When a Bear Isn't

Let's try an experiment. Take a moment to imagine a big white bear. Got it? Ok, now that you've got it, I need to ask that while you are reading the following post, you try not to think of the white bear. Any time you do think about it, you should tap your left index finger.





Where to start. My weekend was not good. My fella's family doing an early thanksgiving because fella's sister and brother in law and new their new baby were in town. It's the first time I've met this sister and her husband, who are very important to my fella. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to like them. I wanted them to like me.

Maybe I should start with the The Card Game Which Wouldn't End on Friday night. That was most of the family, minus more local brother and his wife. Father was drinking. He gets a little competitive when playing games. He has made the now wife of my fella's brother cry. Me? He pissed me off. And I don't have a poker face, voice, brain, or mouth.

Saturday brought something like an apology from him. "Will you forgive me for being belligerent?" my fella's dad said to me with a pouty face and in what I was a little aghast to realize was slightly baby-voiced speech. I wanted to say "If you're apologizing for acting like a child, it'd help me feel a whole lot better about it if you said it like an adult." But while this was honest, it felt shitty. Instead I hemmed and hawed a bit and finally I settled on "I just thought you were drunk," which in retrospect was probably not exactly polite but I respected the guy too much to try to hand him some insincere bullshit. The apology came in front of several other family members so I couldn't have the open discussion with him which I'd like to have had. The one which would have started with me saying "Yeah that was a little weird..." and which would have hopefully ended with us agreeing amicably just not to play cards again so no one's style has be to seriously crimped. Or to have a safety word or something.

Fella's father went to bed early that night.

And then came Sunday.

Sunday I had what I am recognizing as a "pfg's greatest hits" fight. I've had it now with at least one social group at each stage of my life. This fight has happened with my family, friends, lovers, friends of lovers, and family of friends. It's the "I don't want to watch Freddy Krueger/Hannibal Lecter/most of the Quentin Tarantino collection" fight. Why a fight? Fuck if I know. It always starts out simply and I'd guess innocently enough. Someone suggests, shows up with, or goes out and rents a movie for a group which includes me. Since it's meant to be for group viewing, and making my usual assumptions that group members have a say about what the group's going to do during group decision time, I say something like "I really can't watch movies with over the top violence..." I often say it with some degree of self recrimination or chagrin, a tone of apology because I know that people don't like to have their video recommendations dissed.

Aside from the largely unavoidable tone, I have tried different ways of saying it. I've tried different word choices in expressing this. The repeat nature of the arguments my sentiment provokes has taught me what apparently doesn't work. I'm still looking for what does.
Here's what doesn't:
"No no, it's me. I mean, I don't think that (insert title of movie, e.g. Pulp Fiction) is a bad movie. I know it got good reviews, and if it's not death, dismemberment, rape, torture, and the like from start to finish and if you've seen it and can let me know when not to watch, I'm ok with watching it because I have heard it's good"
"Does anyone get a finger cut off?"
"A lot?"
"Does anyone eat a body part?"
"A lot?"
"Hey I'm not saying you guys can't watch it."
"If it's open for discussion, I mean, if it has to be something we'll all watch, can I just vote we not get it, at least not tonight?"
"Look, can we just not make a big deal about this?"
" Can we not have a fight over this? If you really want to see that tonight, I can do something else for a while..."

When dealing with this topic, I've even gone so far as to explain (to people I have some established reason to believe I am close to and who therefore should give a shit) what watching such movies does to me. As a matter of fact, I had had this conversation with my fella's dad on Wednesday night (we were over there a lot this week on account of the family thing). The topic happened to come up totally out of the blue and I thought "Aha, this is a good time to let him know I can't watch that sort of thing". I see it as like letting someone know you're allergic to peanuts. You might not tell them right away, but if the topic of peanuts or food or allergies comes up at some point and if you happen to have this allergy, you'd be stupid to not mention it then.

I do sometimes find people who don't take deep personal offense when I express my desire not to expose myself to this stuff. Being agreeable about it is different from "taking my side" - which in fact I find I genuinely don't like. "Taking my side" only perpetuates any possible (and likely) contention the whole issue is causing. My statement and the "side takers" who chimed in after created a terrible fight at a friend's place many years ago. That episode ended by me giving in because I wrongly accepted responsibility for making a scene, harshing a scene, or otherwise fucking up everyone's plans. I think I felt that continuing to try to negotiate a reasonable activity which did not include this movie would have necessarily meant continuing the extremely unpleasant argument about banning all things nasty and violent, ever, for everyone. I'm older now and I make a point of not letting that happen anymore. That is, I try to own my shit but not anyone else's. And I'd rather leave and create a social tear than stay and fill my head up with that fucked up shit which will bother me for YEARS.

This weekend the topic of one of Tarantino's latest projects came up - as raised by my fella's brother and brother in law, who had come back to the 'rents' house with the movie Saturday night. I was not quiet or demure about my feelings and intentions for MYSELF on the movie that evening. I was clear and upfront about it. And I thought "hey I talked to my fella's dad about it and he seemed to get it", which gave me some reassurance that I could at least assume he wouldn't get on my (or someone else's) case about it.

The movie was not watched Saturday night, rather, when my fella and I got to the 'rents' house Sunday afternoon, father, brother, and brother in law told us they had watched it that morning. Then began the retellings. My not watching this shit ban (for me, personally) extends to not wanting to hear retellings. If I am going to go through all that social fuckery to AVOID seeing this shit, why the hell would I want to hear about it second hand? If I could deal, I'd just watch the damned thing and not risk what is seen as a totally unacceptable fuss in expressing my desire not to see it in the first place.

I have come to totally dread this discussion. It touches on issues of my own abuse implicitly, whether or not I choose to explicitly involve them. Needless to say, I find it extremely difficult to navigate a tricky social interaction when a good chunk of my brain is trying very hard to suppress some quite unpleasant thoughts.

So the retellings..."It was totally disgusting," fella's dad declared. Ok. I'm with ya. Totally disgusting. Sure. I had just taken off my shoes in the other room, put down my purse, hung up my coat. Brother chimed in with "No way, it was awesome!" he went on saying something unintelligible or possibly just unmemorable because around that same time, just after brother in law also started talking about the movie, I turned to my fella and said "I really don't want to hear this, I'm going outside," and started putting my shoes back on.

My fella spoke to them while I was putting on my shoes. I heard him say something like "She really doesn't like those movies guys...can you not talk about it?" and then heard him say "Ok well we're going outside, you can talk about it while we're out." When we came back in, we played a game of cards with one of fella's sisters. The other men watched various football games in the living room. Topics like Hustler and Ann Coulter came up. I mention this I suppose because I think the lack of disagreement as a result of these topics demonstrates that I wasn't just looking for a fight. I just wanted to get through family time, enjoy what was enjoyable and not get ruffled or ruffle anyone over the rest.

Then Pulp Fiction came up. "Lollipop. That's what Bruce Willis' character called his girlfriend in Pulp Fiction" my fella's sister said. We were playing cards at the dining room table while father and brother sat swallowed up by sofas in the living room when she said it to the group as a whole. Fella's brother in law was sitting at the end of the dining room table where sister, fella and I were playing cards. Brother in law was dividing his attention between looking up scores for other football games on a laptop and watching the TV which brother and father of fella had begun switching between several games.

At the Pulp Fiction reference, I shifted a bit. Shit. More Tarantino movies, I thought with some concern. I didn't say anything then though because sometimes it doesn't go there and why preemptively go there anyhow? I wanted to avoid coming across as unreasonable.
"I didn't see it..." I offered conversationally.
"Yeah, I took my mom to see it" sister said, most of her attention still on the card game.
"You took your mom?" we heard father's voice chuckling from the sofa (her mom is his first wife)
"I've never seen it because I didn't want to see it." I said.
"She didn't like it" sister said and went on a bit about what her mother couldn't watch. Now details of the movie were starting to come out. And now the details of the conversation for me become less specific*.

Brother or father or brother in law said something about "...that scene where they inject the...into the heart...."
And I said "You know guys, I didn't see it for a reason."
The conversation continued, but without graphic details for a few turns.
Then sister said "She got up and left after..."
"Hey, guys. If I'd wanted to know about it, I'd have seen the movie" I said, slightly louder.
Father and sister had some conversation about the first wife's reaction. Everyone's attention was divided, except mine. I had my cards in front of me but they were little better than polite props.
And then someone said something about "the rape scene"
It may have been brother in law. Or it may have been someone else and then brother in law was expanding on that. Regardless, it was soon after "rape scene" and to the brother in law that I said, loudly "I say for a THIRD TIME, IF I HAD WANTED TO KNOW I'D HAVE WATCHED IT."

Brother in law looked up, searching my face for the sarcasm cue my tone hadn't held. I felt hot and I know I was flushed. I have some idea what I look like when I'm feeling that pissed off. In turn, he looked the way someone would look if the refrigerator suddenly started doing The Chicken Polka, just totally caught off guard. I felt bad for that.

Then father said "So I can't talk about movies in my own house?"
Shit. Maybe I needed an analogy I thought. "No, but it's like, how about if I came into your house and lit up a cigarette**? You wouldn't like it, right?"
"Right, so if I'm in YOUR house, I won't talk about this."

A moment later I was putting on my shoes. I was thinking maybe I'd go outside for a smoke, walk it off...but I was also thinking "this just isn't getting any better. This is bullshit. I don't need this. Not again." and I was thinking "This is worse than the booze fueled Card Game Which Wouldn't End but now, unlike then, it's still light out. I can get in that car and drive home.."
And the keys were in my hand as I walked out the door. Brother called after me "Are you going out?"
"No, how about I'm just going?" I said.
And I left.

For which I now suck the most of anyone ever in my fella's family. Which really is nothing compared to how I feel about myself for so many things.

* There are actual terms for this shit. "Intrusive thoughts" being a good one if you want to look it up on Google Scholar or some such.
** Since it was lost on most of my fella's family, I feel the need to expand on the analogy. My smoking is to his house as his descriptions of violent imagery is to my head.

How's that not thinking of the bear thing going for you? Did you forget about it? If you're like most people, you didn't (unless my story of family drama was that compelling). Try going back and re-read the post, but this time know that it's ok if the white bear prowls through your head while you're reading. No biggie. Just a bear. It's not like a graphic rape scene.

brand new phone

I have a new cell phone. Unlike my fella who takes a fondness for obtaining and playing with techy gadgets to a level where I sometimes think it might be appropriately classified in the DSM-V , I had been putting off my most recent phone upgrade. Although I do like gadgets, I also like being in a certain comfort of use zone with such important every day tech. Given how important my cell has become, it falls squarely into the category of shit I don't like to fuck with lest it disrupt or hinder my routine use of said shit.

One of the things I dislike the most about switching phones is that it is the electronic equivalent of changing offices and having to wait for things like your filing cabinets to arrive. Or worse, having to move each file one by one because you can't afford to hire movers to just pick up the old cabinet (files and all) and cart it 20 feet down the hall for you. Oh yeah, and you lack the physical means to move it all at once yourself.

How's that for an unnecessarily drawn out analogy? Regardless, I assume the point is sufficiently clear. Changing phones can be a pain in the ass, and it wasn't one I had the time and inclination to deal with right now.

Still, I will upgrade when necessary. Since my old phone was starting to do some slightly annoying things which suggested it was necessary (is it me or doesn't it seem like something which costs that much money should last for more than two years?), and since I was at the point where a particular upgrade was in fact nearly free, last week I finally bit the bullet and got a new phone. But because I was not super-psyched about doing this, and because there's been so many other things going on, I've been a little slack on updating the new phone so it approaches being as routinely useful and informative as my old one.

Thus...as I write post, my new phone is ringing - well, it's making a noise like ringing. I've found the newer phones seem to be set up to encourage the user to buy any number of exciting ringtones. Toward that end (I believe), the "rings" the phone's manufacturers have left for built in choices range from sounds which most humans will universally find mildly irritating to sounds which I believe may actually inflame select layers of neocortical cells in any mammal within hearing range.

So when I say my new phone is ringing, what I mean is that my new phone is making a mildly annoying sound as it sits, unanswered, on my desk. Why not pick it up? Because just a few moments ago, it made the mildly annoying sound in my bedroom. I fetched it, looked at the call information displayed on the front, and saw a Boston area number. Thinking it might be someone like my brother or one of the aunties who I've recently been in touch with on account of a family death, I answered it. While I've entered some of the more important contacts, I hadn't gotten around to others like the local pizza place, the university financial aid office, my former infectious disease doctor (whose number I often have occasion to share on account of this being a high Lyme disease area), and my parents.

It turned out that when it rang just then, in the bedroom, when I picked it up because although I didn't recognize the number it was familiar and Boston-area, it was my mother.

"I just wanted to call and wish you a happy birthday," she said.
"Ah. Well, did you get that all out of your system then?" I asked.
"Yes," she answered.
I sighed and said "Great. Bye," and I ended the call.

And now she's calling back, causing my phone to burp and chirp annoying little noises at me.

On the plus side, I currently have a renewed sense of purpose in completing my cell phone transition. Additionally, I think I just might go make myself some ring tones. For the 'rents, I need something which will immediately convey the right quality and type of information to unmistakably specify "Holy shit don't take that call!"

breakdown

My car, which already overheated and broke down once this month, went into the shop again yesterday. That alone is enough to make me laugh or cry since it's got 115 thousand rather hard miles on it and needs to be replaced soon. The longer I keep it to try to save money by not buying a more reliable car, the more I spend. And spend and spend.

After the last breakdown I decided I should start looking into getting another car. I won't say "new" because this implies ambitions which are far, far beyond me. I looked, I have some idea of what degrees of "can't afford" I can live with. I sought out a local bank which does auto loans (mine doesn't), and bookmarked a few pages. But I thought I'd have until at least October to start the process in earnest.

Therefore, it came as a bit of a set back to this plan when a week after diagnosing and replacing a bad thermostat which caused my car to catastrophically overheat, the parking brake light started coming on every time I hit the brake pedal. It started Tuesday morning, while I was on my way to a new GI doctor appointment. I had no choice but to get my car back in ASAP and see what was up or risk breaking down again, this time with no fella to come get me after. I'm without a safety net for the next two weeks since A____'s leaving tomorrow for a two week trip to Italy. So no A___ and no car of A____ to fall back on since his car will be in NYC the entire time (and is a standard anyhow).

I just found out that getting my car in immediately was a very good idea because part of my brake line is rotted. The light coming on was on account of my having barely any brake fluid in my lines. Fuck. Good thing I didn't drive it on the highway, huh?

The mechanic gave me the estimate for how much it's going to cost to patch up the brake line (and that's without dealing with the nearly worn out pads). Of course I always have the option of getting my car back without even the minimal $300+ repair to the line, but in that case the car will only be useful as a large paperweight, lawn ornament, or possibly a sled come winter.

When I got off the phone with the mechanic, I started chuckling, then laughing out loud. Within a moment I realized I was not only laughing but also crying. By the time August is out, I will have dumped about 5 months worth of car payments into a car which I will have to trade in for scraps as soon as possible lest I risk dumping more potential car payments into keeping this monster road-worthy.

I am currently ready to consider suggestions, recommendations, related experiences, and empirically sound advice in pretty much any form. If anyone has any experience in auto loan shopping, car shopping, deciding between bank loans and dealer based financing, etc that they'd like to pass on please do so. I've resigned myself to the fact that although I managed to live the last 15 or so years with minimal debt, that era of my life is over. And with acceptance comes some something like peace. With a somewhat frigid sense of resignation if not actual calm, I decided I will deal with these things as they come. This is life. For now, for just right now, I have to get on with my day. Maybe do some work before I go pick up my car later this afternoon. One more cigarette, I thought, then I'll go get dressed.

While smoking, I checked my email and found a cranky message from my cranky advisor who has forgotten everything about what I'm doing right now. I think I will make her a poster to hang on her wall. I'll update it as necessary. Oh then I'd need to make her another poster to remind her to look at it though.

I started to write back but decided speaking would be better - less opportunity for compounding what was charitably a text based misunderstanding. While I was waiting for the phone tree to let me access her extension, I opened another message in my inbox. This one was from my little brother. In it, he reports that his insurance has cut off his mental health benefits (he's HIV positive, an abuse survivor, and trying to kick a substance addiction) and that our mother was admitted at about 1 AM to a hospital for acute cholecystitis. I strongly suspect the gallbladder disease has a point of origin somewhere outside her gallbladder given that my brother tells me she's been complaining of severe fatigue for nearly a month now and that she drank Jack Daniels like it was water for 20+ years of her life. I certainly don't begrudge the universe the karmic balancing it is exacting on my mother these days but I do think her messes are going to be extremely hard on my little brother since he still lives with the 'rents.

Well, as hard as I tried, I think I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am standing on the doorway of the tea room again. Two weeks without my partner in crime to help me feel better about the shit in life, the start of an ambiguous school year, and family and financial fuckery most assuredly equals some down time for the psyche.

best hit

"why is my father a douchebag?"
I take some pride in the knowledge that typing this question into google brings someone to my blog.

my own personal douchebag

"Do me a favor," my father said to me after the funeral mass. "Say hello to your mother."
"I'll say hello if I see her" I said, meaning "no I won't seek her out just to make you feel better or some such shit, and if I can avoid her I will. I'm only talking to you because your poor sister who is standing right there saw us run into each other and I couldn't take the look of fear that crossed her face - only for a moment before she forced her features back into the careful mask she's been fighting to keep up all damned day, hell probably all week" I didn't say this because my aunt was right there and I am not a douchebag.

My dad replied "Bury it". He said it in his pissy voice. As a child, I would have described it as his growly voice, the one which was a yell without the volume. As an adult, I see it as an attempt to intimidate from someone who is in no position to do so. Someone who in fact should be groveling and averting his eyes when I pass, hoping I take no notice of him lest I choose to repay even one small sliver of what he dished out when we were kids.

I answered him in a low and sarcastic tone "Hey, maybe I'll kick a little dirt over it."
He half turned away from me then said loudly"No, I mean it." He hefted up the tote bag he'd been holding. "Literally bury it. I've got your uncle right here," he said, swinging the bag for emphasis.

His birthday's coming up in a couple of weeks - he'll be sixty six. Now I forget. Is sixty six Massengill or Summer's Eve?

funeral, take 2

Another funeral this weekend. Certainly not close enough to the last one this April to readily count as a member of a group however prior to April I think the last funeral I went to was in the early 90s.

All of the grandparents died off when I was still relatively young. The last was my mother's adopted mother who died while I was in my mid twenties and living in MI. My mother's mom, otherwise known as "Nanna", always struck me as incredibly frail. She was quite skinny, had pure white hair which she had set and styled at least once a week so it constantly fluffed out around her head, creating a brilliant, glowing poof. Her hands were exceptionally thin. They looked like bone with the thinnest layer of skin spread unevenly onto it, slipping off the more peaked parts into the wells between knuckles and ropey blue veins.

She had looked like this for as long as I remember her.

Still, she lived past cancer and even into several levels of heart failure. She had the first heart attack while out on her daily walk - far more than I manage to do these days even so go Nanna. I didn't hear the news that she had died until many days and many subsequent heart attacks and resuscitations later. My mother told me she hadn't wanted to disrupt my studies with the news. This was, like so many other things out of my mother's mouth, a load of crap. My mother had issues with her mother, to the point where she took her mother's death just one of the many inconveniences she felt the woman had thrust upon her.

The family mythology was that either my mother reported her father's was sexual abuse to Nanna or that Nanna had caught him in the act. In either version, according to my mother, Nanna had told the bastard (in front of our mother) if she ever caught him doing that again, she'd send the children back to the orphanage.

Being a sophisticated enough audience, it only took the one time for her to explicitly point out to my sister, brother, and me that this had meant Nanna had essentially sealed my mother's fate. Keep silent if it happened again or get sent back to the orphanage.

Bad Nanna!

Many years later I heard a different version of this story. This version is not nearly as cut and dry and involves my grandmother moving with the children out into the chicken coop rather than let them continue to be around the monster she had married. Mind you this was like early 1950s rural New England. There were no fucking shelters.

Nanna's funeral was the last in the family before this week's but due to my mother's machinations I didn't go to it. This week's was my uncle, my godfather in fact. We weren't close but his wife (my father's sister) and he had no children. In fact, none of the women on that side of the family had kids. I don't know for sure since I'm not at the stage of my life where my age group peers are dying off but I suspect that knowing you have family, and specifically knowing there is another generation coming up after you may be in some ways comforting or at least a little reassuring.

I may be wrong. I'm basing it on implicit impressions of older relatives speaking of death and on numerous pop-cultural reference. The aunties do like to talk about their nieces and nephew (just the one...my dear brother) .

So A____ and I went up Boston-way for a smoldering hot Saturday morning funeral mass in the "Immaculate Contraption" church (as my brother is fond of calling it). A_____ had never seen a catholic mass before - this was the real deal complete with drunk clergy.

My aunt seemed genuinely happy to see that all of us "kids" were there. We first saw her on our way into the mass. I hugged her, possibly for the first time in my life. She felt small and full of an uncomfortable energy. In our phone calls over the week between when her husband died and the funeral, I noticed she moved with little transition between speaking casually of life and its minor details to choking up on a sob when the topic touched too close to certain aspects of the notion of her very recently deceased husband. The energy I felt when I held her was both the strain of holding this in and some seepage of the very stuff which was being held in.

She had arranged for coffee and refreshments to be served after the mass at the church school, which was behind the church. I walked out after the mass was over to the front entrance of the massive, circular church (yeah J, it's like one of those conan churches!) and I realized I was on exactly the opposite side from the school. There was no shade en route. I had already been feeling unwell soon after arriving over an hour earlier. The had been church was cooler than a late morning August parking lot, but not quite cool enough to refresh me after walking to and from the car to the church entrance twice - one trip there had turned into two after we realized Hey you probably can't walk into a church with a huge cup of dunkin donuts iced coffee and they had no trash cans about. I'm sure my feeling a bit, well, swoony for lack of a better word, during the service was not helped by the usual up down up down up down of a catholic mass. After the mass concluded, my sister helped me get to a bathroom where I threw water on my face, arms, and neck. (Oh fyi, apparently the Boston area catholics save all that christlike asceticism for the restrooms.)

The water helped but I still felt drained. Seeking to avoid the rather lengthy shadeless walk to the school hall, I made my way over by walking through the outer church corridor which ran the circumference of the big round building. Every now and then there was a break in the corridor. We'd go through a door to the outside, and then a few steps later go through a door back into the indoors corridor. Hot as it was in the church, it felt positively cool compared to the oven of the nearly afternoon parking lot.

I say "we" because my aunt made this whole strange trip with me. See, just before embarking on this procession, I had taken my aunt's hand. She had started crying when saying how happy she was that we could all come up, so I held her hand and said how wonderful it was to see her. Someone mentioned we should get over to the reception, and so my aunt and I began walking. She had continued to hold onto my hand although I had somewhat loosened my grip when I realized I was planning on making such an oddly interrupted and circuitous path out of the building. She fussed about my staying indoors, commenting that this path (i.e. not so much through but around the inner part of the church) would be best. Saying "I'll walk with you dear..." and holding my hand up in hers.

So we walked together, in and out, blinding and blazing then cool and dim. Others from my family - people I know mostly by face and not name, and my sister and A___ walked behind us, A____ coming up ahead sometimes to open a stuck door for us. At some point I noticed that this promenade was like some kind of closing ritual. A counterclockwise circle made slowly and deliberately by the mourners. Not fully closed until A____ and my sister and I piled back into the hot car and drove the rest of the way around the church and out onto the street.

what's this coffee spoon stuff?

I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease in 2002. Since then, I've not felt well. I was unfortunate enough to have some other medical problems prior to that but mostly they were episodic. Since 2002, there hasn't been a single day when I have felt well. Always there's some level of the "post lyme" which could be chronic lyme or could be an autoimmune disease. Sometimes on top of that are the migraines, or the endo, or the intestinal problems, or the out of the blue shit like my hip going out. Sometimes it's everything at once.

I do write about these things here, but I don't write about them as often as I feel them. It seems overwhelming, not simply to me - I mean I will live with that regardless of what other choices I make. What I find mostly overwhelming is other people's responses. I sometimes write about those responses and how they affect me here too, but again, not as often as I encounter them.

There's a social proscription against too much complaining, and complaining of a certain type is especially proscribed. My god, I'm an abuse survivor, an incest survivor, a feminist, and what is most quickly summed up as a liberal. I've got way too much complaining to do already without adding in the sickness stuff.

So lately, I've been posting the medical stuff more on a blog I devoted entirely to medical stuff. I figured that blog's title, description, and content would help self select for readers who are less likely to have that automatic reaction healthy people have. Oh yes, they do tend to have it. And I deal with it enough in my outside life. I dealt with it once here and I didn't like it one bit. The Tea Room blog has a lot of other stuff on it and most of my hits are from people looking for that more general stuff. I find that some days I just don't want to deal with the ignorance which is likely to come from someone who would see the illness stuff as the final bit of evidence that I am inherently weak, not here at least.

What makes me mention all this now is - well there are a couple of reasons. One is that I feel like shit today, felt like shit since Wednesday of last week in fact. Not the cramps and endo whatnot, just shitty. For the first time since getting Lyme, I almost had to call someone to come rescue me because I felt so unwell I was worried about driving. Who needs the details? Me and my doctor I suppose, no need to list them all here. For here, it's enough to say I feel like shit. So it's on my mind.

Another reason is that I have been recently struggling with my faculty about what having a chronically ill grad student means. Does it mean I get the same standards for evaluating progress as my mostly healthy peers? Does my having three times as many publications as my peers prior to getting sick count for anything or will faculty continue to look only at my current rate of progress now that I have so little reliable stamina? Does being so sick mean I get allowances or accommodations only if I ask specifically for each of them in turn, in advance, and of any and all faculty and staff who might be involved in the relevant decisions? Are there limits on what accommodations I can have? Do I need to show documentation? All of those are good questions, and none of them are ones I've been able to ask because the people I need to ask them of have been dodging me since the end of the semester. Possibly it means what my advisor said to me when we were having one of what I now realize were casual discussions about it. That I'm not just not healthy enough to work at a research university. I might not be healthy enough to work. Her casual assessment of my employability was such a gem that this topic also has been on my mind since she said it.

The last reason I bring this up now is that I just found this truly excellent essay about living with illness and disability. It's called "The Spoon Theory". I posted about it on the blog I started for my health related stuff, and I decided to link my post about it here because the essay title and topic ties back in with why and how I chose my blog url for Do Not Enter The Tea Room. The "and coffee spoons" address for this blog is an indirect reference to the notion of being someone who has "measured out my life with coffee spoons", c.f. T.S. Eliot and Crash Test Dummies. The author of the essay does not reference the quote of measuring life in coffee spoons, however her Spoon Theory is exactly right, and it happens to tie together both of my blog-worlds.

DWNW

Excerpted from The Washington Post

Black, Hispanic, and white drivers are equally likely to be pulled over by police, but blacks and Hispanics are much more likely to be searched and arrested, a Justice Department study found. Police also were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter.

The study, released yesterday by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, covered police contacts with the public during 2005 and was based on interviews by the Census Bureau with nearly 64,000 people age 16 or over.
...
- African Americans (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent).

- African Americans (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6 percent of the time. But officers were more likely to use force against or to threaten to use force against African Americans (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) than against whites (1.2 percent).

I know this is probably preaching to the choir (all two of you) but I couldn't let this one go uncommented. This is a good non-gender/sex based example of continuing "subtle" bias in our culture. Sometimes I get the sense that americans in general believe bigotry is a myth so when there is evidence of it I personally think it is important to discuss it.

I've noticed there is a large number of people who are apparently "reasonable", who hold a set of unexamined principles which conform to late 20th century cultural ideals, and many of whom I think have lived lives which are in general socially, emotionally, and spiritually relatively undemanding. Let's call them "the masses" for convenience.

Members of "the masses" act as if they believe they and their ilk are not sexist, racist, anti-gay, fearful they will catch cripple cooties, or hateful of old people. Most of us like to think such attitudes do not exist in our worlds and when we do acknowledge them we ascribe them to others, to caricatures of people (who may well be people themselves but who are so extreme as to count as something other in the mass mind - e.g. "those white supremacists like the ones we saw on Jerry Springer/Jeraldo/etc."), places ("red state", rural), and times (anything before nineteen sixty something, right?).

We are so fucking wrong. Sexism, racism, hatred of homosexuals, old people, sick and disabled people all exist in vibrant diverse attitudes of our neighbors, friends, coworkers, and other community members. Yes they do. When we hear or see things in those arenas which bear the hallmarks of bigotry, we will jump through hoops to explain them away: Bigots are not from NY/NJ/DC/CA (insert state here), are not young, and smell like Strom Thurmond, therefore my friend having said "that's so ghetto" is not racist and the fact that I can't finish a full sentence without using the word "gay" to mean something disparaging or otherwise negative is not anti-gay. Can't be. I'm not a bigot.

I'm not sure why this line and style thought is so alluring. It seems like it would involve so much energy to contrive and believe such a huge lie. I'd love to think it's because people want to believe good things about themselves, others, and humanity in general but I am about 99% that isn't true.

I think it's because people don't want to acknowledge that others might not be having a great time, or that there is no "great time" to be had (you know, the one we all can get if we just try hard enough...someday you might even be president! (some restriction apply, see all white male founding fathers for details)).

As a woman, abuse survivor, and semi-professional thorn in the side, I've found members of "the masses" sincerely and deeply do not like to be told or in any way discover that some people's lives are significantly not ok. In general, I've found people of all walks show a very strong preference for refusing to see or acknowledge that many of the systems and circles they exist in rely on principles of inequity - i.e., principles which serve to exclude or limit the full participation of some set(s) of individuals who have a priori been designated as "other".

My more strictly feminist experience suggests the reason for this blindness (and anger) is that to see clearly would mean to see that what one has is not necessarily what one deserves and that threatens some part of the sense of self worth. However, it seems sometimes to be baser than that even.

And it is with this cheery attitude that I greet my Monday.

No Pain...

No pain.

I'm taking a break from my mountain of grading. It's amazing how much faster you go through them when you've decided to accept that this is just grade generation. This is a nice change of attitude as it means I do not need to bother commenting my grades. I can simply assign them.

And this is why I say I need to get out of grad school before I become a complete asshole.

A___ and I were talking today about the term "No pain, no gain" as it is applied and realized in graduate education. I was asking for a term describing the philosophy of glamorizing the "hoop jumping", self eroding work-a-holic aspects of our program. Possibly most or at least many programs in fact. This is not merely my own jaundiced view (a commenter in fact refered to my writing as "jaundiced" not long ago - hence I feel justafied in calling myself "jaundiced". And coincidentally, my liver enzymes reflected that I was in fact jaundiced for a prolonged period in 2005. So there you go.)

No, this is not just me. One student, an older person who returned to school although she had a rewarding career already well underway because she couldn't live without the title "Dr." and needed the frequent cookies and pats on the head which are part and parcle of being a student, told me she didn't mind "the hoops". "I'm good at jumping!" she said as if this were an asset.

To me, hoops as in the term "jumping through hoops" implies a somewhat useless or extra-relevant but costly and/or difficult task. Why someone would feel such strong, expressive pride in their ability to do this is beyond me. Seriously. However, the older cookie and head patting student expressed an attitude which I see promoted by the faculty who do interact with grads and reflected back by the grads.

I overheard two younger grads from another related program talking about time. "Oh my god, I only worked like 30 hours this week...I am so lazy! I'm just like I know some weeks I work 60, but right now I did 30 and I feel like I worked so much. I used to do more. I'm getting lazy!" I piped up with the advice that some weeks you do 30, some you do 60 or more, and that in the end it all evens out. If you're getting your work done at 30, use that extra time to stay positive.

It was as if I were lecturing herring on the current choices for US presidential candidates. Honest. Not a negative response, just a blank one. Just bubbles and fins.

This attitude is promoted and rewarded by the faculty. A set of them have a habit of using the following terms to refer to ideal grad students: "zombies", "slaves", "miserable bastards", "miserable blighters", "sacks", "poor fools", "unhappy sods". These terms are said in contexts which convey some kind of appropriateness of the meaning, as if we all should be this way. As if the traits associated with these terms were good positive ones we should aspire to. We live at the poverty line, have substandard housing, and some of us have family or other extra-curricular commitments and demands on our time, money, and resources. When these things add up and a grad ends up hospitalized, ill, called away for a sick or dead relative, or simply seen dragging his or her carcass through the halls, those terms are applied. And strangely, well to me at least, many of the grads respond as if they have been comforted or reassured. I see nothing at all reassuring in knowing my faculty consider their students' misfortunes cute.

So A___ and I were talking about this today. My point was that we don't all have the luxury of circumstances, past or present, to do the hoops. Those of us in that position are trudging along doing what we can when we can. Insisting we use our "spare" resources for graceful hoop jumping is in effect insisting on pain. That glamorized pain is something which is seen as not real pain or suffering, just good character-building fun. The "poor blighter" faculty member once told me this shit "built character". I told him I had plenty of character already, thanks.

No pain, no gain has been misapplied to this endeavor and has come to be seen as meaning pain = gain, in a very real sense. The amount of pain you are willing to publicly subject yourself to (e.g. multiple all nighters, over-loads in teaching, on demand research product with no research/writing mentoring) is a measure of how well you are doing. It's small wonder I am finding the culture of academia problematic. If it is built on the assumption of chronic personal over-extention for the degree, how does someone whose emotional and physical resources are already largely spoken for manage to get by?

Nearly all of the people I've known in grad school with who have left or are leaving are all assault/abuse survivors. I wonder if that correlates with a low threshold and tolerance for seemingly gratiutous self inflicted pain?

much badness

My brother called me tonight.
"I just had a very emotionally draining dinner with mom" he began.
I assumed it was more of her usual shenaniganery. No. It was this. My mother treated this man. Although I keep my name (and hers) off this blog, since it's a criminal investigation I'm guessing I'm probably not supposed to say more than that about the details on that end which my brother related to me after hearing about it from our mother - so I won't.

However, I am concerned for my brother, who lives with her. Our mother's been through bad stuff in the ER berfore but it used to be if something horrific like this happened, she would deal with it through her counselor Dr. Jim Beam or his associate Mr. Jack Daniels. Our mother quit drinking, wow something like 9 years ago. Sometime between February of 1997 and Spring of 1998. It's hard to pin down because it was after I moved out and since quitting has been what is sometimes called a "dry drunk". She did not do rehab, counseling, or therapy in her divorce from the bottle. Her last patient who rattled her on this level was a very determined suicidal, psychotic young man. That was when she was still drinking. And boy did she drink. And boy did she not get any help to work through dealing with the trauma of the event. And boy did we all pay for that.

Cost

"I think your mother and I have more than paid for what we did when you kids were younger"

That is the latest from my dad, said to little brother T on the heels of T's latest meth mess. Of course, the latest meth mess was very near to the previous meth mess. I sometimes feel like I should be counting in between to know when the storm will be above me.

During the meth messes, there's a sliver of semi-lucid but totally dysphoric thinking before a descent into full psychosis. That sliver tends to involve excruciatingly critical thought where T focuses on whatever he's done which he thinks might have made his life right now wrong or bad enough that it is so impossible for him to live without meth. He doesn't put it like that but this seems to be what is going on. This time, his demon driven inner critic picked living with parents as "what needs to change".

My sister and I couldn't agree more that living with them is horrible. But this is not because of the unseemliness of a 34 year old living with mom (and dad). I think some slack could be cut for someone who turned HIV positive when he was only 24 and supposed to be starting out feeling fearless over confidence in his own ability. I'd argue that this kind of arrogance is common in 24 year olds and is necessary to get us through the transition from adolescence to adulthood. To be given what at the time was a certain death sentence, and one with still quite large stigma in the larger social context, has got to take some of the wind out of that sail.

My sister and I don't like the living with mom and dad thing because mom and dad are abusive fucked up people and like many abusive parents, they continue inappropriate, hurtful behavior even with their grown children. Although the hitting stopped as soon as we were old enough to potentially hit back (with my dad, with my mom it's a different story), they have no regard for boundaries and continue a pattern of emotionally abusive behavior. One example of their continuing and intolerable behavior is the chronic attempts to exonerate themselves for what they did when we were kids. This is a large part of why my sister and I won't have dealings with them. It is dangerous to our health. Personally I feel it risks my freedom as well since my interactions with them in my late twenties often ended with nearly violent fights. I decided it was better for me to stay away from them after hearing my father snarling at my 30 year old sister and then kicking the dogs. I was angered to a frighteningly severe point and it was all I could do not come after him with whatever was around. My mother was intentionally antagonistic, setting up times for us to have mother daughter moments together then sabotaging them, then using the failed "moment" to have a tantrum where she would say things like "you're dead to me!"

My sister made the same kind of decision a short time after I did. My brother noticed my parents' continuing horrible behavior, how it stifled our adult identities in very damaging ways. He talked about it, had nightmares about it, and then lost himself in meth and k.

My mother's a pro at the exoneration game. She can work in a plea for extenuating circumstances or co-victim status masterfully as if she were expressing guilt or remorse for her failings as a parent, prompting you to say things like "it's ok" when you know it's really not. My father is either less skilled at or less comfortable with the subtle approach. He chooses a more direct tactic, like the example at the start of this post. This is odd because he was the more physically abusive one. You'd think it would be harder for him to reconcile a desire to believe he did nothing wrong with years of memories of assaulting his own children. However, it seems he has convinced himself that we owe him some sort of absolution.

Even if he had spent the last 15 years being the best dad ever, what he wants is not an option. It is just not possible in this case. The guilt he feels he has paid off was not placed on him by a court. His (and my mother's) "guilt" is a natural guilt. It is a simple and direct consequence of repeatedly harming children who were in their care and who therefore had no hope of avoiding them, no other recourse, no one else to tell them they did not suck or did not deserve to be ground down emotionally and physically. The guilt they have is a consequence of destroying lives they charged themselves to foster. And because the guilt here is not an artifact of a legal system, it is not debatable. It is consequence. Hurt someone over and over and you are guilty of hurting someone over and over. They might move past it, replace it with something good later, but the history is still there. Hurt someone over and over as they are becoming a person and you will have written the act and your part in it into their existence completely and inextricably.

If we keep up with the analogy, it is fair to say my father admits some guilt but believes he has paid his debt and is arguing that he has served his time in guilt prison. See, he thinks the sentence and the guilt are separate things. He's wrong. The guilt is the sentence. There's not a debt, there's a mark, an unhealing wound that each of his children can at best bandage and treat gently. For my father, the sentence is what he created - hate, distrust, anxiety, pain, damaged people who will measure their success not in terms of living a good rewarding life but in terms of not harming others as they were harmed and not letting fear of being harmed again limit and color every aspect of their existence.

My point is that no matter what my parents may have convinced themselves of, there's no getting off the hook on this one. There's only pretense and denial, and that seems to be exactly what my father is pleading right now. Because my sister and I won't speak to our parents, and because our brother lives with them, my father is making his case to my brother. You'd think if he were convinced that such a wrong thing to do were somehow a legitimate and plausible option, he'd have tried to make the plea to me. I'm the one he didn't hit much. I'm the one who inherited his temper. I'm the one who is most like him. I'm also the one who most recently and directly called him on his shit, reminding him that if you intimidate and push people they just might push back, and that bullies who live in old man bodies shouldn't antagonize the very people they damaged. Could be this is why dad's not asking me, that and convenience. My brother is conveniently located, right there in the same house. So dad is pimping his "debt paid" shit to my brother.

Even if my brother were inclined to accept my father's logic, my brother cannot choose to ignore the damage done by what we were raised in. As with all of us, it is part of him. He can choose to find ways to channel it, to address and express it in safe areas and with safe people. He can try to find the social equivalent of a bomb squad to help him defuse the explosive devices his trauma will occasionally build in his soul. He can choose to subject it to attempts at emotional alchemy. He can do any number of things, but he cannot refuse that it is there, which is essentially what my father is asking. To attempt to do that risks my brother's soundness of mind, and that is already something in short supply these days.

Which brings me to the next point. Whether my father consciously intends it or not, this strategy of his can only serve to further the abuse. It is abusive to try to coerce my brother into declaring my father's time served. There is no way my brother can do that without assuming some of the guilt himself.

So what is it that dad thinks he and my mother paid for?
Let's make a list.
For inviting my mother's adopted father who was an unconvicted, untreated pedophile to live with us when we were 3, 4, and 5.
For using my mother's father as a babysitter, thus giving him access to us and putting us into a position where we were expected to recognize him as an authority.
For failing to respond appropriately when my sister informed them (hey big surprise) that he was sexually abusing her.
My father: For letting my mother "handle it"
My mother: For "handling it" by alerting her father to the accusation, the result of which was that her father stopped trying for my sister and redoubled his efforts with me and my brother.
My father: For beating the shit out of my brother and sister over and over and over and over and over......
For making me a witness to it.
For abusing my brother and sister in violent but not battery ways, like locking my brother in a small laundry hamper in the basement, then leaving him down there in the dark for what seemed like hours.
For force feeding my sister a piece of cheese that she tried to feed the dog. The dog licked it a few times, decided she didn't want it, then walked away and left it on the floor. My father grabbed it, grabbed my sister with his fist balled up in her hair, pulled her head back and literally stuffed it down her throat. She gagged and cried and choked on it. How many years of guilt do you serve for that? How fucking many?
For behaving in every interaction with us as if we were the most loathsome and criminally reprehensible of beings because we did things like NOT PICK UP ALL OUR TOYS or DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY STOP LAUGHING AT SOMETHING or WATCHED A TV SHOW THAT STUPID PEOPLE LIKE or WANTED TO DRINK TANG AND EAT WONDER BREAD or ACTED "CUTE" or any number of things kids just do.
For more often than not storming into a room and when he wasn't hurting people breaking stuff like the tv (kicked, thrown out window) and the phone (ripped out of the wall).
For calling my sister stupid, retarded, moron, ditzy, empty headed, a space cadet, dipshit, maggot, little bitch, ungrateful little shit, selfish pieceof shit....
For mocking my brother when he cried after being beaten.
For becoming enraged at hearing any of us cry when he scared us.
My mother: For letting it happen even though she knew (and I knew she knew because I wrote her notes telling her).
For letting it happen.
For letting it happen.
For letting it happen.
For facilitating it.
For being drunk and inappropriate (she once open mouth kissed my brother then laughed about it, made jokes about masturbation a lot).
For leaving.
For systematically invalidating my anger at my parents' horrible behavior.
For confiding in my sister with her personal marital problems with my dad, thus robbing my sister of a genuine mother figure.
For acting as if our love was never good enough.
For flipping out and beating the shit out of at least my sister and me in public places.
For writing stories where characters which strongly resemble her own children fantasize about having sex with their parents...and asking us to read them.
For getting drunk at parties and sobbing to strangers that she shouldn't have ever had children because we were so horrible.
For gettting drunk at home and sobbing to her mother that she shouldn't have ever had children because we were so horrible.
For violating each and every boundary we so desperately needed in that house.
For threatening us with foster homes when DSS came in (finally) to investigate the claims about her father's sexual abuse of us.
For lying at family therapy.
For attacking me, occasionally physically and always with unwarranted spite, repeatedly the summer before I started college and was out of the house more than I was in (but never in any trouble).
For her tantrums at christmas, birthdays, and many other holidays which usually involved booze and were often in public.

I know there's more but these are the ones that occur off the top of my head. If I were to count each and every instance of only the most horrible and concrete of this list, their guilt is worth at least three lifetimes of regret, one for each of their children. Neither of them has the right to ask for absolution from any of us for their acts or for the outcome of their acts. To speak of having "paid for" any of this is absurd, and I'm pissed off enough that I'm thinking of finding a public and punitive way of telling them so. If only I had free time and some money...I'd sue their asses. Not because I'm a fan of litigious solutions but since my father has chosen to wrap his inappropriate desire in that framework, it strikes me as just to consider a very public accounting of the crime and the cost.

Addendum: I just found this. So it seems my parents are in fact still open for a lawsuit, at least civil if not also criminal. I just might look into this, seriously. I don't have a lot of free time and I have even less money, but maybe the inquiry will make me feel better.

I'm so confused

Did Mark Foley want to fuck little boys because he was molested or because he is gay? The most recent "break" in this story really leaves that issue up to the reader.

Attorney David Roth said Foley was molested between ages 13 and 15...He also acknowledged for the first time that the former congressman is gay, saying the disclosure was part of his client's "recovery."

I can't help noticing that it seems the former representative is being portrayed a strong gay child sexual abuse survivor, maybe one we should find some small sliver of admiration for because, according to his attorney, "As is so often the case with victims of abuse, Mark advises that he kept his shame to himself for almost 40 years."

As another survivor (who once tried to make out with a fourteen year old boy when I was fifteen but got completely turned off by the fact that, despite his being a cute funny smart little bad ass skate rat, I probably could have tossed him over my shoulder and run a 50 yard dash without breaking a sweat), I have to admire the former congressman's ability to have kept his SHAME to himself for so long. I am not even close to as strong as that, choosing instead to express my SHAME all the time and in numerous different ways.

Hey now, here's a thought. Maybe what former Congressman Boyfucker was ashamed of wasn't that he was abused. Maybe it was that he himself had some pedophile tendencies.

I guess we should all be thankful he didn't shoot a schoolroom full of little boys to take revenge for it.

Honestly, I am so sick of the media perpetuated ignorance when it comes to this shit. "The shame!" Fuck their shame. The only shame is the shame that is laid on us by a continuous flow of shit like this. Foley disclosing now that he was molested, what the fuck is that? A defense? The number of people who have been sexually abused as children far outweighs the projected numbers of pedophiles. Look it up, I'm busy and can't get you the references right now (I'm writing a lecture, presumably). But it's a convenient myth for Foley and his lawyer to use at the moment. Something to explain it, to make it all part of a larger crime in which Foley is the victim and not the nasty old fuck that he seems. And the media is happy, oh more than happy, to perpetuate this shit.

It's not just the mainstream media who are pushing my buttons these days though. A quick review of current news at some of the more prominent feminist resources (NOW and Feminist Majority Foundation) shows a complete and utter lack of awareness about the recent gendercide school shootings. Not even a friggin' mention on their news pages.

For example, at feminist.org you can find a link to The feminist perspective on U.S., global and campus news stories this week. In this page, they're on the Foley story too, just like the mainstream media. They have breaking reports about bride kidnapping and domestic abuse in Kyrgyzstan and underrepresentation of women writers at Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. But there is not even ONE single sentence of "feminist perspective" on the recent gender based attacks on girls in two different US schools this week. Nothing on how prior school shootings have had a tendency to have been boys hunting girls and women. Where's the feminist perspective? Or is two men planning to rape and kill little girls in one week not enough of a feminist issue for them? I'm guessing the PACs don't give much of a shit, because the elected officials that be (and that might be) don't give much of a shit. And major mainstream feminist groups are, these days, just packaging for their political fundraising committees. I get the need for them, I do. I worked for one briefly one summer. But what the fuck is the point in electing "pro feminist" officials if the feminism exists only in terms of token gestures, bumper stickers, and dangerous daily instances of misogyny represented only as a mythically far away and foreign event?

I know there's not much I can do alone. I'm working with my campus women's center to try to do something local in the next week. I also know that a candle light vigil or cleverly composed quarter sheet fliers will not change the world. However I simply refuse to be a part of the masses of people doing and saying absolutely NOTHING other than reading the dwindling mainstream media news reports of official handwringing over how to classify the apparently brand spanking new criminal concept of males violently attacking females.

Mothers to me

I was thinking that there are several women I have known in my lifetime who have, even in small ways, been like a mother to me. Which is a good thing because if that job had been lfet entirely to my actual mother, I would have turned out pretty scary (er?).

Since it was mother's day recently, I figured I'd recognize these women and my gratitude for what they contributed to my life. There are some women who I have left off the list because they were more professional/mentor type people, although they certainly have helped me as well.

Various childhood friends' mothers - notably Carolyn's mother (Mrs. Rossi) and Liz's mother (Mrs. Kurpeski). No, not a cozy and squishy happy mommy type thing, but they were mother models that were in many ways superior to my own. They also provided safe homes for their daughters and by proxy, if nothing else, provided a place for me to stay (sometimes for days on end it seemed) when I was a kid without making me feel like an interloper.

My friend cjblue's mother, Rena. Again, not someone I have a lovey mother-daughtery relationship with but someone who always treated me kindly and respectfully, who made me feel welcome in her home, who hosts a great brunch, and who is poised, considerate, and an excellent mom.

My friend Marion Aitches. She was a professor in my undergraduate program in Michigan. I had her for a literature course, but I became friends with her first through interactions as her student and then after completing her course and graduating. I visited her on a few occasions and her house always felt homey to me. She's elegant and articulate, intelligent, and quick to laugh. Her life has been very rich, providing ample topics for stories of growth and the difficult processes of becoming a self possessed person, always told with a great sense of humor.

My friend Beverley Goodman. She is amazing. Beverley was my undergraduate advisor. She started working in the department towards the end of my time at college but quickly became one of my favorite teachers ever. She's candid, honest, outspoken, insightful, very funny, considerate, and full of some great contradictions (idealism and cynnicism, informality and diligence, pacificism and rowdiness). Also, her advice and support for me has always been so unbelievably well timed and appropriately irreverent. She's one of those quiet rebel types. I admire Beverley immensely for all of her personal and professional acheivements that she shared with me, but also more recently because she was able to take on a bum of a husband and a life threatening, life changing illness. Even superhuman strength won't help make that kind of combo anything less than torture. Beverley was honest about how much it sucked and I was so relieved she didn't bullshit me. Getting through something like this takes incredible strength and she did it, honestly and as always, on her own terms.

Mother's Day 2000

"Number 20!"

The numbers are not in any particular order, just given so that when the party’s table is open, the restaurant manager can yell the number out and not have to try to pronounce a possibly difficult last name.

I had too much wine last night at the wedding and too little sleep. My hair is held back by a handful of multicolored butterflies, flowers, and a leopard print clip barrette. I will not take off my sunglasses in the super bright Sunday morning Bickford’s. Not only is it Mother’s Day, it is also (the newly wed couple just informed me) First Communion Day. But so far I have not seen any cherubic children with pious parents. Just lots of women with flowers.

Bob is doing better than I am. He wasn’t as bored as I was at the wedding so he didn’t drink as much as I did. Also, he didn’t have nightmares about tornadoes and other natural disasters. After we’ve been seated and ordered our coffee, he asks me what kind of jelly I want then he diligently searches through the stacks for the strawberry. The table is a little sticky we notice as we choose our breakfasts. I watch the families around me. I build a fortress with menus to sheild myself from the glare of the sun reflecting off the shiney SUVs and minivans in the parking lot while I wait uncomfortably for my omelet.

No one has flowers at that table. The mother has dark brown hair and a thin mouth that looks accustomed to scowling. The father has a striped shirt, big oversized stripes, and short sandy hair. He likes to point and gesture. Right now, he is pointing and gesturing at his daughter. The mother accompanies his motions with deeper degrees of frowns, and the occasional quiet word of parental support. “If you don’t want them, then why did you order that?!” the father is practically shouting. Or maybe it’s not the volume so much as it is the manner, his face looming too close to the girl’s as he barks his rhetorical question. She is flanked by her brothers, a little one on her right and a slightly older one on her left. All of the kids’ backs are to me, but I can see the slightly older brother’s face from the side as he is at the end of the booth. He is drawing on the placemat with crayons. The mother smiles warmly at this boy for a moment then resumes frowning when she returns her attention to her daughter. The waitress finishes taking their order and the table is relatively quiet for a while.

The girl and the older boy are playing some game, heads leaned close together over the placemat and crayons in hand. “You’d better think of something, or he’s gonna hang you!” the mother says smugly to the daughter, beaming a smile at her son, who I am thinking is probably cheating or misspelled the word. More silence. The newly weds are seated far away from us , me, Bob, and the unhappy family. They are poorly matched and I wonder how long it will take for this to dawn on them. Bob and I chat about various forgettable topics while my attention wanders over to the claw machine, trying to imagine what it would take to actually snag one of the tempting beanie baby prizes.

What am I thinking? I hate beanie babies.

The waitress has staggered up to the table bearing a tray full of fresh and fruity breakfasts. A moment later, the father addresses his daughter in an exasperated tone, “You’d better just eat them. You can scrape it off, but it’s too late now to change it. Why didn’t you ask before you ordered them?!"

I inspect a menu but my attention is drawn back when I hear the father’s disgusted voice, “Are you crying?! Are you crying? Great, now she’s crying,”

I can’t hear the daughter’s voice at all although I know she is speaking. Her head is down and her posture is more defeated than defiant. I wonder if her disappointment at the mile high pile of whipped cream on top of her waffles might have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for her parents’ scrutiny. "You’ve ruined mother’s day. You’ve ruined everything!” I hear her father say.

And so another perfectly good mother’s day is ruined.

I am happy for my sunglasses, happy that they are hiding the direction and nature of my gaze. If the mother and father saw it, it would only serve as further evidence for how much their daughter ruined the day by drawing unwanted negative attention to their otherwise perfect family. I fight the nearly overwhelming temptation to ruin it more by flinging an open grape jelly at the man. I want to see jelly oozing down the father’s face. I want to pour my pulpy orange juice over the mother’s head for crippling her daughter. I want to make the daughter laugh, send back the waffles she felt pressured into ordering, and tell her to order whatever the fuck she wants. I want to dance on the table and kick fruit and whipped cream onto the father’s LL Bean jersey. I settle for stabbing jellies with my fork.

morale booster

I wouldn't consider myself an optimist. But I am a survivor, and so I look for things to boost my spirits when I am down. I've moved past wanting to throw dyed uncooked eggs at um...stuff (that was a thought on Friday - it was a bad week) as a festive way to release some of my inner demons etc. Today I stumbled across something that is much more wholesome. It's from my favorite advice columnist, Dan Savage, who also brought us Santorum, a largely scatological term named after US Senator Rick Santorum (etymology is here).

Savage's newest and less excretory political dig is called Impeach The Motherfucker Already. Here's what Mr. Savage has to say about the Impeach The Motherfucker Already campaign:
Spotting an ITMFA button, bumper sticker, or lapel pin will serve as a morale booster for folks who are despondent at the prospect of three more years of Bush—and those folks, recent polling shows, amount to 67 percent of the country. Hell, I know for a fact that it will be a morale booster: I gave a speech last week at the University of Missouri and folks showed up wearing ITMFA shirts and buttons that they had made themselves, which boosted my morale.

Visit www.ITMFA.com to see pictures of men, women, cats, and babies sporting ITMFA gear, order your official ITMFA buttons and lapel pins (for yourself or send one to your congressperson!), and help spread the meme.

But Mom! All the other kids are sleeping in cages!

This makes me fucking sick.
Ohio Woman Says Kids Requested Cages

Before I get to my reaction, I want to address my reaction to talking about my reaction. I feel very real trepidation about expressing myself here because I was abused. I even cringe writing that, not because I am ashamed of myself but because I know there is a very strong and negative stigma associated with people who disclose this. This is not pretense folks. There are numerous social punishments for expressing an honest and personal reaction to anything bad. It's just not polite. Heard any of these lately?
"Too much information!"
"You need to learn to let go of your anger"
"Ok, now tell me how you REALLY feel (hahaha)"
"You can't spend your life as a perpetual victim"

There are so many explicit ways we censure disclosure and implicit ways we threaten it. I usually assume those who do this to abuse survivors were not abused themselves, although the numbers suggest that some of them were. We tend to default to the false assumption that everyone has no history of abuse, which is ridiculous. Based on the stats of just the reported cases, each of us knows and is probably even close to an abuse survivor. The worst part is, we all are at least marginally aware of the high incidence of child abuse. And still we assume "everyone" or "everyone else" never suffered in this way. I blame that on the silence.

"Silence? What silence? This stuff is all over the news," you might be thinking. But the news is not real. It is a report of real. Real is the your coworker whose office is next to yours who you avoid because she's such a downer. Real is that your wife can't have an orgasm unless she knows you can't see her face. Real is the kid you wish your kid wouldn't hang out with. Real is a husband's distress when his inlaws casually chat about the sensationalized abuse story in the news and he knows he can't voice his honest reaction without risking the nearly physical pain of the family's most likely ignorant reactions to his explicit or implicit disclosure.

Hearing reports about abuse can elicit all sorts of negative emotions - disgust, revulsion, anger, sorrow, fear. We do not deal with those feelings well. We do not express them well. And I think we know this. So these feelings are more readily expressed as reactions to a remote situation. Utlimately, I think this is because the emotional impact of these feelings is easier to avoid if the issue is kept remote. We will acknowledge it in a public sphere - abuse is an ok topic for tasteless jokes, state and municipal budget battles, TV melodrama ("reality" or not), and controversial social-behavioral research. But it remains not an ok topic for the abused. Allowing that there is a large scale social ill of abuse but no real in the flesh abused people is more comfortable for most people, but it perpetuates a climate of dangerous silence. That silence keeps kids quiet while it is happening and sends survivors a message to "get over it" even before anyone has even had time to acknowledge an "it" to get over.

The stigma is there and felt quite directly at the personal level. There are countless mechanisms to keep it in place, to maintain the social silence. Today I'm chewing through the gag because I am just revolted at how the silence allows ignorance to guide personal decisions and public policy, thus putting and keeping children in high risk situations.

So, let me tell you how I REALLY feel about this fucked up situation and this fucked up couple.
What the fuck was this woman thinking? Not the locking her kids in cages part. I mean, I do think I follow her screwy reasoning for that. It went something like: The kids are getting up at night and causing 'problems'. I'll just put them in cages!" A normal person might have responded to the apparently overwhelming behavior problems these kids have by thinking "I'll not adopt 11 emotionally disturbed children whom I do not have the skills or resources to adequately care for." But she and her husband are clearly not normal.

What I want to know is what the fuck she was thinking when she declared in court that the kids wanted this treatment. She portrays the cages as cheerful little playpens. They were not. According to a local paper's Sept. 15, 2006 article about this family, the average dimensions of the cages were 4 feet long, 3.3 feet high, and 2.5 feet wide. Local police who entered the home also reported:
- "The insides of the cages were lined with "hardware cloth" - criss-crossed sections of what (a local police officer) called 'heavy-gauge wire'"
- "One of the bedrooms contained six cages, stacked two high upon each other against one wall"
- "In one of the cages, the wire lining had been partially ripped open from the inside"

I can't fathom that these people were allowed to adopt not one but 11 special needs kids. Today's news report says the mother claimed to have "sought help from...county social workers and received none". I have no way of knowing if that is true or not, I sincerely hope the state can check to see if she did. If she did and none was given, that would strongly suggest there is a massive problem in the state's child services program.

Clearly Ohio should re-examine it's adoption process since there is obviously something seriously wrong. Further, the state legislators in Ohio who recently proposed a gay couple adoption ban should be slapped, hard. Their ignorance, bigotry, and utter lack of genuine concern for child welfare is grossly apparent if despite the caged children story making national news, they are wasting time and tax payer money exploiting the issue of child endangerment as yet another means of criminalizing homosexuality.

The blame does not belong solely to the state. Support for adoptive parents of troubled kids would be a more tractable issue if our country had less fucked up attitudes about children and child rearing. The prevalent mainstream attitude of "breed til it hurts" is promoted although it is obviously destructive on so many levels. I see attitudes like this as strong contributing factors in the Ohio situation. According to the local report, a neighbor said "she thought it was unusual for them to have so many children but never noticed anything amiss at the home. 'Like anybody, you'd think that house wasn't big enough for 11 children,'" Indeed, you'd think. I don't blame the neighbor for not calling social services if all she saw were happy well fed kids playing outside. I don't even blame her for not thinking collecting 11 kids in a house that is too small to accomodate them is by definition a neglect situation. It probably was just something she saw as evidence of "low class", like having 11 cars up on blocks in the front yard. I mention her quote to illustrate that what can only be described as child hoarding is not seen as dangerously pathological in our culture.

Unless we tacitly agree that some kids are just made to be used, harmed, or destroyed, then we must assume responsibility for creating a social climate where child abuse is intolerable. Currently, social intolerance is skewed towards the victims, a sort of mean spirited "kill the messenger" attitude. Our intolerance should be directed at the beliefs and values that allow abusive situations to arise and persist in our communities. It should held for perpetrators who continue to breed, adopt, or be employed in jobs with child contact. It should be applied to government policies which promote pregnancy, child birth, and child rearing without concomitant programs to eliminate socio-economic injustice.

Introduction - To blog or not to blog

This is my first attempt at blogging. I'm sure there will be breaches of etiquette and technical difficulties as I learn, but hey, I managed to set up my DSL connection today. I've never had DSL before. As a grad student in a research program, I am surrounded by lots of geeky men. So there is almost invariably a guy around who is not only available but pretty much chronically willing to offer "help" with various computer related conundrums. Sometimes the help is in fact helpful. I consider it peer learning, and if any of them gets to be too much of a dick, I confront. Hence, it's a win-win situation. I get to remedy my femininely conditioned computer/tech deficiencies (which are minimal compared to the population at large I think) and they get to learn how NOT to be sexist fucks.

Since my (old) hard drive just went down in flames last week, I found myself having to rely overly much on the kind intentions of these menfolk to get my computer back up and running, so I decided that although there were offers to help with the internet I would most certainly NOT entertain them this time. I'm smart and resourceful, regardless of being shamefully somewhat ignorant about my own computer. I was determined to do this on my own. And I did. Now I'm feeling all proud and competent and I decided if I can get the DSL up and going, I can do a blog.

I am self conscious about this choice though. After a good deal of consideration, I decided blogging is no worse than breeding and inflicting your children on people in restaurants, busses, and other confined and necessary public areas. One caveat here: I do not disapprove of all breeding or child rearing. I think some people make just fine parents and I am very happy they are creating people who will be raised in safe and supportive homes, contribute to the overall joy and progress of society, and hopefully grow up to be responsible, considerate, socially aware adults. Then there are the rest of them, and I do believe they make up the at least visible majority. They don't ask themselves if they should perhaps not have those kids. Nope. They just have 'em, and then you and I are stuck with them.

While I am sure that the people who indiscriminantly breed do not ask themselves if the world really wants or needs their offspring before they go making the babies, I do find myself wondering if the world really needs another jaded blogger. I decided that since the legacy drive is an apparently legitimate (although seemingly post hoc) excuse for populating the supermarket isles with stranded verbally challenged 8 year olds, my channeling this drive into a blog is not something I should allow self consciousness to arrest.

But why now? Because I have had a couple of the most unbelievably shitty weeks of my life and I thought I'd report back to the universe about it. It seems like someone should be taking notes: "Subject responded to shelves collapsing on her monitor and barely missing her head by staring blankly at closet doors for about 2 minutes".

It's not been life or death shitty, but a stream of unrelenting and unexpected shit. What is this mythic shit I speak of, you ask. It lately seems that when things go bad, they transcend bad, rotten, shitty, and even just plain fucked. After an ill conceived marriage with inevitable divorce, 7 quite likely wasted years in grad school, a horrid relationship with my former academic advisor, battles with various nasty illnesses (1, 2), finding and now perhaps losing the love of my life, I guess it makes sense that these days when things go bad, they go marvelously bad. They go absurd.

I decided that if I were 22 again, I might want to know where the steps I was just starting to take on this path would lead. Of course I recognize that this journey is not complete. Hell, I'm only 33. But I've reached a place on the road where I am going to stop for a while, look around, take in the view. Really, I have no choice. I am in the tea room.