2) I think the key to me being happy and satisfied with anything in life (work, relationships, hobbies, stupid household chores, etc.) is that I need to struggle. If it is too easy I despair.

Yes, all of it.

Issue #2 is a bit less heady in that I project all my woes onto others. . .and then feel shitty about it. See, on your burfday, people like to do things for you that they think will make you happy. They really try to enforce that whole “it’s your day!” crap. But lo! what if they do anything short of a first class job of interpreting and actualizing your inner dreams? Wah! Nobody understands or cares about me blubber, blubber. Also I give myself a hard time over the stupid things that I do want, which are either not possible, don’t make any sense, or contradict each other because I’m the kid who always wanted a unicorn and my parents to get back together. “Oh no, Mom, I don’t want any things, just impossible concepts, please.”

Issue #3 is the shame that fills me upon recognizing the absurdity and injustice of my self-created ethereal disaster. None of it is anything real and I’m retarded.

Issue #4 is me wanting to scrap the whole thing.

Issue #5 is me not really wanting to scrap the whole thing but not knowing how to have a good fucking birthday.

For ’80s Night, oh yeah!

(Quick tidbit: Mother’s Day was originally a day a bunch of mothers got together and voiced their opposition to war, appealing to people on behalf of their children who go off and die for no good reason. Some non-mothers thought that was cute so they made it a holiday, sort of a mom-centric Memorial Day with a heavier pro-peace slant)

OK, we took a day that was supposed to be about mother’s standing up and saying war is bad and isn’t that cool and we should listen to and respect our mums–a great thing to observe–and turned it into a generalized celebration that means nothing. It’s not about how strong and courageous mothers are–it celebrates how they’re the “best!” It’s not about all the things that moms have accomplished or what they contribute (besides offspring, that is)–it celebrates all the aspects of motherhood that are already overly romanticized and valued, and in my mind harmfully stereotyped.

The fact that our “celebration” actually totally ignores the desires of the ones being celebrated is what really kicks me in the tuchus. Mother’s Day exemplifies how truly unvalued mothers–and women in general–are when you zoom out beyond the family unit by warping a day they tried to use to promote awareness of the harsh realities of war into a day they’re told to shut up and get flowers shoved in their faces.

Re: Birthdays

I propose that the true tragedy of being born is that never in life will we ever be that close to anyone or anything again. Besides brief spiritual revelations, however one may come by them, everything in life is so painfully separate–and it is our fault. The price is a constant struggle for meaning, for intimacy with greatness.

I am always, always so very lonely.

Late Saturday night we thought we’d hop in the hot tub before going to bed, but after getting in we realized the water wasn’t quite warm enough, and actually seemed to be getting colder, so we decided to go back inside. The fact that it was raining and seemed to be getting worse helped, too. Thus it was with visions of hot cocoa and a warm fireplace that we discovered we had locked ourselves out.

So there we were: wet, cold, in the rain at midnight in fucking Goldbar, and we had 2 robes, 2 towels, an umbrella, a locked car and a locked house. There was a neighbor down a ways on one side, but slogging through the mud while half-naked to wake up a potentially angry stranger in the middle of the night seemed like a good course to remain in the Last Resort category. Therefore we went around to the sliding back door and there was a nice heavy dowell placed so it wouldn’t open more than 1/4″ at the bottom and 2″ at the top. We went around to the kitchen window–another dowell (in addition to that squeeze-type of window lock). Both bedroom windows? DOWELLED. All the other windows were not of the openning variety, and we were beginning to consider which would be the cheapest to break. Fortunately, the dowell in the main bedroom window was placed at an angle rather than laying flat in the groove of the frame, so I went back to that one to mess around with it. To our delight the sliding panel itself popped right off and Ian boosted me up and in, I plopped onto the bed with muddy feet, and unlocked the damned front door.

HURRAY! We did it! We did it together!

It might disappoint Mr. Dane Cook to know that neither of us was willing to play the “Oooh, I don’t know, maaaaaaaan!” role in the B & E scenario. We both adopted the “LET’S FUCKING DO THIS” character and found it to be much more useful. Of course, we’ve both broken into our own homes and various relatives’ homes, but forcing entry into somebody else’s house, even if you’re renting it, is waaaaay scarier.

AND BADASS!

In three years, I plan to have finished my Master’s and be hopping onto the Occupational Therapy career-boat. Ian will still be in school, whether he’ll have his Bachelor’s by then or not, and will drop his working hours to part-time to take his turn as a full-time student. Maybe we will be buying a house. But, since we’re planning for me to become the primary income provider of the household, the very beginning of a career is a crappy time to get pregnant, have a baby, and then breastfeed.

This is why a foster child sounds really nice. The gob’ment gives you a bunch of parenting classes and puts a potty-trained, solid-food-eating, love-needing chillun’ in your home, and then they pay for food, clothes, and health insurance. If it’s terrifying it doesn’t matter because it’s temporary. The loving and caring for a child are the easy parts, what we need to practice are our patience and time budgeting, which fostercare amply provides. It seems to me the ultimate parenting training wheels.

Is this awesome
(Y/N)?

For the sake of laziness (not simplicity which has far too many practicalities to its credit because simple and practical are not the same damn thing) I’m going to adopt some terminology to keep my two jobs straight. I will from now on refer to my front desk job as “working Upstairs” and to the homeless women’s center as “working Downstairs”.

OK, so this morning I was Downstairs and feeling very tired, sick, and just generally lackadaisical. So instead of socializing or rearranging inventory between stuff-to-do times I read from one of our many Binders of Interesting Stuff (one is all about common health issues in the shelter environment, one is a comprehensive, although out-of-date, compilation of every social service you can imagine in the Puget Sound area–you get the idea). Unlike the others its content wasn’t informative, but intended only to keep us poor “Servers” from getting too disheartened. It was full of probably a few years worth of those Weekly Reflections I wrote about before.

Anyways, the disturbing thing that I learned and wanted for whatever reason to declare on this here interweb is that, apparently, “God”–as a word, as it is practiced–doesn’t mean anything to me. I read the quotes, poems and stories at a fairly stable rate and with a fairly stable level of interest in understanding what I was reading, and then whenever I saw the word “God” or “Lord” I quickened my pace or skipped over that section entirely. It’s like when you’re reading a story that really has your attention and you come across a long foreign name, or maybe some French or Latin phrase that supposedly all haughty intellectuals are supposed to know, but you don’t, or any group of words that to you just looks like a string of irrelevant letters. If it’s French or Latin maybe you’ll search for a root you recognize, but if it’s a name in something that looks like a click language and you can’t fathom how to pronounce it you probably skip right over it. (Example: when I was reading Anna Karenina there were so many goddamn characters and all of them had Russian names, a language I know diddly about, that when I read names I basically scanned it for a series of letters and that’s what I knew the characters by. Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky? That was Stiva Arkd-Obsky, and so on). It’s as simple as tihs tnhig ebevyrdoy kowns auobt tkhnas to teh ietrnnet. We don’t really read, generally. We scan for things we recognize; we search for what we already understand to gain a larger/deeper understanding.

Well, I don’t understand the word “God”:
PROBLEM PROBLEM PROBLEM.

It has too many conflicting meanings, too wide a range of perceptions, for it to mean anything at all. I read it and I see an abyss of generalizations. I try to find meaning in the context, like I would with any word I don’t understand, and all I see is the author’s laziness. They assume I know what they mean by “god’s will,” “god’s love,” they think I know who their audience is when they lament, “Lord, grant me ___” and “thank you, Lord.” I guess my gauge is this: if you erase each sentence that contains “Lord” and “God” is there any weight left to the work? Absolutely sometimes, but in my experience the answer is more often, “No, not a lot.” And that’s lazy and irritating and utterly unmoving. My newly discovered problem that maybe I shouldn’t allow to be a problem is that I feel even more ridiculously isolated from the world’s gigantic population of Folk Who Believe In “God.” I want to understand SO BADLY, but we seem to be stupidly unable to communicate because of a lame vocab discrepancy.

This is one of many reasons why I like old-timey gospel music. I can tell what they mean because the music more than makes up for language’s ambiguity.

Ugh! I want to run away to somewhere warm and sunny where everyone eats fruit every day and there is no violence or hatred because we all love each other and sing together and fuck and the essence of life and wisdom fills the air like a honey-scented smog of fulfillment.

Er. . .that’s all for now.

I shouldn’t have to slosh through the rain to fill in a bubble that says we shouldn’t give huge pay outs TO property owners who want to break the law. I shouldn’t have to request that we NOT take away millions of dollars from education and give it to our wealthiest citizens. I don’t see why I have to OK every hmm and haw about paying for infrastructure repair, maintenance, and transportation expansion because it ISN’T FUCKING OPTIONAL. And lastly, how is allowing adult entertainers to make money a public issue? I DON’T CARE.

But I also don’t trust everyone else to not be retarded, so I vote anyways.

Funny but similarly cynical side note: the page with Ian’s name on it (and however many other voters whose last names come before Albert) was lost, so he had to fill out a provisional ballot. So ha ha! to Ian for being too much of a hippie for The Man to want him to vote.