breathedout: femme blonde peeks out from behind her martini; woman in tuxedo glowers (celebration)
It's my birthday on Thursday, so here are some things that are making me feel celebratory:

  • [personal profile] greywash and I brought our puppy home today and he is VERY SMALLL!! PUPPY!!


  • This past Sunday we did a tourist day in the city, which included mirror mazes and sea lions and fancy brunch and a fair number of adult beverages, and it was super fun & affirming and a great pressure-release valve to just. Goof off all day. <3


  • So many great outfits at the Met Gala this year; I die.


  • Thursday we have tickets to an NT Live screening of All About Eve starring Gillian Anderson, at a theater near us!


  • For my bday [personal profile] greywash got my registration in a four-day, early-morning yoga immersion at one of our local studios (2 hours/morning for four mornings). Today was morning #2, and so far it's been such a treat to have a little more leisurely, in-depth yoga time. The teacher is highly regarded but I'd never studied with her before; luckily I don't love her more than my two regular teachers, but she's good, and she's had us do some things I'd never tried before. On morning #1 I learned a cool new-to-me handstand trick where you balance your head rather than your heels against the wall, which engages your core muscles and puts you closer to the alignment you need to balance in the middle of the room. Who knew!

  • Had a lovely dinner and conversation with a friend/lover last night about the Bikini Kill reunion tour, managing anxiety, the politics of queer country/city dichotomization, and the link between the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the legacy of thriving direct-services nonprofits in San Francisco (you heard me right). Then we toured the scenic industrial waterfronts of West Oakland on her motorbike.


  • I am taking Friday off work, and other than the massage I have scheduled in the afternoon, plan to spend the entire day reading and writing.


  • Ditto Saturday.


  • Sunday evening is attempt #2 on successfully attending the queer book group I want to try. Which means I'd better get some reading in before then!


  • Last weekend I didn't get all that much writing time (see: well-earned goofing-off day in the city; see also: prep for bringing home puppy), but during the bit I did get, and also thanks to some good conversations with [personal profile] greywash, I feel like I actually substantially moved forward in the planning for the second arc of my Canadian WWI novel. I've shifted from "research as vague fishing expedition in search of a plot-niche concept I could use to scaffold the emotional trajectories of the home-front thread" to "outlining the actual shape of said plot-niche concept, which I now have." Onward & upward!
breathedout: the Side Eye (tm) (dubious)
FRIDAY.
Back in December, I scheduled a dentist appointment for 3pm today. I was willing to wait that long because not many dentists take my insurance, and this one had great Yelp reviews. Over this past week, the office confirmed this appointment with me by phone, email, and two separate texts; basically a reminder every day Monday through Thursday. Cool, I will not forget, I swear. As promised, I show up today at 2:50 and the office is shut. Like. Blinds drawn, door locked, "Please call again" sign up, phone goes to voicemail, SHUT. I wait around until 3:15... nothing. What is going on with this week?!
breathedout: smug blonde next to a typewriter (office life)
MONDAY.
Occasionally I wish I were a visual, rather than a text-based, artist, because there is (to take a random example) a very particular vibe that comes from waking up with an anxiety attack at 3:30am and getting up and going to the gym which I feel, if the cinematographer knew their stuff, could be communicated in a single long shot of the clammy 4am fluorescent lights and the mirrors and the slightly too-loud pop music and the omnipresent TVs all layering news on top of basketball, and the dudes doing powerlifting looking strong and sturdy and not remotely shaky or nauseated with sleep and adrenaline. Painting a picture in words is never quite as elegant as that shot in my head. (Though there are also things words can do better, of course.)

TUESDAY.
Dogs are extremely good, and some of them are also EXTREMELY SMALL.

WEDNESDAY.
About a week ago [personal profile] greywash and I rewatched Episode 2.9 of The Good Place, which features a 10-second clip of a remix of Lorde's "Green Light." As a result, the song got extremely stuck in my head. I listened to it on YouTube to try to exorcise it. That didn't work, so I listened to it about 45 more times. Then I was tired of "Green Light" and just let YouTube play on. It treated me to other songs off the same album, whereupon those songs got stuck in my head, without the original song ever exactly leaving. Then I was like "Ugh, fine, maybe if I just buy her record I can listen to the whole thing and the holistic experience will release me from the earworm." So I did that, and now for the third day running I have a mashup of Lorde's entire Melodrama album viciously stuck in my head. Is it time to break out Dion & the Belmonts' "Runaround Sue"?? I am slowly going mad. Also: six straight hours of conference calls.

THURSDAY.
"Let's invent a new version of "Fuck, Marry, Kill," except instead it's "Discipline, Fire, Resign," and you have to do it all simultaneously and also it's not a game, or fun." (ETA: A comment made me realize I should add: I work in HR. None of these things happened to me personally; I'm just the person who has to carry them out. BUT STILL.)

UGH SELF

Apr. 14th, 2019 08:14 pm
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (Default)
Friends, I have disappointing news, which is that I got the wrong location for my queer bookgroup, meaning that I will not, as anticipated, get to discuss Myra Breckinridge with twelve other folks, so I will not be able to regale you with stories of the no-doubt extremely spirited conversation. Apparently there are two bookstores with the same name, at opposite ends of the East Bay, and I picked the wrong one. *Very sad trombone noise*

The level of my disappointment at this development is... possibly unreasonable. The group meets every month, so it's not like it's a huge deal; I'll just try again next time. And their May selection is Samantha Allen's Real Queer America, a much less controversial-seeming choice which I'd wanted to read anyway. I have another group event—a hike—on the calendar for next Sunday, so it's not like I'll have to wait a month to socialize with other queers IRL, even.

But I'd started seeking out in-person queer socialization opportunities because I've been feeling isolated both in my work and personal lives lately, and I feel like a wider net of community connections is something I sorely need. The work thing is, ugh, whatever, long story short it is my job to sometimes break unpopular news to people, and recently I did that and now everyone is having feelings about said news and a lot of the negativity in those feelings is being directed toward me even though I don't, actually, personally dictate California employment law. As surprising as that fact may be. I think it's just one of those things where it'll be uncomfortable for a while and then we'll all rebuild our connections, but for now it feels pretty lonely and pretty lousy.

On the personal side, I haven't been as interested in dating-type interactions lately, so although I have reconnected with a few lovers/sexfriends who are great and lovely people, that's not really the kind of dynamic I'm craving. And internet- and fandom-wise I feel sort of lonely that I don't have a media source I feel particularly fannish about at the moment. So many folks in my circles, including of course [personal profile] greywash, are super, super into The Magicians but I'm just... not, really; and the stuff about the show that does interest me runs counter to the prevailing fandom and shipping trends. (Also counter to the stuff the showrunners want to spend any energy exploring, APPARENTLY, but that's a post for another day.) The major writing project that I am passionate about right now is an original one, which is further isolating. I didn't really realize, I think, that despite the often-toxic atmosphere of Tumblr and the way the infinite-scroll, constant-refresh setup poorly impacts my mental health, I'd come to rely on just the massive number of connections and types of connections I'd made there over the years: no matter which part of my personality I was expressing at any given moment, there were probably some folks who related with interest. But I can't really support heavy engagement on more than one social media platform and I don't think it'd be good for me to go back there, so: no way out but forward.

All of which is, you know, all well and good, it's just the way things happen sometimes. A month or so back I got on Meetup, joined a bunch of queer groups in the area, RSVPed to some events, and I really felt like "Okay! I've got this! I'm taking responsibility for my feelings and looking after supplying a lack in my life! True self-care is investing the effort up-front to get one's needs met sustainably in the long term!" All of which still holds true, but having the first thing I put on my calendar rescheduled (this was the hike that is now next weekend) and the second thing I put on my calendar fucked up due to my own navigational confusion, is surprisingly demoralizing! It feels like I've put in all this hard work of doing outreach, researching logistics, preparing reading, psyching myself up, and leaving the house... all for no payoff. Even though really, as I should remind myself, the payoff is just slightly delayed.

Anyway that's my whining for the evening. I will now drink Pinot Grigio and read about amazing sex workers in India doing practical, peer-based AIDS activism in the early 2000s and actually making a difference while punitive, shaming, nonconsensual government-sponsored programs with huge budgets failed. And will be fortified for the week to come. So there.
breathedout: femme blonde peeks out from behind her martini; woman in tuxedo glowers (celebration)
Well! I haven't been around over the past few days for the good but honestly kind of exhausting reason that I've been visiting my parents, in my hometown. Being recently retired, my parents now have a RAGING social life, oh my god. I socialized more in the past five days than I had in the previous five months (excluding [personal profile] greywash, of course, who doesn't count as "people" for the purposes of requiring recharging after hanging out with her). A quick bulleted list of trip highlights, as I wait in the Portland airport for my flight to start boarding:

  • Went clothes-shopping with my mom (who is great fun on this kind of excursion), with the goal of refreshing some of my work staples that are 10-15 years old. We had kind of bizarrely good luck with sales: a beautiful $80 blouse marked down to $20, three $75 shirts marked down to $7 each, I could go on. I ended up with two new pairs of pants, five new shirts, a stellar red Lunar New Year dress and a plaid pencil skirt for under $200.


  • My parents have a nine-month-old puppy who is adorbsable and also a lot of work. One key element of their newly-amped-up social life is the "puppy happy hour" at which some other puppy owners in the area come over, the dogs run wild, and the people drink wine. So I met some nice people with some lovely dogs.


  • One of the puppy owners plays in a folk/bluegrass band, so we went to see a gig of theirs at a local joint. Because Portland is a small town, it turned out that one of my former middle school teachers was also in attendance. Also the manager of Sock Dreams, at whom I fangirled a bit about their merchandise. Other highlights of this outing: the bartender put the puppy & kitten channel on the TVs instead of sports, and passed out free bacon at intermission. (Which I can't eat, but it was still very Portland.)


  • I had lunch with a friend/former lover of mine who has been struggling over the past eight months or so with her second divorce. It seems like she's in a much better place now than she has been, and it was really nice to catch up. Also she took me to this new vegetarian Thai place on Division (not surprising it's new since literally everything on Division has been replaced since I moved away), where the pineapple fried rice was delicious.


  • Tried two new-to-me styles of workout! In both cases I got the friends-and-family discount: the friend with whom I had lunch is a functional fitness/strength training instructor, so she put me on the list to try out one of her classes. It was... probably not really my "thing" in any pursuing-it-long-term sense, but it was fun to try out, and to see where she works and what she does with her days. Then one of my parents' friends, who has her black belt in Taekwondo and co-teaches a class with some other blackbelts, put me on the guest list for that class as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since I'm so into Ashtanga & other structured/“form”-based styles of yoga, this was much more my speed. I thought it was particularly cool that the structure of the class meant that so many different ages and levels of practitioners could practice together: there were probably forty people in the class, ranging from about 7 to about 70 years old, at all experience levels, and everyone was SO kind and welcoming to the newbie.


  • My mom, who briefly owned a dressmaking business back in the 70s, has been getting back into sewing since her retirement & has been very generously been making me garments, including some fabulous lounging pyjamas that she finished while I was in town. She's working on a blouse for me right now, so we went looking for buttons. We eventually found some in a local yarn shop, where I also bought some buttons of my own, and also yarn for the Cypress vest by Brooklyn Tweed. (You can see the yarn I picked up here.)


  • We had a dinner party with my godparents, my parents, and my parents' close friends and neighbors who bought the house across the street where my childhood best friend grew up. The dinner party was in my BFF's former house, and it was a really bizarre experience to be back in this house where I'd spent so much time throughout my elementary, middle, and high school years, but redecorated. The dinner was lovely, though.


  • No trip to Portland is complete without a trip to Powell's, and I got to commune with the mothership. I hope to do a Reading Wednesday post later today, & I'll talk more about what I got & some other reflections in that post, but: it was lovely. Also, having just finished a watch-through of Leverage, it was fun to have lunch at the brewery where its last season was filmed. (Especially since said brewery is about to close in March. Sadface.)


  • My parents are really into Schitt's Creek right now, which I hadn't seen, so we watched some episodes of it. Good Christopher Guest-y fun; Catherine O'Hara's face is always a highlight. I'm kind of surprised I haven't heard more about this show via Tumblr/DW/social media, since it features an explicitly-identified pansexual character (as in, the word "pansexual" is said, and then defined, onscreen) who is also a lovable trainwreck.


  • Somewhere in there I managed to write a couple of thousand words of the Good Place bodyswap story (still in need of a title). I'm currently having that realization, relatable to many long-form writers, where I thought this story would top out at 10k and it's currently 9k and only about halfway done. OH WELL, it'll be what it'll be.


I'd better pack up & head over to my gate, but hopefully I can write more about the reading portion when I'm safely back home.
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (Default)
[personal profile] breathedout: for the half hour I’ve been sitting at the [airport] gate, no matter what has been playing on the tv, the closed captioning just scrolls through the sentence:
[personal profile] breathedout: “I have always tried to be involved in articulating a sensible solution to this, this chain to a number of folks”
[personal profile] breathedout: over and over again
[personal profile] breathedout: right now it’s playing over video of someone frosting a cake
[personal profile] greywash: ahahahahhahahahahaha oh dear
[personal profile] breathedout: now it’s advertising a documentary about richard nixon
[personal profile] breathedout: now it’s narrating schoolchildren making sculptures out of water bottles, and so on
[personal profile] breathedout: even though I know it’s nonsense, my brain keeps looking at it & trying to make meaning by connecting it to the image
[personal profile] breathedout: now it’s pretending to be the story mark zuckerberg’s sister is telling a reporter about the pranks she & mark used to play on their mom
[personal profile] greywash: wowwwww
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (Default)
I have a favorite treadmill at the gym: all the way at the end, isolated from most of the TVs and many of the people, easy escape routes in the event of unwelcome attention. Previously, on the TV in front of this treadmill at the time I usually go, my gym had been playing FOX News. Which: really, guys? Read the room. Or indeed any room in this geographical area.

Anyway, recently—probably because lots of us complained—they switched from the news to reruns of Supernatural. And I am no great fan of this show, but I guess everything is relative because I'm over here running my five miles like "SAMMY!! 😃 DEAN!! 😃 SOME BEAUTIFUL WOMAN WHO IS STYLED TO LOOK ‘WHOLESOME’ AND SO WILL PROBABLY DIE IMMEDIATELY!! 😃 STERLING FROM LEVERAGE!! 😃 LESBIAN FELICIA DAY WHO IS NOT EVEN ON THIS EPISODE BUT THEORETICALLY COULD BE!! 😃 I LOVE YOU CRAZY KIDS, WHAT'S NEW IN YOUR WACKY PIE-EATING ADVENTURES!! 😃😃😃"

Whisperspace )
breathedout: plotting mischief in underwear (conspirators)
Today at brunch, after I assured our rather attentive waiter that there really was nothing else he could do for me today, [personal profile] greywash said she gets a kick out of it when dudes put the moves on me when we're out at a restaurant.

Me: It seems like there have been a LOT of them lately!
Her, cackling: Yeah! I really enjoy it.
Me: In what way, exactly?
Her, gesturing expansively: Just.............. narratively?


I mean! How else could I have expected her to answer? I am disappointed in myself for even needing to ask. <3 <3

In the spirit of which, here's a funny story: last night I was drinking, watching The Magicians with [personal profile] greywash, and texting a friend about logistics for an upcoming weekend trip I'm taking to visit her. My friend was saying she and her fiancée are really enjoying the wedding planning process, creating a ritual that will be meaningful for them and their community. "Yes," I texted back. "[Ex] and I enjoyed crafting ours too." Except fucking autocorrect changed "ours" to "lies." So what I, already on record as an anti-matrimony curmudgeon divorcée and aficionada of fictional untruth, actually said was: "[Ex] and I enjoyed crafting lies too."

THEN, right as I hit send something critical happened on TV (for "something critical," read, probably: Eliot and Quentin were having a cuddle). So I looked away from my phone for 2-3 minutes, during the whole of which my friend was like "... ????? the actual fuck, man," before I finally realized what had happened and vociferously apologized.

Anyway. Please narratively enjoy this anecdote of how I inadvertently acted like even more of an asshole than I actually, in real life, am.
breathedout: plotting mischief in underwear (conspirators)
that about 80% of the time, when I try to read the word "picspam" my brain translates it as "priapism," and let me tell you that leads to some hot takes
breathedout: plotting mischief in underwear (conspirators)
I know the fannish world is collectively over the trend of retooling childhood favorites to make them dark and gritty. THAT SAID, the marquee on the movie theater near my yoga studio currently reads "MARY POPPINS VICE" and I can't stop laughing about this unexpected yet vivid AU.
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (Default)
I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother, who died earlier this month.

Or more accurately, I should say: since earlier this month, when it happened, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother’s death.



*



It’s hard to know how to process this death, because, to be honest—and I can say this in part because few people from my “real life” read this blog—my grandmother was a very difficult person. It’s hard to know how to mourn a person who was difficult in her particular way. Throughout my life I felt my efforts at knowing her were persistently repulsed. Now she is gone, and I never will.

What to do with that?



*



For the last sixteen years, ever since my grandfather died, my mother was her mother’s primary caretaker. This has consumed an enormous amount of my mother’s time and energy: an amount that often seemed to me unfairly gendered. My mother is the only daughter in a family of brothers, and my grandmother belonged to a generation that unabashedly upheld different standards for women and girls than it did for men and boys. So even though my mother did so much more for her mother than either of my uncles did, my grandmother was still dismissive of her daughter’s intelligence and abilities, while on the other hand privileging any opinion expressed by either of her sons—or, indeed, by my father, or even my male partner. This arrangement seemed to me, I think reasonably, to be radically unfair.

It also meant that, whenever I went home to visit, my reconnection with my parents was punctuated by mutually awkward, time-limited interactions with my grandmother. I’m almost 37 now, and my grandmother moved north when I was a sophomore in college. That covers a lot of ground in terms of my life, if not in terms of hers. She was there to comment on my college papers (”Oh my, people are still reading Jane Eyre! Why would you bother, I read that in high school.”). She was there to sniff at the shortness of the skirts I wore (”I hope you are wearing LOTS of underwear with that!”). She was there to deride—or, if not deride, at least fail to grok—all my long-term creative projects after college, be they musical or fiber-arts-based (”That seems like MUCH too much work to be worth your time”). She was there to comment on my jewelry, which I never intended anyone to take for valuable (”Costume jewelry. Imitation emerald: not. Worth. A thing.”) She was there, disapproving yet weirdly proud, when my partner and I announced that we were going to have a commitment ceremony—an event she called a wedding. “You’ll change your name,” she said, like it was a demand rather than a question. “No,” I said. “I’ve lived almost thirty years with my name; I’m attached to it.” “Well!” she said. “If you want to be a [LAST NAME] all your life!” She delivered this line, in front of my father and two of my father’s siblings, as if being a member of my father’s family were a fate she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. She probably didn’t mean it that way.

Maybe she did!

Who can say.

She gave me her wedding ring, anyway. I’m not a big jewelry person but it was beautiful: they bought it in 1948, but the engagement band (later fused to the wedding band) looked vaguely Art Nouveau, and although the diamonds were modest, they were well proportioned in their settings. I wore it for almost three years and then took it off when I was let’s-just-say-divorced; and later I moved five times; and now I’m not sure where it ended up. Strangely, a couple of days before my grandmother had the first of the series of heart attacks that killed her, I was struck by the urge to search for it; but it wasn’t anywhere I looked. I’m tempted to feel guiltily sentimental about this. But there’s one thing I know for sure. If my grandmother were alive, she would berate me for losing it for one reason and one reason only: because the ring was appraised at $600, and I might need to sell it someday.

After all, she has a point. $600 is $600. Having $600 and no ring would be better than having no ring and no $600.



*



These days I work for an organization that operates out of two major regional offices, a Northern California regional office and a Southern California regional office. For my first three years of employment with them I worked out of the Southern California regional office; and then, a few months ago, I moved; and now I work out of the Northern California regional office. When my coworkers heard that my grandmother had died, the offices sent around separate condolence cards; I received the Northern one first. I only just got the Southern one the other day. It was particularly comforting because I’d worked so closely with many of the signatories. In fact, my SoCal coworkers had hunted down a couple of former employees with whom I’d worked especially closely, and got their contributions on the card. I found this really touching.

One coworker, who I like a lot and with whom I have been working lately on a project, wrote: So sorry to hear of your grandmother’s transition. Despite how genuinely poignant I found the card, I couldn’t stifle my immediate impulse to laugh at this comment. “Transition” reads to me like a Human Resources euphemism. Like someone fired my grandmother for her poor performance, or let her go due to an unexpected shortfall in the budget. Like her position, unfortunately, had been terminated, and so she would have to move on. Or else like she herself decided, voluntarily, to take a more advantageous position at another organization.

That last possibility is probably closest to the truth. She hadn’t had much use for life, for some years.



*



I felt bad about laughing at my coworker’s inscription, because I know that many people genuinely do view death as a transition. Lots of folks believe that we living people reside in one space and the dead continue to exist in another. Personally, I don’t particularly share that belief. I pretty much believe that when you die you’re dead, at least for any discrete or individualistic definition of the concept of “you.”

I know this sounds cruel, but honestly, when I think of my grandmother, I hope I’m correct in my metaphysical instincts. She was a very unhappy person; she spent basically her whole life miserable. She told us all, many times, that she was ready to cease. I wouldn’t like to think that she’s now being forced to be miserable somewhere else, to hold herself together against her will, still confined to the boundaries of her inviolate ego. I hope, for her, that she persists no longer—or else, that she’s free.



*



My grandmother and I had very little in common, but there were a couple things. We were born within a few days of each other, and we were both Tauruses. I don’t believe in astrology any more than I believe in life everlasting, but my long-time ex, who believes in it with a seriousness that never stopped surprising me, once did my whole chart. Not only is my sun in Taurus but also my Mars and Venus. I’m not sure what that means, but what I took away from the experience is the idea that I am emphatically bull-like. My grandmother also struck me as an interpersonal bull. I’ve often thought that maybe it’s why we didn’t get along: head-butting.

One time, though, when I’d just graduated from college and didn’t yet have a paying job, my grandmother—who usually relied on my mother for both inspiration and execution when it came to gift-giving—took it upon herself to make me the graduation present of two months’ rent on my apartment. She got in touch with my landlord and everything: it was all taken care of. I told her, the next time I saw her, that only another Taurus would understand what a perfect gift that had been. I don’t think my grandmother believed in astrology, either, but she seemed to relate to what I was saying. She agreed that we Tauruses share some special understanding the value of rootedness. Of belonging. Of homecoming.



*



I guess that really, a lot of what I’m thinking about as I think about my grandmother’s death is my own relationship with my mother—and with mothers, in general. In addition to the woman who raised me, I’ve had a number of surrogate mothers over the years. This number includes, for example, my childhood piano teacher, an 80+ year old woman who told me, at age 11, that in order properly to play Chopin I should go out and have love affairs in order to get my heart broken. It also includes the mother of my former long-term partner—the one whose name I never took—who I used to refer to as my “mother-out-law” due to living in ill-defined liminal sin with her son. I’ve been thinking about her lately, too, since I’m currently knitting a sweater out of some yarn I bought during a trip with her to San Francisco about 15 years ago.

I had almost as fractious a relationship with my mother-out-law as I did with my grandmother. It was the same kind of mutually unconnective dynamic, in which we repeatedly tried to make contact over the gulf separating us, and repeatedly washed up on opposite shores. Once, when I was still a baby of 22 or 23, my mother-out-law straight-out demanded of me: “Give me intimacy!” I may be misremembering, but I think she actually stamped her foot when she said it, though she didn’t raise her voice: in her milieu, that wasn’t done. When this happened, I didn’t know how to respond. I was shocked and uncomfortable. I had no context for what she meant when she said “intimacy.” I was too young and not sufficiently self-possessed to tell her: That’s not how intimacy works.

I feel like, if that thing with my former mother-out-law happened now, I would know better what to say. But these days it’s less of an issue. I don’t expect that my current mother-out-law will ever demand undefined intimacy with me as her rightful due; unless maybe I’ve told her this story and she’s decided to tease me with an engineered jolt of déjà vu. But if I’m gaining on my surrogate maternal relationships, this whole thing has brought home to me that I still have no experience doing what my mom just did: helping a parent to die. And I will have to, at some point. I am an only child, and pushing forty. I have no context for that kind of intimacy, either, but make no mistake: I will have to give it.



*



I remember lying on my parents’ bed, one night when I still lived in Portland and had driven across town to visit them. My mother was lying next to me on the bed, talking on the phone to her brother. There had been some crisis with my grandmother. There were often crises with my grandmother, and the burden of dealing with them usually fell on my mother, because she was the only sibling who lived in the same city—or indeed, the same state. I remember lying on the bed and listening to my uncle’s canned-sounding voice through my mom’s little cell phone speaker, arguing that if my grandmother was getting too difficult then my mother should move her down closer to my uncles. Or that she should hire help. My uncle said that he would help out, if she needed money. There was no need to say this part on the phone, but my uncle was a childless widower who earlier in his life had made a lot of money and invested it well. So he could afford to hire a nurse, above and beyond what my grandmother could pay for herself.

My mother said that she wouldn’t abandon her mom. She said that my grandmother had been abandoned over and over again by her own mother. (This is true: my great-grandmother was a flapper and a passionate hula dancer and guitar player and a heavy drinker and a prolific lover and a terrible, negligent parent. I take after her, except that I never had a child.) My mother said that her mother had never known what it was like to have stability until she married my grandfather; and that then she was too young, and couldn’t trust it.

And then, my mother pointed out, my grandmother had suffered other abandonments. Her eldest son had been killed in a plane crash in his early 20s, and after that my grandmother, as the cliché goes, was never the same. My mother, that day on the phone with her brother, said that she wouldn’t put my grandmother through that again. She wouldn’t abandon her. My mother put out a hand and held onto my ankle, which was the easiest part of me for her to reach. Her voice was unsteady. She said that she couldn’t imagine losing a child. She said she just couldn’t imagine that.

We were all silent, trying to imagine it: my mother, her brother, and me.



*



Sometimes I think about how my grandmother would have responded to someone demanding of her, “Give me intimacy!”

I literally cannot fathom it.

Yet somehow, trying to picture the scene still makes me laugh.
breathedout: femme blonde peeks out from behind her martini; woman in tuxedo glowers (celebration)
I wrote up writing- and reading-related reflections-and-goals posts, and then I realized... there is also everything else in my life! So I guess I should do a reflections & goals post about that stuff, too.

Work )

Yoga )

Body )

Travel and Socializing )

Money and House )

So, you know. That's enough to be getting on with, I think. Culled from the above, goals are:

  • Make flashcards and study for professional certification
  • Take the certification test
  • Settle into a regular yoga schedule, 3x a week
  • Improve time for 10K (eventually get this under an hour)
  • Check out aerial/handstand/acro-yoga classes
  • Portland in February
  • San Jose & San Diego in March
  • Further travel plans?
  • House budgeting
  • House renovation
  • Set up retirement plan
  • Formulate charitable giving budget
breathedout: recoiling in horror in a library (horrified)
Tfw you're like "it's okay that I'm still sick and I have to go back to work, it'll be an easy day just catching up on the mathy part of my job" and then you spend the entire workday delicately and diplomatically apologizing for not having caught someone else's mistake a month ago, while frantically racing against the clock to fix the problem said mistake caused; and then, after eight hours of that, having sucessfully squeaked under the wire with the fix, you figure you'll decompress by just folding a load of laundry and putting it away, that's an easy task that will make you feel competent, and so you sort your laundry into stacks and take the first stack, which is actually just a single dress, to the part of the closet with the dresses, and you're looking for a hanger to hang the dress on but there are no free hangers in the dress section, but it looks like there's an empty hanger on the other side of the hangy closet thing, so you reach around to try to pull it out but it's tangled on the hanger next to it, and that hanger bumps the hanger holding the hangy closet thing, and the hangy closet thing falls down and breaks the hangers on either side of it, and actually neither of those other two hangers were empty after all but only held camisoles which had half-slipped off of them, so you're standing there with a dress in one hand, trying to get the camisoles back onto their broken hangers with the other, and then you lift the hangy closet thing back up onto the hanger that was holding it and you actually manoeuvre it back onto the place where it was hanging but then right when you let go the little fabric carrier on the upper corner of it rips off and it falls to the floor AGAIN, except this time it does so first-one-side-then-the-other so that everything inside it also falls out, and then you're like "it's okay, I'm a seamstress, I have sewing shit I can use to fix it" but then you realize your sewing basket is in the half of the closet that you can't open because the door is blocked by the pile of clothes recently fallen on the floor on this side of the closet, and then you're like "IT'S OKAY, I'M A KNITTER, I HAVE KNITTING SHIT I CAN FIX IT WITH" and then there you are, kneeling in your closet on a pile of all your pajamas and workout gear and broken hangers and also some dresses that are like, what the fuck is that thing, why do you even own that, shoving $50/skein merino-silk yarn through the top of a $26 cotton hangy closet thing with a blunt tapestry needle, over all of which you're leaking snot because you're still, in fact, sick.

BUT YOU FUCKIN TRIUMPH IN THE END.
breathedout: A woman with an extremely dubious facial expression (extremely dubious)
The answer to the request "Please give [personal profile] greywash and [personal profile] breathedout a New Year's where one of them is not sick" should NOT have been a New Year's where we're both sick. Unacceptable. 0/10.
breathedout: A blonde in a fur, with a topless brunette (ooh la la)
I’m pretty much always looking to dress like a slutty lesbian version of my own grandmother.


—Me in January 2015, apparently
breathedout: recoiling in horror in a library (horrified)
As I am preparing for my parents' upcoming visit (after our actual Christmas, which will be spent elsewhere), I keep remembering this exchange I had with my mother when I was six or seven.

Me: "Why are you cleaning more than usual? Don't you want Tutu and Grandad to get a picture of how we normally live?"

My mother, RIGHTFULLY AGHAST: "Honey. No. No!!"

Poor Mom.

Whisperspace )
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (Default)

Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:

  • A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning). 
  • Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage. 
  • I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
  • Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
  • Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both. 
  • Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????). 
  • The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.  
  • There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
  • Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned. 

Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles. 

(This post had 93,600 notes on Tumblr.)

breathedout: femme blonde peeks out from behind her martini; woman in tuxedo glowers (celebration)
Well, the online world is on fire (figuratively), but over in my meatspace life this week marks the third time in three years that I've been told to give myself a promotion and a raise.

I have to say, it doesn't get old.

And will also help to pay for my credit card charges from two weeks ago, when my online life was okay but my meatspace world was on fire (literally).
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