This is where my head lives.

So, last night, I met this guy.

He was very handsome, with a hint of Asian ancestry, long, jet-black hair, and a killer smile. We hit it off immediately and I gave him my phone number. A few days later, he called me and we went on a date. Oh man, it was a really awesome date, too, although I hardly remember anything about it other than gazing into his eyes and laughing at his jokes.

After a few weeks and a whirlwind romance where I fell head over heels in love with him, he told me he wanted to show me something. He took me to a dark cave in the woods. I was thinking, “okay, perhaps some spooky makeout time and some cool glowing moss”. Instead, he led me deeper and deeper into the cave, which was almost suspiciously devoid of bats. Finally, he stopped near an underground waterfall and turned to look at me.

That’s when I found out my boyfriend was Prince of the Spider-People.

Hundreds of enormous spiders came into the cavern, from nowhere. When I say enormous, I’m not saying “size of my palm”, I’m saying “size of a grown human being”. Despite not normally being afraid of spiders, I panicked. I screamed and ran blindly out of the cavern, dodging giant spiders and sometimes jumping over them with the speed of a demented Mario to escape the hellish place. I didn’t stop running until I was back at my home and safely behind locked doors.

A few days later, his sister came to see me at work. She was very angry, and told me that I had broken his heart, and the entire spider kingdom now hated me and vowed to kill me on sight. After my “OMG GIANT SPIDERS” panic had finally subsided, I had begun to feel guilty about leaving him behind and wondered if I’d done the right thing. I broke down and cried to her that I still loved him, but I’d been so afraid of all these giant spiders hurting me. She looked shocked and told me none of them wanted to hurt me that night, but rather to welcome me to the family as their prince’s future wife. I asked her if she thought I could set things right, and she told me she wasn’t sure, because now they all wanted to kill me. But she told me her brother was heartbroken without me, and that she would do everything in her power to take me back to the cave to explain to the other spiders that I had panicked, and really loved their prince.

That night, she and I went back to the cave. It was even darker than before, and there was some sort of red glow coming up from the depths, so it almost made me feel like I was entering the mouth of hell. It wasn’t far into the cavern when the spiders came out and saw me. I tried to tell them, with the princess’ help, that I had come back to make things right, that I loved their prince and wanted to be with him, but they wouldn’t listen. They bound me and gagged me and started beating some strange drum, preparing a ritualistic and possibly gruesome death for me. The princess had disappeared, and so I closed my eyes and wept silently at the end of my life, and the loss of my beloved.

The princess raced to the chamber where her brother had sat in quiet contemplation since the night I ran away. He had hardly spoken to anyone, or eaten, and his face was tired and withdrawn. She told him that I had come back with her, that I loved him more than my life, and that the spider-people were preparing to kill me for my betrayal. A fire seemed to light him from within, and he threw on a ceremonial robe and raced with his sister back toward the entrance of the cavern, hoping that he would still be in time to save me.

A wicked, twisted blade was being sharpened not far from where I sat, bound and helpless. I could hear them sharpening it, and my stomach rose into my throat, but I kept my eyes tightly shut and waited for death. Suddenly, a powerful voice broke through the drumming, and the spider-people stopped and bowed down to their prince. I opened my eyes and saw him standing before me, and he reached down and untied me, the greatest tenderness in his eyes. He quietly asked me if what his sister had told him was true. With tears in my eyes, I threw my arms around him and told him I wanted to stay with him forever.

The next night, we were married. The spider-people wove an incredible silk wedding dress for me, and my betrothed wore his finest silk robes. It was the happiest day of my life.

—————————–

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, that was a dream I had last night. XD My subconscious is a bizarre place! There was also a bit near the end where I asked him to show me his spider form on our wedding night, then I got a little scared and he had to comfort me, but it didn’t flow well with the story so I left it out. And also, there were a bunch more dreams after that one, but they were more disjointed and didn’t have a proper plot, so they’re not worth writing down.

Catharsis

Lately, I’ve been feeling very ambivalent about the online community I spend most of my time on. I think it’s about time I attempted to articulate why.

As you guys know, I’m an avid knitter. I am an active member of Ravelry.com, and in fact spend a fair portion of my time there, reading and making posts on the forums, looking up fun patterns, chatting in the chat rooms. In general, I usually feel welcome and at ease there. But lately, I’ve started feeling stifled in terms of my expression, and I can’t figure out what to do to fix the situation.

For starters, I realize I have very strong opinions about things, and I want to make those opinions known. That’s a large portion of why I started blogging, because my opinions demand to be shared, and I feel strongly that I need to spread the word about things I consider important. I also realize that I can sometimes be off-putting to people because of the intensity of my emotions and opinions, which is why I try to “rein it in” in public places, like my job or a forum like Ravelry. But sometimes, I just feel like I have to speak up.

There are a couple groups I spend a LOT of time in, on Ravelry. No names, because I don’t like rubber-necking, but my Rav-based readers will likely recognize them immediately (and I ask you not to name them in comments either). One of them is a haven of support that I consider a welcoming place for crafters of all kinds, and the other is a fan community that regularly challenges its members to craft in new and exciting ways. And most of the time, I am very happy in those groups. I spend some time in other groups as well (several animal groups, and a couple lifestyle groups, as well as running a book club group which is still in its infancy), but these two places are my main homes on Rav, the places I check first thing in the morning and right before bed, the places where I make the majority of my posts and have the majority of my friends.

And here I’m going to broach the delicate topic, which has led to some drama for me before. In the past few months, one of these groups has instituted a new rule that any discussion of parenting or children in a negative light will lead to the topic being deleted and the posters being warned. This was a direct result of past discussions that grew heated, but this rule is beginning to feel stifling to me. Even the most gentle discussion of parenting seems to turn into “us against them” and makes me feel alienated and attacked for my child-free status, and I don’t even engage in the discussions myself anymore (it’s just not worth the drama and hurt feelings). Even people who imply that perhaps not all children are perfect and perhaps parenting is a job not all people do well get a verbal smack-down, it seems, and then a moderator pops in and tells them to cool it. I don’t want to go into whether the rule is harsh or not, or whether it should be broken, or any of that. All I want to highlight here is how I feel. Because this is my blog, and I feel I am justified in talking about how these discussions have made me feel. And alienated, frustrated, and hurt are my main feelings. I feel like my viewpoint as a member of that group is now considered lesser, that my voice is diminished because of my childfree status (which I can’t even mention for fear of breaking the rule), and that really bothers me. This is a place where I’ve grown a lot, learned a lot about myself and my relationships with other people, and I feel like part of that group has turned its back on me because of this. I struggle with the decision whether to leave the group outright (which I would do quietly, with nary a peep, because I do hate it when people publicly flounce), or stay and hope that this ends up blowing over and keep a low profile in the meantime. I don’t want to go, because I love the group, and most of the people in it (there isn’t anyone I really despise, and only one or two members who I mildly dislike, everyone else is either “neutral” or “OMG BEST PERSON EVAR”), but I still feel alienated and unrepresented as an individual.

The other group does not have that problem. There are plenty of parents in it, and lots of discussion of children, but no one is judgemental about the childfree and they’re very welcoming. No, the problem that I seem to be having in the other group is that of boundaries.

Boundaries are things that I have trouble with at the best of times, to be honest. As a small child through my teen years, I had no concept of “personal space” and would often hug people who I hardly knew if they looked friendly or in need of a hug. It wasn’t until high school when I had a rude awakening (being told by a friend that she was uncomfortable being hugged by me right after I came out to her as bisexual) that I began to withdraw and now I hardly feel comfortable touching anyone unless they touch me first. But that’s another discussion. Physical boundaries, emotional boundaries, boundaries of “appropriate topics of discussion”, these are things that have never made much sense to me. Perhaps it’s just because of my poor social skills, but I don’t really feel like there should be any separation between subjects, except in terms of comfort (such as not discussing rape with a rape victim) or very personal things (such as sex and personal relationships, unless mutually agreed upon by both parties).

So in this other group, which is a group with teenage members (and thus marked as mild language only, which I have no problem with), I’ve run up a couple times against boundaries that I wasn’t even aware of. Things like discussing my budding interest in energy manipulation or possible non-neurotypical disorders seems to make other people uncomfortable, and I end up getting a very gentle nudge from the moderators to perhaps not discuss the topic anymore (and they’re very nice about it, I never feel like I’ve been shouted at or shut down). What frustrates me is that I feel like I keep bumping up against invisible walls around discussion topics that I’m not supposed to talk about, and I have no idea where they are or how to avoid them. The fact is, being a bisexual size acceptance activist who is learning about energy manipulation and has a strong emotional investment in various social justice issues is who I am. My life is not the same as a lot of people’s lives (just the law of averages, population being a bell curve, I’m usually on the margin), so these things don’t feel odd or out of place to me, but I keep introducing a topic and then learning that it’s not something they normally discuss. As a result, it’s made me skittish about what to talk about there. I really like all the people in the group (really, I don’t even mildly dislike any of them so far, they’re all so nice) and I want to be an active member, but I feel like there’s only so much I can say about my knitting before I start repeating myself, and other topics are potentially off-limits so I don’t want to try to talk about them. So then I end up posting stupid one-line things like “hi, I’m bored, what’s up” and no one cares to read that all the time.

Individually, these two issues aren’t a huge deal. They don’t really impact my whole life, because my internet life is not the entirety of my existence. If I was only dealing with one of them, I’d probably just shrug and wait it out and hang out in other groups for the duration. But because both are happening simultaneously, with the two groups I spend the most time in, I’m starting to feel very frustrated by the whole thing. It’s a cumulative thing, bouncing from one to the other until I feel like my head’s going to explode because of the pent-up emotions that I don’t feel like I can express in either place. I try to go to other groups to decompress, but most of my other groups are quiet, and since every post can be viewed by anyone on Rav, I worry that venting someplace else could create drama in the main group, even if I’m vague. Plus, I don’t want to be the girl who complains constantly in one group while showing a blank emotionless face in the other. I just want to be me. x.x

Again, this blog post is sort of making this a bigger issue than it really is. In the long term, I probably won’t even remember all this a few years down the road (or heck, possibly even a few months), and since the internet is pretty fluid, most other people probably won’t remember it either. I just feel like I need to articulate how I feel, so I don’t keep growing more and more frustrated and end up exploding at someone who doesn’t deserve it. Blogging is my pressure valve.

And that is all I have to say about that.

A Learning Experience

Hey gang! Long time, not post, eh? Honestly I’ll be amazed if more than two people even read this, but I gotta start somewhere, right? ;D Oh, and here’s a pic of how I look right now, ’cause I got my hair cut even shorter so I gotta show it!

Hey, that's me!

Anywho, here’s my first Real Blog Post of 2012. It’s about an experience I had recently with someone I work with (all names are fake, for privacy reasons), and my knitting. Please enjoy.

More than a year ago, the temp agency I was working for got me an assignment at a large insurance company in downtown Cincinnati. Originally my job was pretty simple. Using a simple desk scanner to scan insurance applications into the company’s system. The catch was that the department I was going to be working in was more than 6 months behind on this duty, so they were hiring me to make up the difference. Essentially, I was a glorified secretary, but that was about on par with other things I’d done as a temp, so it didn’t bother me. It was a paycheck, and since the scanner took forever I had plenty of down time to scribble story ideas in my notebook and daydream about cute super heroes (or whoever I was crushing on at the time).

Of course, as usual, I was painfully shy around the new people I was working with. I already have a tendency to be very reserved with people I don’t know, and that tendency had only increased during my time as a temp, working with people I might not see ever again once the temp job was finished. It took me at least a week to say more than two words to my coworkers, except when I had to ask for help, which I only did when absolutely necessary. Gradually, I began to make friends with them, at least to the extent of a casual working relationship. One of them, though, was a bit more friendly than the others. We’ll call her Mary.

From the beginning, Mary was very nice to me. She was a bit older than me, perhaps around my mother’s age, and so I think she felt some kind of urge to watch out for me. She surreptitiously warned me when the bosses were in a bad mood, chatted happily about her life and her family, and over all made me feel a lot more comfortable than I otherwise would have been. When the company asked if I had any interest in being hired on full-time, she confided in me that she and the other ladies in the department were impressed by my hard work and politeness, and when they’d been asked how they liked me, they heartily endorsed my being hired on. Indeed, after I was hired, I ended up being moved to a different cubicle, which was right behind Mary’s. Every day from then on we would chat when it was slow, talk about this and that. She gave me some good advice about dating back when I met my ex-boyfriend, and during the relationship that followed. She also helped cheer me up when I felt sad about having to dump him. All in all, she’s a good coworker and a good friend, and having her there makes what can sometimes be a tedious job more bearable.

Now, any of you who know me, know that I have a problem trying to give people too much. I think it’s partly a deep-seated urge that I’m still trying to conquer, to make people like me by doing them kindnesses. The problem is, lots of people will take advantage of that, so I’ve gotten burned over the years. Still, after a while at my job, being in Mary’s company and benefiting from her friendship and experienced advice, I felt the urge to pay her back. She isn’t much for sweets, so my usual tactic of “drown them in cookies/muffins/cake” wouldn’t work with her. After I finished one of my first shawls and took it to work, she ooohed and aahed over it, complimented it, talked about how lovely it was, and I knew then that I wanted to knit her a shawl.

A few weeks later, pretending to be browsing knitting patterns for myself, I brought up a few and asked her opinion of them. She chose a lovely shawl by the same designer who had made the pattern for the one she’d been impressed by, said she liked the colors in one of the model photos (dark purple and grey), and that was that. On my next paycheck, I ordered the yarn and resolved to cast on for the shawl as soon as I received it.

I started the shawl in the first week of October, hoping that I could finish it by Christmas and give it to Mary. Unfortunately, I did not foresee that my birthday gift of a new iPad 2 at the end of the month would cut into my knitting time so badly that I hardly worked on anything throughout the rest of November and December. I struggled, telling myself (as only a master procrastinator can) that I still had time, that the shawl would be finished, that I would work on it as much as possible. And yet time went forward, a few rows were knit, and my iPad games progressed much faster than the shawl did.

Finally, right before the time off I had scheduled for Christmas, I came in to work one day and found a bag on my desk. Mary had bought me a Christmas present, and I was wracked with guilt that the shawl was not done. I blurted out that I was making her something, and it would be done by the time we both got back from vacation. She smiled and thanked me, and things went on.

Unfortunately, the shawl didn’t get finished. And after she’d come back from her time off (which was longer than mine, her having more seniority in the company), I kept guiltily silent, until she asked me about it. She jokingly chided me, and I felt betrayed and angry, because teasing is something I still haven’t learned to take very well. I went home and asked the opinion of my online knitting friends on Ravelry. They helped me calm down and see it had only been teasing, and so work continued on the shawl. I wanted to finish it as quickly as possible, and I’d managed to shrug off the lure of the iPad well enough to at least work on it in the evenings.

Finally, last week, it was nearly done. Tuesday night I realized I had only a few rows until I could cast off, and the next day I told Mary that she would have it on Friday. But she sighed, told me it wasn’t worth it, and made me feel even worse than her light teasing had. I returned to my online knitting friends, upset and ready to throw in the towel, telling them I was going to finish it because I couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore, and give it to her and then wash my hands of the whole affair. Thankfully, one of the wisest people I know on Ravelry helped me see that her response hadn’t been related to me or the shawl at all, but rather other experiences in her life that were making her feel down. I realized that what she had said was something I would have said, back when I was horribly depressed all the time and felt worthless. She wasn’t telling me that my shawl was a waste of time, she was saying that she wasn’t worth the effort.

Wednesday night, I finished it, washed it, pinned it out, and left it to dry by my running box fan. On Thursday night, I took pictures, wove in the last trailing ends, and carefully packed it in tissue paper and a nice little bag. I put one of my Knitterella Gift Tags on it (the blue one) and filled our names out in the to/from lines.

On Friday morning, after unwrapping myself from the winter layers and setting my things down on my desk, I put the bag on her desk. I watched out of the corner of my eye while she finished a task she’d been involved in, then slowly unpacked the bag. At first, she didn’t say anything, and my heart sank. After all the work I had put in, she didn’t like it, and I felt like I was an utter failure. Then, she put it around her shoulders, stood up, and came over and hugged me tightly. Then she walked all around the office, showing it off to all our coworkers, and bragging about how I had made her such a lovely thing. So all was well in the world, the gift was well-received, and I glowed from the praise.

Still, a lesson was learned. The only person I craft unconditionally for is my mother, because she cherishes everything I make for her and uses it as it’s supposed to be used. She doesn’t make offhand comments that make me feel like a failure, because she knows how I would take them. Mary is a wonderful person, a good coworker and a good friend. But she doesn’t know me as well as she could, or else she would’ve known how her comments would’ve made me feel. And knitting something like a shawl, I put so much of myself into it that it isn’t worth doing if the person may not like it.

I knew, academically, the emotional risks I was setting myself up for, taking on this project. But I don’t think I was prepared for how much they would affect me. Perhaps one day, I might knit Mary something else. Something small and simple that I don’t think much about, something that only takes me a weekend or so to finish. Or perhaps I won’t.

What I know is, I’m knitting myself one of these shawls, in entirely different colors, because her’s looks really awesome, and I love the pattern.

All pinned out and dry.

 

Hanging on the back of my desk chair.

 

I think it looks great, don't you?

A New Day

Hey guys! I am coming back to this blog, sorry for the long silence. <3 I am going to try to update at least once a week to start, but I make no promises, as always. ;D

I will have a real post for y’all soon, and some new pics too.

Grief and Guilt and Letting Go

This is morning hair. Spectacular, isn't it?

Had to start off with a goofy pic today, because this is going to be a pretty heavy blog post.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11th, 2001. And instead of becoming stronger as a nation, pulling together and choosing to not allow terrorists to divide us with hatred and fear, we are spending our time flogging ourselves and reliving the memory over and over again, directing vitriol at people who don’t deserve it, and refusing to let the good people who died that day really die.

Anyone who was alive and more than a few years old on that date probably remembers where they were and what they thought. I do. I’m certain that I will for a long time. But I’m not going to tell you about it, because it’s not important. I am angry about this date now, because people refuse to let us go forward, instead insisting we stay mired in the past. We are stuck like a pig in a bog, and instead of struggling to get out, we’re wallowing further down into it. And that makes me angry.

Now, let me say this. Grief is not a bad thing, when something bad happens. Grief is a natural coping mechanism that allows us to deal with overwhelming events, to process them and continue on with our lives. However, where grief becomes a bad thing is when you give yourself over to it so completely that it’s impossible to break free. When you won’t allow yourself to continue living your life, because the grief is more important. When the grief becomes guilt, and you become trapped in the endless cycle of the two, not allowing yourself to move on from the event that you’re grieving.

I know something about the cycle of guilt. Not to say that I’m any kind of expert, far from it. But I have spent a long time learning how to cope with overwhelming guilt over things that happens long, long ago. My example happened when I was in elementary school, around 7 or 8 years old. We had a cage full of mice that we were allowed to play with, under supervision. I was very good with animals, even back then, so I was allowed to take one of the mice out to play with, for a few minutes, without much supervision. I let it run around inside the circle of my arms, petted it, and otherwise enjoyed its little furry self. Then I discovered that I had a rubber band in my pocket, and I decided to see if I could get the mouse to jump through it. When this failed, I decided to hold the rubber band in the air, perhaps an inch from the ground, and suspend the mouse with it. The poor little mouse struggled, but I didn’t think it was really being hurt, so I wouldn’t relent until it squeaked at me. Then I put the rubber band away, and went to a teacher to return the mouse to its cage. An hour or so later, one of the teachers noticed the mouse I’d been playing with was acting strangely. It was lethargic, could hardly move, had trouble opening its eyes. I was questioned, but I felt afraid of punishment and thus lied about nothing happening. The mouse died not long after, I can only assume from internal injuries, and I knew it had to be my fault. That mouse lived for perhaps a year and a half, but I could not let it die. I spent ten years remembering my actions, and feeling absolutely awful for them. I had killed a defenseless little creature, and not even by accident, just by doing something I thought was play that had injured it so badly that it died. There would be months when I wouldn’t think about it, and then one day it would just surge into my mind, making me weep in helpless guilt and grief for what I had done. It wasn’t until I was almost 17 years old that I finally forgave myself for what I’d done. I still remember, vividly, but I do not grieve or feel guilt anymore. I treat all animals with a little more care, and I remember that what might be play to me could be painful to them, and I value the lesson that mouse taught me. But I don’t grieve anymore.

Keeping grief and guilt alive for so long is not healthy. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized it was anxiety that caused me to replay that and lesser memories over and over again, feeling awful guilt over my actions (sometimes for situations as innocuous as asking for a ride to the grocery store from a friend). It gave me pain, and while I eventually learned to cope with my feelings and later break the cycle of guilt, I remember what it was like.

It isn’t healthy for us, as a nation, to grieve over this event. We are dishonoring the memories of those who died ten years ago, by spending our time weeping and reliving the horror, instead of honoring their bravery, and celebrating our combined strength as a nation. We bar progress and keep ourselves from moving forward, from moving on. We create a grave marker over the site itself, instead of rebuilding and showing that one loss is not enough to break us.

We have to move on. We have to let the dead lie in peace, and instead of flogging ourselves repeatedly for an event that was not our fault and not in our control, we have to show the world that we are not that weak. It makes me angry, to see this day made into a living corpse of our bad feelings, when it could be a celebration of life, of honor, of bravery and our standing together as a nation.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Divorce, Desperation, and Feminism

Hello, world.

It's a lovely day outside, and I am trying to get things done.

Hello. I am not dead! I have been so busy over the past few months, though. I’ve been spending so much time doing other things that I didn’t have time to blog anywhere, not just here. In other words, I’ve been too busy living my life to write about it!

Today I have a real blog post for you. I’m going to write it based off of an article I read last week, and have been wanting to share my opinions on. I’m busily cleaning my apartment today (real, deep-cleaning, scrubbing the bathtub and the floor and vacuuming and dusting, not just surface cleaning), and doing laundry, so I’ll be writing this in between cleaning bouts, when I need a moment to cool down.

Here is the article I read.

This article is, to me, a perfect example of why I have absolutely no faith in the institution of marriage. Naturally, my inital misgivings came from the extreme backlash of my parents’ divorce, which scarred me enough to make me doubt marriage was good for anyone. But as I grow older, I find more and more evidence that the emotional scar isn’t the only thing that makes me distrust the idea of marriage.

Let’s start from the beginning. Marriage was, originally, a socio-economic construct. It had nothing to do with emotions. Marriage was a status symbol, (multiple wives = rich enough to support them), a political move, a way to make money, and a way to ensure that the children produced by any given woman could be tied to specific man (her husband). For the poor in almost any era, marriage was (and is) something that only sometimes happened. In particularly religious times and places, perhaps peasants could have a quick ceremony in front of the priest so they weren’t “living in sin”, but it wasn’t really the same. Indeed, many poor people couldn’t afford to get married because the landholders required a tithe that they didn’t have.

That isn’t the most auspicious beginning, I don’t think. Now let’s look at marriage in a more modern era, shall we? With the advent of first world economics and the structure of economy, it became necessary for people to get married to gain financial stability, and rights regarding their spouse. However, this almost universally applies to women alone. Men can generally live a financially stable life entirely by themselves. Women (especially in the earlier part of the modern era) usually had limited options, and it became a choice between getting married and taking a low-paying job that they would barely survive on, and in rural areas there wasn’t even that. A man could travel across the country and sell things, or work on farms, but women who traveled were taking their lives into their hands. So, for emotional and financial safety, women got married. And despite the fact that the choices are a hell of a lot better now, this is still a problem.

As always in these types of articles, the only women they are really paying any attention to are upper middle class (and mostly white) women. Most women in any other walk of life don’t have the choice at all. And yet, despite the fact that these women are more capable than ever before of providing for themselves financially, choosing who they spend time with, and otherwise living rich lives independently, it is so engrained in our culture that women need a man that they get married, knowing that the relationship is doomed. They tie themselves financially and emotionally (and with children) to a person they don’t really want to, because the horror of being alone, the idea of the ticking biological clock, they’re just too much.

Despite the title of the article, the idea that most divorced women knew before the wedding that the relationship was doomed is not “shocking”. It’s a natural side effect of a society where women do not value themselves, where a woman alone is ridiculed and treated as a lesser person than a married woman, where the cult of Mother has elevated those with children to a status much higher than their childfree counterparts (regardless of marital status), while simultaneously attempting to force the all-sacred mothers to give over control of their bodies and their children’s lives to the management.

I have felt it myself. I broke up with my ex-boyfriend because I didn’t love him. Honestly, I wasn’t even that attracted to him. I knew when we started dating that it wouldn’t last, but I was so tired of being alone. I wanted to have someone in my life in a romantic way, and there wasn’t anyone else rushing to fill the gap. But once the hassle of the constant upkeep outweighed the good feelings, I broke it off.

There’s still a part of me that whispers that since I don’t have people falling all over themselves to date me, something is very wrong with me. It’s not just low self-esteem, or depression, or anxiety, it’s the programming I’ve had from before I can remember, that a woman without a man is useless, that being single makes one pathetic and lonely. I know, objectively, that I am an amazing person. I value myself highly, and I know that in time, I will find other people who will value me as well, who I will be attracted to and want to spend time with. But sometimes, when my emotional roller coaster is at its lowest, when I feel emotionally drained and worthless, I understand why someone would marry a person they don’t really love. Sometimes, it seems better to be with someone we don’t truly care for, than to be alone.

The unfortunate truth is that it takes a lot more effort to choose to rebel against programming than it does to simply go along with what society dictates is normal and desirable. And women who do go along are not weak. They’re not lesser than those who fight back. They’re just tired. It can be so exhausting to fight, constantly, against what other believe is right, that sometimes you just have to let go. I can’t know why anyone else does what they do, and it’s not my place to judge why any woman would choose to live her life as she does. That’s not what this is about. This is about the anger I have that we’ve had this programming in the first place, that it’s even necessary to fight.

Divorce is an ugly thing, even between just two people, no children involved. Saying “oh I’ll just get a divorce if it doesn’t work out” is like saying “well I’m gonna put my hand in this bear trap, and if it springs I’ll just hack off my arm”. It’s never that easy.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Thoughts

Glassy-eyed stare.

 

Braindead.

Today is… well. I’m not having the best day today. Or the best week.

Okay, let’s start from the beginning. On Monday, while on the way home, I got rear-ended. My rear door (it’s a station wagon) won’t open and my driver’s seat is broken, stuck in reclined position and thus undriveable.

Tuesday and Wednesday I got rides from friends to and from work, finally on Thursday I got a rental car courtesy of the other person’s insurance company. So I have that until it is figured out what will happen with my car. It’s very nice too, way nicer than my car, but it makes me nervous to drive it because I don’t have much experience driving diverse cars (I learned to drive in my car and have driven it since I got my license four years ago at 21).

So now I have a rental car. Awesome. And today I took the afternoon off work to go to the doctor. The doctor says aside from the enormous bruise on my leg (where it hit the dashboard) and the slight muscle pain in my neck, I seem fine, but to wait a couple weeks to make sure nothing else surfaces.

And by sheer coincidence, my mom and brother drove up this weekend to help me move all my stuff that was in storage because of the bed bugs into my apartment. Hopefully sans bed-bugs (well there’s probably a couple in there, but they should be 100% dead because they can only live 18 months without being fed and they were in that storage unit for 20 months). So my mom looked at my car and she thinks it might be totaled (because totaled, in insurance lingo, means “costs more to fix car than car is worth”, and the car is only worth maybe $2500). Which frightens the hell out of me, because I really can’t afford a new car right now.

So right now I’m frustrated, nervous, and frightened. My apartment is full of boxes I don’t want to unpack by myself because of the possibility of finding dead bugs (or worse, live ones) and I can’t get comfortable enough with them here to even contemplate sitting and knitting or watching TV or something relaxing. Plus my family is in town so I kind of want to see them but since they spent all morning moving my shit they might not want to see me. And I know my anxiety is shooting through the ROOF but I can’t help it and AUGH I JUST WANT MY LIFE TO GO BACK TO NORMAL.

Finished Knitting Projects

 

There are some big storm clouds gathering outside!

 

But I have some exciting pics for you guys!

I forgot to post these, which is funny because I am SO proud of them and showed them off everywhere else.

This was my first little shawlette.

This is called the Holden Shawlette, which was designed by the pattern maker after visiting Holden Beach, NC. It was a gift for a shawl swap, so I didn’t get to keep it, sadly, but I had a lot of fun making it! I’m supposed to get a shawl in return from someone else, but no sign of my package yet.

My second shawlette.

This was my first big colorwork project. The pattern is called Chadwick, and was designed by Stephen West, who is a famous knitwear designer (at least most knitters know who he is). The picture really doesn’t do it justice, it’s much more vibrant and lovely in person.

And the third one!

And this is my favorite one so far! The pattern is called Clothilde, and is part of a set of two patterns called “Two Ladies”. The other pattern is Arabella, and is one of the next patterns I’m going to knit. I named the project “Dramatic Lady”, and the other shawl is going to be called “Romantic Lady”. Because I like naming things! I wore it to the opera on Thursday night and it made me feel quite lovely and stylish.

I’m working on another shawl right now that’s going to be lovely, I’ll definitely post pics when it’s done. That’s all for now!

Fathers

No shower today, so a little rough-looking.

Apologies for such a long time between posts. I’m still figuring out what I want to do with this blog in general, and while thinking about it I’ve been sort of keeping away. But I just got a really nice compliment from a reader that made me want to make a post so you guys know the blog isn’t dead. Anyway, on to the actual post.

A while back, when I first started this blog, I made a couple posts about my parents. At the time I was mildly worried about posting too much personal info because it was the first time I’d had a blog I shared with most of my family (I sent the link to all of them when I started, and everything is cross-posted to Facebook). I sort of stifled myself a little in regards to my real feelings, because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or share too much. But as time has gone on, I’ve learned a lot from this project, and I now feel pretty safe saying this, so here goes.

I won’t be calling my father tomorrow. I won’t email him, or send him a card. And I’m going to tell you guys why.

When I was a small child, I adored my father. Not only did he play with me as much as he was able, he seemed to know everything and was always willing to answer any question I had. I thought he was just about the coolest person in the world. I actually went through a period of time where I was afraid of men who didn’t have beards because my dad had one the entire time I was growing up (and still does). In short, I thought he could do no wrong.

As I grew, though, he started becoming distant. At first I just thought it was his job. He is a doctor, and was still in medical school when I was very young, and working on his residency when I was in elementary school. He was always tired and never seemed to have time for us, which made me sad, but I tried to understand (as a kid it’s hard, but my mom did a good job explaining why Papa couldn’t come play with us when he got home). I spent more time bugging my older brothers and mom as a result, no big deal. As I grew up, though, it just got worse. I couldn’t understand why the father I adored couldn’t come to my choir concerts, or spend time with me after school when he was home. We kept moving around to different houses, to different states, because of his jobs, and I began to resent that.

Right after my freshman year of high school, my father decided the job he’d had for only a year wasn’t what he wanted, so he found another one a few hours away. However, my mother didn’t want to move us so soon after the last one (especially because my older brother would then have gone to high school in three different places), so my dad moved away and we stayed. And that’s when things really started getting bad for all of us.

I was desperate for my father’s love and attention. And it seemed like the more I tried to get close to him, the less I was able. My mother struggled to help us connect more, suggesting joint guitar lessons, trying to get us to have a shared interest, but nothing seemed to work.

Finally, after a year of living apart, my mom and I (my brother having graduated and gone to college) sold the house and moved to live with my dad. That summer was one of the longest of my life. I hated the new house we had, and my parents just fought all the time. Finally, after a vacation to visit family, the other shoe dropped. My father wanted a divorce. My mother was absolutely blindsided and crushed. He refused to go to counseling, refused to do anything but insist on a divorce. So my mother and I left.

There was no custody fight. There was fighting about money, fighting about assets, a lot of stuff I didn’t understand. At one point my dad’s lawyer was going to try to negotiate for ending child support for me (the only minor kid at that point) when I entered college as opposed to when I turned eighteen, which would cheat my mom out of two months of money that we both knew she needed. I solved that by telling her that I’d be happy to take a year off before college. My father kept breaking his promises to her, changing his mind about what he would provide, and meanwhile my mother was heartbroken that the man she loved so much was leaving her. I watched my mother cry every day for several months. I tried not to be angry with my father, but it seemed like he kept doing things to hurt her, over and over again, and it made me furious. And part of me was angry there was no custody fight. Despite the fact that everyone knew I was better off with my mother, I still felt like he didn’t want me. They agreed that two weekends out of the month I would spend with him, but that just meant I spent hours on the train each way, since he was rarely willing to meet my mother halfway to pick me up or even (goodness forbid) come all the way to see me. And when I arrived? We would go out to dinner. Go back to his house, the house I had hated since I first set foot in it and now hated even more because of the bad memories in it, and watch TV. We’d go see a movie, we’d go shopping. I would prattle on nervously about inane things because I had no idea what to say to him, and he hardly ever talked to me. He would sometimes seem to resent spending money on me, but if I said we didn’t have to go shopping or something then he’d act mad that I vetoed something to do. I know he spent money because he felt guilty. And I liked being able to get things my mom could no longer afford. But it was empty.

My mom and I grew closer and closer and my dad and I grew further and further apart. And when my dad decided to remarry, mere months after the divorce was finalized, that made me and my brothers furious. His wife wasn’t a bad person, although she seemed to resent me and my brothers and go out of her way to not spend time with us. But he was so wrapped up in his feelings for her that he had no interest in what we wanted, and it only got worse from there.

When I finally went off to college, I was relieved I would no longer be forced to see him, but hurt because I never saw him. He never came to visit me. He never came to my concerts unless I was a lead in an opera, or if it was my recital, which meant he only came to maybe five of my performances the entire time I was in college (it could’ve been more than that, but either way it was less than ten). He never came to my performances in high school either. And at my senior recital, the culmination of all the work I had done in college up to that point, he arrived halfway through. I was about to start “Stride la vampa”, an aria about the character’s mother being burned at the stake, and full of vitriol and anger. I had no trouble being angry right then, and you may be able to guess why.

When I did visit him, he was never without his wife. I never got to spend any time with him alone, always with her as well. I always felt unwelcome in her house, uncomfortable, so it was never a long visit either.

I can’t really relate any specific stories about my relationship with my father, other than what I’ve already shared. There have been dozens of things he’s done and said that have hurt me deeply and made me wish I could cut off contact with him. Some days he will seem to act normal and I’ll almost feel like he’s my dad again. Other times he’ll act like someone I don’t even know and say something awful. He complains that I only call him to ask for money, but if I call to say hi and chat about stuff he says he’s busy and doesn’t have time.

All in all, I know my father isn’t a bad person. He’s a good doctor, and a good husband. He just isn’t a good father. He’s good with children, but after a certain age he doesn’t know what to do with them if he doesn’t have stuff in common with them. He doesn’t seem to understand that a relationship is a two-way street. And it hurts me every time he says or does something thoughtless, because he IS my father.

So that’s why I won’t be calling him tomorrow. Or emailing, or texting, or sending a card. Truth be told I’m a little scared of him actually reading this blog entry and calling me up to ream me about it. But I know that’s only because I wish he actually read this blog. I sent him the link, you see, back when I started it. I sent him the link to the post I made forever ago about him. But I know he didn’t read it. And I know he won’t read this one either.

And that’s why I don’t celebrate Father’s Day.

Happy Cookie Day!

 

Oh noes, my neck disappeared!

 

I am happy it's Friday!

Wow, I ate a lot of cookies today. XD My coworkers did too! Many cookies were eaten by all. And I just finished baking the rest of the dough so I can send out cookies in my packages tomorrow too. For tonight I shall vegetate, and tomorrow I shall go to the post office!