Lunch Break

I don’t know why I feel the need to share my life’s story with new people. It’s like I’m asking them to form an opinion about me before they’ve really earned the right. We have a new receptionist, and so far this morning, I’ve confided in her with things I don’t want to tell anybody else in my life. Why? Someday, this will bite me in the ass and someone will use the sensitive information I give them against me. I know this, but does it stop me from spilling my guts? No.

Maybe it is because I don’t feel that there is really anyone else in my life that I can confide in at this point. I used to have a couple… now I am at odds with those people or circumstances have cut-off our relationship. I don’t share everything with my boyfriend that I used to share with my previous boyfriend or my mom or my used-to-be best friend. It’s too much for him to have to wear all those hats. So he wears the boyfriend one, and even that wears him out once in a while.

I need a mother. I have a mother, but I need that relationship again. I so desperately want it with my mother, but it can never be the same as it once was. I can never tell her all the things that are concerning me, she doesn’t want to hear them. She loves me and she wants me to talk to her; she thinks she wants me to confide in her. But she doesn’t agree with my lifestyle, so how would she be able to handle the types of conversation I need to have. Conversation that she thinks only married people should have. How can I go to her with those things if she doesn’t even want to believe I’m experiencing them.

I’m 7 pounds heavier than I was 30 days ago. I’m 3 days late. I’m not super-concerned yet, but yesterday and today, my boobs have been hurting. And, though I could just be getting fat, my stomach has grown considerably and I can’t really suck it in anymore. I’m concerned.

I took a pregnancy test that came out negative… but I’m not ruling anything out for a while. We’ll see if my period comes.

I’m scared. I would like to talk to my mom about this. But I’m pretty sure her first response would be tears. She would cry because she would be so heart-broken that her first grandchild would be born out of wed-lock. She’d be convinced that the father and I, and possibly the baby, were all condemned to hell. She would be concerned about what everybody at her church would think.

This doesn’t affect my thinking on how I would handle the pregnancy or how I would love the baby. It doesn’t change how I would raise the child. It just make me so upset that my mom, as much as she wants to be, can’t really be the support I would need for something like this.

I don’t regret any decision I’ve made in my life. I’m so happy where I am, and I’m excited for the future.  I just wish that my relationship with my mom had more substance to it so that it could have survived through all of the disagreements.

I’m constantly stuck between doing what’s best for me, and what would make her happy. It shouldn’t be that way.

To my future child, no matter what stage in my life that you come into– no matter what age I am, what my beliefs are, or how you are received by others, I will always love you. I will always do what is best for you. I will always want you to be happy. I will respect your individuality and encourage you to become your own person. I promise. I will be your mother no matter what differences we may have. I love you already. I will love you forever.

——3 Days later, I started. I’m not pregnant, I’ve lost those extra pounds, and I’m guessing that the gain was all that caused the delay. I guess I should have been happy. Is it bad that part of me was disappointed.

I’m definitely not ready for a kid… but what will happen when I do get pregnant? What will my relationship with my family be like at that point? Jared has said that he doesn’t want our children around my mom. Will I want them to be influenced by her? If things don’t improve, I don’t know that I will trust her with them.

Yeah, I’m definitely not ready for that kind of life-change.

I’m trying not to resent my family….

Disclaimer: Do not read if you’re feelings are going to get hurt. I’m just being honest.  The following events actually occurred, but names and places have been changed for the protection of those involved.

I feel like a brat, complaining about this, but my family angers me with their selfishness.

Last year, I got a guilt trip from my mom for not letting her pick which day around my 21st birthday would be spent with the family. She was trying to figure out how to keep me from “partying.” It went well despite it all. I had a great time with my family, at least, with my “extended” family and my boyfriend. I always enjoy my “adopted” sister and her kids more than my own siblings.

We had a bar-b-que by the pool at her apartment, Jaime and Chris provided the food, mom bought a cake. Mom said she would get me a present soon because she couldn’t afford one at the moment with the recent move and paying off a full new living room set.

My sister wanted to take me to get mani/pedis together. They were more expensive than she planned so she gave me $15 dollars and I payed the rest of the $90 bill. It was my fault. I told her she should get hers done too or it wouldn’t be any fun. I offered to pay for mine…. and the tip. My mistake. After all, I only spent $150 on her birthday dinner and drinks.

Of course, my mom forgot about my present…. I never brought it up. That would be childish.

Christmas came and went and my mom couldn’t afford much for all of her kids because she had just bought a new entertainment center.

This summer, my mom started planning a trip to New York to visit my sister. She invited my “niece”  Brooke along since she loves all things fashionable and it would be around the time of her birthday. Brooke’s parents paid for her plain ticket as a gift. Mom and Dad paid for David’s, as a birthday gift (tho I don’t know if that’s his big coming-of-age present for his 18th).
 Not sure about Andy, but he seems to be rich these days, saving up for an engagement ring, flying to AZ to meet the parents…. what’s one more airfare to NYC?

My mom invited me if I could pay my way. She invited Jared under the condition that we either be married by then or he stayed in a separate hotel room. No, thank you.

My birthday came and went. Mom forgot about it. Apparently everybody else did too. I feel retarded cuz I had to call my brother to try to plan having lunch with them. I thought they’d turn in into a dinner with the extended family, but it wasn’t. Mom, David, Andy and his girlfriend met me at Super Salad at 1pm… Mom said I owed her $30 for the phone bill. So, I handed it over, and she payed the tab with it. Yay…

After lunch, the rest of the family and Jared did join us at the house. Mom had made me a cake, and she gave me a present. She had stitched a musical-ish canvas for me to hang in my future music room.  It was all she could afford becuase she had just purchased an iPhone and now has hire monthly bills. But, this was the most impressive display of thoughtfulness I had seen from my family in some time.

They left for New York today. They all uploaded pictures to facebook through there fancy iPhones. They all look so happy. Lizzy is up in NY excitedly awaiting their arrival….

Maybe I’m the selfish one. I turned down her offer because I was unemployed at the time, and didn’t know what I would be doing this fall. Now, I know I couldn’t have afforded it, especially with the grand I owe the IRS.

I just sometimes wonder if I roll over and take it too much. Does anybody else in my family feel this way? Does this make me selfish to be hurt by these things? I keep defending them to Jared because I want for them all to love eachother someday. But the more he sees the more he hates them. And I don’t have anything to defend Jared about with them, they just don’t like our relationship, simply because they don’t understand it.

I don’t know if I should tell them how I feel about this, since I already know how they’ll repsond. And I don’t want to talk to Jared about it anymore, because he hates them so much and he keeps saying  that he’s gonna let them have it the next time they pull some crap in front of him.

Am I really a bad person?

It doesn’t really help that Jared’s family, that he has complained about since I’ve known him, seems to be the most generous and supportive family system I’ve ever known. It’s really nice to have them in my life, they remind me of what is good about family. But they also seem to unintentionally high-light how crappy the relationships I have with my family really are. I’ve  always known how strangely distant my cousins and aunts and uncles are… now it just seems like my entire family is just disfunctional. I don’t want my kids to have that kind of experience. But if things keep heading the way they are, they’ll barely know my brothers and sisters…

Is it my fault alone?

Brink

I feel like I’m on the edge of some great free-fall. Something is about to start, or another about to end. I’m not scared, not really even concerned. I’m excited. It feels so tangible, so set in stone, yet I have no idea what it is.

Do I tell someone? How do I express my emotions on a subject that is so unknown to myself? Yet how do I contain something so huge?

All Drains Lead To The Ocean

Apparently the inhabitants are a bit camera-shy

   

One of my absolute favorite things in my house is a 50 gallon fresh-water fish tank. The tank is home to a South Texas Sicklet, a Jack Demsy (or South American Sicklet), an Algea-eater Catfish (for cleaning purposes) and a mid-size Crawfish that I stole from Pappadeaux when I still worked there.
The filter in the tank creates a rather tranqual sound as the water runs through the pipe and pours back into the tank. The lights can creat a nice light glow when the house lights are turned off in the evening, and the two sicklets are quite entertaining to watch as they fight for dominance and claim their domains by shoveling pebbles around with their mouths. All around, it is just a tranqual, zen-like piece to our home.   

Except:
The Crawfish (whom I have lovingly dubbed “Diddy”) does not seem to be happy in the tank. He does not seem to realize that I saved him from a fate worse than death– to be exact, his fate would have been death, then ingestion/digestion. Instead, he seems to think he has it pretty bad being fed shrimp pellets every day and possessing his own rock to hide under.   

For about a week, Jared kept noticing the lid on the filter had been moved, left slighty ajar. Without thinking much of it, he would just replace the lid and go about feeding the fish. Finally, we found out what had been moving it, though it was hard to believe. Early one morning, Jared found Diddy on the bathroom floor. All we could guess was that he had crawled up the filter tube. Though we had just gotten a kitten, it was highly doubtful the cat had somehow made his way to the top of the tank, and reached or swam all the way to the bottom to grab the crawfish and bring him to ground level, without waking us. We put him back in the tank and went about the day.    

(S)He might have climbed down the electrical cord on the backside of the tank

   

The next morning, Diddy was not in the tank. Diddy was not on the bathroom floor. We could not find him. We lifted the couch, we moved shelves and tables. No dice; no Diddy. Finally, Jared thought to look inside the filter, which had a displaced lid once again. He reached his hand in to feel for the crawfish, and got pinched. There he was. Or there she was. It’s very difficult to tell the sex of a crawfish. Perhaps that is why he/she is so unhappy.   

Simple fix: we moved the rock (see above) away from the filter. Voila! No more escape attempts.   

Friday morning, I kicked him into the bathroom cabinet. I guess he figured out a new way to get out.   

Keep fighting kid, all drain lead to the sea! –or at least to the San Antonio River.

Things of the Sky

On Birds

This morning there was a very eery noise hovering in the air in my house. It was almost a buzzing separated by a high-pitched ring and a small low-pitched rumble, yet so close together that it was unmistakably coming from the same venue. I walked through the house for a little while trying to figure out where this sound was coming from. Then it stopped, and resumed again. When it began again, it started with a sort of sputtering and then went into the continues “buzz” that I had heard before. I determined that it had to be coming from outside, and looked out the window. In the tree by my kitchen were a couple of Mockingbirds. Aha! Those pesky birds have caused me a great deal of annoyance throughout my life, mostly by mimicking car alarms, which are intolerable enough already. While they frustrate me, they also inspire me. It’s so strange a thing to do, mimicking man-made machines. Mockingbirds are wired to be able to “mock” birds of other species as a survival technique, and now they are mocking lawn mowers (this is the best explanation for this morning’s display, since everybody on the block manicured their lawns this weekend). It just astounds me, and entertains me at the same time. Is this a good thing or a bad thing for the Mockingbird? Only time will tell, but I don’t predict they’ll be on any endangered species list anytime soon.

On Aeroplanes

I remember when I was a young child I would marvel at the sight of planes flying over my back yard. I think this was a mixture of the Peter Pan’s Pixie Dust complex and  the sheer delight of seeing my brothers cover their ears and wince in pain at the obnoxious sound (I was a bit masochistic, but overall a very sweet child). When my father taught me that the planes were actually much higher up than they appeared and that the sound was traveling from so far away but was still so loud, it was like noticing planes for the first time all over again.
To this day, I will still stop what I’m doing to look for a plane overhead if I hear it in time. This can cause problems when I’m driving down the highway, but somehow I still expect some amazing reward for my efforts.
The office I work in now is about 2 miles from the city airport. When planes take off or land, they fly right over our building and shake everything. No longer can I just hear it, I can feel it. It’s amazing… until about the 5th time in the day when it becomes irritating. Still, I don’t know where this fascination comes from. And I still have not ever been in a plane myself. Maybe this awe will dissipate after I have experienced the phenomenon from the other side.

Let’s just hope that Mockingbirds don’t take after mimicking airplanes…

On Clouds

I had a parakeet once. I got it for my 11th birthday. My parents decided I was responsible enough to have a pet of my own, and somehow I thought a bird would be more interesting than a dog, cat, or reptile… Eleven year-olds are probably the most confused group of people.
We went to some large chain pet store to buy my darling, and I picked the parakeet that had the most vivid blue feathers on his chest. I named my parakeet “Cloud” because of the pattern his blue and white feathers made on his breast. We bought a cage, and feed, and little beak sharpening things which I called “chew-toys,” I borrowed a stack of books from the library to read about bird-care and teaching parakeets to talk. I refused to let anybody else put their hand in the cage until that bird learned to trust me the most. After 2 months, the bird still cowered away from me, never made a peep, and I’m pretty sure my brothers stuck their hands in the cage when I wasn’t looking. I started to dislike being a bird-owner very much.
One day, our family dog, Wendy, decided she wanted to play with Cloud.  She jumped up on the less-than-satisfactory decorative table my mother had designated to the cage, knocked the entire set up onto the floor and set Cloud to the bottom to squawk more than he ever had before, while Wendy barked and pushed the cage with her nose. Cloud survived that ordeal and I declared war on Wendy. Later that night, my precious, boring parakeet was on his back at the bottom of the cage. Heart attack. Turned out parakeets are especially prone to heart-attacks brought on by stress. Thanks for telling me that, PetsMart! (It might have helped to have actually read those library books)
Oh well, I didn’t cry. The damn bird didn’t ever talk or perch on my hand or anything– what’s it good for?

Next time, I’m getting a  Mockingbird.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”  ~Hannah Arendt

Conditional Love

      The air conditioner in my place of work keeps going out. This causes me to become quite cranky, and slows down my rate of productivity. I realize that 90% of the world’s population lives without air conditioning, and that even of the remaining 10% a large portion works day in and day out in the heat of the day or in more dire conditions. However, I am not part of the 90%, nor am I a member of that portion in the 10%. Because of these rather celebrated facts, I have come to expect my air (that is, the air within the space that I inhabit at the given time) to be conditioned to a comfortable 72-75 degrees fahrenheit whether I be at work, at home, or in my little blue automobile. 
         When these conditions are not met (the air conditions) I become prone to shameful behaviors such as watching countless political spoofs on YouTube or over-updating my status on facebook which makes me feel like a spoiled product of my generation. I do not like to be reminded that I am a product of anything. I’m a very generous,  down-to-earth person…until you mess with my modern conveniences.
         I also dislike what the heat does to my appearance. Aside from the obvious “glisten” that appears on my forehead and the hairline on the back of my neck, I am forced to put my hair up in a pony-tail fashion. This is not a flattering look for me, and despite what you have heard before, is the main reason I left the restaurant business– the pony-tails.

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”  ~E.L. Doctorow

Intentions

I don’t care if this blog is read. Idon’t care if it is followed or tagged, or quoted.

I will not write for the sake of others, apologetically or otherwise.

After all, I gave up on writing a long time ago.

I merely want to write. Let me write, please. I love the calm that comes over after putting my thoughts into carefully chosen words. I love the quiet in my head after I finally pull the screaming arguments and nagging concerns out from between my ears and let them run through my hands onto paper or keyboard. I love looking back at my own writing and remembering how I have come to be who I am; how I reached the conclusions that I have reached. It is wonderful to be reminded and maybe even to reaffirm myself — to encourage myself.

Everyone should write. By all means, I am not saying everyone should be read.  But even so, everyone should write if at all possible. If such an inexpensive and powerful therapy was utilized by everyone, there would be much less mischief in the world.

That’s my opinion, anyway.

I used to write, like I used to sing. I still sing, on occasion, but not in the way I used to. I still write, pretty regularly– just not the same way. It’s lost something. I want to get it back.

That is really my only intention in creating this blog. I want to find something to inspire me to continue writing. Maybe, eventually, writing will become what it used to be. I realize there may be others that feel as I feel. If they were to stumble upon this blog and find it somehow helpful, or encouraging in their own venture into writing, I think that would be a good thing. Sometimes, when I read the words of another it ignites my desire to redevelop this passion.

I may put thought into the posts I create, or I may just ramble. I’m not going to limit myself to one style or idea. I just want to grow. I really don’t care if others see my growth, whether they call it “good” or not. It’s about personal growth, and I am the person. Mine is only opinion that matters…in this matter.

“Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story that you most desperately want to read.”
Susan Isaacs

 

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)