see that the information on the check had been retyped several times. She said that the woman who tried to do it was wearing a wig and she knew that the minute that she saw the woman because she was a hairdresser and could tell these things. Which for some reason struck me as a really funny thing to say and I had trouble not giggling.

So she said that the woman had run out of the store and gotten into her car and locked the door, while the manager stood outside of the car and yelled for her to get out, then said “Fine! I’ll just get your license number!” and did, and really, I know it was probably scary for the woman and scary for everyone in the store but all I could think of while she was telling me was that he must have looked pretty ridiculous out there in the parking lot.

The Contents of a Desert

Gad, woke up this morning to the sound of someone banging on the door — wasn’t quite as startling as it might have been, because it was the second time I’d woken up (I went back to sleep after Todd left for work and I’d talked to everyone on IRC for awhile) and I knew that someone was coming here.

Last night the phone rang, it’s always extremely startling because we’re literally online from the time we wake up until we go to sleep. Not necessarily actually sitting here at the computer, but neither of us can stand phones and we’re off and on the computer so much that it would be silly to log in and out every time. So the phone rang and we both jumped and I answered it. Turns out it was the lawn guy, asking if he could come by and pick up his check today, I said sure, and made sure he was okay with doing our lawn next year he said he’d be happy to, I hung up and then figured I’d be awake in time. He was quite jolly, though, and I even managed to write out a check that made sense.

Got a really surprising letter from my aunt on Friday that I keep forgetting to write about here. Not only did she completely understand what happened with my father, she sympathized because he’s basically shut everyone out of his life, even his own siblings. One of the really hard things to find out was that my little brother came to visit with my father and she said he was extremely quiet, reticent, and she didn’t know what had happened to the laughing happy little boy he’d been last time she’d seen him. I don’t know what to do. If I write my little brother they’ll open his mail (no, that’s not paranoia talking, I’ve seen them do it) and he’s never, as far as I know, at home by himself so I can’t call him. If I do write and they find the mail, it will lead to another screaming fight. Hurrah *sigh* family politics.

After a rather blah day yesterday for both of us — don’t throw up, but we missed each other a lot and as a result had yucko days — we had a wonderful evening last night. Ended up ordering pizza and while we waited for it to come I read Todd a beautifully written story that a good friend had sent in the mail. By the end we were both teary and sniffling. After having two nightmares yesterday, I seem to be averaging about 2 nightmares a week, so hopefully that’s my week’s allotment…this is so weird, really, because six years ago when I was miserable all the time and having a really stupid life I never ever had nightmares and now that I’m bouncing out of bed every morning saying, “Hurrah! Another day!” (okay *laughing* maybe not QUITE that cheerful, but I would be if I could just have an intravenous coffee drip in my arm overnight) my nightmares are getting kind of worrisome. But anyway, this morning I woke up from a perfectly benign dream, which was that I was very thirsty and kept drinking water until I must have drunk 5 or 6 gallons, but nothing made the thirst feel any better. Finally, in my dream, I remembered the cold filtered water in the fridge and ran to drink some but the pitcher only had about half an inch of water left in it and fortunately at that point I woke up, feeling like I’d just eaten the contents of a desert. And happily the pitcher of cold filtered water was full.

Just got email I’d been waiting for giving me exactly the answer I wanted about me getting my own domain name, so it may be a reality soon, I’m so excited!

Weird, wierd?

Geez, I feel like I’m swimming through jello, or honey, or something equally mind-stupefying.

I’m having an extremely hard time waking up — my reaction time is about 1/4 of what it usually is (although, *wry laugh* without much depth perception to speak of, my reaction time when, for example, someone tosses something at me to catch is dismal anyway — the funniest part is when Todd and I try to toss things at each other, since his depth perception is even worse than mine) and everything has a dreamy, other-world feeling to it. I’ve felt like this pretty much since last night around nine. Weird.

I found out recently what a truly terrible speller I am, after taking this spelling test. I bring this up because ever since I took it I’ve been spelling the word “weird” like this: “wierd” because I thought I’d gotten it wrong. Unfortunately, when I went and double-checked just now, I found that it was one of the only words I didn’t get wrong, and that weird was the correct spelling all along. Boy. If I hadn’t seen someone collapse at a high school dance from too much Vivarin and have to be taken to the hospital I’d go out and buy some right now, maybe it would jump-start my thinking.

It seemed like an extremely long weekend, which was wonderful. I realized on Friday night when Todd and I were eating out at a foo-foo chinese restaurant (really horrible food, though — we don’t go there more than once a year and every time we go we swear we’ll never go again and then forget like fools) that it was his 25th birthday on Sunday. We decided to celebrate it on Saturday instead of Sunday because we’d already asked Sarah over to watch a video with us. Sigh. After talking to her on Sunday I feel so uncharitable about Sarah — it’s not that I don’t understand what she’s going through, or am unsympathetic, it’s just that she’s being so defeatist about everything. Todd and I were so frustrated talking to her — how does someone respond to a statement like: “Well, I just don’t feel like there are any houses in this area in my price range and perfect for my very picky needs. I lost the last one. So I guess I’ll just settle for something and live in it for the next thirty years.” We tried to talk to her about how many houses are for sale in this area, how many options she has, but it didn’t seem to make a dent in her misery. Todd and and I do understand that part of it, for us, is just jealousy. We’d love to be able to buy a house, and it’s hard to watch her turn down so many that we’d jump at.

Despite all of that, the three of us did have a great time watching the movie “Nell” together. I’d avoided it because of the traditional American attitude towards people who are different — lock them up in the nuthouse and throw away the key — and it didn’t help that the character reminded me tremendously of Kitey (take away the water, turn the cabin into a teepee and you have Kitey’s life) but I must admit that I was extremely impressed and in tears by the end of the movie. It was after the movie that Sarah started talking about how hopeless she thinks this whole situation is. ARGH.

Todd called Saturday his “Australian Birthday” because Sherlyn said it was his birthday in Australia on Saturday morning when we talked to her on IRC. We considered going to New York City but decided against it and ended up eating at a Mongolian restaurant about an hour away, then to a wonderful music/book store where we both found music we wanted. Oh, but first we’d stopped at a bagel place (after crabbing at each other a little about whether or not we wanted to go) where while one of the people behind the counter made our bagels, another right next to her talked to a friend of hers who was ahead of us in line. What an insipid conversation! “Did you take your SATs?” “Not yet.” “Oh, I’m going to take them in a week.” “Are you?” “Yes.” Why do people who have absolutely nothing to say to each other have conversations? Politesse is so boring. So then when we were checking out our cds and tapes at the music store the clerk looked at the name of one of the tapes which had the name “Tom” in it and said “My name’s Tom,” but it didn’t feel sincere, it just felt so dumb, like he felt like he had to say something because he was standing there and we were standing there and talking had to happen or else…what — it was rude? I have no idea. I don’t understand small talk at all.

Todd wanted a cooking knife for his birthday, so we went to a kitchen store with some really nice ones and he’s quite thrilled with the one he got, I tried it out and he’s right, the one he’d been using was really really really dull. Blech. I’m re-reading this journal entry as I go (I usually do) and it all looks so self-conscious and stilted, I wish I knew why I felt so off. Maybe partly because I’m nervous about what I’ve said about Sarah — she doesn’t have a computer now but she might get one in life and …oh, I don’t know. Right, if I were brave I’d just tell her how frustrated I feel, but I don’t want to just put more crap on top of all the awful stuff that’s happened to her already.

On Sunday after Sarah left we grumped around for awhile, talked about how frustrated we felt, made veggie burgers and then did what we’d been planning to do since we realized how great it would be at the vegetarian deli that morning — move downstairs. We’re just better at being in a small space, and this is a big house. So now half the living room is a conventional living room, half of it is the bedroom, the dining room is the computer room, and Claire is so happy I don’t think she’s stopped purring since she saw us take the bed downstairs.

At Least She was Laughing

I ended up deciding on Sage Words 7 to send to my aunt, and hopefully she’ll write today and let me know what she thought.

She hasn’t read anything I’ve written in literally years and years, so I’m hopeful that she’ll like it. When I was writing her — even while detailing everything that went on with my dad — well, here, I’ll just put the email message in. She said that no matter what happened, they wouldn’t turn their backs on me, and here’s the part of my email message to her that deals with my dad:

Awww, that’s so sweet of you to say. And helpful. I mean, I guess I knew that but in the face of no response to my letter I forgot. Well, let’s see. I guess it was in August of ‘94 that all of this happened, I used to have the actual email messages somewhere but I lost them somewhere along the line. Basically, my dad called and said — again — that he really wanted to correspond with me via email. And as I was talking to him on the phone I realized that I just didn’t have anything to say. After five years of having what I could/couldn’t say restricted, when I could/couldn’t call on the phone restricted, not being able to write letters, I just didn’t *know* him very well. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. I was on the phone with someone who was a virtual stranger.

You may have never heard this story, but one day when I was in college I called to say hello, I hadn’t talked to him in about two months and I wanted to touch base. I didn’t know that his wife was home at the time and after talking to him for about fifteen minutes, I had to get to a class and I said, as I always did, “I love you, daddy,” and there wasn’t any response. And I didn’t know if I’d done something wrong, or if I’d said something wrong, and finally he said really awkwardly and weirdly that he loved me too. And when he called back a few days later, it was to say that his wife had been there and when she’d heard him say that he loved me they’d fought for hours. That if I called and she was home he would just tell me that I had a wrong number. This is just one in a very long, painful string of stories like this.

So when I got off of the phone with him, this is back in August of 94 again, I burst into tears. I didn’t know what to do, or how to make our relationship any better — I felt like I’d tried everything I knew how, but I just couldn’t act like I had to be his secret daughter anymore. It was making me terribly unhappy. So I wrote email to him saying that if I couldn’t call him when I wanted to, or write when I wanted to (after I sent a letter to him that said nothing more about his wife than “please say hello to Ruth for me” there was another screaming fight between the two of them and he asked me not to write anymore) I couldn’t have a relationship with him. That we were virtual strangers already.

And he wrote back saying that he hoped I’d “get over my anger” someday and that was it. I haven’t seen, spoken, or heard from him since then. It’s hard, and it’s awful, and every day I think of him, but it’s a 100% improvement on the way things were.

I talked to Sarah last night on the phone, she said that the card made her smile, and made her feel like she had friends, and I felt really glad that I’d done it. She said it was quite something to come home and see Karma’s face staring at her from a card on her front door. She seemed somewhat more cheerful by the time I got off the phone — I told her all about the zillions of people who have been getting back in touch with me and by the time I got to the part about my cousin being a father, she was laughing. So I guess that’s something I can do. I mean, to combat the helpless feeling — remind myself that at least she was laughing last night.

Baby Web Page and Real Babies

Gad, what an exciting morning! I was up until 1:30 AM finishing Justine’s Ode to Justine and having a great time — this parodying stuff can be a lot of fun — and when I finally got ready to go to sleep I turned off the computer and checked voice mail.

There were two hangups, and then the last one was from Sarah, she said that she hadn’t gotten the house and was crying. It’s not that she was crying because she hadn’t gotten the house, per se — it’s her whole life that’s falling apart, and truly through no fault of her own. I felt absolutely terrible that I hadn’t checked voice mail before, and woke Todd up and told him, realized that I could go over today and leave a card for her saying that we were here for her and asking how we could help. Because I do really feel helpless. I don’t know how to make things better for her and it’s so frustrating, I know that the perfect solution is just around the corner but damned if I can think of it.

So this morning I was going to walk downtown and buy her a card, but realized that the ones they have downtown are smarmy and dumb and wouldn’t really mean much anyway, so I cut out two photos of Karma (he’s her very favorite out of all of the eight cats) and pasted them onto a card, in an arty way, wrote inside about how we were here for her, and was just walking out the door when our neighbor two doors down was coming out the door with his little girl. He said that his wife had just had a baby boy! I was really surprised because I’m a fool about pregnancies and the last time I’d talked to her I had no idea she was so far along, but he was born last night and the husband and their daughter were going to the hospital to see them. They were both so excited they could hardly stand still, and I congratulated them and felt so glad. This couple is so goodhearted, and so lovely to their daughter, and I’m looking forward to meeting the new baby when he comes home. I’ve never seen a baby that young before — it’s just astonishing to know that yesterday he didn’t exist and today he does.

I walked over to Sarah’s, it’s an absolutely beautiful, warm day, the leaves are everywhere and there’s a slight breeze, I brought my book to read but was so thrilled and felt so happy that I mostly didn’t read it, I just beamed all the way there. My aunt wrote yesterday, told me all the family news that I didn’t know, and speaking of new babies, my cousin, who is YOUNGER than I am has had a baby! Well, he didn’t actually have a baby, he’s just a new father, but I was absolutely shocked, I spent the rest of the night saying to Todd, “How can he have a BABY? Last time I saw him he was barely out of junior high! I mean, okay, that was over ten years ago, but still…” It was a wonderful letter, and it looks very likely that the letter that I sent the other aunt never even arrived, because this aunt never heard about it, and hadn’t heard a thing from my father about what was going on. She doesn’t quite have web access yet, but she said to send what I wanted to via email, so I’m thinking of sending my daily journal entries to her and seeing how that works.

As Casey likes to sing, in her own sing-songy way, “It’s a very exciting life.”