Note: Okay, this really is meant as humor, though everything listed here actually was said to me by my mother, either directly or by implication. This, in the midst of bragging about how open-minded and "hip" she was compared to HER mother.
Not sure why I feel the need to warn that some may find this offensive, but in any case, consider yourself warned.
Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day!
*
1. All men have a "thing."
2. If a man is in your bedroom but doesn't see a bed -- just a studio couch -- he won't think about sex.
3. French kissing? That's when a man tries to kiss you, but then he goes and STICKS HIS TONGUE in your mouth!
4. If you're about to have a romantic moment and then one partner gets distracted for even a second, it will kill the entire mood, and you might as well just forget it.
5. It is the height of rudeness for the man to ask the woman if she enjoyed it.
6. If you're holding hands with a boy and he scratches his finger against your palm, that's a signal that he wants to have sex, so you should avoid him.
7. I've heard that there are some guys who actually want you to put your mouth on "it." Or they want you to let them stick it in your butt.
8. I understand that sex can actually be quite pleasant.
9. Don't sit with your legs apart. Someone will come along and try to stick something in there.
10. One day, if you're not careful, some man will come along and force you to lie down and "connect" with him. ["connect" was the term I invented for intercourse when I first learned about it]
Click Here to Read More..
Showing posts with label Mom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mom. Show all posts
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Thursday, October 09, 2008
I almost, sort of get this.
CNN recently had a feature story about phobias. As an example, they used this one lady who could not cope with wet wood:
"If I saw someone lick a wooden spoon, I had to turn away," says the 41-year-old massage therapist from Portland, Oregon.
"I'd break out into a sweat ... and I'd just get sick to my stomach. I could not even look at someone with a toothpick in their mouth."
It wasn't just looking at wet wood that freaked her out. It was touching it, too.
"I could not eat Popsicles to the end," [she] explains. "As soon as I got close to the end, I would give it to my kids. I would not even own wooden utensils because I could not wash them. Not even in the dishwasher because they would still be damp when they came out."
Until [she] was treated by a professional -- a process that involved gradual exposure to wet wood to "reprogram" the way she thought about it -- physical contact with wet trees, fences and the deck surrounding her hot tub was out of the question. (Instead, she would wear slippers to walk back to the house post-soak.)
OK, I can happily and confidently say that I'm not phobic about anything. True, I've never been through an earthquake, a tsunami or a tornado, and any one of those would probably leave me catatonic. I'm somewhat over-avoidant behind the wheel when it comes to making left turns when there's heavy traffic and no traffic light, and my personal "squick" is amputation. But that's far from being phobic. I can cope with all those things. Yes, even spiders. I used to be kind of freaky about arachnids, until I worked at a summer camp where the choice was adapt or go home and forfeit the $300 salary plus theoretical tips.
I'm not terribly good with high places. Not too many years ago I climbed a ladder and got myself up on top of the refrigerator, for the purpose of scraping some wallpaper that was near the ceiling. Once I got there I was suddenly overcome with a paralyzing certainty that I was going to either get stuck up there (the ladder wobbled a few inches out of reach when I hit the last step) or fall; it was about a minute or two of not being able to move, until I remembered that the sink was just beneath the edge where I was huddling and hyperventilating. Then I was okay in a hurry. I will often forget this problem and scramble all the way up to a roof or other such perch and then get the willies for a few minutes. But I'm not phobic in the sense that even thinking about high places puts me into a swoon, or that standing on an 8-inch Rubbermaid stepstool is an impossibility. So I think for me it's really more vertigo than acrophobia. And of course, it's all a matter of degree. I'm sure Phillippe Petit never got the heebie jeebies on top of a réfrigérateur.
All in all, I really don't understand phobias all that well. I will even go so far as to admit that I'm a tad on the insensitive side. I will indulge the neuroses of people I am close to, mainly in order to avoid having to listen to them go on & on about it (which they are guaranteed to do...).
I've written about my mother before, and I suppose she's the one who immunized me against taking this sort of problem too seriously.
My first exposure to Mom's catalogue of fears was at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. The three of us rode the SkyLiner across the fairgrounds and about halfway along, Mom managed to work into the conversation that she had a "fear of heights." I was only about 6, but even then, I remember thinking something along the lines of ...and what, may I ask, has this to do with me? Yes, you can say it, I was a little shit. Still am.
But then, shortly after that day, we were at home and Mom was having one of "those" evenings where she would consume mass quantities of brewed beverages, smoke about 2 packs of cigarettes, and sit at the kitchen table detailing all her sorrows while I sat on the sofa and listened to her. At that stage of my life I found Mom quite fascinating.
We got onto the subject of the SkyLiner again. I said "...and you have a fear of heights." Mom answered, "No. I'm afraid of being closed in!" That's when I learned the word claustrophobia. It was also when I learned about Mom having been enticed by an uncle, offering candy, into a chicken coop when she was quite young; he then, according to the story, locked her in there and left her alone.
All these decades later, I'm reasonably convinced that he didn't just lock her in there. I don't think she ever told me anything about how she got out. And having spent a number of years working for a psychologist whose sub-specialty was child sexual abuse, I've drawn some pretty sweeping conclusions about that incident. It makes a lot of sense in light of my mother's overall temperament and attitudes. While I often express exasperation at her emotional weakness, I do not make light of this trauma, and have often wished my great-uncle Paul had lived long enough for me to tell him off good and proper. To the tune of a hick'ry stick.
So while I didn't hear much after that from my mom about her fear of heights, I did hear a great deal throughout the ensuing years about her claustrophobia. She was almost always drinking when she talked about it, and often she'd make statements that simply made no sense, even when I was pretty young.
I once remarked how unpleasant it would be to be locked out of the house. "Oh," she said, "I don't worry about that. I worry about being locked in! That would be the most awful thing in the world!" I then proceeded to explain to my mother how utterly impossible it would be to get locked in our house. We had three doors, and every one of them locked from the inside. Then there were windows. "You could kick the screen out, Mom! It's easy!" said Little Miss Logic over here. True, the upstairs rooms would be hard to evacuate through the windows, but, as I reasoned, Mom didn't spend much time upstairs, so what was there to worry about?
Anybody remember The Gong Show? Chuck Barris was the host; it was an amateur-hour type of show, in which performers of varying degrees of talent would attempt to get through a whole minute of doing their act before a judge got sick of them and struck a huge gong. But that's not the point. Chuck Barris liked to do a silly dance during the closing credits, and for whatever reason, he often put a fedora on his head and pulled the brim all the way down over his eyes while he danced. It drove my mother nuts -- "I can't stand to watch that--it gets me all claustrophobic." There we were, enjoying this utterly innocuous TV show, and Mom had to darken the occasion with reminders of her awful childhood 50-some years before. No one was putting anything over her face; no one was locking her in a chicken coop. As was the case many times, I felt resentful of this declaration; though I didn't put it in these exact words, my feeling was "Yeah, Mom, I almost forgot, it's all about you." I never lacked sympathy for my mom's terrifying childhood experience, but I did dislike her tendency to bring it up at random times.
So by and large, people doing a show-and-tell about their phobias or freakouts don't earn a lot of sympathy from me; they tend to make me wary, wondering just how narcissistic they really are. I'm more respectful of a phobic reaction that is a surprise to both the victim and myself, especially if they haven't advertised it beforehand.
Getting back to the wet-wood lady on cnn.com. When I read the story, I actually understood where she was coming from. No, wet wood does not cause me any ongoing problems. But this is a case where the fear does actually make a modicum of sense, all the while seeming not to.
I know that on at least one occasion, I've run my hand over a wet timber, only to end up with a splinter. Wet wood seems wonderfully smooth and polished ... but there you go, you can still get splinters from it.
Wet wood is slippery. Very. My brother-in-law lost his footing and went sprawling on our porch the last time he visited, when it was raining. No harm or injury, but a good demonstration.
Wood is organic and porous, and so much more likely to harbor bacteria, especially when the wood is in the form of a kitchen cutting board.
I don't especially like the taste of popsicle sticks either.
So this is fairly rational, understandable stuff.
I think every phobia most likely has some pinpointable origin, even if it's buried in someone's memory. It's tricky, because two people can have the same experience at the same time, and while one of them might develop a phobia as a result, the other person will just shrug it off. I'm sure science is still a long way from figuring out the mechanics. Click Here to Read More..
"If I saw someone lick a wooden spoon, I had to turn away," says the 41-year-old massage therapist from Portland, Oregon.
"I'd break out into a sweat ... and I'd just get sick to my stomach. I could not even look at someone with a toothpick in their mouth."
It wasn't just looking at wet wood that freaked her out. It was touching it, too.
"I could not eat Popsicles to the end," [she] explains. "As soon as I got close to the end, I would give it to my kids. I would not even own wooden utensils because I could not wash them. Not even in the dishwasher because they would still be damp when they came out."
Until [she] was treated by a professional -- a process that involved gradual exposure to wet wood to "reprogram" the way she thought about it -- physical contact with wet trees, fences and the deck surrounding her hot tub was out of the question. (Instead, she would wear slippers to walk back to the house post-soak.)
OK, I can happily and confidently say that I'm not phobic about anything. True, I've never been through an earthquake, a tsunami or a tornado, and any one of those would probably leave me catatonic. I'm somewhat over-avoidant behind the wheel when it comes to making left turns when there's heavy traffic and no traffic light, and my personal "squick" is amputation. But that's far from being phobic. I can cope with all those things. Yes, even spiders. I used to be kind of freaky about arachnids, until I worked at a summer camp where the choice was adapt or go home and forfeit the $300 salary plus theoretical tips.
I'm not terribly good with high places. Not too many years ago I climbed a ladder and got myself up on top of the refrigerator, for the purpose of scraping some wallpaper that was near the ceiling. Once I got there I was suddenly overcome with a paralyzing certainty that I was going to either get stuck up there (the ladder wobbled a few inches out of reach when I hit the last step) or fall; it was about a minute or two of not being able to move, until I remembered that the sink was just beneath the edge where I was huddling and hyperventilating. Then I was okay in a hurry. I will often forget this problem and scramble all the way up to a roof or other such perch and then get the willies for a few minutes. But I'm not phobic in the sense that even thinking about high places puts me into a swoon, or that standing on an 8-inch Rubbermaid stepstool is an impossibility. So I think for me it's really more vertigo than acrophobia. And of course, it's all a matter of degree. I'm sure Phillippe Petit never got the heebie jeebies on top of a réfrigérateur.
All in all, I really don't understand phobias all that well. I will even go so far as to admit that I'm a tad on the insensitive side. I will indulge the neuroses of people I am close to, mainly in order to avoid having to listen to them go on & on about it (which they are guaranteed to do...).
I've written about my mother before, and I suppose she's the one who immunized me against taking this sort of problem too seriously.
My first exposure to Mom's catalogue of fears was at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. The three of us rode the SkyLiner across the fairgrounds and about halfway along, Mom managed to work into the conversation that she had a "fear of heights." I was only about 6, but even then, I remember thinking something along the lines of ...and what, may I ask, has this to do with me? Yes, you can say it, I was a little shit. Still am.
But then, shortly after that day, we were at home and Mom was having one of "those" evenings where she would consume mass quantities of brewed beverages, smoke about 2 packs of cigarettes, and sit at the kitchen table detailing all her sorrows while I sat on the sofa and listened to her. At that stage of my life I found Mom quite fascinating.
We got onto the subject of the SkyLiner again. I said "...and you have a fear of heights." Mom answered, "No. I'm afraid of being closed in!" That's when I learned the word claustrophobia. It was also when I learned about Mom having been enticed by an uncle, offering candy, into a chicken coop when she was quite young; he then, according to the story, locked her in there and left her alone.
All these decades later, I'm reasonably convinced that he didn't just lock her in there. I don't think she ever told me anything about how she got out. And having spent a number of years working for a psychologist whose sub-specialty was child sexual abuse, I've drawn some pretty sweeping conclusions about that incident. It makes a lot of sense in light of my mother's overall temperament and attitudes. While I often express exasperation at her emotional weakness, I do not make light of this trauma, and have often wished my great-uncle Paul had lived long enough for me to tell him off good and proper. To the tune of a hick'ry stick.
So while I didn't hear much after that from my mom about her fear of heights, I did hear a great deal throughout the ensuing years about her claustrophobia. She was almost always drinking when she talked about it, and often she'd make statements that simply made no sense, even when I was pretty young.
I once remarked how unpleasant it would be to be locked out of the house. "Oh," she said, "I don't worry about that. I worry about being locked in! That would be the most awful thing in the world!" I then proceeded to explain to my mother how utterly impossible it would be to get locked in our house. We had three doors, and every one of them locked from the inside. Then there were windows. "You could kick the screen out, Mom! It's easy!" said Little Miss Logic over here. True, the upstairs rooms would be hard to evacuate through the windows, but, as I reasoned, Mom didn't spend much time upstairs, so what was there to worry about?
Anybody remember The Gong Show? Chuck Barris was the host; it was an amateur-hour type of show, in which performers of varying degrees of talent would attempt to get through a whole minute of doing their act before a judge got sick of them and struck a huge gong. But that's not the point. Chuck Barris liked to do a silly dance during the closing credits, and for whatever reason, he often put a fedora on his head and pulled the brim all the way down over his eyes while he danced. It drove my mother nuts -- "I can't stand to watch that--it gets me all claustrophobic." There we were, enjoying this utterly innocuous TV show, and Mom had to darken the occasion with reminders of her awful childhood 50-some years before. No one was putting anything over her face; no one was locking her in a chicken coop. As was the case many times, I felt resentful of this declaration; though I didn't put it in these exact words, my feeling was "Yeah, Mom, I almost forgot, it's all about you." I never lacked sympathy for my mom's terrifying childhood experience, but I did dislike her tendency to bring it up at random times.
So by and large, people doing a show-and-tell about their phobias or freakouts don't earn a lot of sympathy from me; they tend to make me wary, wondering just how narcissistic they really are. I'm more respectful of a phobic reaction that is a surprise to both the victim and myself, especially if they haven't advertised it beforehand.
Getting back to the wet-wood lady on cnn.com. When I read the story, I actually understood where she was coming from. No, wet wood does not cause me any ongoing problems. But this is a case where the fear does actually make a modicum of sense, all the while seeming not to.
I know that on at least one occasion, I've run my hand over a wet timber, only to end up with a splinter. Wet wood seems wonderfully smooth and polished ... but there you go, you can still get splinters from it.
Wet wood is slippery. Very. My brother-in-law lost his footing and went sprawling on our porch the last time he visited, when it was raining. No harm or injury, but a good demonstration.
Wood is organic and porous, and so much more likely to harbor bacteria, especially when the wood is in the form of a kitchen cutting board.
I don't especially like the taste of popsicle sticks either.
So this is fairly rational, understandable stuff.
I think every phobia most likely has some pinpointable origin, even if it's buried in someone's memory. It's tricky, because two people can have the same experience at the same time, and while one of them might develop a phobia as a result, the other person will just shrug it off. I'm sure science is still a long way from figuring out the mechanics. Click Here to Read More..
Friday, April 11, 2008
Role Model
Hard to get through the day today -- just tired. I think the pollen is getting to me, especially since I've been sleeping with windows open the past few days.
So, as I was zoning out at my desk, the Random Thought Generator kicked in. I don't remember the exact sequence of thoughts, but I think it was two separate notions that sort of collided.
In many ways, that's so.
Aspiration. I don't think I have any idea what my mother wanted from her life. Although we conversed quite heavily, and she kept up a kind of stream-of-consciousness monologue when she was drinking, going on & on for hours, I don't remember her ever saying anything about wanting to "be" something. It could be her mother just cornered the market on that. She wanted my mom to be "a star." That's why she sent her down to the city right after her high school graduation. My mom was a babe in the woods in that environment, and from what she hinted, I think the wolves got to her very, very quickly. I think my dad may have started out as one of those wolves, but then turned into the Handsome Prince.
And I think that sums up my mother:
I think she wanted to be a Princess. Rescued by the handsome guy who could magically take care of everything. Take her away to live in a castle, surrounded by luxury.
I think you can get an idea of a parent's personal aspirations based on what they say to their kid. Here's a sample:
Dad: I'd love to see you become a doctor, discover a cure for cancer...you'd have the world at your doorstep! But you have to be good at math! That's important!
Mom: Marry a man with money! Who can take care of you!
When she hid behind the booze, Mom seemed very unconventional. She cursed, she blasphemed, she cynically dismissed nearly every other human on the planet as being somehow beneath her. She also tried to give me very explicit information about sex at an early age, and was rather smug about this, as opposed to friends' moms who were kind of squeamish on the subject.
But deep down, Mom was ultra-traditional. Men should be men, she thought, and women should be women, and women should be delicate creatures who never did any kind of hard labor, including housework. Mom hated the word "housewife," saying it sounded too much to her like "titmouse." She did housework but grumbled about it constantly, and as I grew older, I saw more and more that she wasn't the "clean-freak perfectionist" that she liked to advertise herself as being. Here were Mom's criteria for "the perfect man":
Turns out, none of this was precisely true. Mom wanted to be a high-class housewife ... what do they call that? A "matron?" I went on dictionary.com to find some synonyms, and the closest I got was "consort." I guess that's close enough to what Mom wanted. The cherished mate of a prominent man, who has little to do other than raise the kids (successfully, of course) and oversee the servants, who do the real work in the house. I think having to do it herself made her feel like a drudge.
And now we come to subject of me. What were my aspirations?
I grew up with the sense that I was special, exceptional, and important, but this simply means that my parents were thrilled beyond belief at having finally produced a child. They were well into middle age (both past the halfway mark of their lives, as it turned out), so it really was a big deal to have me in the world. However, by the time I was in first or second grade, it was apparent to me that the rest of humanity didn't view me that way. And although my dad always did encourage me to reach as high as possible, I'm quite sure that Mom was intimidated by ambition. I never heard her urge me to get top grades, or to work extra hard, or to be competitive. Every new thing I tried was met with "Be careful! Don't take on too much!" and similar sentiments. Dad also urged caution, but it was different. I think his fears were of me experiencing physical pain or injury. Mom's fears had to do with her losing me. Big difference.
I think Mom had what people now call "a failure of the imagination." She truly could not picture the process of striving for success. She thought it "just happened" to some people. And therefore (this is something I've understood for awhile), I just went along on auto-pilot, thinking good things would happen to me, or they wouldn't, and it had little to do with anything I did myself. I saw myself in my lower middle-class existence at age 17 or 18 or so, and then saw myself with plenty of money, an interesting career and all the trimmings, but had a blank spot in my head when it came to whatever lay between.
I had a lot of blank spots in my head! For a long time I lived "in my own private Idaho." There was a big disconnect between what was just behind my eyes and what was right in front of them. It's really only the last five years or so that the two things have connected up. And of course, that means a LOT of time got wasted.
I shouldn't be so hard on myself for not having fulfilled anyone's dreams, including my own. I realize now that I didn't have the greatest role model(s).
And, I'm not at the end of the line, yet! Click Here to Read More..
So, as I was zoning out at my desk, the Random Thought Generator kicked in. I don't remember the exact sequence of thoughts, but I think it was two separate notions that sort of collided.
- I haven't done much with my life, other than go from one low-paying office job to the next, and
- My mother worked office jobs until she could quit and have a kid, and then she went back to work in a factory when I was in college.
In many ways, that's so.
- I don't smoke
- I don't drink...much -- certainly not like Mom. Socially only. I drive a lot and go to work 5 days a week, and have very little money, so drinking is dangerous, impractical and expensive.
- My marriage is good
- I'm not full of anger and bitterness (though I like to indulge occasionally)
- I don't cling onto my child like he's a life raft
- I'm more worldly and much less timid
- I'm basically a WYSIWYG type of person
- I have a social life and I get out of the house a lot more than she did.
- My health is good (though hers started to decline at age 53, and I've still got a few years to go before I reach that mark)
Aspiration. I don't think I have any idea what my mother wanted from her life. Although we conversed quite heavily, and she kept up a kind of stream-of-consciousness monologue when she was drinking, going on & on for hours, I don't remember her ever saying anything about wanting to "be" something. It could be her mother just cornered the market on that. She wanted my mom to be "a star." That's why she sent her down to the city right after her high school graduation. My mom was a babe in the woods in that environment, and from what she hinted, I think the wolves got to her very, very quickly. I think my dad may have started out as one of those wolves, but then turned into the Handsome Prince.
And I think that sums up my mother:
I think she wanted to be a Princess. Rescued by the handsome guy who could magically take care of everything. Take her away to live in a castle, surrounded by luxury.
I think you can get an idea of a parent's personal aspirations based on what they say to their kid. Here's a sample:
Dad: I'd love to see you become a doctor, discover a cure for cancer...you'd have the world at your doorstep! But you have to be good at math! That's important!
Mom: Marry a man with money! Who can take care of you!
When she hid behind the booze, Mom seemed very unconventional. She cursed, she blasphemed, she cynically dismissed nearly every other human on the planet as being somehow beneath her. She also tried to give me very explicit information about sex at an early age, and was rather smug about this, as opposed to friends' moms who were kind of squeamish on the subject.
But deep down, Mom was ultra-traditional. Men should be men, she thought, and women should be women, and women should be delicate creatures who never did any kind of hard labor, including housework. Mom hated the word "housewife," saying it sounded too much to her like "titmouse." She did housework but grumbled about it constantly, and as I grew older, I saw more and more that she wasn't the "clean-freak perfectionist" that she liked to advertise herself as being. Here were Mom's criteria for "the perfect man":
- Very quiet. You could prop him up in the corner somewhere and he'd just sit and smile and listen to everyone else talk and you wouldn't know he was there. Her father and her oldest brother were very much like that.
- Not at all demanding about food. Whatever you "stuck in front of him" was what he'd eat. The ideal man had no food preferences and zero ability in the kitchen -- he was completely dependent on your ability to feed him and grateful for every morsel.
- Extremely handy around the house and indefatigable. A beast of burden.
- Somehow able to earn a respectable living and keep his cherished princess wife and perfect children in a beautiful house that all the neighbors would envy.
- Eccentric and talkative, often embarrassing her in public
- Not terribly fussy about food, but knowledgeable enough to express preferences (butter instead of margarine, for example).
- Absolutely hopeless at building or fixing anything. Dad had ADD, I'm sure, which is why he didn't finish high school. He would take something apart and leave the pieces all over. Our house was a wreck. My mother felt great contempt for him when we had to call a professional to fix things around the house.
- Dad never earned more than $15,000 a year on his job. Still, we did have a house, a car, and various things we needed, even though Mom was strictly a stay-at-homer. Our house was small and plain, with new furniture coming in at 25-year intervals and new decor maybe once every 10 years.
Turns out, none of this was precisely true. Mom wanted to be a high-class housewife ... what do they call that? A "matron?" I went on dictionary.com to find some synonyms, and the closest I got was "consort." I guess that's close enough to what Mom wanted. The cherished mate of a prominent man, who has little to do other than raise the kids (successfully, of course) and oversee the servants, who do the real work in the house. I think having to do it herself made her feel like a drudge.
And now we come to subject of me. What were my aspirations?
I grew up with the sense that I was special, exceptional, and important, but this simply means that my parents were thrilled beyond belief at having finally produced a child. They were well into middle age (both past the halfway mark of their lives, as it turned out), so it really was a big deal to have me in the world. However, by the time I was in first or second grade, it was apparent to me that the rest of humanity didn't view me that way. And although my dad always did encourage me to reach as high as possible, I'm quite sure that Mom was intimidated by ambition. I never heard her urge me to get top grades, or to work extra hard, or to be competitive. Every new thing I tried was met with "Be careful! Don't take on too much!" and similar sentiments. Dad also urged caution, but it was different. I think his fears were of me experiencing physical pain or injury. Mom's fears had to do with her losing me. Big difference.
I think Mom had what people now call "a failure of the imagination." She truly could not picture the process of striving for success. She thought it "just happened" to some people. And therefore (this is something I've understood for awhile), I just went along on auto-pilot, thinking good things would happen to me, or they wouldn't, and it had little to do with anything I did myself. I saw myself in my lower middle-class existence at age 17 or 18 or so, and then saw myself with plenty of money, an interesting career and all the trimmings, but had a blank spot in my head when it came to whatever lay between.
I had a lot of blank spots in my head! For a long time I lived "in my own private Idaho." There was a big disconnect between what was just behind my eyes and what was right in front of them. It's really only the last five years or so that the two things have connected up. And of course, that means a LOT of time got wasted.
I shouldn't be so hard on myself for not having fulfilled anyone's dreams, including my own. I realize now that I didn't have the greatest role model(s).
And, I'm not at the end of the line, yet! Click Here to Read More..
Thursday, April 03, 2008
An Era is Ending
Actually, less than 2 years, but it felt like an era. Carl has gotten the job he's been after for the last month. He starts in about 10 days. Hooway.
If he doesn't sign up for the medical insurance, I may have to kill him.
[edited the next day] On the current job, he's been told not to come back next Monday -- supposedly the day he took off for the interview was a no-no ...
We'll see. There are other back-up options before he starts at the new place.
***
Two posts in one day? I'm getting BLABBERY again. The real reason for the loquacity is that it feels like Friday. One more day, one more day.
I'm in a month-long feminine theology workshop. A bunch of us femmes sat around talking about our earliest impressions of sexual issues (menstruation, relationship, childbirth, menopause, etc).
It occurs to me that EVERY WOMAN I KNOW feels she comes from a home environment where these matters were treated with secrecy and embarrassment to some degree or other. Is this inevitable, and is it universal? I would say yes, it's universal, and in some cultures it's downright pathological (FGM, for example). I think my mom wanted to pretend that it wasn't that way in our home, and I must give her credit -- she boldly went where other moms dared not go. She did the best she could, she really did.
I still haven't figured my mother out, and I suppose I never will. Click Here to Read More..
If he doesn't sign up for the medical insurance, I may have to kill him.
[edited the next day] On the current job, he's been told not to come back next Monday -- supposedly the day he took off for the interview was a no-no ...
We'll see. There are other back-up options before he starts at the new place.
***
Two posts in one day? I'm getting BLABBERY again. The real reason for the loquacity is that it feels like Friday. One more day, one more day.
I'm in a month-long feminine theology workshop. A bunch of us femmes sat around talking about our earliest impressions of sexual issues (menstruation, relationship, childbirth, menopause, etc).
It occurs to me that EVERY WOMAN I KNOW feels she comes from a home environment where these matters were treated with secrecy and embarrassment to some degree or other. Is this inevitable, and is it universal? I would say yes, it's universal, and in some cultures it's downright pathological (FGM, for example). I think my mom wanted to pretend that it wasn't that way in our home, and I must give her credit -- she boldly went where other moms dared not go. She did the best she could, she really did.
I still haven't figured my mother out, and I suppose I never will. Click Here to Read More..
Monday, March 17, 2008
Futility Mode, and then a little better
"Futility Mode" is a fancy-ass term for depression. It's that state of mind I get into that goes, why bother doing anything? Why make the effort? We're all gonna die anyway! I got a bad attack of it this morning before leaving for work. And last night I got up from the dinner table because I had a flashback of a bad childhood incident involving my mother.
However, by the time I got into the shower this morning I had started my self-talk. Mom was a great role model for what not to do. Any time I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, or her birthday, or Mother's Day, she'd just give that wistful, willow-in-the-wind sigh of hers and say "Peace....happiness..." in a tone that said she'd never, ever have any of those things and it was all our (Dad's and my) fault.
Blanche Fucking DuBois.
Even as a tiny little kid, I knew when she said this, that it was bullshit. It took a few decades before I could put it into words, but to summarize:
If you want the image I keep handy for moments like this, catch the movie Gypsy next time it comes out on AMC. It's the movie with Natalie Wood as Gypsy Rose Lee. In one of the scenes just before the end of the movie, Gypsy's finally made it big. She's stopped being the mousy, dutiful older sister to Baby June, who has run away. She has unwittingly become a burlesque stripper and to everyone's surprise, she's taken off like a rocket and she's the hottest thing in showbiz at that time (a true story, by the way). But her mother still wants to run the show. They have one of their innumerable arguments, and after Mama Rose storms out, Gypsy realizes she has to put her angry, hurt feelings aside because she's just about to do a photo shoot. She sits on a stool and the guy who's setting this up says "C'mon, Gypsy, give us a smile." And oh, does she smile. You can see her summoning every ounce of willpower she's got, and then she tosses back her head and splits her mouth, her entire face, into this absolutely stunningly brilliant smile that everyone is looking for on a magazine cover. You can almost hear her thinking, here's your fucking smile, goddamn you to hell, all of you. KISS MY ASS, WORLD!
So that's a good thing to fall back on when I feel myself sinking.
I exchanged e-mails with Doug today regarding Wally. I thought he was going to get on my case like he often does, but I told him straight out what my situation is, and he managed not to jab at me.
Wally is looking forward to seeing me this weekend. I hope it goes well. Click Here to Read More..
However, by the time I got into the shower this morning I had started my self-talk. Mom was a great role model for what not to do. Any time I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, or her birthday, or Mother's Day, she'd just give that wistful, willow-in-the-wind sigh of hers and say "Peace....happiness..." in a tone that said she'd never, ever have any of those things and it was all our (Dad's and my) fault.
Blanche Fucking DuBois.
Even as a tiny little kid, I knew when she said this, that it was bullshit. It took a few decades before I could put it into words, but to summarize:
- I am not responsible for anyone else's mental state, and
- No one is responsible for mine!
If you want the image I keep handy for moments like this, catch the movie Gypsy next time it comes out on AMC. It's the movie with Natalie Wood as Gypsy Rose Lee. In one of the scenes just before the end of the movie, Gypsy's finally made it big. She's stopped being the mousy, dutiful older sister to Baby June, who has run away. She has unwittingly become a burlesque stripper and to everyone's surprise, she's taken off like a rocket and she's the hottest thing in showbiz at that time (a true story, by the way). But her mother still wants to run the show. They have one of their innumerable arguments, and after Mama Rose storms out, Gypsy realizes she has to put her angry, hurt feelings aside because she's just about to do a photo shoot. She sits on a stool and the guy who's setting this up says "C'mon, Gypsy, give us a smile." And oh, does she smile. You can see her summoning every ounce of willpower she's got, and then she tosses back her head and splits her mouth, her entire face, into this absolutely stunningly brilliant smile that everyone is looking for on a magazine cover. You can almost hear her thinking, here's your fucking smile, goddamn you to hell, all of you. KISS MY ASS, WORLD!
So that's a good thing to fall back on when I feel myself sinking.
I exchanged e-mails with Doug today regarding Wally. I thought he was going to get on my case like he often does, but I told him straight out what my situation is, and he managed not to jab at me.
Wally is looking forward to seeing me this weekend. I hope it goes well. Click Here to Read More..
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