nostalgia
so, recently, the onion AV club (of course) started reviewing my so-called life, which has finally been released on dvd. and the reviewer (the hater herself) links to you tube episodes of mscl. man, that show was great. and yeah, the clothes look really dated now and there's some crappy tv elements, but it's solid.
actually, i kind of like the super-dated clothes. mostly because i liked them then, but also because...hmm.
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i don't know if you know this, but i love my grandma. Love her. love all my grandparents. tehy are and were great. grandma morawski - the one who's 89 and still has all her own teeth - is getting a little too senile to live on her own. which is a problem mostly because she lives in chicago. so my parents have decided that now is the time to move her down to be close to us. right now the plan is to bring her down in that last week of july/first week of august, have her live with my parents for a bit and then take her to an assisted living home. we'd probably just have her live with my folks, but the reason we're moving her down is because she's kind of slipping mentally. 'kind of'. really. and honestly, if i get to be 89, i expect i'll be more than a little dotty...anyway.
it's been a tough process for my folks, especially my mom. what's not making it any easier is that, in addition to the emotional aspects of this stuff, they've got to do a lot of stuff around the house to make grandma feel at home. we want her to have all of her own stuff, or most of it, so there's a lot of furniture re-arranging going on and painting and all sorts of stuff. this house upheaval, i am somewhat embarassed to admit, has also involved a MAJOR overhaul of my old bedroom.
i admit it, i'm a packrat. i'm better about it now than i used to be, but yeah. it's bad. and it's been bad. and when we lived in the house i grew up in, it was worse. ask my friends from high school and they will tell yo uabout my insane room. i moved most of that stuff to the house my family moved to after i graduated. a lot of it has stayed in boxes. and then i accrued more shit in college that stayed in other boxes (or piles, if applicable) in my room and my mom bugged me about it for years to get it cleaned up so they could use it. and she finally did it.
this made some weird revelations for my mom. first off, she realized that the reason i could find things in my piles of shit was because they were all organized. or organized-ish. at least i knew where everything was, and i'd be the one using it, so, meh. that didn't surprise me too much.
what did catch me was this weekend, when my family finally got together to celebrate father's day, she said that cleaning out my room (god, that's an embarassing admission) was really emotional for her. and i said 'why?' and she said that all the stuff she found had so many memories wrapped up in them and it was like going back through everything with our family all over again. what's weird about that is that's the exact reason i could never get through throwing crap away and cleaning. my mom throws things away, she just does. but that's the whole thing with being a packrat, you want to hang on to that memory for as long as you can so you hang on to an object for forever. it was weird to see her associate with that. and she was getting kind of choked up about it even when she was telling me. it was strange.
also strange is watching your parents get older. i'm pretty lucky that they're around and i can do that. lucky, and also troubling for a world-class worrier such as myself. like, my dad pointed out that he'll be 62 in 5 years. that's unfathomable to me. just...wow. and they're having old married couple conversations while we're home - you know, mom'll say something, dad'll say something different and mom waves it off. or vice versa. and they don't remember things. it's cute and troubling all at once.
it's hard to get old. grandma's been saying that for the past 10 years. it's hard to get old. she's right. she's really, completely right. and i guess, right now, for me it's not that...well, no, life does get harder as you get older, just more things to worry about. but, um...it's hard to watch your people get old. and know that one day you're going to have take care of them, too.
i don't know...
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i don't know if this is the case for dudes, but being a pre-teen and my sister being a teen when my so-called life was actually airing kind of makes the whole thing ring that much truer. my mom LOVED the show. my sister LOVED the show. a few years later when mtv started showing it, I loved the show. because it just seemed so perfect. all that shit -well except the angel thing, maybe - really existed and happened. and watching it as an adult, and knowing that behind all that teen angst bullshit there lies further different bullshit, but that it's okay. and eventually you move on. it just feels like...all that stuff was there, in every family, in one way or another. and really in my family. like...wow. it's uh...it's strange. and it's strange to have such a different perspective on the whole show. anyway...
yeah. that's kind of where i'm at now.